3E was a technology sponsor for the 2010 NWA Business EXPO. If you missed 3E Software’s seminar on “How professional is you web presence?” or would simply like to get a copy of the power point, please download a PDF version of the power point file here.

Thanks,
Joe Ehrhardt
3E Software, Inc.
Easy Efficient Effective Custom Software

1. Meta Tags – Ok so let’s face it, they really aren’t used a lot by search engines anymore, but does the time it take to create a description tag and a keywords tag really that hard. We recommend 5 or so keywords and in Google the description tag is what gets seen over ½ the time when results get displayed in Google. So why not use them?
2. Say no to a page that is an Image-  People you cannot take a great image that you put on a billboard and stick it in a website and expect Google to like your site. I have seen so many great looking sites where the owner’s state people can’t find them in Google. I open the page and 95% of the home page is one image. I mean the text and everything. What’s worse, they didn’t even use an alt tag on the image to say what the image contains. Don’t do this and fire the company that does this for you.
3. Lack of keywords – I have clients that state they want to be found on Google, but when they type in flowers Springdale AR they are nowhere to be found. So I pull up their site, to find that the word flowers is in their logo which is an image with no alt tag and the only place I can find Springdale is on their contact us page. It’s obvious why you’re not found by those keywords, your site doesn’t even have them.
4. Page Titles – First off if you don’t have page titles then you are wrong. Secondly if you’re not using them for SEO you are wrong, well at least missing out on some easy SEO. Simply putting my company name as the Page Title is ok, but it helped you very little with SEO. Once again assume you are a flower shop in Springdale called New Flowers. Why not have a nice Page Title like “New Flowers – Severing Springdale and all of AR”. Ok it’s a little long for people, but   trust me Google will see the difference, but don’t make every page the same, change it up to best reflect the page and what you want people to come to that page for.
5. Flash (Say no to full flash sites) – Don’t get me wrong flash is cool and flash can be done great, but unless you have a text version of the content or really know what you or the company you hired is doing. It’s probably going to be negative for your site. Simply put, getting SEO with a site that is heavy in Flash is no easy task and if the site was cheap, then you can probably rest assure they didn’t do any SEO with the flash content. If you do use flash for major content, menus, etc, please check out the SEO TC by Adobe. http://www.adobe.com/devnet/seo/
6. Directories/Search Engines – So it takes about 10 minutes to list your URL with the major directories/Search engines out there, but you would be amazed how often this is not done. Simply put, list you URL with the following directories at a minimum:
   1. http://www.google.com/addurl/
   2. http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx
   3. http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
   4. http://www.dmoz.org/ (It’s a long wait, but it could be useful)
   5. http://dir.yahoo.com/ (It costs 299, so I don’t highly recommend it, but it can help)
7. Sitemap/Robots File – So you listed your site with the search engines, good first step. Now do this last basic step to make things better. Create a sitemap. It’s not hard, try http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. Now that you got a site map create a robot file and put your sitemap in it. Need an example use ours? It’s as simple as they come, just make sure you update the site map. http://www.newerabusinesssolutions.com/robots.txt . Once again if you hired a company and they didn’t do this then they didn’t do the basics and you deserve better. For more information on Robots.txt files http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/03/speaking-language-of-robots.html . Check out the webmaster tools at Google I highly recommend them.

So let’s face it, these are simple things that almost any SEO expert would say is like step 1 in the 20 step process of making your website findable in Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. Sadly though there are a lot of great companies out there that simply ignore this or more likely hire people that have no experience on good website development. In my experience, I seem to run across sites like this that come from two sources, a marketing company that thought they could throw images, flash files and PDFS online and call it a website or some cousin, brother, sister or friend of one of the owners of a business that thought they could hook them up for more than it usually costs for a good shop to create a site. In the end if you site doesn’t cover these 7 basic steps, then your probably aren’t anywhere close to the top of a Google search on keywords that apply to your business.