Vincent O’Hare from Vincent O’Hare Consulting did a great session at Affiliate Summit West 2012 in Las Vegas on “25 Ways You Can Improve Your Website” on Sun 8th Jan 11am:

Top 25 things webmasters should look at when building a site or evaluating their website performance. Attendees will leave with actionable items to improve their sites with easy to implement steps.

UPDATE – Vinny has just released an awesome book on Amazon Kindle called “25 Ways to Improve Your Website” which includes top tips from this session – download it on Amazon here (and if you are lucky and in time you can also get it for free as part of a special promo for 3 days only from Aug 10-12 2014)

Here are some top tips:

 

Keywords

Many people just blog and think search engines will pick them up – don’t just do this, target specific keywords.

Try tools like compete.com, Google Webmaster Tools, Snoozle

Wordtracker has a free 7 day trial

Paid tool – Raventools

 

Colors

Just because it looks good doesn’t mean it is

 

Title

Keep below 70 chars as after that Google won’t index any longer

Put your keyword near the front

Search engines rank you higher if search term is in the beginning of your title tag

 

Meta Description

After 150characters it will be cut off and Google will display dots

Keyword in beginning and a Call to Action or Curiosity near the end

 

Meta Keyword

After you use more than 1-2 keywords, you are almost signalling Google that you are a spammer

Search Engines claim they don’t use this, Vinny thinks they do

Meta Keyword should be the one focus on that page, most SEOs will tell you don’t even bother

Some directories crawl and grab this keyword to

Bing claims they use it to catch spammers

 

Search Boxes

Normally puts 2 searchboxes on websites, one up the top then one down the bottom

Macy’s, JC Penney has searchbox above the fold where it should be

 

If you put Google Searchbox, can see in Google Webmaster Tools what people are searching for, then make new pages about these terms

 

Logos

If building trust you want to have a nice logo, want to make it look good

Always link back to home page

 

About Us

Customers don’t buy from a website, they buy from you, they want to know that you are trustworthy before they put a credit card and make a purchase

For Vinny, most important page, won’t launch a page without it

Should be easily found, in your footer, probably with a nofollow tag so you don’t waste link juice

Another example of creating trust on the internet

Derek Halpern SocialTriggers.com About Page is great example, all about how he can help the customer

 

Blog

Permalinks – set correctly, change from p=?35, you want it to be category name or postname or both, Vinny recommends just using /post-name/

Note – The latest version of Wordrpress 3.3 has /post-name/ as one of the options for permalinks now under general settings in your blog

 

Contact Us Page

 

Should be making your website so good that people shouldn’t need to contact you

Always let user know how long it will take to get to them, like 12 or 24 hours

Use a contact form to avoid spam, don’t just put your email address there will get spam, many free WordPress contact us plugins

Once people ask questions – add them to your FAQ page

 

Privacy Policy

Google requires you to have one to be in their Adsense Network

Make it a nofollow page, no reason to create linkjuice

SERPrank.com has good free privacy policy templates

http://www.serprank.com/privacy-policy-generator/index.php

Cookie information, how you are going to use their email

 

Trust

Would you buy from your own website? Ongoing thing to keep improving

 

Email Newsletters

Heart and Soul

Google did ‘freshness’ update, one of his sites got hit, the site had 7000 subscribers, but site traffic went down 3000 hits a day, he sent one email a day and got the traffic back above what it was

When Google

Offer for free signups, free ebook, e.g. for Travel Website – 10 Best Ways to Save Money on Vacation, even take older pages and freshen them up and put in ebook

Vinny users Aweber, can set up Aweber so every time you make a new blog post it goes out in an email newsletter, can set to do once per week, once per post, or once per 10 posts etc

Use Twitter and Facebook to get people on your list

Uses Twitter to get them on Facebook list, then get them on newsletter list by posting to Facebook

 

Navigation

Too many, reader gets lost

Control where reader goes, have maybe 5 at the most

Make it spiderable – Vinny sees Javascript Dropdown boxes, which Google claims they can index, but still recommends make it simple html

 

Backlinks

Find competitors backlinks, email them to try and link to you

Or give them a guest post, with links already embedded

 

Blekko.com – type in link:competitionwebsites.com and you will see the backlinks

Firefox Add on – Quirk Search Status

 

Images

Alt Text – Optimize

Picnick.com

 

Videos

How to videos

Self hosted or youtube

Self hosted means upload to Amazon S3 account, costs pennies, will get billed like $1.63 for a years worth of service

Can host on youtube, problem with embedding those on website, if you show related videos people leave and go to youtube

Note – Youtube now allows you to TURN OFF related videos at end when embedding

Can put a video on about us page

Can have videos transcribed on SpeechPad.com, costs around $1 a minute and you have pages of content

Never have them autoplay when you go to a website

 

Landing Page

Call to action

No sidebars, No navigation, No other links or distractions

 

Internal Linking

Whenever Vinny makes website, he makes it link to at least 3 other pages on the site, then you find out if people scrape your content

Set up google alert at least for link:yourwebsite.com and site:yourwebsite.com that way every time you get a link or page indexed in google

WordPress has plugins that will automatically link every time you use “red widgets” to your red widgets sales page

Internal Linking keeps people on your website, Google will probably rank you higher if people click through to 3-5 pages rather than clicking one page and leaving, also helps Google spider your content

 

On Page Content

Keyword Density – don’t go over the top and put 70% about Blue Widgets, Vinny keeps if around 3%

Uses Content Composer software, tells you the Keyword Density while writing

Always want to have quality

 

Site Speed

Google webmaster tools has page speed tools

Cheap hosting is not worth it – many sites were on Godaddy $4.99 plan, when Vinny moved his sites off them his traffic went up 40-50%, was on cheap shared hosting with 20,000 other sites and probably 19,000 of them were porn and spammy sites

Take steps like Picture optimizing

GTmetrics.com – will crawl your whole website, tell you what is slowing down your website

 

Blogs in Niche

People who comment – great idea for backlink partners

 

Forums

Link to website is in signature

Also put your twitter, Facebook fanpage in there

You want to become the expert there

Go in there, make maybe 10 posts before you put your signature

 

Youtube

Build subscribers and friends – builds repeat visitors

As every time you upload video, they get an email and end up back on your site again

Put http:// links, still a nofollow link, but they click through after the video

Leave comments on other “blue widgets” videos

 

Twitter

Find influential people in your niche, follow their followers

Vinny has Tweet Adder follow everyone that Missy or Shawn has @ messaged in the last 6 days

Users Hootsuite to send out automated messages – can upload a spreadsheet with 50 tweets

 

Facebook

Google is seeing the interaction

Google indexing Facebook Fan Pages

Facebook are nofollow links not dofollow, but with 700 million people you want some of that

Uses Facebook to get people on Email Newsletter List

 

Google Plus

Recommend get a business page set up for each website

In time Vinny can see Facebook not mattering as much

Tip – on Google Plus whenever you make a new blog post, instead of attaching the link at the bottom, drop the url with full http:// into the little white box where you write the message, your site will get indexed in Google in 4 minutes


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