Websites Review - What to Look For?

As part of the service that I offer to potential customers I offer to do a review of their existing website. What do I look for when I do this review? I divide the review into 2 sections -

Section 1 - How search engine friendly is the website?

Section 2 - How user friendly is the website?

How Seacrh Engine Friendly is the Website?

The are a number of different factors that I look at to determine if a website is making the most of its search engine exposure.

Current PageRank, Links, Domain Data
To get a guage on where the website is currently at I look at its current Google PageRank, how many links it has in Yahoo Site Explorer, and how many pages it has indexed. I then also look at the age of the domain, when it was last modified, when the domain expires, and what is the last cache date in Google.

I find that this data gives me a good picture of where the site is at. If I am doing a more indepth analysis I will then look at the link profile of the website to see where the links are coming from, what PageRank the sites are that link into the website, and the age of the links.

MetaTags

I then look at the metatags for the website. What is the page title. 'Home Page' is not a useful page title yet I see it. What is the meta-description? Alot of sites do not have a meta-description. The title and metadescription are the bits of your website that appear in the search engine results. Your page title should contain keywords that your users are likely to be searching for, and your meta description should give them a reason to click on your link as oppose to the other ones on the page.

Keywords

Keywords are the other thing that I then look at for the website review. I still use the metakeyword tag (even though it is rumoured that most search engines ignore it). I find it useful to remind myself of what words we are targeting. Are your keywords in your page title? Are your keywords in your page headings? Are your keywords in your navigation menu? Are your keywords in your inpage links? Are your keywords in your footer?

Your keywords tell the search engines what your website is all about. It is vital that you make the best use of your keywords in all areas of each page on your website.

How User Friendly is Your Website

4 Second Rule

What is the first thing that capturesyour new visitor's attention when they land on your website? Does it compel them to look further? Does it tell them that they landed in the right place? One of the great challenges of efective website design is to create an instant and compelling message to your visitor that makes them want to look further?

Have a friend or colleague look at your website and tell you the first thing that they see. What captures their attention. Send it to me and I will do a website review for you.

If you fail the 4 second rule then your visitor is off looking at another website before you even had a chance to show them what you have to offer.

Colors and Fonts

The rule that I use here is to be consistent. Be consistent throughout the website, and be consistent with your business image. If your customer already knows your business then they will be looking for something familiar to assure them they landed in the right place.

Navigation

Is your navigation menu easy to identify. Does it utilise keywords? Do all the links work? Are you utilising insite links within your content?

That is the basic overview of a website review that I conduct for my clients. Feel free to add anything else that you think is important to you.

Websites Review - What to Look For?

Use Facebook to Promote your Internet Business

It is often thought that Facebook is just a social networking site where you can catch up with some people that you haven't seen for a long time.

However you can also use Facebook to promote your business. Create a separate business page to promote your business on Facebook. If you have a personal page on Facebook you can use this to promote your business page.

Use your Facebook business page to promote your business website and drive traffic from your business page to your business website.

This is one of many ways that you can drive extra traffic to your business website. If you would like to talk to me about other ways to increase traffic to your website check out my professional website design services.

Use Facebook to Promote your Internet Business

What Makes a Good Website

What makes a good website?

I think that the real key to this is measuring and testing. Not many of us get very excited by statistics, but I once heard it said that if you don't measure it you can't improve it.

I have owned a number of small businesses and I work with small business owners, and small business is a process of continual improvement. Measure this, try this and measure again.

Your small business website is no different.

There are lots of great tools on the web to help you do this. Google analytics givesd you the chance to do this with the site optimisation service. You can test different elements of your page and see which works best.

Websites are not set and forget. In order to get the best results online you need to be continually testing and refining the different elements of your site and measuring your conversion.

What Makes a Good Website

Squidoo

Have been away for a few days cause my internet died. It is very hard to run an online business with no internet connection but I am back online now.

I have just made a squiddo lens for my internet business. Squidoo is another good social media forum. You can showcase anything you like. You can use it to link to content on your site, and you can generate some extra income by featuring Amazon products and other things on your site.

My lens is Professional Website Design for Small Business and you can check it out using the link at the top of the page.

Social media is a great way to promote your business and also to create links to the content on your site. A win win situation for your website. Squidoo is one way of doing this. I am in the process of putting together a list of my top social media sites. Which ones do you like to use? Got any recommendations that you think should be on the list?

Squidoo

Track the Visitor Behaviour on Your Website

Have you ever wondered how people behave when they visit your website?

What things get clicked on the most? What things don't get clicked on at all?

Obviously if you are selling a product online, the more people that click on the links in your site to buy your product, the more money you will make.

The great thing about Google is that you can see how people behave when they visit your site using Google Analytics. You will have to sign up for a free acct and upload some code to your site or get your webmaster to do it for you. After a month or so when you have some meaningful data you can then go to the content section of your site on Google analytics and look at the Click Patterns - Site Overlay for each of the pages on your site.


This will then show you the page from your website with people's click patterns as a pecentage of the total number of people that viewed the page.

How many people that viewed your page clicked on the link to buy something?



You can then experiment with optimising your webpage to increase your click conversions and direct people to where you want them to go to on your website.

Track the Visitor Behaviour on Your Website

Find Out Where Your Customers Hang Out

Hi All

Been a busy week. Website number 2 is up and running and the client is very happy. Now I'm looking at a revamp of my web design site to give it a fresh look.

In the meantime I have been looking for more cool web tools to help you and me get better results online. So I came across this one

http://trends.google.com/websites

Obviously the best place to interact with your customers is to hang out where they hang out. Be one of them. Find out what they are looking for and give it to them. So if you look at the Google Trends website as above and put in a web address it will give you the Top 10 other websites that people also visited and it will also give you the Top 10 things they searched for.

So if you have your own website put it in Google Trends and see what other sites your customers are visiting. Get a link from these sites if you can.

Find out what other terms they are searching for. This will give you an idea of other terms you might want to look at optimising your site for.

Good luck making money online.

Find Out Where Your Customers Hang Out

Drive Traffic & Search Engine Rankings using Social Media

Been busy for a couple of days looking at ways to drive traffic to my sites and gain search engine rankings by using social media.

I have previously written articles on networking and link building with associated businesses and this is what I have been working on. My website design business is focussed on small business website design, so I have been looking at small business forums and blogs.

I have also been using social media sites like Linkedin, Stumbleupon, Facebook and of course Blogger. There are obviously many social media sites that you can use to draw extra traffic to your business.

Just remember the golden rule, DO NOT spam these sites with your website link. Create meaningful content and help people solve their problems. Share your knowledge and for this you deserve a link.

Networks are also a great way to find associated businesses to share links with. Again, remember that you should do this around quality content. Not just a reciprocal link sharing arrangement.

Drive Traffic & Search Engine Rankings using Social Media

SEO - Explain This

Over the last 12 months or so, I have been trying to learn everything that there is to know about SEO - search engine optimisation. One of my goals for this 12 months is to use as little of my own money to produce online income as I possibly can. Hence my desire to rank well in the search engines for my selected keyowrds so that I can get as much free traffic to my site as possible.

So, I have been looking at links, metatags, keywords, and optimisation among other things to improve the rankings of my sites.

Hence this little story.

My wife is an event photographer and graphic artist. I have setup a website for her event photography. I haven't really done much optimisation with it up until now, so last night I was sitting down to look at the competition. So I went to Google Australia, and typed in the term "event photographer" and I looked at the number 1 ranking site. PageRank 2, 12 incoming links (none related), no metatags, and no keyword optimisation. Imagine my glee at finding this. I can blow this one out of the water.

One of my link building strategies should overtake this in no time flat.

Site number 2 on the rankings seem to be a much better optimised site. The only thing that the number 1 ranked site had, was that the page title was 'Event Photographer'.

I have some articles that I have written. If you want to know more about how to get better rankings for your small business website check them out here - SEO services for small business websites.

That number 1 ranking in Google might not be that far away.

SEO - Explain This