1. Website is All Flash or Graphics
Everyone wants their website to get easily found on the search engines when their targeted audience is searching for the type products and services. The search engine’s spiders (for example: Google’s Googlebot) crawl websites and use the text content to help determine what the website is all about. Unfortunately, a website that is all graphics or Flash has very little information to help the spiders determine the purpose of the website. A well designed website will balance text with graphics, Flash, videos, etc. to make each web page search engine optimized and still meaningful to the web visitors.

2. Page Title Tags & Meta Description Tags Poorly Written
When looking at websites across the Internet it is amazing to see how many sites have poorly written Title Tags and meta description tags missing and duplicated on every page. The Title Tag is used by the search engines and visitors as a short description of the web page. Poorly written Title Tags or Title Tags stuffed with too many keywords can spell instant death at achieving good marketing reach on the search engines’ organic (free) listings.

3. Poor Navigation Design
An important factor in the overall web design is to make sure your targeted visitors can quickly find what they are looking for on your website and also meet your goals. A poorly designed navigation system will frustrate your visitors and surely send them off to your competitors. Navigation systems need to be easy to follow and have the correct wording so the visitors know what they will find if they click on a navigation link. This also holds true for the search engine spiders trying to crawl your website.

4. Too Much Industry Terminology
Often website developers leave the text content to the client and the client describes their products and services in common industry terminology. Unfortunately, many times the targeted audience doesn’t think and talk that way. So your targeted audience searches with keyword phrases that are not found on your website. Thus, your website doesn’t appear in the search engine listings when your potential customers are searching for your type products and services. Know how your audience talks and mirror those words within the website.

5. Home Page Too Cluttered
Websites that try to cram too much on their home page make it difficult for the visitor to find what they are looking for and probably spell goodbye! Avoid overloading the page with flashing graphics and using too many different colors. Define the key elements that need to standout, especially above the fold and then design accordingly. Ask some people to find things on your web site and see how easy or difficult it is to achieve the task.

6. Pages Never Updated
There is nothing worse than going to a web site and seeing the sale they have posted is from 2003. Or, that the hours or location has changed but hasn’t been updated. Keeping your web pages and content updated and fresh will help keep your audience engaged and can also improve your search engine page ranking.

7. Design & Colors Are Awful
First impressions do count on the web as well as in person. When we land on a website we have certain expectations and the first thing we do notice is the design and colors. Nothing is a bigger turn off then seeing a web page that looks awful. Spend the extra bucks to have it done right. The web can make you bigger than life if done correctly.

8. Forms Don’t Work
There is nothing more frustrating to any of us than when we fill out a form (as example: contact us form) and have it not work and message is not sent. So you go back and try it again and it still does not work. That’s it… goodbye!

9. Duplicate Content
Today, many small businesses choose to save money and fall into the trap of going with a template website that already has content created for your website. Wow! Sounds great doesn’t it? Wrong! Search engines will discover your content is the same as a whole bunch of other websites and will only list in the search results one site and discard all the others. Or, they may penalize your site for using the duplicated content.

10. Broken Links
One of the biggest ways to loose your audience is when they click on a link they see the dreaded “Page not Found” error. This holds true for internal page links as well as links to other web sites from within your web pages. Many small businesses will link to supplier’s websites or supplier’s product catalogs. Unfortunately, suppliers do change their web site pages and this can cause links to fail because the page URLs have changed.

11. Website Poorly Optimized
This is actually a combination of several of the above points. You are all excited about your newly created website. Now a few months go by and you realize you website is not generating any online leads. The site was designed without ever considering how you will get found online. With over 172 Million website today, every website needs to be optimized correctly from the start and updated regularly.

12. Failure to Analyze Website Traffic & Usage
Often times you may be told by your web developer that you are getting a lot of hits to your website. Although you are getting traffic you are not meeting your goals and the website is not generating any leads. Without site analytics you are shooting in the dark and have no way of determining what is wrong. Using a good analytics program, such as Google Analytics, will help you see where your visitors are coming from (called referrers), how well landing pages are performing and what pages they are exiting from. For example: the online yellow page rep says “We are sending you a lot of traffic.” With a good site analytics program you can quickly tell if this is true or not and if it is generating any leads.

Webstream Dynamics announces the launch of Site Manager XL! This is a powerful Content Management System for retail stores and based off of our 10 years working with retail stores all over the USA. What makes this so different is the Site Manager XL is designed to allow store owners the ability to easily manage their website and at the same time we can create for our clients a unique, custom website design. So now, your website can have its own unique apperance and still be powered by our Site Manager XL. Store owners save huindred of dollars by using our Site Manager XL. Create their own unique content to separate yourself from your competition and to avoid being penalized by the search engines for having duplicate content.

Every website with our exclusive Site Manager XL has many free, built-in web modules to help generate more sales leads. Plus,  you can create unique title tags and meta descriptions for each web page, which dramatically improves search engine optimization and at no extra charge! We are also continually adding new, powerful features and updates to help improve website visibility, stickiness and generate more sales leads.

This will undoubtedly raise the bar for retail content management systems. Store owners now have the power over their website content and can cut monthly developer cuts.

 Here is what one of our retailer beta testers said after we converted their existing website to the Site Manager XL system:

"Thank you again for your help in getting us started with this new website.  It gives us the flexibility we absolutely need with virtually total control of the content without years of webmaster experience.  We think it gives us a great competitive marketing advantage in this medium."

For a free, no obligation demonstration contact Webstream Dynamics or call (920) 994-8835.

I see poorly designed menus so often while browsing. Why do so many web developers fail to understand the importance of menus and help their clients build them correctly? This should be web development 101.

Let me start by explaining a couple of things. Websites are designed with multiple pages and there are menu links to the various pages. The menus are really a way to allow visitors to navigate through a website. Today, they are also a very essential part of search engine optimization. The words used inside a link (called anchor text) are used to tell the visitor what to expect to see or learn if the click on the link to that page. The actual words used with each menu link can "trigger" the websitevisitors to go to those linked pages to learn more or fulfill their web tasks.  Just like the visitors, the search engines use the anchor text to determine what the linked pages are about and can help improve organic page rankings.

For example: Many websites just use a menu link called "Products". Unfortunately "Products" is way to general and really doesn't tell the visitors or search engine spiders/bots what kind of products they offer. The best way to create menus is using one or two relevant word modifiers to better describe in the menu link what the page is about.  As another example, I have seen a menu with a link to "shoes", but I have no clue (nor do the search engines) what kind of shoes. Are they running shoes, baseball shoes, dress shoes, men's shoes, women's, etc.. If you have several different kinds of products you might consider breaking it down into several separate pages and each one has it's own menu link with a well thought out anchor text. This will give you better exposure with the search engines and help your visitors find what they are looking for quicker.

Creating unique and interesting content is a must-do for websites. Content is still a major force when it comes to generating targeted traffic to a website. Make sure your content truly fulfills the needs of your audience better than anyone else and make it interesting. Boring content doesn't inspire anyone, but unique, interesting content that really helps your visitors can become an invaluable resource to others and may inspire them spread the word across the Internet, via blogs, forums, websites and social media.

Don't Be a Clone!
There are thousands of websites that appear identical to their competitors. Many of these websites are created with web templates and duplicate content. Besides all of these sites having the same boring content, search engines frown on duplicate content and may drop your pages from the search results.

Today, there are lots of options for creating unique, fresh content to engage your targeted audience. Content can be in the form of blogs, videos, images, podcasts, web pages, etc. and may all appear in Google's Universal search results. For example: More searches are done through YouTube than through Yahoo (see here for article). Besides videos you can add interesting podcasts or embed compelling Flash videos to help get across your points and information. The bottom line is, be genuine and unique and look at your content from the eyes of your audience.

2009 looks to be a tough year for most small businesses. Capturing sales leads and getting them to visit your brick-and-mortar store or small business is going to take extra effort this year. Here are my recommendations for small business website owners for 2009:

• Tune-up your website and make sure it is easy to use and fulfills your customers' needs.
• Optimize all title tags and meta description tags for each web page.
• Optimize the website text content and stay on a main topic for each page - don't drift!
• Don't be a me-too - Make your content unique and interesting!
• Make pictures as large as possible for the website and add value to the page
• Use video when possible to enhance the user experience
• Add RSS feeds where possible
• Encourage social media by using awesome content that users find invaluble
• Make sure all forms work and check your email often
• Include "Call to Actions" and special offers, be sure they appear above the fold.
• Use social media to connect with potential customers
• Look for off-line opportunities to find new customers and get them to your website

I can't stress enough about the content. The web is flooded with boring content that appears the same and has no real, exciting value to potential customers. Take the time to make your website standout from your many competitors with unique content that will inspire your targeted audience into action. I think most people are getting tired of the seeing the same things that have little value to them. This is a year to be really different and make your potential audience be thrilled that they found a website that truly helps fulfill their online quests. Then use, highly visible Call To Actions to get them to interact with you either online, by phone, or in person. If you do that, your online rankings and traffic will for sure increase dramatically.

When you land on a website while searching for specific products or services how many seconds does it take for you to determine if you are in the "right place"? What things trigger your reaction to look further? Is it professional graphics, the colors and design, the headings, or all of these things that trigger a look further or abandon the site?

The point being that most studies show that people judge the website in about the first 10-12 seconds. First impressions do matter in a highly competitve environment. If your web site is not easy to navigate and users cannot quickly find a path to what they want they will be gone.

The next time you go searching for something, think about your reaction to each website you look at and how it effects your decision to stay or leave. Also, line your website up against your competitors and analyze each one, which one feels like the best place to buy from. Better yet, ask some customers or friends to analyze the websites side by side. In times like these buyers are at a premium and your website needs to convey quickly that this is the right place.

By the way, how many seconds do you normally give a website you land on to decide if this is the "right place"?

Hyperlinks are what everyone on the internet calls "links". Links are an essential part of the World Wide Web and are used to connect everything together from web page to web page and web site to web site. They are used in menus, within web pages, by the search engines, and even in emails. Although links have been around for many years they are often taken for granted and poorly written.

In order to better understand HTML hyperlinks and how to use them effectively we need to dissect a typical HTML hyperlink. The diagram above shows what we would see if we looked under the hood at a hyperlink in a HTML source file. The following is a brief definition for each part:

<a	This just tells the browser that this is the start of a HTML hyperlink tag.
href="http://www.mywebsite.com/"	This tells the browser the URL (website address) the user will be sent to when they click on the link. This can be an internal link to another page within the same website or an external link to another website.
title="mouseover words"	The hyperlink title is optional. It is only seen when the user places their mouse cursor over the hyperlink. It is specially useful when the hyperlink is an image button and can help search engine spiders interpret what the linked page is going to be about. Adding a specially designed title to every hyperlink tag is a good idea <hint! hint!>
Click here...	These are the words users will see and is often referred too as "Anchor Text". The text words used here are extremely important to both your website visitors and to the search engine spiders. If you think about it, the words used here tell the website visitors what to expect if they click on the link. The words used here are often referred to as: "trigger words". The search engine spiders also use these words to help determine what will be on that linked page.
</a>	This tells the browser that this is the end of a HTML hyperlink tag.

The real success of any hyperlink are with the words you use. The words need to be relevant to the page or website you are linking too and should help the web visitors understand what to expect if they click on the link. The words are also used by the spiders and can definitely help boost a web pages organic (free) ranking position within the search engine results if they are relevant to the page being linked, are repeated throughout the linked page and are used in the search phrase by the user at the search engine. To be continued in a future post. :-)

I have noticed many template generated website use duplicate content for each business. Meaning, all the websites have the same, exact content on most of their web pages as do on the websites using the template website solution. This is due to many companies not wanting to write their own content or lack the skill and time to do so.

BUT... you need to understand how search engines, such as Google may interpret websites with duplicate content and why I strongly recommend creating unique content. Google's website guidelines for webmasters states that if web pages or websites contain duplicate content they are most likely going to be:

• either, removed from showing in the search results at all
• or,they may select just one of the web sites to show in the search results and all others will be ignored.

Google has an entire web page discussing the do's and don'ts about Duplicate Content. Click here to read Google's Duplicate Content article.

Do you ever wonder how much text you should put on your web pages? Recently I read where the average person reads about 6 words per second. That would mean a page with 250 words would take 42 seconds to read and a web page with 500 words would take 1 minute 23 seconds to read. This is not taking into account how much of the content a person may retain.

This should definitely make you want to reduce the number of text words on each web page  Using graphic images and/or embedding a short video clip may also help readers to more quickly get the point of your page without having to read every word. Text on a web page is important, but not to the point of becoming overwhelming to the your readers who may be looking for a quick answer.