Improving your online presence part 2

Part 2: Fix your website!

At the risk of sounding like a hypocrite, you really need to fix your website. My website is about search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, social media marketing, and all of that Internet marketing stuff. I do not spend as much time time updating my website as I should. It probably does not convert as well as it should (I am reminding myself now that I need to simplify my home page), but it is setup correctly-for the most part.
Here are some basic things you need to do to get your website up to snuff. If you don't have your website setup correctly, anything else you do is going to have to fight like a salmon swimming upstream.
Assuming you have built a website that tells the human visitors about what you can do for them, this is what you need to do to let the search engines know what your website is about:

1. Have integrity based meta data.
   Your meta data needs to match your pages. Not exactly, but don't put anything in your keyword, description, or title tags that is not actually on the page they are describing. Don't repeat keywords and keyword phrases over and over and over again, but be clear in your meta data what the page is about. If you do this, then all of your meta-data will be unique from page to page, assuming all of your pages are unique.
   I hear different numbers regarding how many characters should be in each area, but here are some general numbers to follow:
   Title Tags: about 70 characters
   Description Tags: about 160 characters
   Keyword Tags: About 4-9 keywords or keyword phrases, about 100 characters. Bonus advice: don’t repeat any individual keyword more than 3 times, and don’t repeat any keyword phrases at all.
    
2. Fix your Heading tags:
   1 unique “H1” tag for each page-give your page a title that tells the SEs what it is about.
   If it makes sense to have more than one H2 or H3 tag, then go for it. Have at least 1 H2 tag.
    
3. Have an xml sitemap-and keep it updated
    
4. Submit your xml sitemap to Google analytics
    
5. Setup a Google analytics account
    
6. Setup a Google webmaster account
    
7. Fix your URLs
   If possible, format your URLs like this:
   Main Keyword Phrase should be dashed in URL
   Example: http://www.domainname.com/keyword-keyword-keyword
   NOT:
   http://www.domainname.com/ keywordkeywordkeyword
   http://www.domainname.com/ keyword_keyword_keyword
   Important: Needs to be unique for each page and relevant to each page
   
   There are a lot of other things that you will hear and you should pay attention to some of them; “flash is bad” (not necessarily true), “what about 404s” and “403s” and “errors”, “301 redirects”, “blah-blah-blah”. These are important, but not for discussion here. You should address those other issues, but if you are not doing what I suggest in this post, you will be fighting to swim upstream with everything else you do.
   
   You always have the option to call me for consulting-720-279-1876. I offer free advice and direction over the phone, and if it makes sense for us to work together, that may also be an option.
   
   If you saw any typos-please let me know by commenting on my blog post!