Is your website organized in a manner that makes sense not only to you but also site visitors within your target market? Nothing can be more frustrating than not being able to find information that you know is available on a site. When content is not where you expected it to be, your website will lose visitors and reputation of being a credible source of information.

Card sorting (and by extension, card sorting tools) is a convenient means of testing your site’s layout and finding out whether or not you need to make any changes that can improve your information architecture.

When thinking about either changing your information architecture that already exists or starting from scratch, it can seem a bit overwhelming when you are not sure where to start. The jargon, the seemingly lengthy process, it can seem daunting. This is a list of some of the best books available to aid in your journey to learn more about information architecture, no matter what your level of experience is.

When you are a brand that has a website with useful content or unique products, your website is destined to attract an audience. Even so, you must be able to hold and convert the potential customers into loyal customers. This all depends on how you choose to optimize and use these metrics so that they best fit your brand and website. There are so many different ways that a website can increase their rates of retention and conversion, but prior to taking on the endeavor you must figure out which specific metrics it is that you are trying to improve for your brand. Use this as a guide to help you determine which metrics are the most important to track. You will find most of these metrics in the Audience section within the dashboard of Google Analytics, along with other metrics that aid you in tracking your website traffic. When you proceed armed with this knowledge, there will be nothing stopping you from growing your website in the way that is best for your brand.

The unthinkable has happened. Your web site has been hacked. What do you do? Where do you start? Do not worry. All's not lost, and you will be able to bounce back. Every day, hundreds of sites face the same predicament, and many are able to get back to their original glory. All you need to do is follow the below steps, and all will be alright in the end.

The speed at which content on your page loads is what is referred to as its page speed. Needless to say, the faster content loads, the better. It is important to have fast page speeds for two main reasons. The first is that it directly affects your SEO rankings. This is because a slow page speed will slow down the bots crawling around your site.

You need these bots because that is how you get a better SEO ranking. They only have so much time to spend on each page so if your page is slow, they will miss out on other content and thus your SEO ranking will not be as high as it could or should be. The other main reason you want a high page speed is that people have increasingly short attention spans. With the advancements in technology, things are becoming more and more instant.

Search engine optimization is a great way to drive traffic to your website for very little financial cost. As a whole, great SEO will work while you are sleeping, but often times what might seem like a good idea to a novice is actually a huge mistake that might actually be violating Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Take a look at these completely avoidable mistakes so that you can make the best decisions possible regarding your content and it's success.

Usability testing tools are vital to a website's success. The user experience relies heavily on user testing, as it helps developers to understand how users interact with the design. In turn, it helps to make the best user experience possible, and aid users in completing their task, increasing conversions overall. Running one's own user testing will include finding and employing a target audience, because of this setting up the necessary hardware can be time-consuming and expensive.

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) terminology, it can sometimes feel like you are reading a foreign language. If you are not a tech person, some of the words can seem odd and completely foreign to you, but once you learn the tricks of the trade, you will be speaking the lingo in no time.

Knowing and understanding the guidelines when it comes to usability of your business’s website is a sure way to grow your customer base. Websites that are not user-friendly are not efficient. Simply put, if your website is not friendly for the people who go to your page, visitors will go elsewhere. Making sure your website is easy to access, efficient to use, and includes helpful content are some of the important guidelines to follow. You should also consider having your website tested for usability. When you test your website, you will be able to figure out what is going right, what is going wrong, and what might need to be changed.

It is vital to increase your conversion rates in order to have a high sales volume and successful business. Many times it is just a small tweak in an established machine that will produce significant improvements among conversion rates. Pair many small changes with a few large tweaks and you can rest assured that your conversion rates will show dramatic results.

Information architecture is known to be the structural design of environments of shared information. In general, it involves a concept or model of information that is applied to activities that will require specific details of intricate details of a complex information system. It is the way that content is organized and then categorized on a website. Many people think of information architecture kind of as “buckets of information” that will make up the sections within the website. Then, the concepts or content that can be grouped together will go into the same “bucket”. All websites have their own information architecture, but do not encounter the same problems, although most of them actually have holes in their information architecture or poor IA altogether, causing navigation difficulties for website visitors. Having a great information architecture and sitemaps will ensure that the maximum amount of website visitors will be able to find what they are looking for, thus improving your conversion and website ROI (return on investment).

A sitemap is a file that contains a list of pages on a website, to allowing web crawlers like Googlebot to crawl a website. Many web crawlers are able to explore and discover all files on a website, but with the help of a sitemap a crawler can gather metadata about the site. This metadata will tell how often information on the page changes, indicating how often the web page should be crawled. It will also show the details about content that would be hard for a search engine to analyze—like file descriptions for images or videos. Google's Search Console allows you to view, add, and test out sitemaps.

With enough website builders and content management systems (CMS) available to fill a book, and almost as many web hosting companies, developing an online platform has never been easier. But therein lies the problem many new bloggers and businesses now face.

There are more than 7.5 billion people alive at any given moment, and more than half of them are online. This means that, excluding those who don’t have access to the internet (and those too young or too old to use it), almost everyone has some online presence. For many, this may be limited to social media accounts and a smattering of subscriptions, but there are still billions of business websites and personal blogs.

So no matter the nature of your online platform, you need to be smart and resourceful if you want your site to be visible. The days of simply posting online and adding a few keywords are very much long gone. The world of search engine optimization has evolved to a point where even most novices know that there are hundreds of factors that contribute to your ranking.

Some of these factors—especially keywords—are very well known. The problem is, with the rise of voice search, keywords are no longer the dominant SEO tool. Many SEO experts have stepped forward and stated that keywords are somewhat outdated. And while they’re not likely to ever fall away altogether, relying purely on keywords is suicidal. That’s where backlinks come in.

Anyone with a basic understanding of search engine optimization knows that keywords are a fundamental part of SEO. When people use search engines—such as Google or Bing—they use words or phrases, and these keywords can form a link between well-optimized sites and the user. A sound keyword strategy will increase your chances of being featured on the search engine’s results page, and it is important to know how well your strategy and website are performing using keyword tracking tools. 

No matter what type of content is on your website, it is vital that you conduct audits every now and then to make sure that it is staying relevant and effective for producing the results that you want. When you create an inventory of your existing content, you will become aware of the gaps in content and will also be able to see the type of content that is performing well. This gives you the information that you need to move forward in being successful.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a multifaceted industry with dozens of techniques designed and developed to push your blog or website to the fore—or at least toward it. But how do you know whether your efforts are paying off? Sure, you’ll probably find that you get more subscribers to your blog, or be getting more purchases from new clients on your ecommerce site, but that’s not a very accurate means of measuring your SEO success. So how do you know just how visible your site is? Well, that’s where web analytics tools come in.

Searching a website for specific words can be a helpful way to find the information you need quickly. Whether looking for a particular product, article, or information, using the proper techniques can help you locate it quickly and easily.

SEO or (Search Engine Optimization) is the method used to increase a website's search results, and when applied properly, can result in a major increase in website traffic. What Search Engine Optimization essentially does is utilize the algorithm of a search engine, such as Google or Bing, to bring in “high quality” traffic to your website. A search engine is a website with an algorithm that uses keywords and phrases we type to identify the websites that most closely match what we are looking for. In learning how to optimize these engines, you are going to have to take into account several different aspects. The main components are; words, page titles, website links, and website reputation. By taking the time to research and implement these elements in your website you will be well on your way to having high-quality traffic sooner than expected. Did you know that more than 90 percent of people use search engines to find what they are looking for on the internet? Or how about that more than 80 percent of those who use search engines go no further than the first page to find what they are looking for? The ultimate goal is to help you make your way, not only onto the first page of Google but also give you a list of reputable websites and tools you can utilize to learn SEO the right way.

AB testing is a randomized experiment that has two variants (A and B) which are the control and variation within a 2 sample hypothesis testing. This kind of testing is a way to compare two different versions of the same variable, generally done by testing the reaction that the subject has to variable A against the reaction to variable B, and then determine which of the variables is more effective. Sometimes called split-run testing and bucket testing, this is a pretty standard test. What does this have to do with website optimization? When you run an A/B test for your site, you are able to test two versions of the same content against each other to see which performs better as a whole—it will lead to more conversions, a lower bounce rate, and a higher retention rate.

It is highly likely that your business is facing a challenge with content. It could be a layout that hides important information, or a navigation arrangement that does not support customer services or purchases. Useful content may be buried too soon after it is posted before you are able to maximize its true potential. Or, less successful content does not become archived quick enough and ends up irrelevant to the audience but stays prominent on the website. These types of content problems are not only hard on you personally, but they become hard on your brand financially. Choosing to complete a content inventory is vital as a preliminary step to take control of the existing burden of current content, and will allow your brand to implement a content strategy that is influential.