Linked Up Design

I found a great tool to work with when it come to doing successful SEO work for your clients. Go on to Google and do a search for “Google Analytics“  and sign up for this right away. You will have to add the code before </body> tag in order for this to work but once you do you will have an invaluable tool that you can use to keep track of your or your clients websites.

Here are the highlights;

• Keep track of the amount of hit day, week, month and how long on the site.
• It breaks down traffic source showing specifically where the hits are coming from whether from other links (specifically which links) or organic (search engines).
• It breaks down whether the hits are coming from the USA, Canada and the other areas of the world.
• Shows the keywords that are drawing people to the site.
• A break down of which pages on the site are being looked at other then your home page. This is great because it shows you which sites you might want to make in to landing pages.
• It also shows the percentage of first visits to the site.

If you are a real stats geek like I am, this tool is a god send to work with. It really shows what is and is not working with your SEO work as well as planning out adword campaigns that will really give you the hits that you are looking for. Probably the best feature to this is the fact that you export this data is several format making life much easier.

Added bonus to this is that Google Key words has a great new beta site that allows you to pug in a website address which then gives you a break down of not only your keywords but also the keywords that are similar to your that you are using. I did this with one of my clients sites today and I found that several of my keywords are doing well. One of them had over 5 million hits but there where some that are getting over 100 million hits a month. Of course I add these to my clients keywords meta tag today so we will see.

A thing to remember whether you are doing this for yourself or for your clients, have this information is great for future business. It is a sold way to show your future clients what your work is doing to improve the number hits. Good luck

Linked Up Design

Well after a very exhausting week, I have managed to redo my site taking what I learned from the video on SEO that I watched on Lynda.com. And what was my reward? Well, I finished the site and loaded it up and then check on whois.sc and got back my score. Now to brag about this would be wrong but I will say that my score was very rewarding for my work.

One of the key things that I learned early with regards to SEO and building a site is this point: “You can’t design for SEO only, you have to design for the our potential clients, customers or readers, those of you that have blogs.” Personally I feel that is really the only way to go. To be more specific, if you look at my sites code, there is no H1 or H2 headers which anyone that knows about SEO will tell you has to be in. I ran in to some trouble with this when putting together my site because of the fact that design-wise this was not going to look good. My design was to have a site that got peoples attention quickly, while showing off some design tricks. Because putting in headers put a lot of space between the header and the paragraph, it would have not look right so I opted to not use them. This might or might now work.

Tools I used:

• First thing that did was homework and that was what took most of the time. I ran through Google’s Adword campaign to check on key words for print and web design as well as SEO. This was pretty easy because each of these words are “the” keywords. These are obviously in the Title, Keywords, Description & Meta Tags section of the site.
• From there it was working out the copy that I was going to use in the site so I handed this over to my partner who is our copywriter and we hashed out putting in these keywords in the copy but not in a way that was overwhelming in the site. In other words, we did not put things like, “SEO is great, you need SEO in order to improve your SEO score to get people to visit your Web Site!”
• Using some bold tabs here and there will also help in the long run.
• One thing that I put in as a keyword is my location, the reason being is that a bit later tonight I will be sending the URL to local directories in Google and Yahoo to help increase my marketing in my own area.
• From there I will submit my site to Google, Yahoo and Bing.
• Next it to put the site in to Directories and a few months from now I will see if this fancy score I got really paid off.

Do understand that just because I got a good score for the site, it does not end from there. The site needs to be built up as it only has about 4 pages and I do not have the delusion that I will be #1 in ranking in a few weeks, I am 35 miles from NYC so I don’t think that is going to happen. What I know will happen is that I will be able to reach people in my area now which is really more important then anything else!!

I have spent the last week watching a bit of an out dated yet very interesting training video on Lynda.com regarding SEO/SEM. The video is broken down in to chapters and then in to sections and was about 9 hrs long. I choose the word out dated very carefully here because the video is from 2006 which in web years is about 10 years old but on the other hand, all the links and people that are mentioned are all still around and valid which make the value of the time spent very high!!

The fact of the matter is that the video is so educational that I have decided to completely redo my website to conform along with the points that the author Richard John Jenkins had brought up and point out. (This explains why I do not have a link to my site as yet!!)

I encourage all of you out there that are will to take on the challenge to site and watch 9 hours of video to do so because it is well worth it. Those who have been around for awhile will pick up some new tips and those that are new to working  with SEO/SEM will learn a ton. As an aside, it is a $25 membership for the month but you have full use of all the videos that they have and this is very expansive.

In the next few weeks as I go through all of the links that were spoken about in the video, I will be adding them to this site.

(Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Lynda.com, I am simply promoting this site based on my experience with them and I receive no benefits from then or any of their affiliates.)