You’ve got your site up, and everything looks to be going good. Your products are loaded in, and the test order has gone through green: the engines are running, we’re ready to drive off into the sunset.

And then a week goes by, and we have no sales.

Two weeks go by, no sales.

Three weeks, and we’re in a panic.

Four weeks… something is DEFINITELY wrong.

Going into Google Analytics, we see that our bounce rate is through the roof. Ninety percent of our visitors are turning tail and running away! Our products are good, our content is optimized? Why are people fleeing faster than you can say “Bubonic Plague”?

Proper optimization of a website and creation of content are both just the start. Part of building a professional site is creating a professional image for your site. If your site looks like that geeky kid Francis in your neighborhood built it in his spare time, you’re not going to keep a lot of attention. You’ll see those kind souls every now and again that will take a chance on a site that may not be the prettiest, or the cleanest, but by and large if people don’t see a professional-looking website, we’re not going to see any of their money in sales!

In our next articles, we’re going to go into two of the most common causes for a ballistic bounce rate: grammatical errors that would make our old English teacher cry, or a banner that looks to have been a crash course in the basics of MS paint. Stay tuned throughout the week, and let’s find a way to put these problems to bed as soon as possible, to start making that site as successful as possible!

There are a few tricks to learn when optimizing pages but, for the most part, it’s not terribly difficult once you pick a strategy and stick with it. There are a few different strategies and, to be honest, I don’t believe anyone but Google really “knows” which strategy for page optimization is going to produce the best results. My advice, do your research, and pick a strategy that you believe will work best for your company. If it doesn’t work, you can try another one.

When optimizing for a keyword or keyword phrase within an article, industry experts suggest optimizing the word anywhere from three to five percent. Which means that for every one hundred words in your article that keyword or phrase appears three to five times. However, no matter the importance of repeating your keywords or keyword phrases, I suggest writing useful content not simply content to rank your website.

I cannot stress the importance of a well-optimized title enough. When you search for any keyword or keyword phrase, you will find that the highest ranking results will have all or part of the keyword or keyword phrase in the title. If your keyword is not in your title, your ability to rank just went down automatically. I cannot stress enough the importance of creating a well-optimized title.

Some people will tell you that meta data doesn’t do anything for website optimization. I say, why not take the opportunity to optimize for your keywords or keyword phrases. Some people say that using optimization in keywords is overrated and that the search engines do not pay any attention to them anymore. Well, I would like to say that I think they do matter and I have noticed a difference between the two ideas as I have tried them both out for a while.

Long story short, get your keywords and keyword phrases out there; it’s very important. You can still write content that doesn’t include your keyword phrases but it will be less likely to be ranking the way you would like it to rank.