Generating organic backlinks for your website can take a lot of work – however there are a few great sites that you can register with and get listed on that will help you build your Search Engine Rankings.  Here are just a few:

Must Have Backlinks!

SuperPages.com

Yelp.com

Google Places

Bing Places

DMOZ.org (Takes awhile to get listed, however you can pay to get listed faster!)

Craigs-Directory.com

Facebook (business page)

Google+ (business page)

Backlinks for Blogger’s

DoFollowBlogs.com

Bloglines.com

Blogsearch.Google.com

Technorati.com

Digg.com (I post to Digg after each blog post).

StumbleUpon.com (I post to StumbleUpon after each blog post)

For more SEO and backlinking solutions, contact us for a FREE SEO proposal!

This impressive little tool calculates your SEO score on a scale of 1-100, lets you know problems in your site, and then tells you how you can easily fix them.  This tool tells you everything from poorly defined (and missing) META tags, to poor page loading speed, and many other factors that may lead to your page not being found on the major search engines.

We ourselves found a problem using this tool with a “rel-canonical” link in our code that was causing our website to not be indexable by some search engines.  Without this tool, I doubt we would have even known about it!

In addition to your on-site SEO score, the tool lets you track your link structure and page flow – this helps you see if you are guiding your visitors to links on your site, or pushing them to other sites that you are linking too.   The goal here is to have a high page-flow score so that you keep your visitors on your own site.

2)   SEO Quake

This tool (another plugin for FireFox and other browsers) tells you valuable information about your (or anyone else’s) site, including the META data,  Google page rank, alexia rank, back links – and what I find the most helpful – the site’s keyword density (or how many times a keyword shows up on the page).  This tool is a great little device for spying on your competition to see what they are doing for SEO and for you to find ways to beat them.

SEO Quake is also very helpful in finding if your robots.txt and sitemaps are properly being picked up by the search engines.   If you don’t know what a robots.txt or a sitemap is, they are files on your web server that help guide the search engine spiders through your site so that they can index it properly.

3)   HubSpot’s Grader Tool

Grader.com is a great tool to analyze your overall web marketing reach and find out areas that need improvement.  The site calculates everything from your Twitter, Facebook, and Blogging scores (on a scale from 1-100), but also give you your MOZRank, readability index,  how many pages are currently indexed, and in a recent upgrade – now lets you know if your website is mobile device friendly.

HubSpot is always updating and improving on this tool (as well as their other tools aimed at blogging and social media) and changing their algorithm to best reflect current market conditions (for example, the release of the mobile portion of the grader tool).  We use this tool extensively to see how our website upgrades, social media campaigns, and blog postings affect both our and our clients marketing footprint.

Generally speaking, a high grade on Grader.com is a good indication that your site is properly optimized for search engines

4)   Mike’s Marketing Tools Rank Checker

Simply put in the name of your site, and the desired keyword that you want to check your rankings for.   The tool will spit out where you rank in Google, Bing, Yahoo, and AOL for that keyword.   Very simple, but it answers the question that most clients ask – “Where do I rank for X?”.

There are may services that do this same thing,  and actually will track your rankings over time (WebCEO, WebPosition, etc), however all of them you have to pay for ($300-500 is the average for these tools).   I recommend these paid services if you are tracking more than 10 or so keywords over time and are running major SEO campaings.  However, if you just want a quick snapshot into how your doing with your SEO efforts – Mike’s Ranking Tools is a great little tool to have in your arsenal.

5)   Google Analytics/Google Webmaster Tools

While not necessarily “SEO” tools, Google Analytics and Webmaster tools can give you important information on your site and show you exactly how your SEO efforts are helping (or hurting) your site.

First, Google Analytics can show you where your traffic is coming from (direct traffic, search engine traffic, and referring site traffic) and for what keywords those users are finding you on the search engines.  If all your seeing is your company name, or your company’s website in the keyword list – then you’re probably not doing a great job with your META data for the keywords you want to rank for.  A high bounce rate for your site may indicate that your site is being found in the search engines,  but maybe not for the right term (thus your users are leaving your site immediately after not finding what they were originally looking for).  Beyond those basics – there are countless other tools that Google Analytics offers you to track your sites progress and help guide you on changes to make to your site.  If you would like more information on how Google Analytics can help you with your site, sign up for one of our Google Analytics training sessions.

Google Webmaster Tools is one tool that often goes overlooked, however it can provide valuable feedback on issues that might be causing your site not to be crawled correctly by the search engines.  In addition, its HTML suggestions area can flag duplicate content errors that could be hurting your search engine rank. Google Webmaster Tools is also the place to submit your sitemaps and robots.txt files so that Google crawls your site correctly.   (note: Yahoo and Bing also offer their own Webmaster tools kits).

In closing, you don’t have to spend a lot of money (or any) to really get a handle on your SEO efforts and web marketing footprint.

Need more SEO Help?  Give us a call at 508-435-6776 or email us for a free consultation.   Join our newsletter to get special deals and find out new information on how to improve your website and web marketing footprint.

So where to begin?

If you’re already doing usability testing on your website, then great!

Unfortunately, most companies wait until their site is fully developed and ready to launch (or in some cases, already launched) before they start usability testing with actual users. If a major usability issue comes up, it is usually too late (or too expensive) to do anything about it.  Typically “major/expensive” issues are pushed off (until the next major build of the website) and only the easy or smaller usability concerns are ever addressed.

We propose starting usability testing as early as possible in the process (typically the the design phases) and adopting the “early and often” approach to usability testing. This “early and often” approach allows the company and the developers to catch usability issues early and address them quicker and in the budget friendly phase of the process. This leads to a user-friendly website that requires less maintenance and generally gives you a better return on your investment.  It is much more cost-effective to fix a navigation structure when its on-paper (or on flash-cards) than it is when it is fully coded on a site.

Even simple mock-ups on paper (or cocktail napkins) can be tested for usability. If your test subject can’t figure out your sire design on a simple piece of paper, they will probably not be able to figure it out when its fully implemented and coded.  If the user finds problems with the cocktail napkin design, it is relatively simple (and quick) to re-draw the design and go through a few revisions until you get it right on paper; far more cost-efficient than to have your developer spend hours re-arranging or writing code on a “completed” site.

As you progress along the development cycle, you should be continuing to find and fix errors, however these issues should become less critical and easier to fix in part because of the extra work that you did earlier in the process.

But usability testing takes too much time and is too expensive!

Steve Krug, author of Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems, and one of the foremost web usability experts, recommends a lean and dirty approach to usability testing in a way to keep costs down. All it takes is one hour every couple of weeks with one person. Krug recommends paying the “user” with a simple gift certificate and/or a free lunch. This approach, Krug states, is often times a lot cheaper and produces better results compared to formal usability testing which can take a few days and involve anywhere from 10-20 people per session.

Fact is, you don’t need a bunch of trained usability testers or expensive equipment to conduct usability tests.  In most cases, a video camera, a notepad, a volunteer (the user), and a moderator is all that you need to conduct usability tests that provide results.

Conclusion

Usability testing is one of the best things you can do to protect your investment on a new website. If a user cannot figure out how to use your site, or worse, not use it at all (due to a missing plugin or some bad script, etc.). then your site is a failure to that user and they will go elsewhere to do what they need to do. This can cause lost revenue and earn your site a bad reputation, which can take years to recover from.

Many people think that usability testing costs a lot of money and is difficult to do, but that doesn’t have to be the case. By adopting an “early and often” approach to usability testing, you can conduct very informal usability tests at a very low cost and generate results that will greatly improve your website.

After we ran our free SEO and Web Analytics reports, we saw that her site was not hitting its potential, with Google page rank of 0 and a website grade of only 16, according to HubSpot.   Since her site was also Flash-based, it also had issues displaying properly on mobile devices, thus further reducing her marketing reach.

The one thing the Jenn had going for her, is that she is a very active Facebook user, posting daily, with over 2500 people following her business page.  As a result, we knew that if we built her a website that was easy for her to update and tied into her social media networks, she would quickly see positive results.

We decided to use WordPress as our platform to design the site around, mainly for its ease of use, great SEO support, flexibility, and ease of integrating it with her existing Facebook profile. In just a couple of weeks we were able to design a site that met Jenn’s personality and showed off her great photography using pure HTML and CSS, both of which are mobile friendly and optimized for Search Engines.

The new site features a custom homepage with a large HTML/JavaScript slideshow, and the ability for Jenn to dynamically control the images that are displayed through a simple control panel that pulls data from her four photo-galleries that we set up.  The site also features a page for customer reviews, a blog for Jenn to post updates about her work, and an easy to use contact form. The site also is prepped with an e-commerce back end, so in the future, Jenn could easily sell products directly from her website if/when she chooses to do so.

Since the launch, her website grade has already gone up to 82 (and climbing) – and she is getting an average of 75-100 people per day viewing her site.   She is already in the top five rankings on Google for her main keyword and most popular photo session!

Our goal at Massachusetts Web Designs is to provide our clients with a web platform that serves all of their digital and web marketing needs while being flexible enough to handle the next big trend in the ever changing world of web marketing.

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That’s right – for absolutely nothing – we will spend up to one hour analyzing your website and create a report that will outline usability and search engine optimization problems with your site that might be costing you customers and money!

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