A good friend of mine, (and direct competitor) recently posted a blog entry about the importance of SEO. He brough this up because he just ran a quick diagnostic of his site via www.grader.com. So, i decided to follow suit and do it to my website. I have been really trying to focus and hone my SEO ranking in a few key areas so I can set myself up as the authority in my city and business market. My goal is actually to do this under a different website, but I still want this one to rank high as well.

The ability to compete in search engine rankings is something that every good and reputable freelancer, or professional needs to have in their tool belt. It’s one thing to be able to design abd build a website, it is a whole other ball game to be able to sit down and come up with a strategy that will guarantee exposure, exposure and prominence. Grader.com tool allows yo to see how you rank out of a 100, but then also see how you compare to your competition. Good news for me is that I currently beat out most of my competition. Bad news, most of my business market and city don’t use the internet to much.

The report was the most thorough I have seen so far, and I like how it broke down the different categories. It is something I am going to be using in future projects.

There were only two major problems I had Wrong:

No 301 Redierect
This is probably a pretty rookie mistake. Search engines sometimes will get url’s with and without “www” in front them confused and see them as two different sites. This can be a problem because while http://www.yoursite.com may be getting 300 inbound links, http://yoursite.com may be getting 3,000 inbound links. You obviously want to get credit for all of those links because the more quality inbound links, the higher ranking. This was a very easy fix for me… simple Cpanel adjustment, and voila!

Poor Keyword Placement
Now this one is hard for me because I originally designed this site ot be more of a personal website portfolio than a full web design agency. I worked on personal keywords, and did not think about trying to target any industry specific key words. Ideally you need to have your keywords in several important places: the page title, the page descripition, meta tags, header tags, image descriptions, strong tags, and anchor tags (and titles). If you can get them in those places, your site is going to be pretty well optimized for keywords. I have my keywords in only one of those places… actually, three now. The problem is none of them are on site. They are either in the code, or in the page title. And for search engines, that’s just not enough. Again, this is a rookie mistake seeing as I could have taken the top spot in my city for my industry. Oh well. Maybe for the next redesign.

Grader.com has some great tools for your twitter, facebook, and other online accounts.

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