The 7 Biggest Mistakes People Make With A Website by Matt Bacak and James Sapp

Matt:
Today, you’re gonna discover the 7 biggest mistakes people make with a website. I’m sitting here with James Sack. This is Matt Bacak, the powerful promoter. If you don’t know Jim’s..James Sack, then you… don’t know what you’re missing. For a while now…. How long has it been?

James:
Since 1995, Matt. I’ve been …uh…very successful in the area of Internet marketing. Especially in the area of Search Engine promotions. And I’ve learned… the biggest thing, though, is that I’ve learned all aspects. I’ve done everything from web development, to actually add copy, to headlines, uh,, you know, search engine optimization. So I’m familiar with every aspect of Internet Marketing. Plus I’ve sold my own product so I’m not just somebody who, er.. basically…did… worked for other people. But basically, it’s something that I’ve…sold my own products over the Internet, and had to bring in the traffic. Do all of this. So, I’ve done it all. I know how the.. how it’s done.

Matt:
Yeah, I think actually you made a quote to me a while back, and you said, “You know, if this stuff didn’t work, I wouldn’t put food on the table.”

James:
That’s where you’re probably right, Matt. I mean I had to make it work. I wasn’t just selling a service to somebody, where, you know, I was just trying to help them improve their stuff. No. This was actually stuff that HAD to work, or I just didn’t make money.

Matt:
Yeah. Well, let’s…let’s go ahead and get started. Can you go over a couple? I mean, you said you were gonna give 7 today… so let’s…Can you go over No.1?

James:
Sure. Um.. the biggest thing is…I see is … Um…people Um… they need to get independent opinions from a knowledgeable person. Too often they deal with somebody on the internet, and it could be having a website developed or whatever, but, the bottom line is.. er.., they wanna get knowledge and opinions, from someone who doesn’t have a biased agenda. Too often, a business on the Internet, or dealing with internet businesses, will just steer somebody towards a particular product. Which may be great for that business, but which isn’t necessarily in the best interests of the person who wants that website developed. For example, this company may specialize in website deign and development. And of course, they’ll do it for their ease of development. But they may leave out or don’t consider important attributes like how the page is going to be listed on a search engine. Uh.. for example, they’ll prepare the page using a bunch of Java scripts or web links within Java scripts. Well, search engines don’t index Java scripts or links within Java scripts. So it may look good, but it wouldn’t be very search engine friendly.

Matt:
Well, you know what it sounds like to me? Kind of, coming from a different background, but it really sounds like… you know.. in the financial field, you think about a lot of…and I just want to give a .. paint the picture a little differently for you too.. as the way he’s saying. But even in the financial field, you’ll see people, let’s say you know, they’re with a firm, they’re selling the products “FIRM”. You know, that’s what they’re pushing. They are pushing that product. And what you’re saying is that you come from a different perspective, and you want them to come from a different perspective, where it’s not like… where you’re open minded in a way?

James:
Yes. Um. In other words, yeah you’re right. A particular financial company may steer somebody towards a potential financial product, because they maybe make more commission on that product. It may not be in the best interests of that person. Same thing is true with a lot of Internet marketing companies.

Matt:
See, That’s a great distinction right there. I mean.. really… for everybody listening right now, that’s something that’s very true. And make sure you know that too. There’s other alternatives… other motives behind those people getting you those products.

James:
I see it all the time, Matt. They… they wanna steer you in one direction, which is, you know, the way they make their money. And just have a little bit of savvy, and kind of, you know, ask around, and get somebody that’s basically kind of independent and doesn’t steer you in one particular way.

Um.. The other aspect that I see them do a lot is they put too many images on the page. It looks good, but the search engine can’t index… they build your reputation upon the text on that page. And if the text is within images, then they can’t read that text. So consequently they’re gonna rank you. An easy way to test for that is, within your Internet browser, you can click on the ‘Edit’ button. And then there is a… click on something called ‘Find’, and search on a particular keyword or whatever it is that you might suspect. And if it doesn’t bring up that keyword, then you know that that text is hidden within the image.

Matt:
Hmmm. So that’s No. 1, right?

James:
That’s No. 1. The other thing that I see, No. 2, and I see this very often, is somebody is starting a website and their whole website will almost just be their company name.

Matt:
Mm hmm.

James:
Okay, and keep in mind that, especially a new company that’s starting out. If nobody has ever heard of your company name…then… see…. the search engines… they base everything upon what is in … within the title for that particular web page. Well and if it’s just the title of your company, well, unless somebody knows that, that’s like putting your name. John Smith. Well, you know, unless they search on John Smith you’re not gonna churn up any search engines. So basically, you need to put the relevancy of what business you’re in. If you’re in plumbing, you might put “plumbing supplies”, “water heaters”… so forth in your title page because that is what the search engine is going to bring up. But don’t just get caught up in putting your company name as your whole title there.

Matt:
Mmm hmmm.

James:
Because it’s not gonna be found in search engines search.

Matt:
Mmm Hmm. Wow.

James:
Uh… No. 3…. Uh…People don’t wisely choose their keywords or mark it. Once again, planning here is key. And what I suggest you do here is, do some sample searches. For example, if you’re… here is where it’s always good if you can do some planning initially. If you’re gonna target certain keywords, well, just go into Google or AltaVista, or any of the search engines, and do a search using those keywords you plan on targeting. Well, if that search brings up… let me use an example, coz it’s just something that I’ve been working with lately…. Is a tax site. You know, if those tax words bring up the I.R.S. Govt. site, and the State of New York’s tax site, and State of Georgia tax site, and California State tax site, well, you might wanna rethink your keywords because you’re not gonna compete with somebody like the U.S Govt. You’re not gonna compete with the New York State Department taxation. If it comes up and Coca Cola is your No.1 on the search, well, you’re not gonna compete with Coke. You know. So, so that means you wanna go back and rethink some of the keywords you search on because you’re not gonna win if you are coming up against Goliath. Okay, so look around for a little bit of a different keyword niche here.

Matt:
Mmm Hmmm.

James:
No. 4. This is kind of a subset of No. 3…. That we just talked about. And this is lack of adequate planning. I.e. What is the purpose of your web page? This needs to be thought out. Is it to SELL somebody? Maybe the purpose is that they can buy right there. You sell them a product, and of course, from there, you can follow up. But maybe it’s also… maybe it’s just to gather information. Basically to collect leads. This is the time to make an important decision. How important it is for people to fins you in the search engines. Based upon the type of business you’re in, er…. It may not be as important as other businesses. To me, it’s always important to be found in search engines, but there are some exceptions. But all things being equal, it’s always best to be found in search engines.

Matt:
Yeah. You know, actually that’s…. a lot of people come up to me and they say, you know, “Matt I noticed that you…”, you know, they noticed my website. “ I noticed you have powerporter.com. And I have another one, The Ultimate Lifestyle Workshop. And they say, “Well Matt, why is it not important for you to…?” Kind of like….. you know that’s one of those specific things… I tell people that I have websites out there on a purpose. There is a purpose for each website. My powerporter.com website, I have, and the purpose for that is branding. Now, my, I have an Alternate Lifestyle Workshop. I have.. and that’s specifically for, Um, for a seminar. It’s date-time sensitive. So there is no reason for me right now to even go out and market it. So that’s why I tell people. It’s served it’s purpose and that’s the only thing I bought it for. Was that purpose, that single purpose right there. So is that kind of what you were getting at?
James: That’s kind of what I was getting at, Matt. And there’s other factors too, I mean, whether, you can sell nationally or just locally. If you’re a business that can’t do business in California – for example, then you’ve gotta turn that business down. You know. For example if you’re a plumber you can’t drive out from San Diego to fix some guy’s pipes. So you know, something like that would factor in also.

Matt:
Yeah – that’s a great…Actually thanks for adding that, because that really clarifies what you were about to say. How you just put that there.

James:
Uh… No.5. And this is very important. In that when people set up their website, they don’t… er… they need to set it up basically to collect the names of visitors coming to their site. Coz they wanna get these leads because, the guy doesn’t buy then, or they don’t buy then, they could always market to them after the fact. But the other thing people do here is they tend to wanna collect everybody’s names in one big box. And what I’m saying here is if your website deals with, let’s say, 5 basic… maybe one general interest… but there may be 5 subsets of that interest, okay. For example, an analogy I might use here would be let’s say, your site deals with football. Okay – the sport football. Well, part of your website might deal with professional football. Another part of the site might deal with college football. Other parts may be geared towards specific teams. Well, by collecting people’s names in such a way, that they… that they more fit in with their level of interest as shown at that point, whether their interest is in professional football, college football or whatever, then when you market to tem after the fact, within the subject headlines of your e-mails, you can put the subject line to more match professional football. Now they are more likely to read that than if it looks like something about college football, which they are not interested in. So this is a very good time to capture that information but also capture what their level of interest is. This can be done on a form, which they check and it goes into an Auto-responder, and so forth. But this is very key…. most people don’t think about. They just set up their website, and go merrily along. And maybe a year later they think of doing that and they go “Ah, why shouldn’t I have… didn’t I do that a year ago?”

Matt:
Right. So we’re at No.????

James:
No. 6.

Matt:
No.6??

James:
Uh.. Over targeting… and I see this all the time. People will over… especially just starting out, they wanna target the world. Okay. Well, Uh… you know, they have a small website and try to target every keyword remotely associated with their website. Well, this is bad from a couple of different fronts. One, this typically puts you up against some very strong competition. And this is suicide enough for a fledgling little new website. But second, it dilutes your entire keyword… er… website keyword message. A better solution is to look for less competitive niches. Uh, for example, and keep in mind to that somebody searching… here’s a good example. You could go out and search on cars. And if you put in the keyword ‘cars’ or ‘cars’ on Google, you’re gonna bring up, you know, a million different web page listings. Well, when you are wanting to buy a car, in your mind, you’re not just wanting a car. You may want a red Mustang Convertible, 2-door, and so forth. So if they just found you looking for ‘car’ the chances of them buying is not very great. Because they were looking…. They were thinking something very specific. But also by, being more of a neat little niche, keying towards a unique little niche, when they find you, one, they are a lot more likely to find you, because it’s a lot less competition, but two, they are in a buying mode. That’s what they are looking for. So they’re a lot, you know, more likely to buy from you than if they just found you in some general search.

So I would highly recommend somebody to, especially starting out to look for little niches. So that they can target specific keyword niches.

Matt:
Hmmm. That makes a lot of sense. “Get rich in your niche.”

James:
Yeah!

Matt:
You know.

James:
Good Slogan!

Matt:
Ha ha!

James:
Uh. And No.7. And this deals specifically with search engines and they do things to these websites that aren’t very search engine friendly. And here we’ll talk about a few of these things. Just common things that people do that… that aren’t very friendly to search engines. First, they use Frame pages, or they use Frame pages incorrectly. And my thinking is if you want good search engine positioning, if you can, just avoid Frame pages. Uh, if you are going to use them, and I won’t get into it, there’s way more things to get around some of the problems inherent within Frames.

Next, I see people do this so. They’ll list their website with a free web page provider. Uh.. Free web space provider. You know, the problem with this is, that most of these things, there are a number of different ones that have been around for many years. Geocities, and Tripods, and problem with those is typically everybody and their brother wants to put a page out there. And lot of times search engines only opt… will list a certain number of pages from a specific domain. If something in the domain is ‘Geocities’, well, you know a hundred thousand other people have a site there too. You know, and the other aspect of it too is from a professional standpoint, a search engine is not going to look at you as very serious if your websites just on free web space provided. One time, nine years ago, that wasn’t necessarily the case but nowadays it just doesn’t make any sense.

Next, your web pages has a low link popularity, and I won’t get into all the aspects of linking here but, what we’re really talking about here is, let’s look at this as an analogy to if you have a restaurant. A lot of people like you restaurant, they talk about it. Lot of word-of-mouth talk about your restaurant, that can be.. is essentially the same as link popularity. The search engines look at linking to your site as kind of an endorsement of your site. That’s why they factor it in and uh, the more sites that link to your specific site, it increases your link popularity. Of course, you gotta be careful here in that there are a lot of people just wanting to do these big link orgies, where you just… I link to you… you link to me…. And everybody disregards that the site is even worth having a link to.

Matt:
Mmm hmm.

James:
You know, there are a lot of trashy sites out there that I wouldn’t want somebody to be linking to me from.

Matt:
Ha ha.

James:
So just be careful there… Um…. people use too many images on their sites, and they don’t use enough text is next. Keep in mind that we already mentioned that search engines, basically rate you and they score your reputation based upon the text they see on your page, the text in your title and so forth. So basically if you’re using too many images and not enough text, this doesn’t help you establish you reputation in the specific area you want to be known.

Here’s a thing that I see a lot of companies out there almost trying to take advantage of people, and that is in submitting your website too often to search engines. There are some sites that’ll say – “Well, we’ll offer you a service for $19.95 or $29.95, or whatever, and we’ll submit your website to all these search engines every month or twice a month. Well, I’m here to tell you, one, you can submit your website too often, and in reality, you don’t need to do that. I mean, you know, Google, for example, the pages automatically re-spider. And one thing most people don’t know about Google is that if you’re not linked to from other site anyway, from within the Google database anyway, submitting your site to Google is not going to get you listed anywhere.

Matt:
Hmmm.

James:
I mean – they don’t typically. The best way to get listed in Google is to have the links already to you from another site, and they spider those sites. They’ll pick your site up from an index. You can submit to Google, but to submit every month, is just a waste of your time, stupid, and could even get you blacklisted, because they’re thinking you’re spamming, constantly submitting things to them.

The other thing, is that I see people overuse keywords on their website. They try to… this was a good tactic nine years ago. Now it doesn’t work anymore. So in other words, don’t try to fill your keyword made-a-tag. For example, every possible keyword even remotely associated with your site. For one thing, search engines like Google, doesn’t even index the keyword made-a-tag. They don’t use that. Although, it has been reported that if you have too many keywords then that made a keyword tag in Google may penalize you. So, don’t get carried away. The other aspect of that is too, if that keyword you’re using within the made a keyword tag isn’t listed in the text in the body of your website, it doesn’t mean anything anyway. You are not going to get a very good ranking for that anyway. Unless it’s just such an obscure word that you know, one-person uses, and there’s no other web page out there dealing with it.

Um, next is, this is something that most people aren’t even aware of. And this is important too, from Auto-Responder standpoints, so Matt can attest to this. Your web page doesn’t have a unique I.P. address. A lot of cheap web providers will just basically share an I.P. address of your site, with other sites. This doesn’t necessarily hurt you, but it can. The way that you can tell is that there is a way you can look up your I.P address. If you type that into the internet browser in the explorer and if it pulls up your website, then it means that you have a unique I.P address. If it pulls up just some generic service provider, then you know it’s not a unique I.P address. So, if at all possible, get a unique I.P address.

Here’s something that most people don’t use but, I just thought I would throw it in, and that is your web page is just redirecting it to another page. There is commands within that you can use that will just redirect that site to another site. Just be careful here, there’s some ways that you can do this that are better than others, but, if you can, just stay away from this. There may be cases where you basically developed a new site and you are wanting to move all your traffic to go to this new site. It makes sense to do, but don’t do it just as a matter of habit. Coz, if there’s search engines that may think you’re just spamming them.

Matt:
Hmmm.

James:
And last, the biggest thing here is dynamic web pages. The web pages are created dynamically. Basically, what we are talking about here is a lot of affiliate sites that basically give you one of these cookie-cutter websites; most of those are created dynamically. You may be marking for a particular company, for example, and they just give you a free website, because you’re marking from them. Typically, ASP sites, so they have… you typically notice them, because they use a lot of weird special characters like question marks and things as part of the address. So that’s kind of a dead give-away that it’s a dynamically generated site. Those generally do not score well within the search engines.

Matt:
Well, thanks James. You just went over the 7 Biggest Mistakes people make with a website, and err, wow, that was some great information! And I know you guys are gonna take these powerful strategies an powerful things that he just told you. And er, you know, it’s great stuff that you just went over, and uh, we’re gonna be able to go over more with this stuff. You got a lot more that’s going on with this stuff other than just, you know, giving away this free information. What else do you have going on that you can share with us??

James:
Well, basically, uh, we have a product that people can buy. It’s like a CD. And we go into more in depth into areas of, you know, what works within Google? What works within the searches? What are they looking for specifically? We can go into the.. it goes into the most common mistakes people make. Some additional mistakes they make with getting their sites listed on search engines. More details. Touching, too, how to properly go about choosing, kind of, targeted markets. Linking Strategies. Linking strategies is something that. Most people, they go about it the wrong way. Beyond just getting the link popularity and link relevancy. And there is also, er, link, er, just the forcefulness of the link. In other words, it’s like, go back to our restaurant analogy. Joe Blow says “I like you restaurant”, it accounts for something. But if some famous chef like Julia Childs says “oh you’ve just got to go to Matt’s restaurant. The food is just superb!” Now so if some famous chef speaks highly of your site, or in other words, in this case, a big site within the search engines speaks highly of your site, then that counts for a lot more than just some less popular sites. I mean, it can count for as much as 20, or 30, or 40 other sites linking to you.

And the other aspect of relevancy, and we’ll go into that too, because if the link is not relevant, it doesn’t count for much.

Matt:
Yeah. It sounds like really what you are going to do is go in depth a lot more and give some amazing and powerful strategies in order to make this happen. But not only that, there are things that you’re probably, you sound like you’re being, you’re gonna share, the things that you’ve actually created millions and millions of dollars for yourself with. And uh… this information sounds like its so valuable, and I know we’d all want to get it. I mean, I want to get a hold of it.

James:
Well. Yeah. I could save somebody a lot of time. I mean, this is stuff that I’ve gathered over, basically nine years. Just reading, research, testing… this is stuff that I’ve used. Stuff that has worked for me. Like Matt said, I’ve sold millions of dollars worth of vitamin products. And over that time….

Matt:
Did you guys hear that? He just said “Vitamin Products”. He’s not talking BIG stuff. He’s made millions and millions of dollars in the last couple of years, selling just vitamins, $25-26 vitamins. So, if you are selling big-ticket items, just imagine what you can be creating for yourself. So, I just wanted to interject there, because, huh, $25 things, you know, this works for everything, right?

James:
It basically will work for almost everything. There are certain, and that’s something we can go into, but, obviously, certain businesses are obviously better for the Internet than others. Like you know, if you’re selling plumbing, you gotta be a plumber to get out to the site and do it, then obviously you’re not gonna travel to Timbuktu to fix someone’s pipes. So there’s some businesses that work better on the Internet than others. But basically any business could take advantage of this and utilize it to their maximum advantage. It will save them a lot of time, effort, and expense to have to go and run all this on their own.

Matt:
We just hit the 25-minute timeframe – so we’re gonna have to end here. But do you have any closing remarks?
James: Um. Get the CD. I think it would be very valuable. It will save you a lot of time, and a lot of money, a lot of resources, er, lot of headaches. Lot of going down the wrong paths… and…

Matt:
Yeah. So there’s a right way to do it and the wrong way to do it and you know the right way?

James:
Yeah. There definitely is. I mean, like anything else, you can, you know, get ahead of the game. But there are no real shortcuts in terms of Internet Marketing, but there are ways to get… to maximize your time and get ahead of a lot of the people that are struggling.

Matt:
Well thank you. Well like he said, you guys can get a hold of the CD. And you guys. …start implementing the strategies that he can give you. There is gonna be some amazing and powerful stuff there. And um, we’re gonna sign off for now. Listen, you guys have a great day! And hope you enjoyed it.

Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips