I was recently told about this website called Raven SEO Tools. It’s a free website where you can get your website analyzed a bunch of different ways (it cost money for more than one website). I ran a Design Analyzer on my site SwimUniversity.com and it came up with some startling results.

I was blown away by this. I thought if anything I had the website part of it down pat. But I kept reading and this is what it said.

I have been building webpages using HTML tables for years and now I come to find out that you should not build your website using nested tables for SEO purposes. Now I know that wordpress doesn’t use tables but I really didn’t want to learn how to re-build my entire website using CSS and DIV tags. I use CSS but for fonts not for the complete design.

I started trying to redesign my site in CSS using DIV tags and I was able to it pretty quickly. The problem came when I realized that my entire website was dynamic and I didn’t want to screw it all up. Especially because my title were dynamic too.

So I did a little research and found out that using CSS and DIV tags are the ideal for website design because you can make one change to a CSS file and it changes it across the entire website but it DOES NOT EFFECT YOUR SEO. Which to me was the most important part. So I have decided not to re-build my website in CSS right away but I am going to slowly construct a test site just so I can build my knowledge about DIV tags and CSS.

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Here are a few bullet points on what you should do before you start building a website. Before I start building I like to draw the entire design on a piece of paper and build it from there. That way you can you can save time instead of editing in the computer. Here is a simple checklist I follow when building a website.

Layout

-Consistent navigation bar and main logo.

-Page footer that includes copyright information and a contact email address.

-Remember that most people use an 800 x 600 resolution so you should design your pages to be no less than 750 pixels wide.

-Make sure the text on the page is easy to read. If you use a black background it is best to use white text so that people can read it.

-Grab attention with the homepage. Put as much relevant information on the main page as you can

-Check Browser Compatibility

Navigation

-If you are using buttons as your text, add links to the bottom of your page. Some people use text browsers and search bots only look at text not pictures.

-Make sure the homepage is under 50 kb for fast loading

-Navigation should be big and simple and easy to find

-Check Links to ensure they are not broken

Search Engine Optimization

-Make sure your meta tags are defined (title, keywords, description)

-Make sure all your alt tags are filled in

-Make sure there are plenty of links and they are not broken

-Preview you pages in a text browsers

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I have been slowly compiling this list for 3 days. These are all tips that I used to build my websites and even this one.

1. Redirect 404 Page
2. Use Header Tags <h1>, <h2>, <h3>
3. Make your links the color blue, so that visitors know that it’s a link
4. Use CSS, for site wide customization and website speed
5. Use short meta data. Every page has to have a title, about 5 Keywords and a brief description
6. Use Google Analytics to track visitors on your website. It’s free.
7. Start a blog using wordpress (it’s the most SEO-Friendly)
8. Use a robot.txt to blog google from going into useless folders on your server.
9. Create an xml sitemap and submit it to Google’s Webmaster Tools.
10. Use large text.
11. Create great content. Content is King!
12. Twitter!!!!
13. Sign up for Stumble Upon
14. Sign Up for Delcious
15. Use flash animation sparingly. Google doesn’t read flash…yet.
16.Choose an easy to spell domain name
17. Get a .com screen name. All the others in my opiniion are worthless.
18. Be consistent in your design across all your pages.
19. Use alt tags on all your images.
20. Check your spelling
21. Create an about us page
22. make sure your webpage works on every browser.
23. Do not play music on your site. If you do make sure it’s the users choice to play it
24. Stay away from intro pages.
25. Add Search function to your website
26. Animated Gifs are tacky, don’t use them
27. Intralink within your website. If there is relevant content related to a page, link it
28. Less images = Faster load times
29. make sure every page has a different page title, keywords and description to match the content
30. Have someone else proofread your work
31. Do not submit to crappy directories that mean nothing
32. Review your website every week and make changes

What next?

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When I first started this site using wordpress I went to serveral different websites looking for the best wordpress plugins to get me started. I’m sure I’ll be adding more, but if you are starting a blog using wordpress I suggest you add these plugins.

1. Akismet -Believe it or not you are going to get spam comments from drug companies and porn sites. This plugin weeds them out. Without this plugin you will get a ton of useless comments. Plus it’s time consuming to delete them all. This is a must have plugin.
2. All in One SEO Pack – If you want your blog to be picked up by the search engines (which we all do) you are going to need this plugin. It is one of the most popular wordpress plugins. It allows to you add all your meta data in one simple form.
3. cforms – On my contact page I have an example of this. It will create forms that users can fill out and it will send that information to your email. Pretty simple to use as well. And It’s fully customizable for any style form.
4. Google XML Sitemaps -Google can take a while to index your pages, especially if you are a new blog. This plugin creates a dynamic sitemap that constantly updates everytime you add to your blog. As long as you submit this sitemap to Google using Webmaster Tools, your webpages will be constantly indexed so that google doesnt have to pick them up naturally (which could take a while).
5. Simple Tags – Instead of trying to think of tags to relate you posts to for SEO purposes, this plugin scans your post and the internet and comes up with tags automatically so you don’t have to think about it. A huge time saver!
6. Subscribe To Comments – some people after they comment on your blog want to know what other people are saying. This plugin allows commentors to get an email every time someone else comments on that same post they commented on.
7. Tweet This – This plugin sends a tweet using your twitter account about this post. So if you want to share this post with your twitter followers, you can easily!
8. WP-Polls – People love polls, they are easy, quick and fun and this plugin makes it even easier. Create multiple polls and have them rotate on your blog or just create one. Immediate poll results.
9. WP Ajax Edit Comments – this plugin allows those leaving comments to edit their comments for a short period of time after they leave a comment.

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