Periwinkle House of Design

Checklist Point #10 – Inbound Link Profiles Getting links back to your website has always been one of the main jobs for any webmaster.  Although Google didn’t like it, they did tolerate the behavior, at least until they rolled out their Penguin. Overnight, established websites dropped from the rankings.  Pages that had been holding the top slot for years suddenly disappeared. Google had done something that no-one believed they ever would. They started to enforce their guidelines relating to “link schemes”.  “Any links intended to manipulate a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site, or outgoing links from your site. Manipulating these links may affect the quality of our search results, and as such is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.”  Finding Backlinks to Your Website There are several tools you can use, some free, some paid.  Ho...

Checklist Point #8 – Legal pages  There are several pages on a website that we can refer to as “legal” pages.   These are things like:  • Privacy  • Disclaimers (including any medical or earnings disclaimers).  • Contact Us  • Terms  • About Us (we talked about this earlier in terms of visitor trust).  • Display of any documents on the site.   These might include things like cookie policy, anti-spam policy, outbound link disclaimer, and so on. Does your website include all of the necessary documents?  Legal Pages Checklist  Not all of these pages are necessary for all types of websites, so check which pages your site needs and add them if they are missing.  • Do you have a privacy page?  • Do you have a disclaimer page?  • Do you have a terms page?  • Do you have a contact page?  • Do you have an about us page?  • Do you have a med...

Checklist Point #7 Bounce Rates & Time on Site There are two metrics that Google most certainly monitors as a way of determining visitor satisfaction levels.   Bounce rate and  Time spent on the website.  According to Google:  “Bounce rate is the percentage of visits that go only one page before exiting a site.” In other words, someone only views one page on your site before exiting. Typically, high bounce rates are bad.   It may mean that people are not finding what they want on your site. Time on site is the length of time a visitor stays on your website.   Low time on site may indicate a problem with your content since people aren’t sticking around to read it.  A page with a high bounce rate but high time on the page is not a problem.  Bounce Rate & Time on Site Checklist  Your website once installed and allowed to run for a few weeks, check your bounce rat...

Checklist Point #6 –  Would you trust the site?  This section looks at the trust levels for your website. We’ve already discussed some of the things that can help people trust your website, but let’s look at a more comprehensive list. People like to deal with real people. When they arrive at your site, do they know who they are dealing with?  About Us Page  Every website should have an About Us page and those that do, often find it’s one of the most visited pages on the site. The About Us page is something that many of us skip over and ignore, but really, it does help build trust when people can find out more about you and your site.  Comments enabled We’ve already talked about comments earlier in this book. Make sure you have a comment system installed on your site so that visitors can leave feedback.  Does the site pretend to be a merchant? This specifically refers to affiliate sites who send traffic to a merchant site in ...

Checklist Point #5  Social Presence Social Presence includes two things: • The website/website author has a social presence on social media sites. • The website has social sharing “buttons” on the site to allow visitors to share the content with their social media followers. Check your website.  Do you have both of these? Let’s look to see exactly what I mean, as well as give you some ideas for a “bare minimum” social approach. The main social channels I’d recommend you look at are: 1.      Facebook 2.      Twitter 3.      Instagram 4.      Snapchat 5.      LinkedIn 6.      Tumblr 7.      Google plus Tips and tricks for your industry/niche.  • Current news in your niche. • Interesting articles you find around the web. • New posts on your site (this can be automated). • Videos, images etc. • Current special offers from your website...

Comments: Visitor Contact A visitor-friendly site is one that offers your visitors the chance to interact with you. ALL websites should have is a contact form. Something that I highly recommend you also include is a comment form where visitors can comment on your content. This may not be applicable in all cases, but visitors do like to know there is a real person behind the site and often want to give their opinions as well. Not only does a comment form build trust, but it also creates social proof as new visitors can see that other people have left comments on your site. General rule for approving comments Only approve comments if: 1. It is clear from the comment that the person has read the article. 2. The comment adds something to the article, like another point of view. 3. If you know that the person is real because you recognize their name (but only if the comment is also not spammy). Fake Comments  Fake comments are those that you or someone you asked (o...

Checklist Point #3 – Site Structure   Is your site navigation helping your visitors find what they want quickly? If you think in terms of needing every page on your site to be just 1 and a maximum of 2 clicks away from the homepage, then you’re on the right track. Good website navigation should be intuitive to the visitor. They should immediately be able to see where they need to go for the information they require. A good test here is to ask a friend who has never been to your website to find a particular piece of information. How long does it take them? Include a Search Box I’d highly recommend you have a search box on your website to help people find information. If you are using Wordpress, the default search box really is very poor. People won’t be able to find what they want on a large site because Wordpress doesn’t rank its results by any kind of relevance (at least not any that I can detect).  What if you could use Google’s search engine to power the ...

In the past, a lot of people made a lot of money throwing up “Adsense sites”.  These were designed to rank well, but show visitors very little content, just money-generating adverts.  Visitors could either click on an advert (and make the webmaster money), click the back button on their browser, or scroll down to find the content. Because of the poor user experience on these sites, most people probably opted for one of the first two options as they figured the content would not be up to much.  If something caught their eye in the adverts, they’d click. Web Page Checklist and Adverts  • Resize your browser to 1024x768 and see what loads above the fold. Is there useful content?  Are there too many adverts?  If there are too many adverts, especially above the fold, consider removing (or moving) them. • If you removed all of the adverts from the pages on your site, would those pages still offer the visitor what they are looking for?   I...

CheckList # 1, The Domain Name  Exact Match Domains In the past, keywords in your domain name helped your website rank better.  The ultimate ranking boost was from something called an Exact Match Domain or EMD for short.  An EMD took keyword “stuffing” to the extreme – by making the domain name the same as the main keyword phrase you are trying to target. Google had finally decided to take action on “low-quality” EMDs and prevent them from ranking simply because of the phrase in the domain name. Some things to look for that might indicate a low-quality EMD site: • Is the site specifically targeting that EMD phrase or does your site have a lot of quality content within the overall niche? • Do you have a lot of backlinks with anchor text that matches the EMD phrase? • Are there very few pages on your site? • Reading your content, does there appear to be a bias towards using that EMD phrase (to try to help it rank better)? • Is that EMD phrase repea...