15 Ways to Improve Your Site in 5 Minutes

There is not a single site that is perfect. All of the sites can use some work and updates. In this post I will show you some of the ways you can improve your website but under 5 minutes. Well at least most of them took me under 5 minutes to go through. They are very simple and easy, and if you fix the issues below, you are giving yourself an edge over your competitor.

15 Ways to Improve Your Site in 5 Minutes

1. Redefine your Semantics Web Markup – If you are not familiar with your design then it is time that you are. Make sure you check for the web semantics. Check to see if your <h4><h3><h2><h1> tags are used in the right places. If they are not fix them. Tweak them a little bit. Suggested Article: Your Guide for Refining the Semantics Web Markup
2. Add Title and Alt Tags – Adding titles to your navigation links on homepage will strengthen your ranking. So try to add title attribute to each link on your homepage. If you feel like it then open up Balkhis source in your browser and see how I am doing it to get a feel for it. Make sure you add relevant keywords in your title though, do not try to spam it. Same goes with your images, make sure each of them have an alt tag. Often time designers put the alt tag in the image because it is required in a website for it to be w3 valid, but what is the point if the alt tag is blank. By putting an alt tag in the images, you are increasing your chances to get google image traffic. Do it on home page first, and if your other page needs it then why not do those also. Suggested Article: Case Study: How did I increase my search engine traffic by 258% in less than a month.
3. Deep Linking – Check your last written post to see if you have interlink between your other posts. It is always good to interlink your older posts because you are increasing your page views, and you are sending your users to other useful content. Another way of deep linking is showing partial content on your feeds or on your blog. Then have the reader go to the full post and read the post. This way you are increasing authority to the full page post because that is the one that really counts. Also you are encouraging users to comment because comment box is right there, and you will be increasing your page views. Suggested Article: How To Increase Page Views on Your Blog
4. Add/Improve 404 Page – By adding a good 404 page, you are reducing bounce rate on your website. Basically meaning that if someone searched your website for a post which is no longer in that specific category, they will be at the 404 page, but by letting them know other ways they can search will keep them as your user. Suggested Article: Optimization of 404 Pages
5. SEO Friendly URLs – While it may sound hard to do, but it is not very hard when you know what you are doing. Basically for wordpress users, default permalink structure is not SEO Friendly, so you want to enable it in a way that it contains keywords of the post. Suggested Article: SEO Friendly URLs for Wordpress
6. Optimize your pages – When I say optimize your pages, I mean on page SEO. Good titles, Meta-Description, and Keywords. For all this you need a plugin called All-in-one SEO. Download this plugin, upload it, and use it. Suggested Settings for All in One SEO
7. Avoid Duplicate Content – Avoiding duplicate content doesn’t sound easy, but this step in the process does. Just edit your robots.txt and don’t let search engines index duplicate pages. Also if you use the settings I suggest in All in on SEO plugin, you will avoid a few duplicate content there. Suggested Article: Robots.txt Guide for Wordpress
8. Make Your Site Load Faster – Well there are a lot of ways that can be done to make your site load faster. Which might take longer than 5 minutes, but this way takes just 5 minutes. Download the plugin called WP-Super Cache, and upload it. Activate it and change the settings to meet your needs. You will see the difference yourself. Suggested Article: Killing a Giant Lion Turtle with your Site’s Load Time
9. Make your page attractive – No no, you don’t need to redesign the page. Just clear up the mess. It is too crowded right now. You need to make it simple for the users. So lets say if your users are on your page, show them like 5 posts a page, so they don’t see a big scroll bar. Then use pagination to guide them. Same with your font-size. Don’t use small font-size because you want some stuff to stay above the fold. There is no point of it staying above the fold, if people can’t read it. Use your spacing well. Suggested Article: How to Optimize your Blog Page to Attract Readers
10. Enable Contact Form – Process literally take about 2-3 minutes, but you can get tons of benefits. You can get feedback from users, get advertising options, new contracts, perhaps a book deal and so on. Suggested Article: Why you should enable your readers to contact you
11. Get an About Page – Your Homepage is not an about page. Give your readers a reason to look around. By adding an about page, you show the users that there is someone behind this site. It is not one of the spammy sites on the internet.
12. Use your Logo – Use your logo to your advantage. Please put a link on it. It will help your readers a lot. I have put a home page on my logo, so if someone wants to get to home page, they just click home. It saves the user some hassle.
13. Let the Users be in Control – Avoid Popups, and all the other stuff like that which annoys the user. Let them be in control of their own browser.
14. Check after updates – Always check your website in major browsers to see a glitch. Because you will not know a single addition can sometimes cause a big mess. Avoid that by checking your site’s compatibility in all other browsers.
15. Rewrite – There is no place to get better post ideas then your own archives. Check your older posts and rewrite them. Make them more interesting, add some more to it, Optimize the title, Simplify it, and make sure not to over do it. Often times earlier posts of the blogs are overlooked. You want your new users to check those out as well, so it is good to do this. Often times, you can hit big in social media this way also and get tons of traffic to your blog.

So in hour and 15 minutes, you can litereally make your blog load faster, have better SEO, avoid duplicate content, decrease your bounce rate, and so much more. Do one thing at a time. Read the suggested article when you have time.