Some of these steps may have several sub steps depending on your answers to the main step. I would like you to go through them and write down your answers.
Then after you complete each of the 12 steps you should take a new piece of paper…. you still have paper somewhere right? ….. and write down the answers again. I think you will be surprised to find that your answers might change after you have done an evaluation of all the 12 steps.
 
Step 1. What is the URL of this Web Site?
Please list the URL IE: http://www.linksareblue.com. This should be the URL you will use for all links back to the home page. Remember http://www.linksareblue.com is really a different URL then http://linksareblue.com without the www, even though they almost always lead to the same Web Site. It is best to standardize the main link URL for back link purposes.
 

Step 2. What is the email address you want to use for all contacts from this Web Site?
Please list the primary email address for this site. You may also want to list any other email addresses you will use or want to use based on departments. As an example: you may choose to have only one email address for the entire site like I do joed@joed.com or you may want to departmentalize the emails such as sales@www.linksareblue.com, service@www.linksareblue.com and accounting@www.linksareblue.com.
There is an up and a down side to everything. With one email address you can make sure you are always getting the email but with multiple addresses you can set up an auto responder to answer the most common emails on a departmental basis.
 
Step 3. What is the General Topic of your website?
EX:
http://linksareblue.com - Web Site Marketing
http://www.bikezine.com - Motorcycles
http://www.marriedmatch.com - Dating
a. My general topic is:____________.
b. I have no general topic the site is a little bit of everything.
If you have a specific topic for your entire website then just move onto step 2. If your website has various topics then consider each page a topic onto itself and go through the following steps for EACH topic you are covering.
 
Step 4. Web Site Objective
What is the objective of your Internet Web Site?
a. Sell Something
This could mean several things. Do you sell a product or service or both?
If you sell a product, is it a digital product or a hard product.
If it is a hard product does it need installed or just shipped?
If you sell a service is it something that can be accomplished via the Internet or is it something you have to visit the customer’s location to do?
Are you limited in the locations you can serve because of the nature of the product or service?

If so what are the geographic locations you can serve?

b. Get a Sales Lead
What information is needed to consider this a good lead?
Email address?
Name and Email address?
Name, Email address and physical address?
Do you need a phone number also?
What is the minimum amount of information needed for this contact to be considered a 1st stage lead?
Do you need to attach specific product information to a specific lead or are they all initially generic to the website?

A case for this might be that you need both real estate AND mortgage leads. In that instance you would need the to know which product they were interested in and possibly their geographic location too along with other information that would make you consider this a good lead.

c. Provide Customer Service
Are you providing technical support, pre sales support, after sales service or some or all of the above.

Is this support done as a paid service or just for goodwill?
Does the customer need to have purchased something to get this support or is some product technical information available to anyone?

d. Make advertising revenue
Is your site designed to make money from Adsense, Yahoo or some other publishing revenue advertising?

Do you sell links or advertising on your Web Site other then as a standard publisher?
Is your site designed to sell leads or products from affiliate programs?
What combinations of the above do you make revenue from?
If your site is a combination of the above list your revenue streams by percentage of total revenue sorted highest to lowest giving the percent of the total gross revenue.
EX.:
Yahoo Publishing 28%
Google Adsense 24%
Affiliate program 1 18%
Affiliate program 2 12%
…etc.

e. My Web Site is a combination of the above
Please list objectives as above and answer the questions for each type you have on your list.

f. Other
If your site does not fall into one of these, please email me and let me know what I need to add here. You can email me at joed@joed.com
 

Step 5. Key Words and Phrases

a. What is the primary key phrase for your Website?
This means if you could only be found under one WORD or PHRASE what would it be? Remember if you cover more then one topic on you site to list a Word or Phrase for each primary topic.

b. List your secondary Key Words and Phrases
These would be other Key Words people would type in to find your site. As a point of interest you may or may not know that your Google analytics pages and your Web Stats should show you the Key Words and Phrases where you are now being found. This will help you get an idea of what other phrases may be prevalent to your site.
When you list your key words and phrases put them in a list like with the Primary Key Phrase at the top of the list followed by secondary Key Phrases below it. Then save the list as a txt file. You will almost always want to refer to this list again in the future.

Example:
General Topic: Dating
Dating
Date
Dates
Online Dating
Bored Men
Bored Women
Sexy Women
Sex Men
etc…..
 

Step 6. Customer Demographics
Who is your Customer? This could be a simple as anyone who owns a website or as complex as a single female, 25 to 33 years of age, no children with an income in excess of $150,000 a year living in a City of over 100,000 people in the State or Ohio who owns 2 or more cats.

What are the absolute demographics for your customer? Please be specific but not so specific that you eliminate people that could become customers.
 

Step 7. Call to Action

If your visitor could only accomplish one simple act when they come to your Web Site, what would it be?
a. Sign up for your newsletter
b. Buy a product or service
c. Download Demonstration Software
d. Fill out a form
e. Other
What is the minimum amount of action on the part of your visitor that you would consider a good visit?
 

Step 8. Analyze your Web Site

a. Look at your Web Site with a variety of browsers.
Try to purchase a product or fill out a form and make sure it works. Not everyone is as up to date as you are with technology so test with not only the new but the old and see how the pages look and feel with different browsers.
Netscape Current Version
MSIE Current Version
FireFox Current Version
AOL
Netscape 7.2
MSIE ver 6.
You should have all these on your machine all the time to test when you modify your site. Don’t eliminate your potential customers because their older browser will not hold up when using your website.
b. Time your Website


Not everyone has a Cable or High-Speed Connection. If you have a standard 56kb modem use it to dial into a service and time your pages load time. If you only have access to a high-speed connection ask one of your friends to do it for you. Make sure you aren’t missing customers because of slow loading pages.

c. Validate your Web Pages
This means to go to any search engine and type in “Validate my html”. You will see a ton of results go to just about any of the free ones and let it test your html on your pages.
You would be amazed at how a small error that doesn’t appear visually will become a huge problem for the spiders to crawl. I have seen it many times where a bracket wasn’t closed properly or a quotation mark wasn’t closed or a link was left open.


When this happens the spider from the search engines may just leave and never get past that point.


So is your html or php validated?
 

Step 9. Title and Meta Tags

Take a look at the following tags on your main page. Write them down for later.
a. Title Tag
b. Meta Description Tag
c. Meta Keyword Tag
Are you using your main phrase in each tag?
Does your description match not only your key phrase and content of your site, but does it also entice someone who reads it to enter your site?
Are the words contained in your Keywords tag related to the words in your title and description?
Did you write your title tag so that it looks good in both Google and Yahoo? Remembering Google uses the first 60 characters and Yahoo uses the first 80.
After looking at your main page you will want to look at your sub pages to make sure that these 3 tags are a bit different on each page and that they reflect the content of that page.
 

Step 10. Web Site Design
Now take a look at the main page of your site in a standard browser. Look up to the upper right side of the browser and draw an imaginary line from the upper right corner to the lower left corner. This is typically called the “SWEET SPOT” of your site. It is what people see first when they look at your page. The following items should be included in that “SWEET SPOT”.

a. A page Title inside H1 tags.
This should include your key phrase at least 1 time.

b. Descriptive Paragraph
A short paragraph of information about the site stating what the visitor can do there using your key phrase and related keywords and phrases. Your primary key phrase should be used no more then 4 times and no less then 3. A good copywriter can help you with this so that it doesn’t look like search engine bait and is enticing for the visitor along with satisfying the search engines. A good idea is to either encase the entire paragraph in an H2 tag or to make the keywords and phrases in bold.
You can use a CSS style sheet so that the H1 and H2 tags don’t look terrible on the page but still appear to be these tags to the search engines.

c. Your companies contact information.
This should include at the minimum the name, address and email address. A phone number lends even more credibility to the contact information.


d. Your Call to Action
Look back to Step 7. Now place your “Call to Action” in the upper left portion of the screen INSIDE the Sweet Spot. This is the best area to have it for visitors to see. Whatever it is make sure it is located here and entices your visitor to take that action.

e. Duplicate Content
Some things to make sure of are:
1. Your site isn’t a cookie cutter website like those sold a lot on ebay. If 100 people are using the same site then no matter what you do, it is never going to rank high.
2. If you built your site using a template you purchased then once again we have the same problem. To the search engines it looks like duplicate content.
Some fixes for these problems without a TOTAL redesign of the site is to add or change the image names. Change around the style sheet so it doesn’t look the same as all the other sites using your same template.


If you used a template or cookie cutter site and do not want to redo the entire site then make as many changes as possible to the site. Every change separates you from the other 100 or 1000 sites that are using the same template or cookie cutter site.
Also take a good look at the content of the pages. Is it real new content or is it recycled from other sites around the internet? Are you displaying RSS feeds as content on your site that is appearing on other web sites? Are you using articles from Article sites to give you more content? These are all things you should watch out for. I agree they are a benefit to the visitor but they also may take a lot away from your site because of duplicate content problems with the search engines.
 

Step 11. Other Page Tags

a. Alt Tags
These tags are placed here for browsers without the ability to view images. It is a good idea to place your key phrase inside the Alt Tag on Images. So instead of having the alt tag say logo.gif have it say Logo Image for “KEYPHRASE”
Please use this alt tag with your primary phrase no more then 3 times on any page.


b. Comment Tags
A comment tag is usually used for programmers to understand that portion of the page when they are modifying the source code of your page.
These tags are not visible to the web browser but are to anyone or any spider that looks at the source code to your page. So at least 3 times place comment tags on your page using your primary key phrase near the beginning of the comment. Here is an example for the phrase Online Dating:
Online Dating Source code for paragraph one of the site.


So the bottom line is use your primary key phrase within both of these tags but also use it in a way that makes sense to a person too if they are reading it. This is critical at times because if you get too high a listing on a popular topic people will complain to the search engines and they will have a human look at not only your page inside a browser but also at the source code.


Step 12. Links

This section is going to get right to the meat of links. It could be an entire book all on it’s own, but I will try to keep it as brief as possible.


Links are one if not THE most important thing you can do to get your site listed higher in the search engines. As far as link values go it used to be that one link equaled one vote to the search engines. Now they try and filter the links and assign value to them, hence PR. The more important the site the more value a link to your site is from it.
Of course we all know Google is the most strict about this followed by Yahoo and then MSN. So when you do your links you want to keep this in mind.

a. Getting Started
There are only 3 reasons for you to have any outbound links on your site at all:
1. So you can trade links.
2. To acquire meaningful content from another website. Be careful when you are doing this ask yourself a few questions, …”is this content going to keep my customers coming back and helping me acquire new customers?” The next question is …”is this content going to keep or bring in enough customers so that the money I make from them is worth the ranking I am giving away by linking to someone else…”. Only you can answer that question.
3. To sell something directly or indirectly. This could be a link out to your payment merchant, or a publishing ad of some sorts or to an affiliate program.
Be very STINGY with your outbound links. If possible try and not put any on the front page of your site if that is possible.

b. Reasons for Link Trades
There are only a couple reasons to trade links at all.
1. To increase your page rankings.
2. To gain traffic from the returned link
These are the only reasons you should ever link to anyone else’s website.

c. Setting up your site for link trades and traffic programs
First you want to create 1.or more pages on your site. Usually called links.php, webring.php and toplist.php. These are the pages where you will place your outbound links. All these pages should have a link at the very top taking the people who hit that page directly back to your home page if they click on it.
When you get too many links on a page, (never put more then 30 outbound links on any one page) create a new page something like links2.php and put a Go To Page 2 link at the very bottom of the page.

d. Getting Unsolicited Links
Of course the best way to get a link is to have such interesting and unusual content that people will just put a link to your web site to enhance their own pages. This is getting something for nothing and that’s always good. Try and look around the net for programs and content that will let you do that. On the bike sites there is a TON of Babe of the Day pictures that the people post to their website. If you look at all the Social Networking Sites like utube and the others they always have linking code to “ADD THIS VIDEO” to your Web Site. Years ago web stat counters were another thing people would post on their site of course giving a link back to the Web Site where they got it. A lot of Shareware software has linking code on it when you post it to your site that is removed when you purchase the full version of the software. Come up with something unique here and you will really be in the game.

e. Paid Links
These are good links to have if you don’t have time to amass your own links. Some of them are like link farms but there are also a lot that look pretty normal. Be picky when you purchase them so you don’t waste your money. But also don’t let your pickiness stop you either. After all they are not reciprocal links. A lot of people think that a “BAD SITE” linking to you can hurt your sites ranking. I just flat out don’t believe that. Otherwise Pepsi would be buying crappy links for Coke and anyone who made a top position on one of the engines would be at risk that someone would post 10,000 bad links to them from bad sites. I just do not believe this is true at all.

f. Link Exchanges
This is a great way to get your linking campaign started. I can recommend 2 link exchanges out there that I personally know are good. http://www.linkmarket.net and http://www.linkmetro.com. I’m sure you can find others when you are getting started. There is a strategy to using link exchanges.
· Only request or accept links from sites that are at least 2 PR rankings higher then your site.
· Monthly Check the links you have going out from your site and make sure they still have your links posted and that they have not decreased in value. If either of these cases exists then remove those outbound links from your pages.

g. Web Rings
Web rings have been around for a very long time. What a web ring is basically a group of web sites on a similar topic that link to each other. Just to make it simple lets say there are 5 sites in the webring you choose to join. When you join a webring you are assigned a spot in that ring. Lets say you are spot 3. When you post their code to your webring you will see that it is actually 2 links you are giving out. One called Previous Site and one called Next Site. So if someone comes to your page and clicks PREVIOUS SITE they will be taken to Site 2 of the webring and if someone clicks NEXT SITE they will be taken to the site with the number 4 spot.
People argue over is it better in the middle of the ring or at the beginning. I think it really doesn’t matter. Most surfers see a webring button on a site and just click NEXT SITE. Although it can be argued that a lot of people go to the webring site itself and search the entire ring in order. Of course the first site in any ring is the Ringmaster’s site so that person is always number 1. If you really feel ambitious start your own webring and you can have the number 1 spot.
To join or start your own webring you can go to: http://www.webring.org.

h. Top Sites, Picture Posts etc.
Again these are all similar to web rings. In the case of topsites pages: You add your banner to the group and then post a link on your pages back to the list. The more traffic you send into the list the higher up your banner appears and the more traffic is sent to you.

The best way to use these sites is to get started in a couple of them and then start your own. On your own you can run your banners between the banners of the groups. This way you always have high visibility.
Picture posts are similar. You put a link on your pages they list you on theirs and the more traffic you send them the higher you get placed and the more traffic gets sent back to you.

There are a lot of variations on these types of sites out there and the one bottom line rule is. They are great for getting started but where they really shine is learning how they work and then putting up your own. Then using all the member sites on their list as “LEADS” to invite them to join your similar webring, topsite or picture posting area.

i. Good Ole’ Regular Link Trades
It is always a good idea to make friends with other people with websites similar to yours. So a link trade there is a good way to start. Not only do you get a link but also you may make a friend or meet a potential business partner. There are a lot of great ideas floating around the net and tossing ideas back and forth are a great way to learn new things and refine old ideas.

j. Things NOT to do, but to watch out for.
First be careful when you trade a link. Actually go to the page that will be linking to you and check the PR and their rankings on the 3 major engines. If they have low PR that’s not a killer, especially if they are coming up good in Yahoo and MSN. There is life after Google. LOL


Another thing that some link dealers and traders will do is place a No Index, No Follow command either in their robots meta tag for their link pages or place it in the robots.txt file addressing their link pages. What this will do is give them the credit for the link FROM your site but their linking pages will never get indexed and your link from them will never show up anywhere.

Please visit my eBay Store for Search Engine Optimization .