Wednesday, February 10, 2010
SEO and Web Design Checklist VII - Miscellaneous
Miscellaneous Points
1. Use Analytics to track visits to your website particularly when running any advertising or promotion campain. See which promotion methods produce most visitors with lowest bounce rate, ideally less than 50%.
Monitor which pages are landed on and which page most visitors leave from. Do they leave your site from that page because they have lost interest or is the leaving page the order page. If it is the order page are you getting a corresponding number of orders or are people leaving your site at this stage because this page is too complicated or confusing and they are leaving because it is too difficult for them to complete their purchase.
Check what search terms in search engines bring most visitors to your website, do you ned to increase your website optimisation to include more similar phrases to those search terms or alternatively is this a search term that is not relevant to your website’s contents so do you need to re-write the website content to include more appropriate phrases.
2. Check that you have not over-used your keywords and phrases, ideally they should form 3-9% of the page content.
3. Do not buy or sell links.
4. Do not Spam by leaving links in forums inappropriately or leaving spam links as comments on blogs etc as spam software will classify your IP as a source of spam and your website’s performance will be affected.
5. Do not have your website set up so that the search engines are fed one page but visitors see another, this is called Cloaking and will result in penalties.
6. Check regularly in Webmaster Tools to see what the Googlebot sees, this will ensure you will spot any hacking of your website. Some hackers insert code so that although visitors see your normal webpage, search engines are directed off elsewhere. If you find malware remove it.
7. If you have hidden text on your website it will be penalised - don’t do it.
8. If you are setting up some online directory listings for your business do not just copy some of the text off your website as duplicate content can cause problems in search engine results as Google’s algorithm trys to ensure that the search results are unique and relevant so that searchers are not confronted with a list of pages that essentially all have the same content. Consequently you could find your website dropped from the search results in favour of them showing the directory listing.
9. Make sure you register your domain with Google Webmaster Tools.
10. Submit your website’s sitemap to Webmaster Tools every time you change your website’s structure.
11. Set up 301 redirects every time you change a page’s url or the domain on which your website is hosted.
12. If you have regularly changing content on a blog or ordinary website set up an RSS feed and use Feedburner to notify Google etc when new posts are added and set up automatic updates to twitter etc to ensure your new items come up in real-time search.
