I just finished speaking at N.A.R’s Tech Edge Conference. It was a very fast paced session. I’m sure I was flipping a ton of slides in my presentation. There’s just not going to be enough time to write down much for notes – so for those that attended my
5 critical things your web developer forgot to tell you
Presentation… This post is for you.
#1. Always Set a Featured Image. Chances are the “featured image’ will be used on your home page in the slider. It may be used in what is called an archive page. They’ll alos be used when your post is shared over on social media sites like Facebook, Pinterest, and so on. Read more about Featured Images. That plugin I mentioned? http://wordpress.org/plugins/auto-post-thumbnail/
#2. Google Authorship. This is something you’ll want to make sure is happening. Simply put, when your post shows up in a Google Search – it’s Google Authorship that includes that little picture of you. Do you know what that does? It dramatically increases the number of people who click to read that post!
That link I mentioned? It was the Structured Data Testing Tool
#3. You do have a robots.txt file. You can find it by going to your site and adding a /robots.txt to the end and clicking enter. It’s important because it directs the spiders and bots where to go, what to look for and what not to look at. Read more about robots.txt here. I once saw a robots.txt file for a site that actually disallowed Google! Never shun a search engine giant that you want to be found in.
#4. Do You Have a Sitemap? And more importantly if you do – do the search engines know where it is and how to find it? A sitemap is a start but the proper thing to do is tell the search engine where it is and when to crawl it. Without doing that, you are just hoping the come visit you. Read more about sitemaps here.
#5. Hosting could be costing you less than $5 a month. Really! Setting up a shared hosting plan is really easy. It just sounds daunting. Maybe that’s why developers will charge their clients $50 or more a month for simple shared hosting. Did you know you could do the same for less than $5 a month? I mentioned a few hosting companies to consider. I’ve been happy with both Bluehost and Green Geeks.
* Some developer is going to stand up and tell you there’s a difference in shared hosting and managed hosting. How dare I… and so on and so on. The truth is yes there is a difference and yes some sites really should pay the bucks for a managed hosting solution. I’ve also seen so called ‘managed hosting’ where the developer doesn’t do a single thing except collect the extra $50 a month. Chances are, if you are reading this, you don’t need ‘managed hosting’. Now that you have an extra $45 a month in your pocket – here’s my Amazon Wish List.
Did that help? Would you like a properly built website that works? One in which the developer tells you all about how to use these tools? You would? Here’s your button!
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He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, sometimes rides a road bike, has a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one, bought a cool orange one, rode a really slow one, and now,a perfect "BDR Weapon"). If that isn't enough, he makes cheese and sourdough bread, loves strong beer and good red wine, and poorly plays the Mandolin.
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