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Hey you. Yes… you! I just finished visiting your website and I’ve got to say it was one of the most painful experiences I’ve gone through in quite some time.

Even for an expert in all things, I had a hard time navigating it.  It’s painfully difficult.

I was searching for some information there. It was nearly impossible and every minute that I wasted made it more and more painful to continue.  Finally I broke.

“Excuse me.  I’ll be right back.”  I pushed my chair away from my desk and stepped over toward the door.

Immediately I began bashing my head into the door frame until my face was bruised, bloody and swollen.  After several minutes of mercilessly smashing my face into the door, I finally reached the point where the pain in my face was more than the pain of navigating your site.  I returned to the desk and tried to continue my quest.

Visiting some sites is simply more painful than getting a root canal with a plastic spoon.

Is your site like that? Seriously, is it?

If you’re wondering why nobody visits your site then maybe it’s because it’s so painful for people to visit it that they would rather play leap frog with a unicorn.  The male readers understand what I’m talking about on that last one.

Don’t get your feelings hurt thinking about this.  We all have to learn and grow.  That’s part of life.  In fact, that’s why Site Sketch 101 exists… to help you transform your site into something beautiful.

So study, work hard, and get better.

The 15 Deadliest Web Traffic Killers in 2011

Here’s a few things I noticed at your site that really made my eyes bleed.

1. You don’t post enough: One of the fastest ways to get even your regulars to start abandoning you and your site is to simply stop posting.
2. Your titles bore us to tears: All I can say on this one is to read this article, 15 Tips to Awesome, Eye-Jerking Post Titles.
3. You punch people in the face with ads: We all understand the desire to profit from your online ventures but there’s a tasteful way to make it happen.
4. Your site is ugly: First impressions are lasting impressions and your lasting impression is disgust.
5. You ignore your readers: If folks leave you a comment, it’s always a great idea to try to respond as much as you are able.
6. You write like a 2nd grader: Spend some time each day learning how to improve your mastery of the English language.
7. You’re all over the place: It’s okay to mix in a little variety, but a new design every week and random content will chase people away.
8. You write the same thing everyone else writes: If people can get the same information somewhere else, why should they visit your site?
9. Your content doesn’t live up to the headlines: You write a headline that offer 15 tips and then you only provide 9.

This is just a quick list.  But hopefully you get the point.  If you’re here at Site Sketch 101, then I hope that it’s to find out how to fix up your website or blog. I’ve laid out in cold, hardcore, brutal honesty the way to take your site to the next level.

In the theme of my blog posts the week of November 15th, I have invited a web designer as my Guest Blog Post. Scott Stadler is my “go to” guy for my web site and any questions I have when setting up Social Media for my clients.

written by Scott Stadler, web designer

When we think of blogs, many of us automatically envision a Blogger blog, or perhaps even a WordPress.com blog.  In other words, we think first of the kind of blog that is provided by a third party and is entirely separate from our own website.  It’s probably because this is how blogging started off (almost a decade ago, believe it or not).

Do you use Blogger for your blog?  TypePad?

The thing is, using these systems is just fine.  With active promotion, online and off, they work just like anything else when it comes to giving you a place to connect with your readers about topics you’re both mutually interested in.  In this case, real estate is the name of the game.

In fact, a stand-alone blog like this might even accomplish some hefty goals when it comes to attracting new traffic through organic SEO and really building up a solid trust-factor with your base of blog followers.  After all, there’s a reason blogging has become and still is so incredibly popular…it just works!

Linking Or Framing Blogs To Your Website:  A Good Start, But…

Well, the next point here is that what works well as a third-party service pointing to your site (i.e. these types of off-site blogging services)…they’ll work even better when integrated into your actual website with more of a cohesive, holistic approach.

This requires more than using a link from the third party, off-site blog to your website.  The bottom line here is that most of your blog’s visitors will never find or use that link from the blog to your actual website.  The path of least resistance leads visitors well away from finding one small link—it’s kind of like finding a needle in a haystack (and then using it to actually sew something).

But everybody already knows this…right?  Old news.

Enter the next popular trend:  Framing your third-party blog into your website.  This means having a dedicated page on your website set up to pull a copy of your off-site blog onto your website itself.  It seems to be a popular trend with real estate oriented websites—and many of the top real estate website providers rely on this tactic.

And sure, it works to some degree…at least it helps your website visitors find and read your blog.  But naturally, there’s a catch.  The search engines that crawl your site only see a snippet of code for that framed blog page—because it’s not actually a part of your site, but rather is just a copy pulled from your third party blog service, the search engines treat it as such.

They don’t associate any of the information within those blog posts you’ve worked so hard on as a part of your site.  When it comes to being a part of your website, your third-party blog might be visible to humans, but it’s invisible to the search engines.  With search being a very real portion of a good traffic generation strategy, this just won’t do.

Your Blog Should Be An Actual Part Of Your Website…

Your blog should be built into your website from the very beginning as a wholly integrated solution…not just as an add-on or framed-in third party service.

The benefits of making your blog a real part of your website are countless.

First and foremost, each and every new blog post you create will be seen by the search engines as a new page on your website.  There’s a little bit more to the story when it comes to optimizing and maximizing this benefit, but the overall concept here is that the more pages you have out there in the search engine’s index, the more visible you’ll be to search visitors.

Search engines love sites that have a regularly updated blog full of fresh new content all the time.  They’ll see your new posts as a legitimate part of your site and give credit to the rest of your website pages as well.  It’s almost like a snowball effect; the more great quality pages and blog posts you have under your website’s “umbrella,” the better each one of these individual pages will do when it comes to being recognized.

In Conclusion…

For what it’s worth, it’s really not any more difficult to integrate a blog correctly into a website from the very beginning.  It’s just a matter of doing it right the first time instead of going back and adding a third-party blog and trying to match it up to your site as an afterthought.  The benefits of building your site around your blog as one holistic solution far outweigh the tactic of using an outside blog for your posts.

Scott Stadler designed my website, ww.BildaBetterBusiness.com. Having worked with many designers for my clients and many real estate web companies, I found working with Scott extremely easy. I told him what I wanted and he designed it – and the first draft was exactly what I wanted! Scott also helped me use Organic Search Engine Optimization and creating a working website that I am proud to have clients come to. To find out a little more about Scott, visit his website, www.visule.com. When you want a great website which will work for you, contact Scott - Phone: 217.617.4610 or Email: scottstadler@gmail.com.

Scott says, “Programmers program. Writers write. Designers design. If you build a website focused on any single one of these different schools of thought, it will likely perform great in that specific area. However, for a website that truly works, it’s important to put them all together.

A Repost

WordPress and Real Estate are a match made in tech marketing heaven if you ask me. WordPress’s flexibility, seo elements, and relative ease of use, coupled with an unbelievable community of users (and corresponding online documentation) have allowed it to become the world’s most popular content management system… And real estate agents in droves are using wordpress every day as the backbone for their entire online web marketing efforts.