This page
will show you how to evaluate your website to identify some common
problems and how to fix them.
Monitor
Your Website Traffic
If your web site hosting does not provide traffic stats,
there are several free traffic monitor services.
Just add
a bit of code to each page and you can monitor
how many visitors come to the site, as well as where they come from,
how they move thru the site, and what search terms were used
to find your site.
My favorite
free traffic monitor is StatCounter.com.
Check
Your Website Rank
Alexa.com
is a free service that ranks all websites by traffic volume.
This is a quick & easy way to see if your site gets any traffic
at all and also to check out your competitors' websites.
If your
site rank shows as “no data” on
Alexa.com then you are not getting enough website traffic to
measure, which is probably less than 10 visitors per day.
To have
an effective business website you need
to have a traffic rank in the top 5 million, which is roughly
50+ visitors per day.
Count
Your In-Pointing links
These
are also called "back-links" - links from other sites to yours. The
more links that point to your site from other sites, the more “juice” your
site has with the search engines.
To see
how many in-pointing links your website has, use the in-pointing
links function of the free Search-It tool. You should
have at least a half-dozen in-pointing
links, but the more the better.
You should
make link-building an ongoing effort. Here are a few of many ways
to build in-pointing
links:
- Make
a YouTube video about your business
- Create
a free web page on Hubpages.com or Squidoo.com
- Buy links
in online directories for your local area or business niche
- Write
an informational article & post on Ezinearticles.com
- Start
a blog or comment on other people’s blogs
- Use
a service such as the free Value Exchange to find sites to exchange
links with.
SiteSell's
Value Exchange Service
& Make Your Links Work
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Free
Download!
Value
Exchange connects
traffic-seeking Webmasters by allowing them to enter
information about their site and submit it to our
database. Then it searches for related sites and
instantly puts them in contact with other Webmasters
that own sites relevant to their topic.
This
hassle-free link-exchange system takes the fuss out of
having to scour the Net looking for prospects.
Click
the book to visit Value Exchange
& download Make Your Links Work -->
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Check
That Images Are Properly Labeled
All images
on your website should be “triple
labeled”:
- The
image filename
- The
image ALT tag
- Descriptive
text next to or below the image on the web page.
Click
below for an example of how we used this technique to get the
top two images
on Google
for the keyword “turkey stuffing”:
- Image
filename: turkey_stuffing.jpg
- Image
ALT tag: Turkey Stuffing
- Label
next to image: Tyna’s Famous
Turkey Stuffing
This
brings in a lot of traffic to our LittleShamrocks.com website,
especially during the holidays.
Click
here to search Google Images for the term "turkey
stuffing"
Google
Yourself
How
does your website look to people who are searching for you?
You should “Google
check” your website by
searching for your website
name and also for
any search terms
related to your business. Does
the listing that appears look
OK?
The
search result listing is put together from several elements of
your web page,
including
page text,
Meta Description tag, and
image ALT tags, so you should
check to make sure that it makes sense to
the
reader.
Is Your
Website a “Link Farm?”
Do you
have any pages with dozens of links to
other sites? These links pages are very poorly regarded by the
search engines.
You
should not have more than a half dozen off-site links on any single
page unless
you use a special
META 'Robots' tag
to tell the search engines not to index the page or follow the
links.
Here is an example of the META 'Robots' tag that we use on our links
page:
<META
NAME='ROBOTS' CONTENT='NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW' />
Website
Theme
Is
your site built around a theme
with each of the pages
about
a topic related to the theme?
The
search
engines love theme-based websites,
and
a website that contains several
themes
may be penalized by the search engines
simply
because they cannot get a clear
picture
of what the site is about.
Site
theme example. A website
about fine art might
be called
modern-fine-art.com
and might
have pages related
to the theme
such as:
- Fine-Art-Portraits.html
- Fine-Art-Pastels.html
- Fine-Art-Abstracts.html
- Fine-Art-Murals.html
This
name structure
carries the
Fine Art
theme to each page.
The
key
to theme based
sites is
to use
the theme keyword
everywhere – in
the title of the page, in
the images, in the heading,
in the META tags,
and also in text links
on each page.
You
should also use the
theme in the name
of the site if possible.
Do You
Have Enough
Words on Each Page?
You
should have
at least
125 words
on each
page for
the search
engines to
consider a
page to
have legitimate
content. Most word processors have a word count feature. If you
do have pages with less than 125 words use the NOINDEX tag as described
above on those pages.
Next --
Evaluate the websites of your competition-->Click
Here
In-depth
information on the right way to build a small business
website:
Make
Your Site Sell!
by Dr. Ken Evoy
Free
Download!
When Make
Your Site SELL! launched in 1999, it was instantly
coined "The Bible of selling on the Net." It
swept the Net. MYSS! remains a great read, full of
useful, evergreen ideas and information, especially
if you are trying to sell a product.
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