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03.12.09 Advice On How To Make A Successful Website  By
Gareth Davies Whilst not technically a session I was fortunate enough to hear Michael Stebbins of Market Motive present a little mini-presentation in the Expo hall, which grabbed a lot of people's attention. I was away from my laptop but managed to type up notes on my iPhone. Michael Stebbins-Market Motive His presentation was titled: 15 stupid things you can do to your website: 1. Using lots of JavaScript menus so search engines can't crawl your website properly. 2. Using stupid keywords-ones that are too competitive or no one is searching for. Michael suggested picking mid-range keywords and work your way up. 3. 'No Crawl' added to the robots.txt on the test site, but then accidentally copying that over to the live site when it goes live. This could include using the 'disallow all' command in the robots file of a test site and then unwittingly copying that robots.txt file over to the live website. 4. Using 'home page' as the title tag on the home page, or even worse not having a title tag at all! Unique relevant title tags that address the page content and keyword agenda should be used for web pages. 5. No Meta description tag-similar to above unique description tags were recommended for all webpages. 6. For Adwords don't accept default 'broad match' as this can be an expensive mistake to make.
7. Don't let Adwords chose which advert is served up. Michael cited a technique put forward by Dan Thies and that was to make 3 ads that work for every test ad, then simply tell Google to rotate the ad and that way the new test advert will only show 25% of the time. This protects the website against having a new advert showing for the majority of the time that might not be as effective as the old one. 8. Leaving margin out of ROI calculations (ROI doesn't include all the real costs. For example no cost of goods are included). 9. Be patient when submitting to the DMOZ directory. If you submit your website to DMOZ don't resubmit over and over again as resubmitting can mean you start all over again and thus reset the submission time. 10. Bad use of images as content headings. Michael recommended using text and appropriate h1/h2 tags. 11. Avoid default blog permalinks. Michael suggested using the all in one SEO pack so the blog URLS can include keywords. 12. Not using a Google site map. Users should choose priorities carefully and not put priority 1 on every page. 13. Mass email using BCC and not using email services. Using an email service provider is highly recommended for sending to large lists of recipients. 14. Below the fold calls to action. Ensure calls to action are above the fold and in order to check how the page appears on different screen sizes undertake browser testing. 15. Collecting unnecessary data in web forms and reducing conversions. Asking too many questions can reduce the number of people who complete a form-so only have the fields that are essential. Creating complex HTML emails with forms embedded in them was also not recommended as its not an effective way to capture data. Michael recommended sending users to a website form instead. Continue reading this article. About the Author: Gareth Davies is a contributing writer on MarketingPilgrim. |
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