Make sure you’re getting the value from your site that you deserve. Your website must include some basic functions in order to be well understood by google and other search engines. When the search engines and other services can find your site, the public at large can also find your site.
If you can’t tell whether or not your site follows these basic rules, send this checklist to your design agency, and get them to double check this list. Or, drop Majabra a line, and we’ll check it out for you, free of charge.
1. The title of your page should appear in the ‘title’ bar of your window. It should include a description of your business, not just your business name.
2. Make sure your elevator statement is included in the meta tags of your site. to check up on this, go to your website and choose ‘view source’ from the menu. you will see a bunch of code. look for this near the top: <code><META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”"></code> if you see this tag, and your elevator statement appears between the quotes, you’re cool. if not, you need to get that added to your pages. That’s the description that will show up in the search engines when someone gets your URL, and page title.
3. Where you have hyperlinked text, the link should say something relevant about what you’re linking to, as in check out my latest blog post on small business marketing not ‘click here’.
4. Photos and illustrations should have clear and descriptive captions. if the art is just decoration, then don’t worry about it. but relevant content should be labeled as such, they say.
5. To maximize your ranking potential, your navigation should be text-based. Don’t worry if it isn’t though, just make sure you’re using alt tags on the links. You could perhaps put a text-only nav elsewhere on the page, like in the footer.
6. Your front page, or home page should have text describing what you do. Make it your elevator pitch, or your mission. If you have a flash intro or artwork on the home page, it is important to also include whatever content is in that flash or art as text elsewhere on the site.
7. Link to your friends and partner networks, and have them link to you.
8. Register your site with whatever free business listing services you can find.
9. Keep the text on your site as text, not images. If you must use images, then make sure you have included proper alt tags.
10. links to your home page should go to your base domain, http://www.whateveryourdomainnameis.com, as opposed to index.html