TRY THIS EXERCISE ON FOR SIZE:

Who are you when you are at your best… living in moment? 1. _____________________________________________ 2. _____________________________________________ 3. _____________________________________________

What do you love to talk about some than anything else in world? 1. _____________________________________________ 2. _____________________________________________ 3. _____________________________________________ How would your best friends, closest clients and colleagues who really know you describe you? 1. _____________________________________________ 2. _____________________________________________ 3. _____________________________________________

Are you truly and fully expressing this bold self that you just described above with everyone you come into contact with? As soon as you expose bright and brilliant you, you’ll be a magnet for new high paying clients!

Stayed tuned for Key #4: Produce A Powerful Personal Brand That Sets You Apart

Cleverness – There are lots of little things that designers like to do because they can. The question is what’s it costing your site. One of my favorites is that date thing. You’ve likely been to a site that publishes today’s date. Perhaps there is a good reason for that but go on back to view source on one these pages and you will see price of that little trick. This date trick adds 300-400 lines of JavaScript code at beginning of your page. All of this makes it hard for those search engines to find your real content. Think long and hard about adding stuff that gets in way.

No Anchor Text Hyperlinks – Web site designs like to make little buttons and badges for navigation links. Now, this can be okay but this is also a place where less is more. Text with a hyperlink is easily understood by search engines. Remember, they can’t see images. Help them understand what your page is all about. Even if you have images navigation, put text links at bottom of your page with all of your navigation.

Referral Marketing - This is a text link

Contact info hidden – There are some web site owners out there that don’t want to be easy to contact but I’m guessing that’s not you. Put your address and contact information on every page and make them text. More and more people are turning to their web browser like a phone book. Lots of local address and content links can make it easier to find you in your own town.

Most important content out of order – Search engines read your source code in order they come on it. Some engines only read a small portion so you should make sure that your most important content is early on your page. Left side navigation columns, commonly found on web sites, appear at top of source code and could be hindering your site from receiving proper credit for content it contains.

No use of Heading tags – HTML uses a series of H or heading tags to help structure a page like an outline. H1 for most important headings h2 for subheads and so on. Each of your pages will do well to contain a keyword rich headline, much like an ad for page, and h1,/h1 mark-up in code to let search engines know that this is a really important part of page. Then, do same with sub sections with h2,/h2 tags. I know that most designers understand these tags when it comes to styling a page but few get important role they play in search engine game.

Look, there is plenty more to learn about this subject and certain aspects will change from week to week but now that you have a better understanding of how search engines view your site you can go out there and make pages that get found.