How to Evaluate a Website...

and Professional Web Site Designers

At Business Marketing Tactics we teach you how to evaluate a website and the professional web page designers in the market place today. Small business website development "specialists" are a dime a dozen these days so you must properly research the best web designer for small business.

Since you came to this page, chances are you are looking into small business website development to get a website designed for you. You also want to make sure that the professional web page designers you are looking at will do a good job.

But what is a good job? How do I know if I am getting a good deal? With all the web designers in the market advertising fast and cheap, how do I tell who will get me the best deal? And here is the number one question you need to ask....What are the search engines looking for to get me top rankings which in turn drives traffic to my new website?

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Tools To Evaluate Professional Web Page Designers

Before we show you how to evaluate a website and evaluate the professional web page designers in the worldwide market today, you must have the proper tools installed on your computer to be able to perform a detailed evaluation.

Below we have two quick and easy downloads that are completely safe and secure.

After you complete the two downloads, we have a website for you to bookmark so you can easily access another tool available to evaluate the performance of any web designer for small business.

Having the proper tools to evaluate any website and the professional web page designers will allow you to make an informed decision as to who to hire for your small business website development needs.

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Evaluation Tools

Before we show you by example on how to evaluate a website, you will first need to set up your computer with the right tools. The Mozilla Firefox web browser and the Alexa Traffic Rank tools are both very safe and secure downloads and they are both free. Internet Explorer does not support the Alexa Rank tools prompting the need to use the Mozilla Firefox browser. Even if Alexa was supported on IE, we recommend the Mozilla Firefox platform due to its superior performance when we teach students how to evaluate a website.


STEP ONE:
Mozilla Firefox - If you currently use the Mozilla Firefox browser, please skip this step and proceed to step #2. Mozilla Firefox is a preferred browser due to its compatibility with with web page creation tools and other protocols. The download is free and completely safe.

Download Mozilla Firefox Browser Now


STEP TWO:
Alexa Traffic Rank - Alexa ranks approximately 65 million worldwide websites. The lower the rank the better. Google is #1 and Yahoo is #2. Once you download this tool, you will see the rank of any website you land on. Remember, lower is better. The lower the rank the higher the traffic that website achieves. This too is a free and totally safe download.

Download Alexa Traffic Rank Tool Now

At Business Marketing Tactics we publish our Alexa rank on the left margin of every web page. What is our Alexa rank? Is it good? Read on to learn more!


STEP THREE:
Bookmark this website whois.domaintools.com. This website give you some keen insight as to the effectiveness of your prospective web designer and the websites listed in their portfolio. Performing a portfolio review of a prospective web designer is the BEST way to gage the effectiveness of their work!

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Alexa Example - How To Evaluate A Website

Lets get started!

Make sure you are using the Mozilla Firefox browser and open up this page. You should see a number at the lower right corner of your screen showing you the Alexa rank for the website business-marketing-tactics.com. The image below shows the Alexa ranking for business marketing tactics as of 3/2/2009.


So what is this ranking number telling you? The ranking of 1,315,044 simply means that of the 65 million websites or so tracked by Alexa, that business-marketing-tactics is almost in the top 2% of the ranked websites. This ranking does not tell you how much traffic the website is getting but this is a very important number to base a comparison to other websites.

Suppose you are looking to hire a web designer. By having the Alexa tool on your computer, you can now compare the Alexa rankings of one web designer against another. You may run across web designers that have very high Alexa rankings such as 10 million or even much higher. Then there are web designers such as Business Marketing Tactics with rankings under 1.5 million.

At this point what this is telling you is that a designer with lower numbered Alexa rank has most likely set up the website properly with what the search engines are looking for which ultimately drives traffic to the site. Having a designer that can properly set up a website to drive traffic to the website needs to be your primary objective!

To take Alexa to the next level, look at the Alexa rankings in the portfolio of your prospective web designer. This will tell you a story as to how effective a web designer is in setting up traffic generating websites. If you are finding sites in a portfolio that were developed more than a year ago and they have Alexa rankings at 15 million and higher or with "no rank" at all, it is time to look for a different web designer.

Learn More About Alexa

Set Up A Website Properly

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How To Evaluate A Website with whois.domaintools.com

We have now learned how to evaluate a website with Alexa. It is now time to take the evaluation a step further so we can put all the pieces together. With whois.domaintools we will now find out some additional critical information on how to evaluate a website.

The Title Relevancy, Meta Description, SEO Score, Alexa trend and the Registry Data looking at the date the site was created are critical data you need to look at before making the decision on hiring a web designer.

Looking at the prospective designers portfolio and looking at this criteria will be very useful in helping you make that ultimate decision.

Below is an example of this website as listed on whois.domaintools.com as of 3/2/2009.

We will discuss the 5 attributes of whois as listed above. When you go to the whois.domaintools.com website and put in a domain name of any website you want more information about, you will find much more than what we discuss here. We only discuss the most important information needed when we discuss how to evaluate a website.

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Example #1

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Title Relevancy
Title Relevancy is a function of the Website Title and the Meta Description. In the Meta Description the title of the website must be written as listed in the Website Title. This may seem simple but it is often overlooked. Having less than 100% as the Title Relevancy shows how well a web designer pays attention to detail and less than 100% will negatively affect the SEO Score.

Description
When you perform a Google search, you will see the search words bolded in blue for each listing. Below is the description of what is on that site and those keywords you searched for are also in bold. The Meta Description is generally the first few sentences of what is on the home page. The Meta Description should contain all of the keywords for that page listed in the first few sentences.

Learn More On Meta Tags And Descriptions

Learn More About Good Keywords


SEO Score
The SEO Score is a function of the Title Relevancy, Meta Description, keywords, the time the website has been on the net and the overall set up of the behind the scenes functions of creating a website. You need to seriously consider a web designer that has as part of their own website an SEO Score below 95%. As stated previously, check on the portfolio of your prospective designer and see what the SEO Scores are for the those sites....THAT will tell a story!

Learn About Search Engine Optimization

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Example #2

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Alexa Trend
Do not get too caught up in this ranking as this is not the most current Alexa rank. Alexa rankings for all websites fluctuate all the time. Seeing a change up or down is normal. However, if you see a site where the ranking went up over 1 million rankings in the last 90 days, there is something wrong with that site.

Most likely the website employed some pay per click traffic generating technique that they could no longer afford. At Business Marketing Tactics we do not advocate using any pay for traffic system. There are too many other ways to drive organic search engine friendly traffic to your website.

Registry Data
The date the website was created is the most important feature in this section. A website with a high numbered Alexa rank that is only a few months old is not a problem. A designers home site that is very new on the internet would prompt the question of why are they so new. Looking at the portfolio of this designer will be critical in making that all important purchase decision.

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Summary - How To Evaluate A Website

Though ultimately we hope that once you learn how to evaluate a website you will choose us as your partner, our goal is to help all small businesses learn how websites function in order to be more profitable. Small businesses are the very foundation of America, and the internet is the absolute best tool to help them succeed. But so few are doing it right.

We hope that the information you have learned here today will help you stand apart from your competition and succeed as well. Teaching you how to evaluate a website will only help the web design community get better and ultimately help the consumer purchase a website that works.

For those who would like to work with us, we have two options for web design services. Our first option is an all-inclusive small business website development package where we prepare a website for you, based on your needs, for a realistic and fair price.

The second option guides you into creating a website for your business on your own, with a fantastic resource of training and support. Contact us today if you have any questions or if you are ready to have a website that works!

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