Category: Web Design

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Keeping Tabs on Your Website Placement

Have you looked lately at your website’s organic placement? The majority of my business comes in from our high listing in the organic search results for the majority of our important keyword phrases. I know this and monitor my own website’s placement at a minimum of once a month.

What I have done is researched the popular search phrases that I want to place on. I have then optimized my source code to organically place for these terms. Once a month I review all the terms and update my placement and the placement of key client’s on my search engine results page.

To make it easy to track my results I made a word document with the term and inserted the Google, Yahoo, and MSN returns page address that shows my placement. When I want to do a review, I click the link in the Word document, use Control+F to open the search box and enter my domain, this allows me to count back up to the top of the page to know my own placement immediately. I then log the placement on the same Word document so I have a running tally of where I am. This allows me to identify if my month’s efforts or last page update made a difference up or down.

After I document my placement, I will typically go and tweak my home page or section home page in an effort to improve my own placement for those specific terms.

If you are not tracking your own website placement you should. You should be using your organic placement as a key metric to identify if what you are doing is working for you. A website that doesn’t work for you is not worth your time and money investment.

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What Do Search Engines Look For?

There is a lot of confusion about what search engines consider important when it comes to determining organic position. Here is my short list of key elements that search engines consider key when determining position.

  1. Source code title tag – this is one of the most important tags for your website and key to organic placement.
  2. Source code meta description tag – this is another important tag but not as crucial as the title tag but still very important.
  3. Keywords meta tags – I still input content in this tag, but it has been devalued by Google so don’t take a lot of time on it, or you can leave it out.
  4. Domain name registration renewal period. I recommend a minimum renewal of two years and five is even better. Google does look at this as just one of their organic placement factors.
  5. Home page content – this is crucial to organic placement. If your home page is all in graphics or has very little content, you WILL struggle to get organic placement.
  6. Spiderable navigation – if your navigation is in flash or image rollovers and you have not provided text-based navigation for search engines to follow, you should make the simple addition of putting text navigation links in the footer of your page.

Sure there are tons of other factors, but for clients who come to me when they are disappointed in their placement typically they all are lacking in the top six items that I have mentioned above and usually have other additional issues such as poor or very little content, no links from other websites, or content that has not been updated in years.

So take a look at your own site, what are your challenges. If you have a factor that you feel I’ve missed click comment and tell me what you think is important.

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Visibility for New Blogs and Websites – When Do You Appear?

One of the biggest issues for new websites and blogs is “when do I appear online for searches using my domain name, my business name, or my keyword phrases”.

My answers are based on years of experience of watching, helping, advising, and doing. Here are a few answers to a few of these questions that new website and blog owners really want answered.

First, there is simply no way to know for sure when your new website or blog will appear in the all important Google search index. One thing that I do know for sure is that until you have several popular websites or blogs pointing to your site, you will not appear in the search index. This is where doing articles for syndication, posting comments on forums and blogs that do not install “nofollow” in their tags, and doing a press release will help Google to discover your new website or new blog. No one can force Google to do anything and that is particularly important when it comes to being included in their search index.

Additionally I have seen some brand new websites fall into the Google Sandbox and not appear for up to six months in the search index for hot property terms – real estate sometimes falls into this category. The Sandbox topic is a controversial one, but I have actually tracked it and seen www.Homes-Database.com be impacted by it when we initially launched the website. Another website we are watching carefully is a new Quick Launch prefab web template site that we launched last week for www.MoussaMoaadel.com for Moussa Moaadel Realtors. I am not sure that Google will delay indexing this site as they did with www.Homes-Database.com, but I do know that it has not yet appeared in the Google index even under its domain name but has appeared rapidly in the MSN Live index.

Another site that we are watching carefully is www.AmericanBoom.com. We are blogging for the site at www.AmericanBoom.con/blog and it is troubling as to why the main website and even blog still do not appear in the Google Search index. As we identify additional answers for that particular blog and website, we’ll keep you posted, but for now know that visibility for a new site is crucial.

So what can you personally do to help the search engines find you? Well, there are some things that you should for sure consider doing while you are waiting for the search indexes to grab your new site.

1. Make sure to do a Google sitemap in .xml and load it into the Google Webmaster control panel.

2. Make sure to verify your site in the Google Webmaster control panel. If you don’t verify you do not get the benefit of the diagnostic tools that Google provides to help you understand any issues. If when you verify you get an error message, work quickly to correct it. One site that we recently tried to verify generated a 500 internal server error. If the Google Webmaster control panel has an error validating your site, the Google robot will most likely run into other issues.

3. Do not work over your server to defeat searches using www. or just http://. If you feel that you absolutely must control how a spider indexes your site, add it into the Google Webmaster control panel. Do not set this up at the server level. One issue that we have uncovered for one client is that they site is visible for http://newdomainname.com but not at www.newdomainname.com. It appears that the programmer has altered some server setting which has caused issues for Google visibility. To check to see if your site is visible for these queries, go to www.Google.com and enter this as your search: site:www.mydomainname.com and then later site:http://mydomainname.com – note the no www and http:// additions.

4. Lastly do not have your home page of your website done in all images or Flash. You are setting yourself up for major visibility issues when you design a new website or blog in this manner. Search engine spiders review text, they cannot read images or Flash. If you do not have the web visibility that you think that you should, then the very first place to look is your home page. The home page of your website is crucial to your website’s visibility. It carries more weight with search engines than any other page on your website. For that matter if your site is dynamic in nature, you still should have a home page residing in the root directory. We recently evaluated a site where no home page existed. How can a search engine robot index the site if the page that the search engine considers the most important does not even exist on the server in the root directory?

From experience I have found that not all programmers and not all web designers understand the nuances of search engines. If your website is not showing now’s the time to check out these simple things to find out why and to realistically identify what you can do to correct them, and to identiry if they are correctable.

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Moussa Moaadel Realtors Website Launched

Moussa Moaadel RealtorsWe’ve just completed another of our Quick Launch website projects. You can view the website for Moussa Moaadel Realtors, Inc. from the link under their name.

This website has been done from one of our prefab website templates. It has been customized to match the clients logo colors and design.

The website have been built to provide a very cost efficient web presence at a price less than half of a custom website.

Moussa Moaadel Realtors, Inc is a real estate firm based in Chevy Chase, Maryland that is a boutique style real estate firm specializing in the unique, different, large estate home or high-end commercial property. With a sold portfolio of large tracts, land, and star-power estate homes in Potomac and Darnestown, this reality firm, which previously had no web presence, is now able to showcase their unique position in the real estate marketplace.

After having worked with the team at Moussa Moaadel Realtors, I can say with conviction that they are friendly, knowledgeable, and wonderfully unique when it comes to providing exceptional real estate service in the Washington DC region.