SMHeart.org

Simple, Useful, Free Tools to Drive Traffic to your Site

1. Google Analytics is free and if you do not have an account it is easy to create one. Set up an account to see who is coming to your site, how they got there, and what they are doing.

2. Use your domain branded email address. ie kd(at)kdderr.com This helps drive traffic to your site with putting the annoying links in your email closing.

3. Using descriptive names for your images rather than img8647.jpg is much more effective than tagging.

4. Use word press. I think this is the best web organization product available today. I recommend adding these three plug-ins to your word press account:
Feedburner
Site Map Generator
Google Sitemap Generator

5. When updating your site it takes time for the search engines to realize you made changes. Set up an account with Webmaster Tools to upload your site map and tell the web crawlers to go look at your site.

6. Set up a Feedburner Account to set up RSS feeds.

7. Think of your website as a work in progress. Frequent updates to your site will drive more traffic because new data is ranked higher by search engines.

Reasons to Avoid Tables and Iframes

I few weeks ago, I met with a former collaborator and we got on the subject of websites. This was a natural topic because most of the funding he receives is to manage a database resource for his community. He has an excellent site with a lot of data. His site gets over one million page views a month. And is considering putting up ads to help fund his site. In fact, he has been approached by a vendor that wants to place an ad on his site. This sounds like a dream situation…

I started researching what he could charge for an ad. I started with a simple Google search to see how his site ranked. I was surprised to find that his page did not rank first on any of my searches. The site had traffic and the content. Why was Google ranking the site so low? A quick check of the code revealed that the site was built on tables and iframes.

At SMHeart, we glibly tell people that Tables and Iframes are 1996 technology. What we mean is that Google’s algorithm changed the webdesign game. Iframes and tables are BG (before Google). The web crawlers cannot read the content inside a table or iframe. This makes it look like your site has no content. Hence, it is ranked low.

This is a heartbreaking story because the website in question is highly established. It will take over a year and an incredible amount of energy to migrate it to a SEO friendly format. I am not sure it is worth the effort. This is why it always better to start with best design practices and work from there.