Best free sites for submitting your website for analysis

[remcdon]

Gary, your feedback has been most helpful and I am in the process of making a number of changes based on your suggestions - thank you!
Pauland - yes totally agree with what you say about product differentiation and the need to be very proactive. To date, all my work has come through existing professional networks and not through the website - which I'm planning to turn around over the next 12 months.

Can I also say that I love Xara Web Designer Premium 7! While I have heaps to learn about web design (and search engine optimization), I really enjoy using Xara and have found it much better than a more expensive package that I used to design the original website several years ago.

[Abikadabra]

Hi remcdon and actionIT. I am not a professional, but I have had quite a bit of success with SEO for the sites that I build. I didn't figure this for out myself...I took a young Canadian woman and her grandmother on a very long private tour and during the tour the woman, who was an SEO whizz (she had just won an award in Canada) gave me some advice about shifting my website from page oblivion to page one and 2 on google. I get a lot of work for my tour business now, even though I am mostly on page 2 for most of my keyword searches, but I am on page one for my main searches, which is private tours and charters in the main wine regions of Western Australia. Here are her tips, which I will use for ever and a day as each of the websites I build rank well within days of being indexed by google. So, here are THE RULES to ascribe by to help move your site from the Deep Net to somewhere a little less obscure:

We will use actionIt as an example here
FIRST:
UNDERSTAND THE BEAST AKA GOOGLE
the index.htm should always remain index.htm or index.html as google like to index(start) from that and then index all the other urls from that. However, ALL OTHER urls should have your keywords in them. It doesn't matter if they are long. Looking at actionIT's website, the page offering web design is listed as http://www.actionitcs.com/web.htm. When someone types in the search query website designer sydney, or web design sydney, google will first look in your domain and subdomain names (urls), then it will look at your website description, which would have been entered in the web properties box when actionIT built the site. After the properties section, google will then crawl the title of your page (for example, in the top of this browser window this page is called Best free sites for submitting your website for analysis). More on titles in a wee bit. After that, google looks for keywords in the body of your text.

SECOND actionIt would do well to do the following :
URL CHANGES - change http://www.actionitcs.com/web.htm . Change the web.htm to /sydney-website-design-web-services.htm or something like that. Sydney website design gets 18,100 searches per month so its important to also put this in the title of the page. Presently you have Website design and then a list of suburbs. Its not likely that people will search for their suburb (best to list your business with google places for that one).

THIRD
PAGE TITLE - Your page title should read something like Sydney Website Design|Sydney Website Design & Hosting & Computer Services . Google crawl the first 64 characters, so in this title it will stop crawling at the end of the word computer . Yahoo crawl 74 characters, so it will crawl the whole title. The competition for all these keywords is fierce, and there is no low competition for these keywords.

FOURTH
WEBSITE DESCRIPTION & PAGE DESCRIPTION - Your present page description (for your web design services page) in the Web Properties box is At ActionIT we can design an affordable website to suit your specific requirements,including visually appealing Flash banners and hi-res graphics. A website can help your business grow by attracting new clients and serve existing customers more efficiently! We can also arrange web hosting, email and site maintenance on an ongoing basis as your products and services evolve.We can also update your existing website, or even give it a whole new look. .
Not all this will appear in the search listings. The text will probably stop just before the words web hosting. You need to use all the available characters to say what you do with your keywords, so do not use the words requirements, appealing, including, attracting or any other fillers. People are search savvy these days and all they are looking for in their immediate search is what they have typed in the search box. The fact that google now display your web page as an image on the right hand side is what people look at now, apparently. They scroll down the side of the listings that have appeared on the page and they look at how your website appears and they will click on it if they like it. Wow! So it doesn't pay any more to have nice descriptions. You could change your description to something like :
SYDNEY WEBSITE DESIGN & Custom Built Computers Sydney Australia | Website Design, Website Hosting, Computer Services Sydney. Don't use too many capitals as google considers that you may be spamming and will drop you from searches. I can see that you have given descriptions to each of the pages in the Web Properties Box, but you will need to change them along the lines of the description I have just given you if you want google to find you.

Are you still with me? I know this is L O N N N G !

FIFTH
PUT TITLES IN THE BACKEND OF ALL YOUR IMAGES
In the web properties box, go to IMAGE. You need to label every single image on the site with your keywords. You can't just type sydney websites sydney websites over and over. Google will penalise you if you do that. Just name each image with your keywords. For example, name the bloke on the web design page Sydney Website Designer, Web Designs Sydney. The globe could be named Web Design Solutions, Sydney Website Designs etc etc. Name them all.

SIXTH
You must submit your site to google to ensure that it is indexed (put into the google library so that when someone searches your keywords you are at least in the running to be selected). You need to submit your sitemap to google, then submit each of your urls using the Fetch Googlebot tool. It also pays to start a Webmaster Tools account with them (its free) so you can track your site's performance with google analytics. You can submit just urls to bing and yahoo without having to submit the sitemap. Also submit to Altavista.

SEVENTH
LINKS & RESOURCES
You have not got a site link or useful links page. Google like it when you are community spirited and you link other businesses and services similar to yours, or who you may use or who may use you. You need to get yourself some links. It doesn't matter if at first you put a whole heap of links on your page without having reciprocal links. Put them on your page and then send emails to the businesses you have linked and ask them for a reciprocal link. Mind you, this seventh point is not so important as I have put up sites without a links page and they have ranked at least to page 3 (might as well be on page 40 though, as we know ppl get bored after page 2). Beware of people asking to link to your site - check them out first. If google find your url on a suspect site they many penalise you and drop you from their index.

EIGHTH
LIST YOUR SITE ON LOADS OF DIRECTORIES
Such at Hotfrog, Gumtree, truelocal, google places, any directories that are associated with your product.

If you want to pull one of my sites apart for seo purposes please feel free. I make simple little websites, but they do quite well on all 3 major search engines in Oz. This little one had no business and had been going down the gurgler due to an awful website that I am sure scared people off...that's if they got to see it as it was on page 14 through to 20 for all major search terms. Since launching the site in August they are now ranking on page one and page 2 for all their major search terms and they are fully booked every weekend until the end of March. And that has nothing to do with me and all to do with the lovely Canadian woman I took out on tour. You can strip it down by right clicking and viewing the page info etc, and checking out the page titles. Right click all the images and you will see they are all titled with the keywords. www.grandiscottages.com.au

Whew! Hope you got through all that, and good luck. Cheers, Abi

[Abikadabra]

I couldnt fit this bit in on my last post...typical woman...just too chatty!

Before I met this young SEO Whizz I had paid more than 2,000 to netregistry for SEO services and they did nothing for me. I was always chasing them up and asking them what I was getting for my money. They said the process happened in stages and that each month I would be required to do something (like page titles, get some links). I didn't even know what they meant with the page titles, and they did not explain anything clearly to me. My rankings improved marginally (ie I shifted from page 36 to page 25...big deal). So I guess I am saying DONT pay for SEO services. They will just tell you to do what I have just told you, and slug you for a few thousand bucks. I have optimised lots of friends and colleagues websites and its remarkable how your ranking can change by just making these considered changes.

Bare in mind that your site may not boost in rankings immediately. You have to wait for google to do a crawl, and knowing when they crawl is like knowing the name of the person who will win Lotto this Saturday night. I have been monitoring them however, and it seems they do a big crawl every 2 to 3 weeks and occasionally do random crawls inbetween. So you might make changes tomorrow morning but google may have crawled today so you wont see your changes appear for a couple of weeks.

[Miko]

These replies deserve a big thank you.

[Hornet]

Yep put simply, everything on a website should be made relevant in everyway to what your customers are searching for.. but of course still look nice to the end user, it does take time!

[Herman65]

what do you think of www.finmax.nl ?

[actionit]

Thanks Abi. That is probably the best peice of information I've seen on SEO. A great help.

[remcdon]

Abi - thanks heaps for that really practical and helpful information. I agree with Abi - what you said is as good as anything I've read on SEO. Again, thanks for taking the time to record that info here. I'm sure many will benefit from it!
Bob

[remcdon]

Abi - hi again. I've been working through many of the really great changes you suggested. The only one I'm having trouble with is changing the URLs (except the first page) so they have an appropriate key word or two in them as you suggest (your 1st and 2nd points) - I've tried making these changes in several places such as the Page file name and Page title on the Page tab but no option so far works (eg it changes the name on the menu bar). I know I'm missing something simple as I'm still very much in learner mode but would appreciate your (or anyone else's) feedback.
Thanks

[Abikadabra]

Hi Bob

I had this problem with my very first Xara site and there is a simple solution - but I cant remember it! Anyway, with each subsequent site I have made I have named all the pages (subdomain urls) before I even choose what navigation bar I want. I then choose the nav bar, and name all the tabs, and ONLY then do I link the tabs. I am sure that someone will come along and help you out here (I think I ungrouped and then grouped the nav bar?...or maybe not). Alternatively, you could just discard the nav bar, rename the pages, and then put in another nav bar, rename etc. Probably will take you about 15 minutes. Cheers, Abi