Top 10 Mistakes Business Owners Make With Their Websites

Thanks to everyone who attended our seminar last week, on the Top 10 Mistakes Business Owners Make With Their Websites. It was a great success, with over 50 attendees.

Here’s the video and Powerpoint of the seminar. If you want to learn how we can apply these best practices to your business, give us a call.

Powerpoint

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Posted in: Landing Pages, Link Building, Pay Per Click, SEO, Sales, websites

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Want to Build a Real Website? Here’s Our Website Checklist.

New Website Checklist

If you’re looking to have a new website built, here’s a checklist of all the things you should consider, to make sure it’s well optimized for search engines:

1. SEO Planning
  • Research & identify keywords with the most opportunity for ROI
  • Create site-map with target keywords (to guide content development) for each page
  • Competitive analysis
  • Provide guidance to your writer for drafting SEO friendly content
2. Development
  • Optimize content (for search engines and for people)
  • Optimize internal links
  • No images as headers or navigation. (Try Cufon or TextKit)
  • Microformats for address
  • Phone number at top and address in footer
  • Technology should meet SEO best practices, including:
  • Robots.txt file
    • W3C compliant
    • No indexing errors
    • Redirect Canonical URLs from old website
    • Search engine friendly URLs
    • Customized 404 page
    • Dynamic XML and/or HTML site map
3. Submit Site to Search Engines
  • Ensure the 3 major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Bing) are properly indexing your site and stay up to date with any changes made on your site.
  • Create webmaster accounts with 3 major search engines and submit XML site map
  • Submit sites to 3 major search engines and 5 relevant directories
  • Create local listings accounts on Google, Yahoo! and Bing
  • Verify or claim listings on review sites such as Yelp!, Insider Pages, Kudzu, etc
4. Statistics
  • Baseline current Search Engine Rank Positions (SERPs)
  • Install Google Analytics and configure for goal tracking
  • Setup SERP tracking software
  • Provide follow up report on SERPs, traffic, and other KPI 2-4 weeks after launch

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Internal Links

Internal Links Video

Watch this short video (4:20) to learn how you can boost search rankings with internal links. A text transcription is below.

Internal Links Video Transcription

Hi everybody, this Dan Kaplan, co-founder of periscopeup

This short tutorial is about how do you use internal links to improve the rankings of search engines positions.

First I am going to describe what an internal link is, and then give you a process by which you can test to see if changes you are making are improving your search engine rank positions.

Definition of Internal Links

Let’s take a quick look at one of our client websites, www.dddsigns.com. Let me say this tutorial presumes you have already optimized your pages. In this case, this interior page, the gallery page, is already optimized for the long-tail keyword term “outdoor business signs.” You can see that i have the keyword phrase in my title tag, in my header tag, and in first hundred words of the content. So this pages is already optimized for this term, “outdoor business signs.”

Now what is a good optimize internal link? Let’s go to our home page now and take a look. You’ll see two instances where we have created a link to the internal gallery page which have been optimized and “outdoor business signs” is in the text of the link that directs users to the page that is optimized for “outdoor business signs.”

Now, there are a couple of things here to note. First, the home page is very important page. So, we’re telling the search engines that a link from an important page to the internal page means it too must have some importance. Secondly, by optimizing by the link in this way, we’re saying that this destination page really is about this term. These are the things that help the search engines know what are the site about and will help raise us up in the search engine ranking positions.

Now, how do we know what links we have already internally? A great little tool that you can use as the Google webmaster tool. It can found at www.google.com/webmasters. If you login into dashboard and go the internal links section, there is a little tool here that tells you which pages have the most internal links directed to them. You can also do a search for individual pages. You notice that our internal gallery page (optimized for “outdoor business signs”) has quiet a lot of internal links already pointing to it. If I click in further, I will see all the individual pages that link to the gallery page. This is a way how we can analyze our side and figure out what internal links we have and which pages we should be adding more internal links to.

Internal Link Process

So, for the second part of this tutorial, I said I will show you a little process that we use to test the changes you’re making to internal links, to see the impact on your website’s search rankings.

  • The first step is to list all the pages and the target keywords for your website.
  • Second, using the Google webmaster tool, take a look at how many good internal link these pages have and which one should be optimized.
  • Third, we recommend increasing the the number of optimized internal links to just one of these pages.
  • Fourth, wait until the search engines re-index your site.
  • Fifth, take a look to see if that had a positive impact — if you went up or down in search engine results for that target keyword.

If you did increase your ranking, you can repeat the process with another keyword term for another page, or if you went down, then you should revert back, undoing your changes and then try something else.

Conclusion

It’s quite simple, but just takes time. The proof is in the pudding. You can see here that our search engine position for DDD Signs, on the term “outdoor business signs,” and as you can see, we are consistently staying on page one of Google and Bing for that term.

I hope this was helpful for everybody, if you would like a free consultation on your website, please feel free to give us a call at 866-446-1972.

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Search Engine Optimization
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