Developing a new website can be a difficult under taking. There are a lot of decision to make and lots of stuff to coordinate. The trick is starting the whole process from the proper angle.

The biggest mistake I see people make is that they have a personal attachment to the way a website looks. This is a big mistake. You have to keep in mind that the website is not for you. It’s for your customers. They are the ones that buy your products. If the website design you like isn’t something that your potential customer’s like you’re screwed. A website should be looked at in a similar light as an ad. Might sound kinda crazy but that in essence is what your website is. It’s out there to attract people, build your brand and drive sales not stroke your ego.

Ads are developed on the basis of who your core customers are. Demographics, income, marital status, etc, etc. The better you know your core audience the better you can speak to them. You should do the same with your website. If you’re redesigning a website you should look at your analytics data to help you make key decisions on the basic site and variations to test. Let the way your customers used your old site tell you where you need to improve the new one. Too often I see websites that are designed and coded without the input of an SEO or a marketer. SEO and marketing are one of the most important elements of a website. If you ignore them from the beginning chances are you’ll get results that are much lower than you expect or are possible. Websites should be designed properly from the beginning with an eye toward long term SEO and marketing because that is what it’s meant to do. SEO and marketability are not, nor should they ever be an after thought.

Once you have gathered that data and really looked it yourself, or had someone look it over. You then need to coordinate and make the people involved (designer, programmer/coder, marketer and SEO) work together. Because this is a business website that must produce sales the marketer/SEO should have final say as to what or how something is designed based on their experience and data to back it up. All coding needs to be SEO friendly. If the coder says something can’t be done in an SEO friendly way then you need to find a new coder because they don’t have the necessary experience to get the best results from your website. Of course all the design elements and other decisions need to approved by you. If anyone in the group has a suggestion or something that they feel should be incorporated they need to be able to explain to you why it should be there. If they can’t chances are it’s a personal like. As you can see communication is key.

So here are the main things to keep in mind when developing a new website

1. Dont get personally attached to the website. Remember this is a marketing and sales vehicle much like an ad. Look at it much the same way.
2. Design it with marketing and SEO in mind from the beginning. After the initail design and launch of the website that’s the vast majority of its job so design it in from the start.
3. Base all decisions on your core customers. They are the ones your website is for not you. If you make them happy they’ll buy your products
4. Back up all decisions made with data. That way you have a solid reason as to why you should do something and a good starting point to improve from.
5. Be prepared to run tests to find what produces the best results. Come up with variations that you want to test before it launches. That way you can let your customers tell you how to improve your website from the beginning.
6. And last but not least ALWAYS keep your customers wants and needs in mind after all they are the one that make your business grow.

Odd yahoo seems to have a server error with their search blog. Kinda funny when you consider how large they are.

Wonder how long they’ll be down?

When I found this out I was astounded. I absolutely couldn’t believe that they were using tools that I can download for FREE to scan for security problems.

I found this out when they found a weak SSL cipher on a website of mine. The hosting company was trying to fix the problem but for some reason hackersafe didn’t recognize the fix. So they asked me to contact support and find out, if possible, what tool they were using. I called support and spoke to a very helpful gentleman that was more than willing to show me what they use. He sent me to the free tools page on the Foundstone website. Obviously I questioned the use of free tools. It astounded me! He said that the vast majority of the tools they use are free. I couldn’t believe that I was paying $1800 a year for free tools. This boils down to paying for a name and nothing else.

It has to be said that McAfee bought Foundstone a few years back, late 2004 I believe. If you search for McAfee purchases Foundstone I’m sure you’ll pull up some articles on it.

One of  the questions this raises is how many of these “web security” companies are using free tools and charging butt loads of cash for it? The next question that comes to mind is why not download the tools and do the scans yourself and not pay for the use of an overly expensive logo & name?

It’s quite obvious that the tools work extremely well and that most people don’t know about them. If you’re a business just starting out and are worried about the security of your website, and you should be, I would say download the tools and do the checks yourself. If you find problems contact your hosting company to get them fixed.

Now paying for the service can bring a boost to your business because it associates you with a well know name and brand, which in turn can boost customer confidence. Boosting customer confidence usually leads to an increase in sales. If it doesn’t then it’s not worth the money. Period. There are plenty of services out there that boost customer confidence even if it doesn’t really amount to anything. Kinda like the Better Business Bureau. They are a reporting agency that facilitates dialog between customers and retailers. But in the end they have no power and can change nothing. You pay them to display their logo and have your company associated with them.

The question boils down to one simple thing – is it worth the extra expense to have your website associted with a well known name in the hopes that it boosts customer confidence? The only way you can find out is through testing. each website and customer base is dfferent.

Most companies offer some type of trial basis and have a guarantee that their logo will boost conversion rates by a certain percentage. If you can spare the extra cash and are willing to run a test for the trial period you can find out if it will increase your conversion rate. Then you need to figure out if the ROI is worth it as well. My take on these logos is if they dont bring at least double their cost in profit then it’s not worth the extra expense. I know some people that believe it’s worth it if you break even. I don’t see how it can worth it if you break even while adding extra work that you don’t get paid for. The whole idea of a business is to be profitable and increase the bottom line.

Today google made a post on the official google analytics blog talking about changes to their search query link that your analytics software will more than likely pick up on. Just based on the parameters that are contained in the url string it seems pretty obvious that google is going to be concentrating on what sites get the click when they are served up for a search query.

Basically what this means is that you’ll have to pay even more attention to how you write your title tags and meta descriptions. They will have to call out to the potential visitor and scream “click on me, visit my site I have what you’re looking for”. The biggest trick to this whole thing is that you’ll have to design a site that really keeps them there and does truly offer what they are looking for. Google want to only serve up sites that are truly the best of the best and offer the highest user experience possible. This is one more step toward the ultimate goal of search result nirvana that google seeks to present to users.

Another way to look at it is that if you have a very well optimized site but your visitors don’t stay, you dont stay highly ranked in the SERP’s. While the effects may not be that drastic you can be sure that over time the results will change toward more of that type of scenario.

While this type of thing has been talked about as something that google is more than likely doing behind closed doors this latest change really cements it for me.

In years past some search engines tried to rank sites based on the number of click throughs it got. Of course this got “spammed” to death and proved to very unreliable. Now google seems to be adding this into the mix of it’s already complex algo. As if google doesn’t take enough things into account already!

So heads up on this one and really get cranking on lowering that bounce rate and increasing your conversion rate. If you haven’t been doing that already then you’re missing out on one of the best ways to increase your business with little or no added expense.

By far the most common question I get asked is “what is SEO?”. In this article I’ll explain it in a way that anybody can understand the basic idea of what SEO really is.


First SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It basically means designing a website, through the words and links that are on it and pointing to it, in such a way that the machines looking at everything can easily tell exactly what your website is about. To take it one step further it’s about doing the same thing for each of the pages within your website as well.


Within SEO there are a few sub-categories the first is on-site or on-page SEO which is about designing your site properly so it’s easy for the machines the search engines use to tell what each page on your site is about. Each page should be very specific and only about one topic. You do that so there is little to no chance of confusing the machines and having them categorize your page the wrong way. As an example you don’t want your hairless guinea pig page to show up when someone searches for hamsters.

This can happen if you write about hamsters on that page even if you only reference them and it makes sense to you. Remember machines don’t think they just do as they are programmed and infer nothing.


The next sub-category of SEO is off page optimization
. This refers to other websites that link (point) to you and the way they do it. The search engines look at the site(s) that link to you (what they’re about basically) who owns them and the way they link to you. There are a few other things as well but I’ll get into those in a later article. This is a way for them to see what everybody else on the internet thinks about your site – if people like your site they will tend to link to it and with that link tell others what they think your site is about through the words that you have to click on the go to your website. (links are the blue underlined words and/or pictures you click on to be taken to a different page or website).


The third major category of SEO is SEM or search engine marketing. This is mainly about getting the people that visit your site to do what you want them to. If you sell stuff it’s about getting them to buy from you. If you write a newsletter it’s about getting them to subscribe to your newsletter and things like that. Most traffic to a website comes from the various search engines so that is why it’s called search engine marketing instead of just plain old marketing. Someone that understands SEM help you design your website so that people can look around very easily and are very comfortable. So comfortable in fact that they trust you enough to take whatever step you want them to.


With that information you should have a good basic understanding of what SEO is all about and how it can help your website and business.

This video is about locating places on the internet, using google search, to develop traffic, reputation and business before you get ranked.

One of the added benefits of using this method is you will also get back links to your site that are relevant and will help increase your rankings. This is generally an area that beginners have a hard time figuring out. If you do things in the proper order rankings will only be an added benefit to your already growing business.


If you rely solely on search engines to bring you traffic and business this can kill you if there is a major change to the algorithym that drops your site from the first few pages. Presence on the internet is much more than just rankings for a given keyword and I hope that this video will show you places to achieve the best results for your business with more than just search engine rankings.

I got an email newsletter and in it was an article talking about a new SQL injection tester from HP. It’s called Scrawlr. Basically it runs through your site testing to see if you have some basic SQL injection vulnerabilities. Not a bad idea actually. It’s kind of surprising how little some people take security into account these days.
Anyway the usefulness of this tool is 2 fold:
Obviously to test your site against some common SQL injection attacks. Not a bad thing if you just set it up and want to see if it’s at least somewhat secure.
As far as SEO goes it allows you to see how a less sophisticated spider can and does crawl your site. If you run this tool and it only shows a couple of links even though you have a bunch then you have big issues as far as search engine friendliness goes.
In the case of one of the sites I work with it found 4846 URL’s no vulnerabilities.
4846 URL’s is way above what is actually there so it seems to be registering session ID’s as unique URL’s. Though there could be some linking issues as well. Needless to say I am looking into it. Anyway duplicate content can be a big problem for sites that have multiple links with different url’s and anchor text leading to any given page. That type of onsite linking structure immediately set’s up dup content issues.

You have to keep in mind that a spider only registers a piece of content by the url’s it found by. If it finds the exact same content under several different url’s it forces the SE to figure out which one is the original and then discount and/or filter out the rest. What it boils down to is that the less you give the spiders and search engines to think about and compare the better.

When it comes to onsite linking structure 1 link and url (same anchor text and url) pointing to a given page or piece of content is the best way to go. You don’t want a link in your nav bar pointing to something and then another link somewhere else, like the footer, pointing to the same thing with a different url and anchor text. Something I see a far amount of is people using their sites search function to find a product and then copying that url into the href tag. That is one of the easiest way’s to get duplicate content.
So If you want another way to look your site over as far as crawlability goes and to check some basic security issues then this can be a somewhat useful tool. It’s free and can be found here

There are a lot of things to consider when trying to get other people to link to your site. First of all in their webmaster guidelines Google states: “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.” Their definition of schemes can be found here .

If you build links intentionally to increase your rankings or page rank you are in violation of Google’s rules and this can and generally will hurt your site should they notice it. You can get penalized or even removed from their index if they feel your violation is bad enough. So don’t shoot yourself in the foot and do lots of work getting a bunch links that will get discounted anyway.

Link building should be very precise. If you go out and get the links they should be ones that bring you traffic from relevant sites. Don’t go out and get a reciprocal link from a dog site when you sell hubcaps. It’s a link that will equate to nothing but wasted time and effort and can easily be seen as violating Google’s rules.

Here are some of the things I do when going out and getting links. I should first say that these tips assume that you’ve done your keyword research and have developed a good list of them.

Building links yourself

Pick a keyword from your list and do a search on it. In case you’re wondering the reason this method works so well is that the sites you find listed are ones that Google considers relevant and at least fairly high quality. So this weeds out the junk that doesn’t matter and would be a waste of time to pursue a link from. Now, browse through the results. I go back as far as 10 or 15 pages. As you browse look for directories (link or article), blogs, reciprocal links pages etc. Write them down. Once you’ve gone back as far as you care to. Take a look at the sites/pages you wrote down.

For each site I look at many factors:

What type of page/site is it? Link directory, article directory, blog, reciprocal links page. Each has their own list things to consider.

Link directory

• how many links are on the page? The less the better. It makes your link easy to find
• Is the page relevant?
• Are the sites listed on the page high quality? If not this is an indicator that the editor doesn’t care about quality which will eventually kill the site in Google
• Where will your site be listed? Obviously the higher on the page the better

Blog:

• Is it a personal or commercial blog?
• Who links to the site?
• Are the posts high quality?
• Look at their blogroll and check out those sites as well.

Article directory

• Is it human edited?
• Look around at the different articles. Are they well written or spammy & poorly written? If they tend to let spammy/poorly written articles in this can be a problem later so avoid it. If the articles are good ones bookmark this site so you can submit your articles here.
• How many articles do they have?
• Are the articles unique or have most of them been submitted to many different directories? You can check for duplicate content here. If the articles listed are nothing but duplicate content or at least the majority of them are Google will more than likely penalize it.

Reciprocal link page

• Is the overall site related to yours?
• Are the sites listed high quality and related to yours?
• How many sites are listed on the page?
• Where will your site be listed?
• How many other recip links pages do they have? If it’s a bunch then you may want to avoid this site as they may get penalized for to many reciprocal links

Does that page that was listed have any PR. If it does it typically means that there are links pointing to it, more than just the on-site links and it’s actively promoted. If you really want to get in-depth check the backlink profile of the links pointing to that actual page to see if they’re good links or junk that will get discounted and lower the value of that page. Having a PR will also keep it out of the supplemental index and allow people to find it and send traffic your way. You can check the backlinks for the page or site using the yahoo site explorer located here

Does it get any traffic? You can check that with Alexa, quantcast, compete. The only problem is that you can’t check individual pages with these tools and you’ll get different traffic estimates from each. The point of looking is to see if there is a decent amount of traffic showing across the board.

Is it easy to find the page on the site? This of course only relates to sub-pages. If it is a sub-page can you get to that page easily. Does it come up high in their on site search results?

Is the site or page truly relevant? Check the meta tags, page content etc to see if the page and the site is truly related to yours.

If you get a good answers to each of these questions then it’s a high quality link that will bring you traffic and boost your presence on the internet.

In part 2 we look at ways of getting other people to link to your site. A practice commonly called link baiting.

The Google Webmaster Central Blog is a great source for all official announcements from google regarding just about anything that is website and search engine optimization related. This feed is put here as a good resource of information that can always be put to use whether your new to SEO & search marketing or a seasoned pro.

I added this feed to my post because I feel the people at google are the best to get info from when it comes to google. Matt Cutts as you can see from the number of videos from him is quite prolific in his willingness to speak about the happenings at google and ways to help your site get ranked. If you’re an SEO or the slightest bit interested in SEO or Search engine marketing then his blog is a must read.