Website Best Practices

Here is my short list of best practices that all website designers and website owners should consider while their site is under design. If you website is already up you may want to consider any items that you don’t have covered in your next website update.

1. Include a privacy and legal policy. In today’s world, you need to make sure that you have yourself covered. If you are marketing to prospects and clients using email you must have a privacy policy in place. If you are doing pay per click advertising, Google will be looking to see if you have a link to your privacy policy on your landing page. Having one may even improve your quality score with Google AdWords.

2. Consider having your navigation be text based. Don’t hide your navigation in JavaScripted rollovers. Search engine spiders cannot read JavaScript. If you feel you absolutely must have this design element, provide alternative text navigation at the bottom of your page. Consider instead styled text using cascading style sheets to give many of the same effects but with the benefit of search engine readability.

3. We’re seeing a lot of activity in social bookmarking right now. It is a smart idea to add this to your new website as I feel that this interaction with readers will eventually improve traffic to your website and may even be a factor in the future for organic placement.

4. Make sure your website is feed enabled. That means that if you have a blog, install in the head tags the link to allow IE 7 and Firefox to autosense your blogs feed.

5. Make sure to include a site map in the footer links of your website or on your sidebar. Most sites over 10 pages will benefit from this. Arrange your site map by topic or mimic your site architecture. The links on your site map can even be to specific paragraphs on your pages using anchors. Don’t just list your pages.  For example if your About page contains team information and your services, in your site map have a separate link to each paragraph. Your web master will know how to do this using links and anchor tags.

6. Consider providing links to important content in your footer. When someone is at the bottom of the page by having navigation right there, you make it easy for people to work their way around. At the very minimum provide a link back to the top of the page so they can access your navigation quickly.

Top Outlook Tips

We’ve got some great tips to help you get the most out of Outlook. Here are links and descriptions to our top tips for Microsoft Outlook 2000, Outlook 2003, and even Outlook 2007.

1. How to set up multiple email accounts In Outlook
These simple instructions take you set by step on how to input multiple POP3 and IMAP mail accounts to let Outlook download them all to your computer.
Link: http://www.mccordweb.com/newsletters/instructions/setting-up-multiple-emails.php

2. How to create address member groups in Outlook
These easy to follow instructions show you how to set up address groups in Outlook to send emails to many members with one click.
Link: http://www.mccordweb.com/newsletters/instructions/address-member-groups.php

3. How to set up a vacation message in Outlook
Follow these instructions to learn how to set up and out of office or vacation message in Outlook using rules.
Link: http://www.mccordweb.com/newsletters/instructions/vacation-message.php

4. Stop spam with message rules in Outlook
Hate spam, you can get a handle on it with these tips. If you have Outlook 2003 or 2007 you may want to consider instead using the Junk Mail definitions instead of this option. Additionally consider tagging mail you get as junk mail by right clicking on the message to add the sender to the blocked mail folder. Outlook will learn over time which items you consider junk mail.
Link: http://www.mccordweb.com/newsletters/instructions/stop-spam-message-rules.php

5. How to add a signature in Outlook
Here’s how to set up a signature in Outlook. Right now the rage is to include an image in your signature, make sure before you do that to understand that some people you send email to will not receive your image intact, they may receive it as an attachment to the message so it’s best to do an image if you like, but also include text in the signature to assure that all receivers will know who sent the mail without having to click on an image as an attachment which they may not do.

Here’s another tip for website owners. When you post instructional information on your website like this, you are creating what is called link bait. It can be a huge traffic and link builder for your website. Not only do you provide interesting and helpful content for your readers but you build traffic into your website over time.
Link: http://www.mccordweb.com/newsletters/instructions/signature-change.php

An Interesting Case Study on Black Hat Tactics

Click our blog post title to view the site that we will be talking about or visit it here at www.Mag-Gro.com. This site has been poorly treated by a number of professional webmasters. The client has a nice product, but has simply not been able to get the web exposure that he really needs. His site has been managed by at least two other webmasters before the client came to us.

The first and most severe issue that we uncovered when we analyzed the site on the server was then unbeknown to the client one of the previous webmasters had created over 100 doorway pages and had even installed them in a directory on the server in a directory called Doorway. Ouch, search engines really hate that. Clearly much time and effort had gone into creating these pages which consisted of line after line of on topic keywords some even linked to his website but in no order or with formatting. There was not even an effort to create keyword dense content, just gibberish on a page.

Many of these doorway pages pointed to the client’s website and some to his MySpace site all in an effort to try to drive traffic. Additionally over 10 pages resided in the root of the server with keyword dense names that had been connected to the doorway pages or to the MySpace site. His real website consists of only ten pages but there were several hundred pages actually sitting on his server.

On top of that, no sitemaps had been created and conversion tracking for his pay per click program had not been installed.

Yikes, I am talking about not taking care of business for a client. We now have this client under our wing and are working to remediate the problems and to drive legitimate traffic to the site. We’ve already cleaned up the server and now our next step is to clean up the pages which we will be working on over the next several days.

Click into the site to see what you think and let us know your comments below.

Welcome to Design-World Watch

Welcome to Design-World Watch a new blog from Nancy McCord owner of McCord Web Design. We post to this blog every Thursday.

You’ll want to check out our other great blogs for more informational content, tips, tools, and best practices at the addresses below:

Web-World Watch

This is our main blog and updated on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It is our oldest and most developed blog. Topics discussed are pay per click marketing, search engine optimization, best practices, Internet marketing, podcasting, using video, and other Web worthy information.

Blog-World Watch

This blog is fairly new for us and we update it on Tuesday. Topics are focused on the blogosphere and include blog widgets, blogging tactics, blogging for search engines, blog practices, writing for your blog, and how to use a blog to garner website traffic.

 We hope that you’ll choose to subscribe and check back each week for new information and interesting tips.

Top Email E-Newsletter Tips

In my theme of top tips or best practices this week, here are my top tips for e-newsletters.

1. Make sure before you send your first e-newsletter, or for that matter even set up a subscription based list, that you have a privacy policy on your website. Note what you will do with the list. For example, we state that we only use our list for our own marketing endeavors, that we will never sell or rent our list, that if we ever change our policies we will post them on the policy page and give ten days notice, and finally that if you contact us, we will automatically add your name to our list. Make sure you have yourself similarly covered before you even start e-newsletter content creation or marketing using an e-newsletter.

2. In your very first e-newsletter make sure to introduce yourself, provide one great article that subscribers will read to determine if they want to stay subscribed to your list, and ask readers to confirm their subscription or explain how to unsubscribe from your list. Transparency is crucial in keeping people on your list that you have automatically subscribed as business contacts when you set up your initial subscriber list.

3. Stay consistent. If you say that you will email to your list weekly with store specials do just that. If it is monthly don’t slip to a quarterly blast. I even recommend going so far as to lock your delivery to a date. For example on my list, I always send my monthly e-newsletter on the first of every month, regardless what day of the week that is. My subscribers know to expect my newsletter on the first and contact me to ask if they had missed my newsletter and to resend it to them if I have sent it out late. So build readership by staying with a schedule for day and frequency.

4. Keep your e-newsletter short! This is not a place for boring dissertations. Short and sweet is the key. If your article is long, consider putting in a teaser and then linking to the full article back on your website. From my personal experience, it is best to do one larger article and maybe two small features. I have also found that typically if you post the rest of the article back on your website very few readers will actually go there to read the rest, so keep that in mind and keep your articles newsy but fairly short. That doesn’t mean go light on content! Make sure to offer something of real value or interest to your audience. That leads to number 5.

5. Keep your articles unique and interesting. This dovetails nicely with number 4. Short is good, but interesting is crucial. I have come up with a combination for my own newsletter of one feature, one small article, and one “bright idea” tip. The tip article is fairly short, but sometimes I have to scour the Web to find one. I have had clients write in frequently to let me know how much they have enjoyed or benefited from the tip.

Try out some of these thoughts for your own e-newsletter program. E-newsletters are a great way to keep in regular contact in a meaningful way with clients and prospects. I have had several clients who have read my newsletter for as long as six months and then contacted me for a project, so I know that e-newsletters do work!

Blogging for Business

I just had a client call me about their blogging services being done by another firm and he mentioned that the blogger was doing social network blogging and what did I think about that. The client is in a high tech market and the topics of the posts were things like: Little Norrie, Corrie, A New Car For Graduation, Daddie Finds a New Love. Good grief who was writing these posts a high schooler?

Blogging for business is just that serious business. Readers on a business blog want to read blog posts that speak to their interest and reason for visiting in the first place. Blogging is not about attracting the MySpace generation who doesn’t have money to pay for the products that are used by fleets and courier services in this case.

My rule of thumb has been that business blogging should be on topic for the industry, be written in an engaging style, offer a reason for people to subscribe or visit again, and build authority on the product or service for the client for Google and other search engines.

Blogging is serious business! By the way, we got the job and the client fired their social networking blogger.