This is a list of 171 things you should know about your website, search engines, and basic tips. 35-52 Part three
35. Does the website tell you how wonderful a company is, but not what the company will accomplish for potential clients?
36. Update your website content often. Search engines like to see that changes are being made to a site and that it isn’t just sitting there for years with no upgrades.
37. Most website designers will not take the time to give you a fully search engine optimized website because they don’t know how; it takes to much time, or think it’s not important.
38. A website can be designed to look like anything, but can it be found in all major search engines? It’s important that your website looks good but also works.
39. Fix bold, underlined, multi colored copy or multiple fonts. They are confusing for visitors and search engines. Use a .css file - External style sheets enable you to change the appearance and layout of all the pages, fonts, or color in a Web site.
40. Use a standard font size so people can read your web copy. Correct light text on a light background, or dark text on a dark background. Only use color combinations that work.
41. Don’t include pages that re-direct a page that automatically sends you to another page or website. (If you find that sentence confusing, so does Google when you do it.)
42. Don’t use clip art. There are many places to purchase icons, stock photos, or graphics.
43. Never use more than one exclamation point in your copy!
44. Scan each page of your website. Does it tell you what your business is about? Take longer than 4 seconds to load? Take more than 4 seconds to understand what it’s about? Make you feel comfortable and trustworthy? If you didn’t answer yes then you should evaluate why, and address each one properly.
45. Check all website design elements in your website, if they are not needed take them out.
46. Eliminate extra characters in your website that are not needed.
47. The Internet is always changing and websites are always being indexed or positioned according to how relevant they are in search engines. Just because you achieve a good page rank or you are indexed well doesn’t mean you will retain this from day to day.
48. Check your website for broken links because of java script or other conflicting code.
49. One of the simplest ways to improve your site’s placement in the search engine results is to work on the keyword density on each page.
50. Don’t use hidden text on your website it is counterproductive, and you aren’t fooling the search engines. This could hurt your search engine placement.
51. If you have a website that is entirely Flash-based make an html version. Provide users a choice to view the flash version or html. Flash looks good, but search engines are not able to read text, links, your website navigation or content embedded in flash.
52. Eliminate any navigation that is Flash-based. Search engines are not able to read the text or the link.
