The Daily Feed Issue #29: Why testing matters

Welcome to Issue #29 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more. If you have questions about SEO, SEM or getting traffic, please post them to 503me.com (it's free).

So far as part of our focus on quality and testing on your site this week we've covered which browsers you should be testing your site in, how to create a mini test lab on your Mac or PC and what you should be testing. So what does all this testing get you? Here is why testing is important and why you should spend an hour or two each week on QA (quality assurance) on your site:

• It will help your search rankings. Checking your site speed, catching dead links, making sure all your pages link to each other and there are no orphaned pages. All these things will help your search ranking.
• It will decrease bounce rate. If your visitors find a fast, attractive and highly usable site they're more likely to view a second and third page. 
• It will increase loyalty. Good quality sites get return visitors.
• It will make your visitors more likely to take the action you want them to. You are more likely to buy on a site that looks great and works great. 
• It will make other sites more likely to link to you, giving your long term SEO a boost. 

If you run a small business or you're just getting started, you don't have the resources to hire a QA team or outsource your QA. So my recommendation is that you make Thursday's QA day. Take a few hours on Thursday morning and run through your site in all the browsers I've mentioned. Check for the problems we've covered this week. Run your site through the W3C's dead link detector. Spending a few hours each week will ensure you have a great site that is climbing in the search rankings and is building a loyal and growing visitor base.

Thanks to our top users on 503me.com late this week for helping out answering questions while I've been on the road.

Have a great weekend and we'll be back on Monday.

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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