Blogging Directories

If you have a blog and want people to know about it, you might want to list it in the following blog directories:

• Blog Hub
• Blog Catalog
• Blogwise
• 
• Blog search engine
• Technorati

Blogs are great ways to get traffic back to your website.

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Get Google to crawl meta tags

Hi Annette,

I can't get Google to correctly crawl my meta tags.At least a month ago, I updated my meta tags on the following website: www.humorandwisdom.com as follows:

META name="title" content="Jokes and Riddles, Humor and Wisdom by Kuder.

META name="description" content="An organized and screened collection of jokes, riddles, puzzles, and lifestyle enhancing wisdom."

META name="keywords" content="Jokes and riddles, Joke, jokes, riddle, riddles, puns, Kuder, humor, wisdom, wealth, happiness, affirmation, affirmations, aphorism, aphorisms, rebus, rebuses, words of wisdom, positive affirmations, blonde jokes, blond jokes, Halloween jokes, Halloween riddles, Halloween humor, Christmas jokes, Christmas riddles, Christmas humor, jokes riddles, difficult riddles, hard riddles, answers to riddles, funny riddles, math riddles, logical riddles, funny puns, office humor."

When I put "humor and wisdom" into a Google search, it comes back with:
return to kuder's home page Jokes and Riddles, Humor and Wisdom by Kuder Click flag. Jokes The best of the best. Riddles The cream of the crop. Words of Wisdom Ditto! ...

The above are random words from my home page, but isn't what I submitted and isn't what I want my listing to say. Clicking on what Google cached, it reads:

This is G o o g l e's cache of http://www.humorandwisdom.com/ as retrieved on Oct 17, 2006 11:59:35 GMT.G o o g l e's cache is the snapshot that we took of the page as we crawled the web. I have re-submitted my website a couple of times. How can I get Google to get my meta tags right? Also, Google isn't picking up the other key words I submitted.

Roger

Hi Roger,

That's because Google doesn't use the description metatag as what they display in the results. If you had "humor and wisdom" in your description tag, which you don't, it might display that, but not necessarily.

When you enter a keyword phrase in Google's search it crawls all the content of your homepage or entire site (depending on your robots follow tag). What is displays in the results is text around that phrase that appears in the content of your page. You don't have "humor and wisdom" in your text of the page either.

Also, you don't have the phrase "humor and wisdom" in your keyword tag. In fact, your doing that tag all wrong. You should NEVER use single words as keywords. You should always use 2-4 word phrases. Second, those phrases need to be in the text/content of the page too. Third, you should only have 2-4 keywords in that metatag, with the most important one first.

When you say Google isn't picking up the other keywords you "submitted" are you meaning the ones in your keyword tag? Not sure what you mean here. Google hardly pays attention to metatags other than the title tag. Other search engines might, but you have to do your tags correctly, as I've described above.

Thanks for asking!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Reputable Website Hosting

Hi,

I am currently hosting my site with IX webhosting and am not too fond of the system - email sluggish and many functions not available as well as dragging teeth to make changes. Wanted to get a few suggestions about reliable hosting sites that some of you may use. Any info appreciate. Thanks - Have a good day!

Susan

Hi Susan,

I host 90% of my websites with www.TheDesignShoppe.com because they are high-tech/high touch. The fees are low, they throw in alot of "bells and whistles" for free, and the customer service is great. They own and maintain their own servers and have 99% up time. In the 7 years I've worked with them, they only had a server crash once and they had all their sites back up and running within 24 hours.

I want to throw in my two cents about GoDaddy and Network Solutions. Both have been reputed to have done disreputable things, some of which I've experienced directly. I've had great problems with both. For example, if you register a domain with GoDaddy, such as yourcompany.com, they will buy up all other versions of it, like yourcompany.net or .biz, and then try to sell it back to you at a higher rate. I've also had them "lock" accounts after I've made a purchase and give no reason other than "security" and not allow access to them again. Network Solutions is not a U.S. based company, so they are not subject to some of the laws affecting the internet. I've had a client get stung by one of their $99 promotions, then get billed $499 for it. I've tried to transfer domains from Network Solutions to another provider and they've been slow to release them.

I've also been told that if a hosting company hosts "adult" sites, that this can affect your websites' ability to get onto search engines, because the search engines may ban all sites coming from those servers. So, buyer beware!

More on this and other issues you need to know when building a website will be in my upcoming ebook. Watch for it.

Thank you for asking!


Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Promoting my Website

Hi Annette,
do you know how I can promote my web site to attract more visits besides what I put in the Meta tags and just sit and wait? I don't have much money so I can't spend hundreds of dollars on ads. Any help is appreciated,

Thanks. Loren

Hi Loren,
I assume you're talking about how to get traffic from search engines, since you mentioned metatags. Metatags are not that important anymore, except the title tag, that looks like this . That's the first and one of the most important places search engines look for keywords. What's most important is keyword-rich original content on your site.

There are 3 aspects to getting traffic from search engines, all of which require a book in themselves. First your site needs to be in the first 2 pages of the results for desirable and relevant keywords or few will ever find it. You have to carefully select your keywords and optimize your website pages for those. This is a time consuming process. Then you have to get other sites of link to your site. There are 3 ways to do this. One is to have compelling and interesting original content, so other site owners will naturally want to link to your site. Second is to request links from other sites. This has to be done carefully, so that you are getting relevant, quality links from busy sites. The third way is to pay for links.

I do search engine optimization and have been successful in getting sites within the top 20 results on relevant keywords.

For those with a small budget, I recommend PPC (Pay Per Click ads, as those get you seen immediately).

Hope this helps.
Thanks for asking!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Ask Girl Geek: Website Feedback Form

Hello Annette,
Is there any type of free web feed back form that I can use on my web site. The web site I have does have a from available but I doent' seem to want to repond to sending me and email that feedback has been received.

What I want is a form that visitors can submit and the form will come to me first before it is actually posted on my site. I have a guest book but I am trying to get a web form also.
Thank you, Martha

Hi Martha,
I'll bet what's happening is you haven't set your form up correctly. Sometimes because of your website hosting package, you have to make sure to route your form to an email that included your domain name, i.e. info@yourdomain.com.

Hope this helps.
Thanks for asking!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Free Guestbook

Hi Girl Geek,
Is there any type of free guest book that I can add to my web site that has the option of reviewing the guest book entires before they are posted to the web site? Thank you
Martha

Hi Martha,
You might try Bravenet.net for free guestbook. Beware, as guestbooks get spammed alot.

Otherwise, I'd suggest a blog. You can get a free one at http://www.blogger.com/ and set it up to moderate comments.

Thanks for asking!


Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Helpful Programs to have for Web Design

Hi Annette,
I've just got started building my own website from scratch. Tried Dreamweaver, but it just took too long to learn. So I've decided to use CoolPage. It's a pretty basic, but quite easily understood web design program. My question is, what are the most popular or most crucial pieces of design software to have while building a very basic website. I'd like to have a shopping cart and newsletter on it. I've got Photoshop and a good little free button making program. What else would I need in terms of software. Nothing too fancy like flash or others. Just the essentials for a beginner website builder like myself.
Thanks
Rob

Hi Rob,
The other thing you will need is a way to compress images, as filesize usually is large and slows down page loading time. Photoshop does that when you tell it to. Click "save optimized for web."

Thanks for asking!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Friends Building Sites for Friends

Hi:

My friend is running a restaurant. I would like to create a web page for them. But i have no experience. Can you tell me how can i begin and is it possible for customer order the food through the internet and them fax it to fax machine.

Thanks
Tat

Hi Tat,

Designing a website for a business takes each of the following skills and knowledge:

1. HTML coding or use of a WYSIWYG editor, like Dreamweaver or FrontPage
2. Knowledge of search engine marketing
3. Visual design and graphic skills
4. Adding features, like fax in orders
5. Excellent writing skills and knowing how people read websites, which is different than print
6. Designing navigation

Unless you have all of those skills, I would recommend you have your friend hire a professional web designer. Putting a "beginners" website online may create a bad impression of your friend's business and do more harm than good. About 50% of my business over the last 4 years has been fixing sites built by well intentioned friends.

I'm sorry, but I had to laugh at your message because your grammar made it sounds like you want to fax the food to a fax machine.


Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Ask Girl Geek: Preventing Spam to Website Email Addresses

I Got 5000 + Emails in a Single Day!

I was thrilled when I saw my Outlook downloading emails one afternoon. Had I run some killer newsletter that was bring such a response? Had my search engine optimization hit the gold mine? But when it got to over 5000 emails, I began to get suspicious.

Sure enough, I was getting spam emails that had backed up and clogged up my hosting server since 2005. So, if you've every gotten feedback that people cannot reach you through your email on your website, you too might have this problem.

The solution, log in to your control panel of your web hosting company and clear your email box of spam at least once a month. Often your hosting company supplies some sort of Spamblocker that you can add to prevent this from happening, or a way to route spam into a :blackhole or bounce them back to the sender.

Another way to prevent getting a lot of spam from your website email address is to not list is as a text link. For example, instead of me putting Annette@GirlGeekWebDesigns.com, I'd put Annette AT GirlGeekWebDesigns DOT com. Or, you could create the @ symbol as an image file and use that. That would confound the spammers out phishing for emails.

If you post an email on your website, some spam is inevitable, but you can prevent alot of it.

Thanks for Asking!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Ask Girl Geek: Getting High Rankings in Search Engines

Hi Girl Geek,

We have several big competitors in our primary market, and we are looking to make our website hit higher on google searches and generate more business. Can you help? How do we get started?

Name withheld

Hi,
Getting your website ranked well in search engines is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short. When people ask me how to get a #1 ranking in search engines I have a list of questions I ask them.

1. What search engines do you want to be ranked well in?
2. What keywords are you wanting high rankings on?
3. Who's linking to your site already?
4. Are you using a Pay Per Click advertising program?
5. What sites do you consider your main competitors?

The first step I would take is a thorough review of your site to see:
1. Is is search engine compatible and browser friendly?
2. What keywords are already on your site?
3. What incoming links are driving traffic to your site?
4. Where does your rank in the desired search engines already?

Then depending on your goals and budget I would make recommendations that could be implemented in stages.

Whole books and conferences are held on this topic, so I'm just going to give the briefest of overviews. My goal is to give you enough information for you to know what's involved and so that you can ask intelligent questions when discussing this with an SEO company or even with your web designer who will need to know whether or not you plan to promote your site via search engines.

So here goes...

SEO is a complicated and ongoing art/science and needs to be reviewed at a bare minimum of every 3-6 months because the ranking formulas/algorithms used by the major search engines are changed frequently. Do not be mistaken: this is NOT an easy project, but it is do-able. To really do the job right you need an ongoing effort. It's almost a full time job, if you're serious about doing it right. And, there's no magic bullet, at least, not one I've heard of or tried.

SEO is also different depending on which search engine you're wanting to get ranked well in. If you're covered by the top 3, Google, Yahoo, and MSN, you've reached at least 90% of internet users. Each of these search engines attract different demographics and have different requirements for the site construction and keyword placement, so that's something to consider when trying to figure out where to put most of your effort.

Similarly, when you ask for better rankings it all depends on what search terms you're wanting good rankings on. SEO strategies also change over time, so your site needs to be reviewed for those periodically. Also, since the internet reindexes itself once a month, changes made today in your site might not result in changes in ranking for up to 30 days.

The two main strategies in SEO are keyword selection and placement and link strategies. Of course, the site has to be designed in such a way that it is not only compatible with the search engines, but that it loads quickly and displays correctly in all browsers. If your site takes longer than 8 seconds to load, it is estimated that you lose up to 80% of potential visitors.

Selection of appropriate keywords is essential. I use a 4 step process to determine appropriate keywords. 1) brainstorming all the keyword phrases that potential site visitor in your niche might us in a natural search 2) checking to see if those terms are being searched monthly at a high rate 3) checking the number of websites competing for that search term and 4) determining the relative cost for that keyword in the 3 major Pay Per Click programs. (You have to go through the same steps for PPC programs, so why not do them all at the same time?) Then you need to follow the guidelines of the search engines as to where to place the keywords within your site and at what frequency. These rules change over time, as people try to "fool" the search engines.

Link strategies are important for 2 reasons. Having outside sites link into your site drives targeted traffic to your site. Having multiple incoming links into your site also alerts the search engines that your site must be "important," so it is awarded a higher ranking if it is busy. So think, strategic alliance.

The best incoming links are natural links, which are unsolicited. You obtain these by having really useful content on your site, so that people will naturally want to link to your site.

The other strategy is to request links to your site from "relevant" websites. Determining "relevant" links is time consuming. The quality of the incoming link is more important that the quantity of links. You have to request links to your site, follow up and often give reciprocal links from your site as a "courtesy" to the linking site.

It seems now that a lot of sites are requesting payment for providing links to your site. That can run into some money. So I generally start out with the free links, then scrutinize the quality and traffic on the paid sites. Some of the ones I've looked at for my other client appear just to be people whose site exists for the sole purpose of bilking money out of naive site owners, who don't know a quality link from a hole in the ground.

About 6 years ago, I got a bid for SEO on my Geek website, and with the designers discount it was $1200 for 3 months. I didn't get specifics because that was outside of my budget at the time, but I've learned what questions to ask since then, because too many people have gotten ripped off because of fantastic claims by SEO companies. So beware of SEO companies that "guarantee a #1 ranking in search engines." What they might mean is they can get you a #1 ranking on an obscure search engine on 1 keyword for about a month. When you get a bid, get a detailed explanation of what you're getting for the money.

Thanks for asking!


Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Don't Lose Your Domain Name

Hi All,
I can't believe it. One of my website clients forgot to renew his domain name, LakesideCounseling.com, and it was immediately snatched up by for resale, a company in D.C. called BuyDomains.com.

When I tried to get them to release it back to my client for the original $12 he probably paid for it, they told me they'd sell it back to him for the "current market value." They estimated the value at $1,888!!! They told me most expired domains go from between $2000 - $4000. Sheesh!

I've also seen some domain registrars buy every version of your domain name that you don't buy, to resell to you at a higher price later. (The registrars I've seen do this are GoDaddy.com andRegisterFly.com.) The registrar I've had no trouble with are Register.com or Enom.com.

So, here's my suggestions:

1. buy all versions of your domain name, i.e. .com, .net, .biz, .org if you have a unique business name and want to stop anyone else from using it or having to buy it later at a higher price. It's not that expensive.

2. Buy your domain names in 5-10 year blocks. It's often cheaper that way anyhow, since most domains register for $9 - $12 a year, and you may get a discount for buying over time.

3. Buy plurals of your domain names too for similar reasons. For example, I own both http://www.girlgeekwebdesigns.com/ and http://www.girlgeekwebdesign.com/ and have them both pointing to my site.

Again, it's not that expensive on the front end, and may save you $$$$ and heartache down the road when you're business name is well known.

Ask me anything!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Ebook Coming Soon!

To learn more about my soon-to-be-published ebook, Girl Geek Speak: Everything you Need to DECIDE and DO BEFORE Hiring a Web Designer, listen to the audio clip above.

I love technology!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Ask Girl Geek: Website Security

Dear Girl Geek,

I have a website that includes text, photos, links, downloadable pdf files, and a video. Are there any steps I can take to make sure that this website is secure? I want to make sure that nobody can purposely shut it down and that nobody can intentionally change the content.
Lisa


Hi Lisa,
This is not a web design question, but a web hosting question. Contact the company that you host your site with and ask them your security question.

All I know is that if you have a good password for logging into your hosting account and if you change it monthly the likelihood of someone hacking into your site to change content is lessened. I'm sure there's more to it than that, so contact someone who understands internet security.
Good luck and thanks for asking.

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free initial consultation
1-877-866-4335

Ask Girl Geek: Making Site Look More Professional on a Budget

Hi Girl Geek,
I was thinking it might be wise to get a webdesigner to help me make my website look more professional and to make my store look more credible, but I don't have much money to spare. I don't think I could afford to pay someone per hour, or just that they'd make the code easy enough to read that I could make changes as needed. What do you think I should do? Also do you think highly of paypal.com as a means for a business shopping cart?
James

Hi James,

Even if you have a small budget, it's worth it to have a professional looking site. I'd be glad to look it over and give you some ideas of how to do this on a budget. You can buy inexpensive templates and build the site around that. Although it wouldn't be customized, there are some pretty good templates out there.

Yes, I use PayPal all the time for shopping carts and think very highly of it. It's cheap and it's secure, and it can do whatever most businesses need.

Thanks for asking!


Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free initial consultation
1-877-866-4335

Ask Girl Geek: Marketing Self-Published Material

Dear Girl Geek,
How does one get self published material seen? Web marketing is a mystery to me.
Tom

Hi Tom,

I'd be glad to answer your question! I'll need alittle more information first. When you say "self published" are you saying you have the book in a paper format or is it an ebook (electronic book)? What have you tried so far?

Either way the best way to get it seen is to identify who your prospective readers are first. Then develop a marketing plan directed at them. This is true for the web or any form of marketing. I'd start with getting the book or ebook on Amazon.com or ebay.com. If you have a website, I'd set up a PPC (pay per click) advertising program on either Google or Yahoo.

This is just a sample of the many ideas I do as part of my consultation services.
Let me know if you want to know more about my services or if you need a website.

Thanks for asking!
Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free initial consultation
1-877-866-4335

Ask Girl Geek: Manual search engine submission vs. automated software?

Dear Girl Geek,

I have two websites and both of them need to be submitted to all of the search engines. Can you pls. give me a quote of what you would charge to do that? Also, what advantage would it be to have you do it rather than a service like submitnet.net? THANKS!
T. S.

Hi T,

I'd be glad to help. I have some questions first. (Hope I don't overwhelm you. Just because I know what I'm talking about, doesn't mean I can explain it so you do, but I'll try!)

1. Which of the hundreds of national and international search engines do you want to be listed on? Basically for the US you need to be on Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Netscape. That covers about 90-95% of the market.

2. How do you know you're not listed? Sometimes sites are listed but their site isn't ranked well, i.e., doesn't come up in the first 1-2 pages of search results.

For example, here's Google's guidelines for listing:"Google is a fully automated search engine that employs robots known as "spiders" to crawl the web and find sites for inclusion in the Google index. Since this process doesn't involve human editors, it's NOT necessary to submit your site to Google in order to be included in our index. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed aren't manually submitted for inclusion.We add thousands of new sites to our index each time we crawl the web, but you may submit your URL as well. Submission isn't necessary and does not guarantee inclusion in our index. Given the large number of sites submitting URLs, it's likely that your pages will be found in an automatic crawl before they make it into our index through the URL submission form. We DO NOT add all submitted URLs to our index and cannot predict when or if they will appear."

3. The rule of thumb I've consistently heard is do manual submissions where necessary. I say "where necessary" because if your site is on a webhosting server, Google will pick it up within a month (unless there's some obvious design flaw or spam offense that gets it banned*). After Google picks it up, most other search engines will pick it up too.

Now directories are another matter and usually are edited by humans. The biggest and the widest known is the Open Directory Project with feeds such directories as Netscape Search, AOL Search, Google, Lycos, HotBot, DirectHit, and hundreds of others. You have to submit manually to them and then wait...and wait...and wait....as they have such a backlog. It's free, but you have to wait...and wait.....and wait.

Yahoo is technically also a directory and has a paid inclusion listing. Submitting your site to directories also needs to be manual because you have to hand select the appropriate category for site placement. Automated submission software, I don't know if submitted is one, doesn't do that for you.

4. The other advantage of having a human do it is that sometimes you have to enter a code in order to complete the submission. Automated submission software can't read the code. And, also, search engines sometimes won't list sites that are submitted via automatic submit software. They consider this spam.

So, I could run an analysis of both sites and see if and where you're listed and ranked on any and as many search engines you want. You'd have to tell me what keywords you want to check your ranking on.

I suspect it's ranking you really want, not listing, cuz if you've had these sites for awhile, they're probably listed. If it is ranking you want, then I would make some recommendations of ways to go that meets your needs and budget.

I need clarification on these points first.

If you want to schedule a call to talk to me about this (in case this is all "geek" to you), I'd be glad to.

*View this link to see Google's design, technical and content guidelines that might result in your site not being listed. http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/guidelines.html

Thanks for asking!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free initial consultation
1-877-866-4335

Ask Girl Geek: How Do I Get More Links to My Website?

Hi Girl Geek,

How do I get links to my law firm's website?
D

Hi D,

As far as increasing links to your site, here's my understanding of how this works and ways to get links. Remember, all links are NOT created equal. You must request links from sites that are relevant to yours.

There's really no guaranteed or systematic way to do this that I know of, so you can select one or several strategies and see what happens.

First, if you site has interesting, useful, or newsworthy information, other sites may spontaneously link to yours. This is ideal.
Otherwise you have to create or ask for others to link to your site.

Ways to do that include:
1. Provide a "Link to Us" page at your website. On this page, provide suggested links to your site, include the HTML tag so people can just grab it and drop it into their site. If you write your own link, you can include important keywords in the link.

2. Register with search directories, like Yahoo ($299 submission fee) and the Open Directory project (www.dmoz.com.), local directories and regional directories, such as chamber of commerce, local attorney referral services, etc.

3. Contact professional association sites and ask them to provide a link to your site.

4. Contact companies or colleagues you do business with and ask them to provide a link to your site and you will to theirs. This is called Reciprocal Linking.

5. Submit to announcement sites, such as www.URLwire.com or send out press releases online at http://www.internetnewsbureau.com/ or http://www.free-press-release.com/submit/free-press-release.php or http://www.floridatoday.com/forms/services/release.htm

6. Find sites that are linking to your competitors and ask them to link to yours also.

7. Search for "keyword add URL" online and find sites that fit your business/industry and link there.

8. Contact email newsletters that your niche market might read and either advertise there or write an article for them, include your website in your byline.

9. Create a blog - post newsworthy comments on hot topics. Many blogs are read by search engines. Plus, if you link from your blog to your own site, you'll add another link.

10. Mention your site in online discussion groups, listserves, and blogs. Although you can't officially advertise in these, it can be part of your email signature.

11. Syndicate content from RSS feeds and blogs.12. Write articles for legal news sites, like http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20040114_marquis.html and include a link to your site.

13. Wait...eventually people will start linking to your site.

Thanks for asking!
Annette

Ask Girl Geek: Help! My sites aren't getting any traffic.

Hi Annette,
I've had two websites for over a year (built in Mambo - a popular content management system). I'm happy with my web designer, but don't know why my sites haven't gotten any traffic. Can you help?
K

Hi K,
If you are relying solely on search engine marketing to promote your website, there are 2 immediate problems that make your sites "unappetizing" to search engines. First is your domains are being redirected to the URL (domain name) within Mambo. Search engines don't like URL redirects, therefore your site might not be appearing on some of the major search engines.

Second, search engines do not rank websites built in Mambo (or other site builders, such as the highly advertised one available on Register.com) as high as they do sites built in html. If your site isn't found on the first 2 pages of the search engines, it might as well not be there.

That being said, since you already have a web designer that you are happy with and since I don't know Mambo, I would suggest you use me to do the keyword analysis of each page of your site, and go through a refinement of your keyword strategy for both Search Engine Optimization and PPC advertising. I will generate a report and recommendations that you can then give to your web designer to incorporate into your site. The report will review what keywords are already prominent on the pages of your site(s), suggest 2-3 keywords for each page and metatags that are relevant to your niche, actually being searched at a high level, and have "low" competition from other websites or other bidders on Yahoo's PPC program.

Also, as we discussed, if you have a clear description of your niche, you could also have me develop some other website promotion ideas particular to help you reach that niche.

Thanks for asking!
Annette

Ask Girl Geek: How Can I get aweber.com to archive my newsletters on my website?

Hi Annette,
I tried to put my December newsletter (on aweber.com) in the archive and was unsuccessful. I clicked on the web archive link but it doesn't come up when I try to reach it through the web site. Any ideas?
Thanks,
Angela

Hi Angela,
When you login to aweber and set up your newsletter you have to click the link way at the bottom where it says
Not published in RSS/XML feed or HTML archive, click to publish message. Then it will publish it and be able to be found on your site.

I just did that for you. Remember to do it each time.

Thanks for asking!

Annette