How often do you visit your own website?

I asked this question at a presentation last week, and was surprised to hear that most people fail to visit their own website, and worse fail to check the traffic analytics and feedback. Just because your webmaster (or you) have designed a nice website, the job isn't over.

A few days before this presentation, I visited the websites of two acquaintances. One had missing images and no alt text, and missing text color in the navigation. The other had three typos and a several broken links. (See Focus Group Pet Peeves below.)

Your website, and especially your home page is the first impression a visitor has of you, your expertise and professionalism. Even though you may have hired a webmaster to design your site, the ultimate responsibility falls upon you, after all - it is your image and your business.

Once your site is online, it still requires maintenance. Changes in search algorithms can require changes in your source code, keywords or content in order to stay visible.

A competent webmaster will keep you appraised of the changes that need to be made to keep up with the search engine algorithms, and will consistently check their work for broken links and missing information or images. No one is perfect and mistakes can be made, however, errors should be corrected without delay. The longer a page stays online, the more likely it can become part of a cache page in search results.

Your web designer/SEO/marketer should be working with your success in mind. If they are analyzing your traffic, they can work with you to understand which pages and links are popular and respond to pages that are losing ranking with changes or fresh content.

It is essential to know what your customers and prospects are seeing when they visit your site. Are they impressed with how well your website represents you? Do they bookmark, share or +1 your site? Is your content fresh, giving them a reason to return?

One of the best ways to determine if your site is working for or against you and your goals, is to utilize a focus group. Unbiased, unrelated (no friends or family) selection of people to give honest feedback on what they saw, felt and learned from your site.

From the many focus groups I run on my clients and prospects websites, the top pet peeves are:
1. Tiny Text.
2. Text too hard to read against the page background. Least favorite: gray text against white background,
3. Sound that launches automatically, whether it's music, a greeter voice on the website, or the auto responder telling you to check your email.
4. Outdated websites with no current content and several broken links.
5. Finding themselves opted-in to receive additional information, usually an e-zine, after they responded to a free offer with no advance indication that they are being opted in.

The number of websites on the internet is growing everyday. Even if your market is only your local area, you still need a consistent plan of action, and consistent changes in order to stay as visible as possible in the search results.

Wishing you awesome and continuing success !

Sumner M. Davenport is a Solutions Consultant.
Best Selling Author and Keynote Speaker
Solutions, not just answers.
Solutions are not one-size-fits-all.
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Facebook News Feed - are your friends getting your updates?

Facebook has changed its News Feed, so that by default, you can only see updates from people you've "recently interacted with." This also means that if you are not interacting with your friends, they may not be seeing your posts either.

To fix this click on the arrow next to "Most Recent."

From the dropdown menu, click on "Edit Options."

You will see the default is "Friends and pages you interact with the most".

Select "All of your friends and pages."
Click "Save."

Be sure to tell your friends because they might be missing your posts until they make this same change.

MANAGE YOUR NEWS FEED:

1.) If you only want to see posts in your news feed from friends who have made recent status updates, then start again at the drop down menu under "Most Recent".

Select "Status Updates".

2.) If you only want to see posts in your news feed from selected friends, then start again at the drop-down menu under "Most Recent" to "Create a friend list."

A window will appear with your friends images. Make a name for this list and select the friends you want included.

Click Save.

Now when you return to your page, and click "Most Recent", you will see your new customized friend list added.

By clicking this, your news feed will only show posts from the friends in this list.

Be sure to tell your friends because they might be missing your posts until they make this same change.

REMINDER: Your friends may find it difficult to find your custom business page unless it is correctly linked from your profile. You can still have your privacy controls set so that only your friends can see your posts, however, visitors can more easily find your business page. See my blog post titled: "Are you making it difficult for people to find your business on your social media profiles?".

Wishing you awesome and continuing success !


Sumner M. Davenport is a Solutions Consultant.
Best Selling Author and Keynote Speaker
Solutions, not just answers.
Solutions are not one-size-fits-all.
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Buyer Be Aware - How Online Retailers Motivate You To Spend More

How To Create Your Own Facebook URL or Username

If you are trying to figure out how to get your own custom Facebook fan page URL for your Facebook business page here’s how you do it.


You must have 25 or more fans (people who have liked your page), before you will be able to set a username. If you do not yet have 25 fans on your page, start suggesting to your friends to like your page. Underneath your Facebook fan page profile picture there is a button labeled “suggest to friends.” you can use this button to invite your friends to come support and like your fan page. 


After you are logged into your Facebook account, go to http://facebook.com/username.


If you have not yet verified your account, You will be prompted to do so before you can create a username.

Once on the username page, select your profile, business page, Group (that you started) or Facebook App that you created from the drop-down menu.

If you have not yet met the requirement of 25 fans, you will see a message that your page is not eligible for a username at this time. Gain your 25 fans and return.

After you have obtained a minimum of 25 fans, return to http://facebook.com/username. From the drop-down menu to select your profile, business page, Group (that you started) or Facebook App that you created. 


A new text box will appear asking you to enter your desired username.

Here is where you want to give it some thought.


Your Facebook username is one of the most important factors to getting your page, profile, or Facebook group ranked in search results. You want to make sure that your username is both short and descriptive and includes keywords that users might be using to find pages like yours.


Facebook has a few defined limitations:
1. You cannot change the name once you have selected it for this page.
2. You cannot transfer ownership to anyone else
3. You cannot violate anyone's trademark. They also do not allow you to use Facebook in your name.
4. You  cannot obtain page names with the intention to sell them.
5. Facebook can delete or claim your custom name for many other yet undefined reasons according to their Terms& Conditions.

After creating your custom URL you can now use this web address to hand out to your customers, prospects, e-mail list, and website visitors so that they can easily find your Facebook page and spread the word.


You also want to make sure that this custom page is connected to your profile so your current and new friends can find it.  See my blog post titled: "Are you making it difficult for people to find your business on your social media profiles?"

Wishing you awesome and continuing success !


Sumner M. Davenport is a Solutions Consultant. 
Best Selling Author and Keynote Speaker
Solutions, not just answers.
Solutions are not one-size-fits-all.
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Google launches Instant Pages on Chrome

Instant Pages is just one part of Google’s new and revised overall Instant platform. With Instant Pages in Chrome, you can skip the extra seconds waiting for a page to load and get to the answers you're looking for faster with webpages that load instantly.

Are you using it?
Does it make a difference in your search activities?

Smart webmasters and marketers will be making significant changes to websites to get them to the top of the first page results, including buying ads.

What is SEO? How has it changed?

Every week I meet someone who asks if I include SEO in the services I offer. I answer yes, followed by the question "what is your understanding of SEO?"

The answers usually include something similar to " making it easier for search engines to find my website, changing keywords or meta tags, etc" While that answer is a partial explanation of SEO, it fails to answer the full picture and the best way to accomplish it.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of your website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Search engines don’t read text, view images, or watch video the same way a human being does, so your website must include certain instructions so that the search engine can not only find you, but can also deliver visitors to your specific content.

What once worked in the past, may not work as effectively today, as the search engines consistently change their search algorithms; the method that they find and rank a website and web page. With the introduction of “instant search”, “plus 1” and results from social networking sites being delivered, your website must consistently change to keep up with the changes in the search engines practices.

In the beginning, SEO was as simple as changing a few meta tags and keywords in your website code. Then as the internet grew with millions of websites, and thousands in your niche, SEO had to evolve. Some of the previous efforts for SEO no longer work today. At one time, cross linking your website (I’ll post your link on mine, if you post me on yours) was popular and for some websites it created an increase in traffic and interest in their products; especially if those linking websites were in their niche. Then the search algorithms changed again and these cross links just washed each other out. For a long time (and still), many SEO companies started placing their clients website on hundreds and thousands of non-specific directory sites. Although this “might” increase the traffic to a website, it has no positive effect on page ranking or earning authority ratings with search engines. Plus, search engines many times either ignore or block these non-important sites, so your link becomes worthless. On the other hand, placing links on high authority sites, especially in your niche area, have a greater potential of delivering better visitors to your site, and increasing your overall ranking.

For years we have been telling clients that content is important, and current content is essential, yet many websites are still launched and left to sit for months and even years, A website with no new activity will soon fall to the bottom of the sandbox, and then take extra efforts to relive it. Internet searchers are becoming more specific in their request, and demanding quicker results. Keeping your content current gives you a better chance of answering those search inquiries.

SEO works when it is included in your overall marketing plan, which includes your website, your blog, your videos, your email newsletter and all your social networking sites, (ie: Facebook, LinkedIn, industry specific sites, etc.), tied in with your offline marketing efforts as well. Working on only one area can be more costly in time, potential designer fees and low returns.

Internet marketing returns better results with (1) a strategic plan; (2) Analytics; (3) Analysis of results vs goals; and (4) Adjustments. Rinse and repeat.

Wishing you awesome and continuing success. Happy Internet

How secure are your passwords? (and therefore your accounts!)

Over this past weekend it was breaking news that Apple's survey website had been hacked and a collection of accounts and passwords were then posted on the internet. Fox News Twitter account had been hacked and erroneous news stories posted.

If the passwords of these giants can be obtained by serious hackers, how safe are the passwords you use on your online accounts from the identity thieves? Despite numerous warnings about easy passwords, or the need to change passwords regularly, many people still ignore the warnings.

A network software security company found that 1 percent of the 32 million people it studied had used “123456” as a password. The second-most-popular password was “12345.” Others in the top 20 included “qwerty,” “abc123” and “princess.”

The most popular (and easily hacked) passwords still used today:
1. Your birthday
2. 123456
3. qwerty
4. abc123
5. letmein
6. monkey
7. myspace1
8. password1
9. blink182
10.(your first name, or any part of your name)
11. 12345
12 123456789
13. Password (with and without capitalization)
14. iloveyou
15. princess
16. jesus (with and without capitalization)
17. jesus saves
18. 1234567
19 12345678
20. abc123
21. babygirl
22. monkey
23. Lovely
25. michael
26. Ashley
27. 654321
28. Qwerty
29. (the name of the website you're on)
30. letmein

The advice is to stay away from common and easy passwords, especially for your critical online accounts that have sensitive and/or financial information about you.

I read a hint somewhere that can be helpful: Take a sentence and turn it into a password. Something like "This little piggy went to market" might become "tlpWENT2m". (Now that I've given you this example, please don't use it, compose your own creative sentence). You might find an online password creator tool easier if you have several passwords you need to create.

PLUS, when setting your "secret questions" for an email reminder of your password, use your own questions or answer only the ones that most people wouldn't know about you.

Yes, it may feel aggravating to have to remember different passwords for different accounts, however, compare that to having your account hacked and your identity violated, or your money stolen.




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