Likewise, if your site suffers from a persistently poor showing in the search engine results pages (SERPs), a SEO friendly re-design might be the only solution.  For example, if your site uses an ugly URL structure with numbers and other strange characters, is difficult to navigate, has page titles and content that lacks relevant keywords, or obscures important information from the search engines by hiding it in flash and images, it will never rank well in the SERPs. Having your site re-worked so that it makes sense to both your customers and the search engines, is the only way to solve this problem.

But, what if your current site occupies an attractive position in the SERPs?  How do you design and launch a new site that meets the needs of your evolving business, while maintaining your current ranking in the SERPs?  Here are the top 10 SEO considerations for re-designing and launching your new website:

1. Know Your Most Important Keywords

   Use Google Analytics or a similar application to identify the keywords that your site’s visitors use the most.  Be sure to optimize your new site for these keywords, using them in the architecture if possible.

2. Know Your Most Important Pages

   Google Analytics will also reveal the pages that are most often used to enter your site.  Make sure these important pages are part of the new site design, and consider keeping their URL the same and performing a mod rewrite.

3. Use 301 Redirects

   A 301 redirect tells the search engines that the page has been permanently moved to a new location.  By 301 redirecting all of your old pages to their new counterparts, you’ll help your visitor find what they are looking for, while helping the search engine to index the new page.  As a bonus, you’ll also transfer the old page’s search ranking to the new page.

4. Create a Custom 404 Page

   When someone looks for a page on your site that doesn’t exist, by default, your web server displays a mostly blank page containing only the message “404 Error – Page Not Found”.  By creating a custom 404 page with links to the main content categories of your new website, you’ll inform your visitors and the search engines that the page they are looking for doesn’t exist, and help them find the new page on your site.

5. Inform Your Link Partners

   Identify your most important links by typing link: www.youurl.com into Google and Bing.   Then, ask these Webmasters to update their links to the new pages.  Of course, be sure to notify all of your dealers and affiliates as well.

6. Update Your Important Directory Listings

   Revise all of the social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc.), web 2.0 sites (Hub Pages, Squidoo., etc.), local directories (Google Places, YP.com, etc.), and review sites (Yelp, City Search, etc.) that you can edit.  Create new listings where none currently exist.

7. Market Your New Site

   Plan to mitigate any drop in traffic by conducting a marketing blitz around the launch of your new site as if you were releasing a new product. Issue a press release, and do some high quality blog posts to spread the word and get new links.

8. Submit a New Sitemap

   Submit a new XML Sitemap to Google, Yahoo, and Bing to help them crawl and index the new site.

9. Track the Performance of Your New Site

   Update Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics so that you can track the performance of your new site and quickly remedy any issues that may arise.

10. Be Mindful of Seasonality

    Consider the seasonality of your organization and plan to re-launch your website during a time when it will cause the smallest interruption.

Organizations that have either outgrown their existing websites, or suffer from persistently low search traffic, should definitely be thinking about designing and launching a new website.  Often however, owners of established sites that rank well in the SERPs are hesitant to make the necessary improvements for fear of loosing search traffic.  Although some drop in traffic is possible in the short term, a new, well-designed and optimized site will largely outperform over the medium to long term.  Following these 10 steps will minimize disruptions and ensure that the re-launch of your website is a huge success!

Although Tobin has had years of experience and success with Google AdWords account management, he is pleased that one of his staff, Jen Lehman, has become a qualified professional.

Like many advertisers, you may not have a significant amount of time to invest in learning AdWords and managing your own advertising account. Hiring a professional can help save you time while maximizing the return on your investment. This new certification will allow Tobin Lehman Design + Interactive to offer improved and expanded services including, AdWords account auditing and training, and optimized search advertising account management.

Google AdWords Certified Individuals are online marketing professionals who have invested time training and using AdWords, and go to extra lengths to attain this status, including passing Google’s exams, which demonstrate their in-depth knowledge of AdWords. Using their expertise may benefit your campaigns and help generate new leads and business from Google advertising programs.

In addition to receiving qualified status, Jen also recently attended Google’s two-day AdWords Seminar For Success in Washington, DC which had already generated new successes and insights for our current clients.

For more information on these services, please contact Tobin Lehman Design + Interactive.

1. Google Places
   This is a must for any business these days. Have your local listing present in the search engines and allow people to find you. This site also allows you to upload photos and videos for your business. New innovations come out every month, so keep this post updated. http://www.google.com/places/
2. Yelp
   This review engine is a great place to be found and allows you customers to rate their experiences. Think word of mouth, digitally. http://www.yelp.com
3. Yahoo Business
   Similar to the Google Places, Yahoo Business allows you to list your business, services, and contact information. http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com
4. Facebook
   With the addition of Facebook company pages, you can create a following and start conversations about news, promotions, and services. This might be a time consuming unless you determine the conversation strategy beforehand. And remember, this is business not your personal page. http://www.facebook.com
5. Twitter
   Useful to promote brand awareness, new products and services, and specials or promotions.  Also a great way to find out what people are saying about your business and your competitors. Tie this to your Facebook page to help with updates, as well think about using scheduled tweets to manage this channel. http://www.twitter.com
6. Linkedin
   Another example of digital word of mouth; you can use the forums to answer questions and share your expertise through blog content and network with other businesses to generate referrals. Also think about using Linkedin Ads as a way to promote your business.  http://www.linkedin.com
7. Local Associations/ Chamber of Commerce
   Find out if there are any local associations related to your business and get the word out through their Websites. This would include any local directories as well.

There are lots of opportunities out there to get your business posted and start communicating with your clients. Quality messaging and photography will help you keep a professional look as well as provide you talking points for your conversations in the social realm. Good luck.

One word of caution, however, once you get in the game, you have to feed the beast. The only thing worse than not having a Facebook page or Twitter feed for your business is having one that just sits there and does nothing.

The Basics

So where do you begin? The first thing you need to do is set up a Page in Facebook and a Twitter. account. Setting up a Twitter account is easy – just visit Twitter.com and follow the instructions. Once your page is set up you can add a custom icon, background image, and define your page’s colors to match your business. Here’s an example of one we recently set up for Sealy: www.twitter.com/EmbodyBySealy.

In order to set up a Facebook page, you’ll need to have a personal Facebook account. Follow Facebook’s setup instructions when adding your new page and be sure to provide your business’ logo, address, website address, company overview, mission, products, and detailed description. If you want, you might also consider providing your email address and phone number. When you create your business’ icon, note that it does not have to be a square image. Check out this example from Sealy: www.facebook.com/EmbodyBySealy – that image is 180×500 and is able to showcase both current promotions and the brand’s logo. Inside your Facebook setup, you can drag a box around on that image to set your thumbnail. This lets you quickly change up the thumbnail that appears when you post to your Wall or elsewhere.

Tip: When you first set up your Facebook page, you will not be able to create a name for your page, like www.facebook.com/mybusiness – you have to get 25 people to like your page before the option to create page name is available to you.

What about getting Tweets into Facebook? Well you can do that, through Facebook applications such as the one provided by Twitter or through Twitter for Pages from Involver. While this can be a time saver to have Facebook and Twitter linked up, there’s not much cross over between Facebook and Twitter traffic and as you find your voice in the two mediums you’ll likely find that it’s best to keep your messaging separate.

Digging Deeper

Once you get set up, it’s time to grow your networks. Follow relevant people and companies on Twitter; like or friend them on Facebook. This alone will result in a lot of follow-backs and help you get established. Once that base is there and you’ve added some good Tweets and Wall posts, consider adding “Follow Us On Twitter” or “Like Our Facebook Page” to your company website. If you’re particularly active on Twitter, you might even consider a live twitter feed within your company website to reach those that don’t yet follow you. Within Facebook, you can create website-like custom tabs and set those tabs to be your default tab. This is particularly useful as more and more people are just as likely to find a business on Facebook as they are on the broader web. The first step in exploring what you can do with custom content on Facebook is to check out the FBML application.  An example of this in use can be seen at www.facebook.com/EmbodyBySealy. There are two FBML tabs on that page, one promoting the product and the other featuring the current sweepstakes marketing campaign. Facebook can be even further expanded through rich, custom Facebook apps. The possibilities here are nearly endless.

Now What?

The real value of social media is the open dialog it can create between you and your customers, as well as a way to reach your customers with new and timely information. You can tweet that your coffee isn’t hot enough and needs to be microwaved, but that’s not going to help your business. Keep your communications relevant to your audience – put your self in their shoes – what kinds of information will be helpful to them, helpful enough that they’ll pay attention when you have something to say. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are also great avenues to run promotions to highlight your brand and raise product awareness. Consider a retweet campaign – for example, anyone that retweets (on Twitter you’ll see a retweet as a message that begins with RT) is entered to win a drawing. Facebook, especially through the development of custom applications or even simply FBML tabs, can also promote or even house contests. In addition to promotions and contests, you can run ads on Facebook – either as PPC (pay per click) or CPM (cost per thousand impressions). PPC campaigns are great for something immediately actionable – typically for more retail-like communication. CPM campaigns are great for raising brand awareness. Like Google AdWords, you can set your click or impression bid, and carefully control the amount you want to spend on a daily or campaign basis. the ads, as you might expect considering all of the information Facebook collects, are about as highly-targetable as ads can be. These are just a few of the many great ways to drive up your number of followers, laying a broad foundation of customers with whom you can communicate.

The simple fact is that to measure social media we need to look at other quantifiable measures in addition to of sales or leads. We need to look at it from a social standpoint. What can the medium do for us, and how can we measure those results? This limited one-to-many publishing platform has some great uses, and as well these uses can be the same factors used to measure your effectiveness. Below is a list of just a few ways you can start tracking social media.

1. Fans, Followers, Connections - These are the base numbers for your accounts. What is your reach and how fast can you grow it?
2. Re-tweets, Mentions -What popularity does your tweets or posts have? Are people passing you on, or are you dead air?
3. Clicks on Shortened URLs - Using trackable links is a great way to see who is really listening and following your messages.
4. Traffic from Social Sites – Looking at your Web stats to see what social sites are bringing you traffic, evaluate the effort spent on those sites with the return.
5. Blog, Forum Posts – Using tools to see how you are being mentioned in blogs and forums. Are you being talked about outside of your own channels?
6. Positive Sentiment – When people are talking about you, what are they saying? Can you identify a good-to-bad comment quotient? What would that mean to your business?
7. Promo code distribution - Like #2, is word of mouth working for you online? Do people want to pass on your value?
8. Crisis management - Can you use this channel to curb, or reply to crisis in your business? Bring focus to your response efforts.

All media should be measured if it used for marketing, and social media is no exception. Don’t settle for just “trying” it without a game plan that involves knowing a way to measure the results. As the medium evolves so will its purpose in your marketing and knowing what success looks like will help you determine the value it has in your marketing mix.

1. Early Checkers, Late Checkers – Keep track of your early openers. They might be a great test bed for A/B campaigns. Late openers could be a great segment to evaluate time-based campaigns.
2. Link Clickers – Which users constantly click your links? Send them a few more resources to get traction on your site.
3. Forwarders – It might be time to reward those who consistently spread the word by forwarding your emails.
4. Those Who Use Coupons – You might only have a small subset that actually use the coupons.  Reward them for their usage with exclusive offers only available to them.
5. Mobile Users – Do you have users that constantly check email on their phone? If so, try providing more direct calls to action or mobile versions to this segment.
6. Consistent Openers – Those who always open your emails might be a good  group to evaluate for big campaign effectiveness, or A/B Campaigns.
7. In-Store vs Online Users – If you can track coupons or similar breadcrumbs, it’s great to know whether your promotion is going online or into the store. Once you know that, you can start feeding more direct online, or in-store promotions to those segments.
8. The Unresponsive – Users that open the email but don’t click links or follow up with promotions might be a good group to try a different type of outreach such as a quick survey to see what they need to become active in your email communications.
9. Social Birds – Users who retweet, or post about your emails on social channels might be a good list to have when you need to press a news release out of lots of folks. This is also a good list to inform about good will campaigns and keep them in “the know”.
10. Operating System/ Email Client – You could take advantage of some of the latest technological advancements in email such as embedded video or better CSS and image support with your users who are reading email on newer email clients.\

There is no better time than now to start looking at your email lists for potential for grown and a new message strategy. Sending the same message over and over will slowly diminish your returns within this medium. Try new way to engage the users, to keep them interested in your communications. Knowing their habits is a great place to start, but you might have some great opportunities for segmentation just waiting to be used. Best of luck!

Time Frame

1 Year
This plan will effectively get you off the ground and moving toward more market shares within one year, but budgetary means for the next year should be under consideration in the third quarter of this plan using a percentage of sales, or other means of budget determination. You will need to think of marketing as a necessary expenditure from this point forward.

Campaign

You should develop a basic message you can use to start advertising your business. Hopefully, your business plan has illuminated your unique selling proposition (USP). With this information you can put together a series of messages to sell your product. These messages might be related to your product’s unique value, or the location of your company’s new physical store front. These key messages will encourage customers to go to your store or inquire about your product. Developing these messages is exactly what a great advertising firm can do for you. But if you don’t have the budget for a campaign development with a firm, you’ll have to rely on your own knowledge of your product and sell your product yourself. Do not underestimate this fundamental task! Buying a single impression of media without defining your message will be like flushing money down the toilet.

Media

Choosing media wisely will have the greatest effect on your immediate success. To do this, you must have a pretty good understanding of what your goals are in this limited budget phase. You should assume two simple goals for your advertising campaign: to spread awareness, or presence of your brand to your local market, and to promote a new product or service.

So let’s look at all the available media, and weigh the options…

Newspapers: Free
Your key objective for any newspaper should be purely public relations. Instead of paying for ad space, try to have the paper run a story about your store opening or promotion to bring some positive PR to your company. Down the road you could consider ad space as a budget item, but for now your objective is to get publicity. There are many free press release templates and how-to’s on the web. You don’t need something perfect, just be professional and persistent in trying to get this into the right hands at the newspapers. You can try a few free press release submission sites, such as prlog.com.

Local Magazines: Free
Same as above, it’s too pricey initially. Take the PR approach and send news to industry magazines and blogs to help with your online presence.

Radio: Not now…
Now, radio can do lots for your company in terms of building brand awareness. With the CPM being fairly competitive, you can reach thousands of your customers for a competitive price. But that price still may eat up a considerable amount of your current budget. Radio should be used when you have gotten some road behind you in a marketing sense, and really understand what to expect and have money to correctly budget. Starting out, radio is going to be too expensive to really net you the customers that you want, without zapping your budget dry. Keep radio on the list for Y3 or Y4.

Television: Not now…
The same basic reason to avoid radio right now applies to TV. It has fantastic reach, but comes with a premium. And with a two thousand dollar budget, it’s not the best use of your money. If you are interested in TV media, start studying the competition’s ads. See what they are doing and how to compete beyond their level. Don’t see your competition on TV? Then don’t rush to be the first one out of the gate. There might be a reason this media is left alone in your market.

Digital
We live in the digital age! This horizon of ever growing new media choices makes digital advertising an attainable, but confusing place to be. I’m breaking this category down into a few subsections to help you see through the clutter.

Web site: $600.00
This is an absolute must for any new business. Its the 21st century’s version of the phone number. You need to have a relevant and legible URL, which you can buy along with hosting from a service such as 1-and-1 internet services. Once you have your URL and hosting package you can set up your business email account and get a simple “splash” page up with your company logo, hours, contact information and brief company overview. After that, you will want to work with a professional web advertising team to have a professional web design created and developed. At the least, you want a two page site with information about your services and a contact form and to collect customer inquires online. A smaller agency could provide this for 500-600 dollars. Again, a good part of your budget, but worth every penny as your online store front.

Email Marketing: Monthly Fee / 30.00
Once you start collecting your customers’ information, you will want to start engaging them via email using email marketing. To do this professionally, you would want to sign up for a service like MyEmma, or Mail Chimp to find a plan that fits your budget. Once signed up, you can pick from template designs, or have your agency create a custom design for you. The key with this media is about relationships. You have established customers and prospective customers you need to continually reach out to and inform about your offerings. This media gives you that opportunity as well as exacting metrics to track your message and efforts. Brand awareness and product placements can both happen simultaneously, with the still most consistent ROI method available.

Social Media: Free
Entering social media can be a very powerful way to advertise your services and build some brand awareness. The rule of thumb I give to new businesses, is to monitor your involvement and pace yourself. All the tools in this toolbox, Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc are all great to build brand awareness and to develop channels to communicate to your customers. But be sure to monitor your involvement, and properly invest yourself in the right channels and not over extend yourself. Overextending could be signing up for a Facebook account that you never use. This sends potentially negative signals to your friends and followers. Pick what you can successful manage and do it with an involvement that will garnish results. Each of these channels offer different types of communications and advantages. Do some research and find out which one would work best for your plans and start slow. You can always grow into it as more time becomes available.

Pay Per Click / Search Advertising: 50.00/Month.
Search advertising is probably one of the most accessible types of online advertising thanks to innovation from search giants like Google and Yahoo. The SEO, or search engine optimization surge of the past six years, carries a parallel storyline to pay-per-click advertising. While you may desire to be #1 on Google, there are more important things to focus on especially if you are not selling online. But, PPC can do some very helpful lead generation if planned accordingly. There are many tactics you could use for PPC advertising that would not break the bank. Start with a very small keyword list and do some iterative experimentation on your own with search. There are lots of articles on tactics for PPC advertising. I recommend that if you do this, you start very slowly and do it after you have all of your other media bases covered. Don’t forget to measure your success.

Outdoor: 200.00
You are fortunate if your business has a storefront because that means you have some free space to promote your brand and start the conversation on your wares. If not, you can look into yard signs, door hangers, etc to spread the word about your business. There are some fantastic gorilla tactics like sidewalk chalk, projectors, etc. that could be a creative way to get in to the public space. This could include sponsorship for outdoor events. Just watch your local laws, and keep your perception in mind. What ever you do, be professional and consistent. No hand painted signs unless it works for your business. Remember, everything is an extension of your company.

Your Face: 250.00
Yes, your face. Another way to think about this is networking. I know not everyone likes to network, but as you grow your business you will need to be a part of your business image. People prefer buying from people more than just faceless companies. Spend the time looking for local organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce to invest some time in meeting people. If you go with the goal of meeting at least two new people, that is two more people that know you than had before.

Get Started!

With any budget the only limits are your initiative and imagination. This plan is only one path, but hopefully it gives you some idea of good place to start. You don’t need thousands to become a national sensation, you can do so much more with great ideas than great amounts to money. Good luck!

A simple metric, it refers to the cost of not one, but one thousand impressions of an advertisement. Some ad channels sell ad space on the basis of how many eyes will be seeing your Ads. This provides a flat fee structure that may be preferable over a cost per click (CPC) campaign, which could vary greatly depending on user action. The simple calculation for this metric is:

This acronym can be expanded into other “cost per” metrics, by looking at a desired outcome, rather than impressions.

• CPC – Cost per Click
• CPL – Cost per Lead, qualified lead from your media
• CPS – Cost per Sale, qualified sale from online media lead

ROR — Rate of Return

Looking a little deeper at an advertisement, we can evaluate the rate of return similar to an investment. To do this, we need to have a pretty accurate metric on sales or revenue generated from the ad. Using digital media, we have some simple tools like analytics or Web statistics that can help us gather these numbers. A simple way of looking at this calculation is the net revenue for that ad period, minus the cost of the ad over that same cost, typically expressed as a percentage, ex. 5%.

COA — Cost of Acquisition

As it states, this metric is calculated by the taking the total cost of he advertising spent, over the number of actual customers received from that spend. The accuracy of this metric depends on how clearly you can track your users and purchases online, just like ROR, and understand their “funnel” that got them to your shopping cart. The benefit of this over ROR, is that it does not look at the revenue, but plays an averaging role by looking at the number of carts, or purchases rather than the profit from the carts.

Putting it All Together

Knowing these few simple calculations can help you make more educated estimates on the effectiveness of your online marketing. Let’s look at this scenario of Tim’s Basketball Store:

Tim is spending 500.00 dollars a month on online advertising, half on banners and half in email marketing. He gets monthly reports from both with the clicks and purchases from each channel from his Web statistics. Here are his results…

Now we can look at both CPM and CPC for each by looking at the cost of the different ads over the number of impressions and clicks.

Email is more expensive in the CPM department, but the clicks are almost half the cost compared to the banners. And if we tied that in with some more data from the web analytics applications, we can see how many of those clicks turned into sales from the site.

So, in looking at these equations, we can see that email is providing some fantastic ROR for its cost. Turing almost a 200% return on its investment. That could be a clear indication of a channel that should be invested in more. But as with any metric, it should be looked at across a larger span than just one month. As in our example, banners had more purchases, but lower total revenue, which could point to some high priced sales with could be out of the ordinary or above average.

Banners turned a great CPA of 16.66 per cart checkout. This shows that based on the money spent, banners were the most efficient this month at getting customers to the site and into the sales column. Further analysis could look at the banner messaging, time of day, and referring site.

By looking at our data, we can see a true picture of the performance of our online advertising. In part two of this post, we’ll look at long-term evaluation of these metrics as well as not so traditional metrics for social media.

The first thing I do when consulting with a client on search-related questions is an audit of their current Web site. Although the calculations used by Google and Yahoo are numerous, there are a few obvious indicators that could be hindering your site’s ranking among search results. The following list can help you evaluate your own site and point you toward more traffic and better ranking.

1. Title tag

The title tag is displayed on the top border of your Web browser as a user views your site. It is also text used in the click-able link on the search engine results pages (SERPs).  This title tag is one of many on-page features that help the search engine determine the relevance of your site. So, for purposes of an audit, look for a few key inclusions, such as your company name and relevant keywords. The text should vary from page to page depending on the page content and be kept to fewer than 70 characters.

2. Meta tags

Hidden in the top of your Web page should be your Meta tags. Meta Tags, are meta information supplied to the search engine to understand your page content. The two most notable tags are the Meta Keywords, and Meta Description Tags.

The inclusion of Meta Keywords in Google’s search engine has been publicly denied by Google. So, the presence of these tags are not critical but best practices would still include these in your site.

The Meta description is just that; a short description of the overall page content. This tag is also used by the search engine as that small bit of text under the title of your site on the SERP. Using this tag allows you to influence the description of your page on the SERP, which could influence those users. Without this tag, The SERP will draw from the body content itself, which may not give you the desired result or be keyword rich.

3. Markup Condition

The quality of the HTML used in your site can affect the way that Google reads your site. Invalid markup or improperly used tags could result in a crawl error, in which the program will stop reading your page, possibly missing some valuable content.

Markup conditions that I tend to look for include: proper use of heading tags, Alt attributes on images, title attributes on links, and overuse of markup.  Heading tags are typically used to define headlines for the viewers and search engines.  They are also indicators of the site content.  You see these as H1 through H6 with the H1 tag being used to indicate the most important text, which may include key words and links.  Alt attributes, which make the page accessible to the visually impaired, are attached to images and gives the search engine an idea of what content it might be.  Alt attributes should be present on all images and include keywords to describe the image.  The same is true with the Title attribute, which contains text that is displayed when the mouse rolls over a text link or image.  They provide valuable information to the user by giving a short description of the link and also may increase keyword relevancy.  Proper use of Alt and title attributes on links and images will help you with search, as well as some accessibility problems.

4. URLs and Naming Conventions

URLs should be short, easy to type, easy to remember, and free of punctuation. The way your pages are named and site is organized can influence your rankings.  Using keywords in your file names is recommended, but don’t go overboard.  A long URL or file name containing unnecessary characters is less likely to be displayed by search engines or remembered by users.  Keep it short and sweet, and most of all, relevant.

5. Relevant Content

The purpose of your site content is to inform your readers and potential clients, but, if it is well written, it can also boost your search engine rankings. This is probably the one element of all these listed that can have the biggest effect on your rankings. Always remember that you are writing to your targeted audience, not the search engines. If you use too many keywords and neglect to accurately represent the content of the page it could actually harm your rankings and alienate your readers.

6. Backlinks

A backlink is a link to your site from other Web sites. Backlinks bring potential customers and visitors to your site, and the number and quality of backlinks will affect how your site ranks on the SERP. The logic, simplified, is that the more sites linking to you, the more relevant your site is considered to be. You can do this check with Tools from Yahoo and Google, and see who is linking to you. You can also check your Web stats for referral sites. I recommend setting up a regular interval to check how many sites link to your site, see what page they link to, and define your most popular content.

7. SEO toolbox

Lastly, I recommend making yourself smarter about your site’s ranking by using a few online tools that can help your evaluate your site’s ranking. Here is a quick list of five tools you should bookmark today:

1. SEMrush.com – great for keyword analysis.
2. SEO Quake Toolbar – a toolbar for Firefox.
3. SubmitExpress.com/analyzer – a keyword analyzer.
4. Keywordspy.com – to see your competitor’s keywords, fun tool.
5. W3C Validation – use this tool to check your HTML to make sure your site is valid.

Following these simple steps will give you a good idea of how prepared your site is for search and what actions need to be taken to enhance your listings. Without these items you will be fighting an uphill battle trying to enter the coveted first page of Google’s results for your keywords. And, after completing the audit, if you are looking for a more in-depth SEO analysis of your site, contact us to hear more about our services.