The same question has been asked repeatedly on our
website optimization webinars
. Customers submit their websites and we have a panel of experts that review three sites per week.
The burning question that all of our listeners ask is "what are the key things I can do right now to improve my Website Grader score?" These customers have used www.websitegrader.com . You don't need to use this tool, but you should be looking to make sure these best practices are in place on your site.
1. Register your domain name for greater than 3 years. It is cost effective and is looked favorably upon by the search engines to see that you are confident that your business is going to be around for a number of years. You will instantly receive search engine optimization credit for increasing the time to expire date. You can contact your hosting provider and for less than $30 extend your site out a couple of years.
2. Have a 301 rediret in place to resolve http://yoursite.com and http://www.yoursite.com. If a permanent 301 redirect is not in place, the search engines will not know where to allocate the credit. If they resolve in one place, one site will receive all of the SEO credit. You've worked hard to earn this credit, so make sure you get it!
3. Create a conversion form. Leads are the gateway to customers. If you have a solid offer and a landing page that supports your excellent call to action, you are more likely to gather that visitors information. You can put them in an email marketing campaign or a lead nurturing campaign. There is a world of options open to you once you have that email address or phone number.
4. Start a business blog. Blogging is of the utmost importance for a couple of reasons:
A. The search engines look at a few important pieces of information and one of those criteria is indexed pages. Each time you create a blog post, another page is created. It is fast way to increase your volume of indexed pages.
B. Blogging is yet another chance to create content around long-tail keywords. Optimize each post around a long-tail keyword that you want to use to get found by prospects.
5. Create unique and meaningful page titles that are keyword rich. Use your most powerful keywords first. Can can separate the keywords by pipes {|}. The pipe is the character between the parathesis that signals to the search engines that it is the end of the thought.
Inbound marketing and search engine optimization go hand-in-hand. Your site cannot be successful without accomplishing both of those tasks at the same time. Please feel free to add any additional suggestions that may have worked for you in the past.
Inbound Marketing Blog Feed
Paul Tyler 8:37 AM on November 22, 2010
Interesting points. Do you have any evidence that supports the theory that registering your domain for over 3 years makes any difference?
Thanks
John McTigue 8:51 AM on November 22, 2010
As you say, #4, blogging is the most important of the 5. But just starting a business blog isn't nearly enough. You have to commit to writing it, preferably at least 3 times a week, on topics that will appeal to your target marketing. This activity will help to bring in leads and also alerts Google that your site should be indexed frequently, which helps your SEO.
jpdesigntheory 9:24 AM on November 22, 2010
I've gotta research on how to do that 301 redirect. I just updated my page descriptions for all of my site pages. Thanks for the tips Melanie, you guys at HubSpot are awesome!
Matthew Simmons 9:41 AM on November 22, 2010
This is a great insight. At the end of the day it all boils down to having a website that is appealing, makes sense to people who arrive there ad gets them wanting more or asking for more information. All of these 5 get you that place.
Thanks for sharing.
Matt
Dave hale 9:55 AM on November 22, 2010
Yes, so simple, yet so important. Most people who do not know how simple ti really is, are looking for the magic bullet or insider secret. yet, by simply implimenting these easy to follow tips and keep them going will help over time.
Lori Turec 10:03 AM on November 22, 2010
I agree with John that committed blogging makes a big difference. I am surprised at the number of people who are confused about whether to have the blog part of their site or to have a separate blog with links to the site. I believe strongly in making the blog part of the site so you benefit from the updated content plus you still can link. Do others have a different opinion?
Chris Morgan 10:39 AM on November 22, 2010
They are all good points, but they are also all predicated on the fact that you have a good website architecture to begin with. There are so many sites out there today that are built on old code that makes them invisible to search engines that priority number one should be to make sure your site is built correctly before doing any kind of optimization.
Mary E. Ulrich 11:00 AM on November 22, 2010
What is a "301 rediret"? Never heard of that before?
Could you give an example of what a title with a pipe might look like?
Thanks.
Vera 11:38 AM on November 22, 2010
I looked up "301 redirect" but don't understand directions. Are there "lay term" instructions somewhere that make sense to a lay person?
Joe 11:38 AM on November 22, 2010
@Mary - That was a typo it was supposed to say 301 redireCt.
An example of a title with a pipe would be Social Media Training | Social Media Marketing Training Online.
Thanks!
Joe
--
University of San Francisco - 100% online
Internet marketing courses
Adam 1:51 PM on November 22, 2010
Mary - If you go to www.hubspot.com and look at the page title, it says,
Inbound Marketing | HubSpot
The pipe is right above the enter key and looks like 2 vertical hyphens. Shift and hit key and you got it!!!
Rafal 2:43 PM on November 22, 2010
They are all good point.What is worth to remember that too many people spend too much time focusing on On-Page
Optimization; they are hoping that if they can choose the right keyword, and calculate the right keyword
density in the page body, then they can achieve a top ranking on Google.
According to Google spokesman Matt Cutts, Google loves links from Social media sites because it
represents the human involvement. The more often your web site gets mentioned in the social media
sites, the more likely it is that your web site will be ranked higher on Google as it represents the
popularity of your website.
___
Internet Marketing Vancouver
Color Banner Printing 3:05 PM on November 22, 2010
Our site is almost up and going and I hear that the blog portion of it is very valuable for SEO. We have a bunch of articles written and ready to go thanks to HubSpots advice.
Brian Fitzgerald 3:10 PM on November 22, 2010
I would agree with Paul Tyler's comment above on the domain registration length. That is a bit of an old urban legend in my opinion. Matt Cutts from Google has made a video addressing this question and basically says that you don't need to worry about how long your domain is registered for - http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp#p/search/19/Y1_1NQWQJ2Q
Any data or information you have to support your claim would be interesting.
Mel 6:00 PM on November 22, 2010
Great article, thanks. My comment is also regarding the 301 redirect - is there a way I could do this myself or does my domain registration company need to set it up?
Thanks
Melinda
aharon 7:14 PM on November 22, 2010
Cool information. I thought that I knew a lot about SEO, but there was a lot of new info here. Thanks
Kapil 5:01 AM on November 23, 2010
We were talking about the company blog for a long time now. But I am still confused about the utility of google blogspot against the company blog on the website...which is more useful in terms of search engine results?
Shriharsha Bhat 8:11 AM on November 23, 2010
A blog supported by your website is much more useful than Google or WordPress blogs. It's good to have your blog hosted on your own domain. This lets you build a reputation with search engines and build a brand as a blogger.
Joe 9:08 AM on November 23, 2010
@Melinda - This is something you can setup yourself. Here's information on how to do it http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2007/03/how-to-properly-implement-a-301-redirect/
@Kapil - There are two schools of thought on this one. One side will say to host it on your domain (ex. http://www.socialmarketingideas.com/blog) and the other side will say to host it outside (http://www.socialmarketingideas.blogspot.com/).
Some people will say to host it off the domain because you'll be able to link back to your domain.
I personally recommend having it hosted on your domain because having it on your domain will give your entire site additional content for people to share and link to which gives you even more links.
Hope this helps....
Melinda 6:22 PM on November 23, 2010
Thanks - I'll ask my developer to check it out.
Rebecca 9:03 AM on November 25, 2010
I'm slightly confused by this comment: 'A blog supported by your website is much more useful than Google or WordPress blogs. It's good to have your blog hosted on your own domain. This lets you build a reputation with search engines and build a brand as a blogger'. I have a wordpress.org site where I have set a static page rather than having the blog as the homepage. Does the above comment imply that I would be better off having a website with a blog linked to it rather than a blog that looks like a website in order to get traffic?
Rob Berman 2:45 PM on November 28, 2010
All good points. I do regularly check my website grader. I do try and adjust based upon the feedback.
Rob