Getting noticed on Search Engines

[prof]

10 tips for the New Year

1. While you’re in the footer changing the year, be sure to add at minimum the town or city, state or province and country of origin for the website. A zip and postal code are helpful too. A full business address is perfect but not every web site needs one. Why do this? Much depends on the type of site you’re operating.

For a local site that wants to do business locally, the address is helpful for local searches, as well as potential customers wanting to do business locally. An address or place of origin helps communicate where sales are accepted.

If your website is based in the UK but you accept sales from outside your country, the footer is a good place to note that. It can be as simple as adding “International sales accepted.” An address also indicates credibility.

2. Go through the title tags for your homepage, landing pages, top level pages of importance, product pages, and PPC landing pages. In each title tag, add a value as an incentive to searchers who are reading SERPS (search engine results pages) to click into your page and not a competitor’s.

Examples: “free shipping”, “free membership”, “clearance”, etc. Avoid bland terms such as “best”, “greatest”, “leading”, etc. Don’t copy what your competitor puts in their title tag. Create your title tag to be more inspirational.

3. Review each landing page for PPC and banner ads to be sure that whatever the ad claims is supported on the landing page. Repeat the same incentive or promotion on the landing page. This tells the human brain it has been taken to the correct place. Absolutely no bait and switch!

4. Similar to item two, each product page needs its own Meta description that specifically addresses the product it pertains to. No cookie cutter descriptions. If you place the product name and manufacturer and your brand in the title tag, your Meta description should follow up the unique selling proposition and a brief product description. Again, ask yourself what would make someone want to go to your product page instead of the other company who is selling the exact same product?

5. Clean up your text. Are your pages jammed with endless paragraphs that repeat the same information? Is your text written well, with no grammatical errors or broken English? Is it compelling? Perhaps this year it is time to hire a marketing copywriter who can improve your conversions and search engine results with their skilled writing.

6. Run link checking software. This is often overlooked or a boring maintenance job. Let’s do it now and cleanup any issues.

7. Upgrade software, plug-ins, blog themes, forums software, and any back-end applications you rely on. Sometimes, as in the case of some forums software and blog themes, all kinds of new things are added such as new photo galleries, better spam defense, added social networking integration and improved user interface both for the front and back-end.

8. Review your website requirements or write new ones. The point of this exercise is re-evaluate why your web site exists and to inspect its performance. Perhaps you’ve never drawn up a written plan or you have added more employees or team mates who don’t understand your original goals and visions. It doesn’t hurt to document your goals for search engines, social marketing, usability, conversions and overall site performance.

Maybe you want to add a new goal such as improving the overall accessibility for the site. With technology and new user interface ideas coming out, it doesn’t hurt to pause. Maybe there are new things you can try and have been so busy you didn’t consider it. Now is the time to explore.

9. Start out the year with a fresh look at your logs and analytics. If you use SEO tools, take them for a spin or have your SEO do it. Get updated data and inspect it for areas where traffic is falling off, conversions have sunk or bounce rates have increased. Create new funnels and track your main tasks or revise existing ones. Research new possible keywords or question searches such as “how do I” and “where is” types that may lead directly into your site.

10. Get organized. There’s nothing like a fresh start and new beginnings. Perhaps you need to budget for help with usability and conversions or search engine results. Blog owners may want to create an editorial calendar so that your writers or you keep the blog alive and active.

This is also a good time to schedule any conferences you want to get to, or local events. Maybe you wish to teach. Look into your local chambers of commerce to see if you can provide workshops. Some schools offer adult education courses. Don’t forget local youth organizations. (I once taught a Girl Scout troop how to make a webpage and how to FTP the files to a server. They loved it!)

http://searchengineland.com/10-search-website-usability-new-year-resolutions-for-2012-106354

prof