Comfortcanada's Blog

This is a repeat of information originally posted on my comforcanadablog.blogspot blog, which I am shutting down…

I set out in 2009 to optimize our company website to attract more traffic and encourage more potential customers to contact us for information. Here are some tools and techniques I’ve discovered:
Hubspot Website Grader: www.websitegrader.com
This free tool will analyse your website and provide guidelines such as title lengths, keywords and even Twitter ratings which can be useful in making improvements to your website. You can also compare your site to other sites providing similar services to see how you rank, and see what they are doing to improve their findability.

Sitemap Generation Tool: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
This is also a free tool, and will generate complete .XML and .HTML sitemaps for your website. For a small fee, it will also generate an errors list for broken links on your webpages, and identify orphaned or abandoned pages that you should remove to maintain a clean site. Once generated, you can upload the sitemap to your website root directory (where the index page is), and link to it from your Home page. You will also need an XML version to submit to Google to aid in Google searches.

Google Webmaster Tools: https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=sitemaps&passive=true&nui=1&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fwebmasters%2Ftools%2F&followup=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fwebmasters%2Ftools%2F&hl=en

A rather long URL, but take advantage of this free service. Once you have an account, you can submit your XML sitemap to Google, and this will improve your search engine results.

Google Analytics: https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/login?ctu=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fanalytics%2Fsettings%2Fhome%3Fscid%3D10618058

This is also free, but you have to download a bit a script and embed it as HTML code in your key website pages. With this, you can monitor important metrics like number of visitors, bounce rate, time on site etc., and see if your website improvements have any affect on your website performance.

Google Analytics 101: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdsb_uH2yPU&feature=channel
This is a good YouTube tutorial on how to interpret your Google Analytics data

…enjoy and good luck
you can also FollowMe @comfortcanada and @StuDotCox

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