ForumsInternet/eCommerce

not bad, I like the list, very nice, thank you for sharing, education is key...

Mike, I glad you like my website. Thanks for the feedback.

well that would depend on what type of business you are surly good tips by the way

LOL, I have a customer who sells mobile homes in a small Northern Michigan town. They had a web guy from another little town and dude forgot to pay the renewal on th website. Long story short the domain name went to auction and got picked up by a porn company. The owner gets a call one day....

I don't think everyone is from Michigan here, right? OTIS is Michigan's criminal record checking website.

I think all that is a little out of hand. Just check their recent work, actually call folks up.

The repossession that is hilarious. Lots of people think a web designer is a generic "computer guy" or "computer gal" We are not. In any event it is better to use a national company like GoDaddy. I resell for Godaddy and love them because we can set up an account for the customer, the customer can call their customer service who answers as if it were my company, and you'd need just about a global nuclear war to take out their redundant data centers for any period of time.

I know a guy in Traverse City who does his own hosting and if the power goes out, all his sites go out. Given how cheap GoDaddy, or Ipower, or Network Solutions can be it just makes more sense to me to use them and let them worry about the servers. Really in the end they give you lots of great support, more options for fun tools, as well.

The other side is don't go crazy and invade people's privacy. People reform, I have a few friends who've had trouble in their misspent youth and are awesome people today. Me, I am jealous, I missed out on a misspent youth! What was I thinking????

Another aspect of web design that should be carefully considered is does your target audience have all the necessary software and capability to fully view your website. Unfortunately, there a lot of unaffordable computerware out there and not eveyone has the latest. Don't be taken in by flashy presentations only to have you audience not capable of viewing it.

Another good suggestion....You can check your website designer. Learn the basics. I put a link to what Google says about SEO above.

SEO is really far simpler than most people think. First thing, understand no one knows the algorytms the search engines use. If they make you are promise, run far away.

Second, good SEO, if it EVER works can take weeks and months to get right. If position is that important, use sponsored search. The "free" SEO may never come to pass and you are losing sales when you can put yourself at the top in minutes using sponsored search.

Third, SEO is sometimes a game people play. Smart SEO, as Google will tell you, is about putting out great content people can use. The last thing Google is going to put up with is Dr Doofensmirtz SEO company wrecking people's experience on the web by successfully placing manuipulated sites in first place. It really is all about building a great site with great content.

I am going to disagree a bit here....

One of the great things with the search engines these days is they look at each page individually.

For example my company designs websites but we also sell custom guest checks. If you Google "custom guest checks" or "custom printed guest checks" I come up 2nd on the former search and 1st on the latter. However, if you look closely the URL (web address) is not the home page, it is the actual page for that product we offer.

If you google just the words, "guest checks" we come up 2nd and 3rd (today anyway) and this brings you the home page and the page for the 1 part guest checks.

What I tell my clients is we want to have that main message, but you also want to promote as much of the smaller messages as you can, and you promote them strongly.

Iwrite says something I wish I could convey to every one of my clients, "you have to speak to people, especially on the web." What you put on the website when you build it is nice, but talk to people. Get a sense of what they want to see. From time to time we survey people on various sites and each time they surprise us with what they want to see.

And this brings rise to the thing that irks me about SEO companies with all their promises. While you can perdict what some folks want to see on your site, there is just no substitute for asking your customers questions, getting them to be tough on your website and then updating the site to reflect more of what they are saying.

I love the folks who suggest they know all the key words people will use to find a website. Again they just don't know. Web people can generate reports that will tell you exactly what keywords people use to find your website. You want to read those reports and use them to build your content.

As an example I have a pizzeria, a small pint sized pizzeria, and we found out people would google, "1813 plainfield pizza" which is the street address followed by pizza. How they knew the address and not the name blew me away. Still we added that to the code and brought even more people.

An example of a little manipuation of search terms for me is a restaurant I have called Malarky's. When I got the account I kept misspelling the name, "Malarkey's" adding that "e" before the y. I thought about it and wondered if others would do the same thing making a google search very hard. So we added the misspelled name in the code in the site. So today if you google "Malarkey's Grand Rapids" with the misspelled name you will still find the restaurant. AND the most common search term used to find the restaurant is, Marlarkey's Grand Rapids"