Your website should be improving daily!

That is so important that I am going to say it one more time.

YOUR WEBSITE SHOULD BE IMPROVING DAILY!

One of the things I want to do is to start writing blog post. So…I am going to head over to some of the question and answer sites and answer 10 questions and then copy and paste those answers into my blog for content as well as into the answer sites.

What this does for me is gives me some ideas of what to write about as well as allows me to start getting some links and traffic to my site from the answer sites.

Then I want to write 5 tutorials, 5 articles, and 5 reviews. So basically this is my 10, 5, 5, 5 plan. This is what I want posted on the site daily. The first thing I want to do is to drive as much traffic as I can to the site.  The idea is to use this traffic to fine tune and tweak the website design, the look and feel of the site, the content, logos and everything else that could possibly affect the user’s experience.

How will I do this?

By split testing two designs against each other at all times to see how my website visitors react to different elements of each design. I will use this method to determine my offer, my prices, the way I’m going to approach the market, my web design colors, web design text my unique selling proposition; all this information comes from my customers.

What do I know?

I can sit here for a couple hours and come up with my unique selling proposition or I could split test different ideas and measure how my website visitors react to those ideas.

I’m not talking about asking the customers, because a lot of times people don’t even know what they won’t. I’m talking about using how the customers react to the website to make the website better.

So were not just asking the customer about the website colors what we’re doing is we’re testing the blue website against the red website and a black website against a green website and seeing how the customers react differently to different elements on a website.

I’ve been reading Kim Roach’s blog for about a year and yes, she’s the Queen of traffic.

So when Kim writes up a 21 Steps to 1,000 Visitors Per Day post, I take notice.

I figure I will put Kim’s 21 Steps to 1,000 Visitors Per Day post to the test. Now, I didn’t notice a time frame on there but if you tell me do these 21 things and you’ll get thousand visitors per day in 100 years then it really wouldn’t be worth my time.

So let’s say 1,000 visitors per day in seven days, now I can live with that. I’ll start tomorrow and I’m going to go through all the steps and rinse and repeat as many times as possible for the next seven days. Then we will see if we’ve added 1,000 visitors per day to our website at the end of the seven days.

The hardest part of designing and developing a website is getting the page layout correct.

It makes no difference if you are selling products, selling a service or if it is nothing more than an information website. Trying to get the page layout correct is one of the hardest things to do.

Web designers, especially the new ones go crazy trying to get the page layout right. A web page has to be attractive, interactive and functional.

So, what are the layout landing page secrets?

1. The first thing we want to do is not center everything. By centering everything we make the page disorganized and boring. This can also lead the website to appear to need more.
2. Contrast is important, it makes the website appear more attractive. The understanding and mastery of colors, values, size and weight will increase the appearance and if your website and edge over the competition. Just by changing font colors and contrast in colors you can make the fonts appear to be bigger or smaller than they actually are. Done correctly contrast helps the page look more organized, stronger, and can help move the website visitor into becoming a custom.
3. All my life I’ve heard that every page needs to look the same as the homepage design. The about us page design is the same as the contact us page design and so on and so on. I wonder if the website visit doesn’t become bored, seeing the same page over and over again. Maybe if we change the pages a little with different background colors, and photos along with the information it could make the site more interesting.
4. There are a lot of SEO companies that have gotten into this whole local marketing thing. They throw up a website and start a business but lack the understanding of how important it is to make sure everything is functioning on their website. I can’t stress enough how important it is to make sure all your links are working and that the website is functional before you start marketing it. We all want to make money as quickly as possible, but by not setting up the website correctly you’re actually losing more money than you would’ve made if you had taken the time to set the website of correctly before you started marketing it.
5. Keep the content and information tight, pretty and useful. Use white space but don’t waste it. Leave a small percent of blank spaces. Use blank space cleverly in order for the website not to look crowded.

There is not a day that goes by that I don’t have to stop what I am doing to answer the phone while some stupid SEO tries to sell me his services. And too make it worst there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t get at least two spam emails from some SEO company trying to sell me their services.

Since these guys have decided to drive me crazy I figured I might as well put their information to good use.

So here’s the thing, I am taking my SEO Watch Dog website and I will start doing website reviews for companies that either call or spam me.

If your website isn’t set up correctly then I would think twice before spamming me and since the statics for online SEO vs. Offline marketing look something like this.

1.  80% of consumers research online before buying offline?

2.   70% of people searching Google never click past the first 3 links?

3.   60% of all traffic on the internet is now video?

4.   YouTube is the #1 search engine?

Since you are calling me and sending me spam email instead of using the search engines to drive traffic to your business I can only guess that the reason for this is that you yourself don’t know how to market your own business online.

So you have resorted to offline marketing to sell and online service that you cannot even do.

Search Engine Optimization is complicated, fast moving, and full of misunderstandings. This makes it difficult to learn.

I’ve read a lot of SEO books that are available online. And I’ve found them full of theory and lacking actionable steps. I am hoping to bridge the theory and actionable steps here and now. I believe that you will find the information I am about to share with you unique even among the information that is being sold online.

I believe the process, followed by explanation, followed by example is unique among SEO books that are currently being sold on the market. And I believe the information that I am about to share with you will make the difference when it comes to outranking the competition.

Now first up is I want you to understand a little bit about how PageRank works. We have to first understand that there were two guys trying to figure out a better way for finding information online. Now these were two Collage guys so they decided to use the same method that was used to organize academic papers. A quick way to judge the quality of an academic paper is to see how many times other academic papers have cited it.

This idea was then created online.

It’s easy enough for a webmaster to manipulate words, placement of words, internal links, and so on his or her own website, however when it comes to getting inbound links from other websites it’s another story. Now there are hundreds of factors used by the search engines to rank a web page but they can be broken down into two groups; relevance and authority.

Now once inside authority we have two more groups; domain authority and page authority.

This authority comes from a measurement taken from other web pages that link to this web page. Now just because a page has a PageRank of 5 does not mean it will outrank a page with a PageRank of 4.

This is why hyperlinks are so important.

Search engines look at a lot of different things when it comes to link profiles. Now I am sure you are thinking that a strong authority website could rank for everything, and they can. Think of Wikipedia!

But the reason they don’t dominate is because search engines put a lot of emphasis on determining relevancy.

I read somewhere that Google’s biggest expense was their power bill. Now if this is true then it would only make sense that this would play into how the search engines work. Other words, if it takes less power to determine relevancy between a text query and a text document than it would between a text query and an image or video file, then it would make sense that we would see more text search results then we would videos or images.

As of this writing, this is exactly what I am seeing.

To me this means I should be spending more time optimizing my text and less time on videos and images. Now I am not saying to ignore videos or images because I believe this will change as computers and technology change. However things like top-level domains, domain owners and code validation are poor signals for determining relevancy. This means your page needs some content before it is going to rank.

The search engines use their analysis of content as their primary indication of relevancy for determining rankings for a given search query. However, instead of counting the number of times a keyword is used on a page the search engines are now able to use a natural language algorithm to determine relevancy.

For example, a search engine can determine from a piece of content about Jessica Simpson that it is related to phrases like “Nick Lachey” (her exhusband), “Ashlee Simpson” (her sister), and “Chicken of the Sea” (she is infamous for thinking the tuna brand “Chicken of the Sea” was made from chicken).

Okay, now when it comes to relevance Google will use image information, link profiles and site structures as well as content to determine how relevant a given page is to the search query. And the anchor text of course let’s Google know what the page is about. And since most people use either the site URL or the page title as their anchor text it’s a good idea to use these to their full advantage.

Google can also look at what I linked to, to help with their understanding of what is relevant to my website, and they can look at the page URL linking to me to help determine how relevant that link is to my page. Knowing and understanding things like this is essential for a SEO to do their job.

Understanding anchor text, and the number of characters preceding and following the link itself is also very important.

In this article I talked about both popularity and relevancy. These are the main ideas that make up the Search Engine Optimization theory. We have very little control over how the search engines operate, so understanding the law of popularity and relevance is important for making the big money in SEO.

If you would like to read more about website design, website conversion, social media marketing or search engine optimization check out my blog at http://www.geeksonsteroids.com/.