Since creating a website that is “user friendly” is often difficult and time consuming, I thought it would be fun to explore a few ways to create a dissatisfying user experience on your website. Unlike the dozens upon dozens of things that go into creating a website that provides a positive visitor experience, one that creates an atmosphere of trust and is likely to improve conversion rates, creating a dissatisfying experience can be done fairly easily in just a few steps.

In fact, while I’m sure there are just as many things that can derail a visitor on a website, there is no need to implement more than a few.We have found that any one of the four things listed below will do the trick!

Not able to find specific information

Visitors come to your site for a reason. Maybe they are researching a topic, seeking to gain information, or are comparing differences between your offerings and a competitor’s. In any case, your visitors are often searching for something specific, and maybe they even want to take action once they have the vital pieces of information they seek. Maybe that information is product specifications, pricing info, or perhaps just a phone or email address. Do what you can to hide this important information. Be sure to provide only basic, general information about your topic, product or services and avoid any decision clinching specifics.

If you feel you absolutely must provide more information, make sure that it is buried in the midst of a lot of text or that any links to this information is difficult to find. Nothing says we hate you like hiding important details or contact information!

Confusing website

People are easily confused, which makes this an easy task to accomplish. Don’t waste much energy thinking about things such as layout, design or

navigational consistency. When developing your content, speak in broad vague terms and use as much industry technobabble as possible. Don’t worry about website architecture either, that’s just a huge time-consuming task that ultimately prevents your visitors from having to do any real work to get the information they need. If you make it all too easy, then your visitors won’t feel that your information is valuable.

Slow website

If you happen to have a lightning fast server you might want to find a new one. You’re probably paying too much for hosting anyway. But if switching hosts is too much of a problem, and then see what you can do to slow it down. You can do this quite easily by using poorly implemented code, excessive code bloat or extremely large images. Add lots of flashy tools and multimedia that must be used such as flash based websites that have to download the full file first.

Since many metrics services look at time spent on a website as an indicator of a site’s overall value, the more you slow things down the better things look. Slow sites mean visitors must remain on the site longer just to get the information they need. This can be a boon to advertising.

Broken Links

Nothing tells your visitors that you care than handfuls of broken links on your site. I suggest you change URLs frequently and that you don’t perform monthly broken link checks. This is actually entertaining to your visitors because broken links create something of a game. And who doesn’t love a good game of hide and seek, right?

There you have it, four quick and easy ways to dissatisfy your customers. The great thing about these is that you don’t have to think to hard about any of them. In fact, they require hardly any thought at all. When I think about how best to go about creating this kind of unusable environment two words come to mind, random and haphazard. Not only are those both fun words, but they make for a fun website.

source : http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1824/1/4-Easy-Ways-to-Dissatisfy-Your-Visitors/Page1.html

The lifeblood of any website/ecommerce business is traffic, and every webmaster knows the best type of traffic is natural, organic search engine traffic. There are two very important reasons for this: (1) it is extremely targeted, and (2) It is FREE! The hard part is getting top ranking for your sites keywords… or is it? The purpose of this article is to provide a few simple, effective, and most important, search engine friendly strategies to help boost your websites’ ranking and ultimately your traffic.

1. We will start with the Meta Tags. I know you have already heard of, and are probably currently using meta tags on your site. This is great. I just want to make sure you are using them effectively. We will only go over 2 tags: the “title” tag, and the “description” tag. We will not go over the “keywords” tag, as the major search engines have placed less and less weight on this one, and some would argue this tag has no weight at all. I still use this tag however, as I feel there is some merit and no drawbacks to using this tag.

I have found it effective to use similar text in the “title” and “description” tags, and to place your keywords prominently in these tags (near the beginning and more than once). I have seen sites with “sitename.com”, “New Page 1″, or “Welcome to my site” in the “title” tag, which really does not help in their quest for higher rankings for their particular keyword. Also, try not to use words such as “and”, “or”, or “the” in these tags.

Important note about keywords Search engines evaluate keyword prominence, keyword weight, and keyword density when determining a site’s ranking. All three are calculated individually for the page, the title tag, the description tag, as well as other areas on a page. Keyword prominence means how close the keyword is to the beginning of your page. Keyword weight refers to how many times a particular keyword or phrase can be found on the page. Keyword density is the ratio of the keyword to the other words on the page. You do not want the keyword weight or density to be too high, as this can appear to the search engine as “keyword stuffing” and most search engines penalize sites that stuff their keywords. 2. Place your navigational links (and JavaScript) at the right or at the bottom, but not on the left, of the page. When the search engines “read” your site, they read from the top left to the bottom right. Search engines place an emphasis on the first 100 words or text on the site. You do not want these words to be navigational links or Javascript. Ideally, you want to have your “heading” tags with your keywords in the beginning of your page. This being said, placing your links/JavaScript on the right or bottom of your page ensures the search engine spiders get to the text first, giving more weight to what’s important on your page.

3. Place alt tags on all of your images. Search engine spiders cannot “read” pictures or images. The only way a spider knows what an image is about is by reading the alt tag. This is also another chance to place more of your keywords in your HTML, improving your page’s keyword weight/density. Alt tags are easy to make and they can make a big difference in your sites keyword ranking. A simple alt tag looks like this: alt=”put your keyword phrase here.” Search engines separately calculate keyword prominence, density, and weight in alt tags as well, so optimize your tags.

4. Place your keywords at the bottom of your page. Just as search engines place more weight on the first words of your page, they also do the same to the last words. The general thinking is this, if your site is about a certain subject, then the main points, or keywords, should, appear at the beginning, be spread throughout the page, and be prominent at the conclusion. But if you have all of your navigational links and JavaScript at the bottom, your relevant page text could end well before the HTML does. An easy way to have your keywords at the bottom of your page is to include them in the copyright information. For example, if you have a dog food website, you could have something like this at the very bottom of the page:

copyright 2005 yoursite.com World’s best dog food

Search engines are not (as of this writing), penalizing sites using this technique, and it wouldn’t really make much sense for them to do so.

5. The Anchor Text of your links. Anchor text is the actual linking text on a site. It is what the user clicks on to navigate to that particular site or page. If a search engine finds many links to your site using the term “dog food”, then the search engine concludes your site is about “dog food”. This is overlooked quite often, but it seems to have a very large impact on your search engine rankings for a particular keyword. Your anchor text needs to be the keyword or phrase you are trying to target. Try to avoid anchor text such as “Click Here” or “www.yoursite.com”

Also, if you’re running a reciprocal link campaign, be sure to use variations of your text. If an engine notices every link to your site is identical, it could place less weight on these links or potentially penalize your site. This is because search engines generally give more weight to “naturally occurring” links, and less to “reciprocal link exchange campaigns”. Using different, but relevant anchor text can dramatically affect your targeted keyword rankings, by making your links appear more natural.

Effective SEO may seem difficult at first, but as you have read above, little tricks that require little or no programming knowledge, can make a huge impact on your website’s keyword ranking.

author Noah Ulrich