If you recall a few weeks ago I provided a test case in which I showed you how a website performed or lack thereof!

long tailed keywordsOne of the largest myths I run into in my private practice is that a majority of clients I talk to think that content alone is the driving force for traffic?  Yes, it is one of the elements needed but not the sole element.

Lets see some of the more typical weaknesses within a website:

1.  General Keywords vs Long Tailed Keywords:  A very large portion of the websites I analyze each year have what I call very general keywords(Broad) in that if one research’s their keywords they will find an enormous amount of competition for those keywords.  Of course the reason why they’re selected is because they have a humongous amount of traffic.  I say, so what!  What good is it to use very broad keywords if you have to compete with three million competitors.  If the number one goal is to get to the first page of a Google, Yahoo or Bing search result these sort of words will never get you to the first page.  I’ve had people try and they all have failed.  It is far more important to find “long tailed keywords” that have low competition and a reasonable amount of traffic.

2.  Title, Description & Keywords:  I once explained to a potential client that if her website had very little traffic one element that may be contributing to this issue is that her website may not necessarily be indexed or categorized properly.  Its complicated but lets just say that a websites title, description and types of keywords have a lot to do with how the search engines accomplish this.  When we conducted a “search engine crawler simulator” we found that the crawler could not see her title, description and keywords.  Yes, Wow!!  Apparently she or her coach never created the title, description and keywords for her website.  There are some specific rules that we need to follow in order to insure that our websites have a well constructed Title and Description and of course we MUST have keywords.

3.  Images:  I once read somewhere that people have a tendency of responding and reacting better when see images on websites.  Mind you, they don’t have to be huge images.  People have a tendency of responding positively to images of guess what?  People, babies and pets are always a huge attention getter as well.  Of course having the images alone is not enough you must also “label” the images and if those labels happen to be “long tailed keywords you have a double whammy!!

4.  Social Networking:  Sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Biznik.com are great sites for posting a business page to garner support from these social networking sites.  Really well thought out websites that have social networking connections get on average about 25% of their traffic from potential clients from these networks.  It amazes me how many websites I see that have NO social networking links or plugins.

5.  Product Selection:  I analyzed a website a few months ago and I was a little shocked that when he gave me his web address and I visited the site the keywords he was using didn’t match the products he was selling.  In other words the “relativity” of his keywords sometimes had nothing to do with the products he was trying to sell?  He told me that his coach or guru told him just add as many products as you can.  What??  Your products and/or affiliate links of products should be relative and consistent with your keywords and content.

6.  Google Analytics:  If you spend hours and hours and days on end to research, then create your website you’ve done a great job.  However, if you don’t have a really good analysis tool then you’ve basically wasted your time developing your website.  There are lots of tools out there that you can buy or for free.  Most of my career I have used Google Analytics because its free and easy to learn and use.  Think about it…this tool will tell you who your visitors are, what search engine or traffic source it came from and then it will tell you which pages your visitor is visiting most often.  Very, very powerful stuff.

In a nutshell, this is a business and therefore you need to approach it as a business and therefore learning some of the basic rules on making money online will go a very long way and it just may put some money in your pocket!