Fantastic video from Website Grader… If this doesn’t have you motivated to start attending our weekly marketing workshops in Dallas, TX… (small plug) I hope it at least get’s you interested in CUTTING THE FAT OUT OF YOUR ADVERTISING BUDGETS IN 2010!  The largest companies in the world and are children are trying to teach us something… Imagine your 10 year old 10 years from now deciding to compete with you in your business….

Thanks for visiting… now…What’s the difference?

You are excited about your database with an astounding 5000 people in it…

They (our children) are going to walk up with their arms heavy and wallets fat… with 5000 people in their favorites on a device that is smaller than your wedding ring… The rest of their contacts (their future market place) will be safely hidden away in the larger devise (half the size of your smallest jump drive)…. How easy it will be for them to reach 1 Million potential buyers… while you worked the last 10 years growing your database to 25,000.

IS 10 YEARS REALLY THAT LONG FROM NOW… HOW MUCH HAVE YOU GROWN OVER THE LAST 10 YEARS?  WILL YOU BE ABLE TO COMPETE WITH YOUR CHILDREN… or WITH MINE??

Compliments International is a Dallas, TX and Seattle, WA based Web Design, SEO, Social Media and full service Marketing Firm.

Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

What does the grade mean:

Under 59 – START OVER, you cannot improve this site… most likely it is a template or was built in containers.  Cannot be read by search engines. This is often the result of working with a web “designer” vs. a “developer”, a company that specializes in making websites for 1 industry (like doctors – it is built with fancy reports that woo customers, vs. effective development), or template WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editors. Pretty.. but provides no / little real value.

60 –  70 – Should be the results of a website that was recently launched on a well built platform.  If, you invest time, money and/or resources into continued development, seo and marketing, you will start to see it climb in the first 90-120 days of being online.

71 – 80 – Should be a 6 month goal for improvement.

81 – 90 – Well designed, SEO’d site.  Can be achieved with a good team within 6 months online.  Don’t be fooled by a website that grades high, but it is primarily because it has been online for 15 years. Check the other key factors.

90 – 100 - You are now in a good position online.  Each point, once you get in the 90’s is more difficult to attain.  Keep working at it, it’s worth the investment. You can now typically sell advertising on your website with the results to warrant it, if all other key performance indicators are in line (traffic rank, page rank, indexed pages, inbound links, time on site, page views, etc.)

“Website Design Companies are popping up everywhere… it is great that the open sources developers of the world (real coders) have designed multiple content management platforms that just about anyone can throw up and make a website, however, it’s important to remember… the coders are key, designers are users of their systems.  We don’t recommend working with anyone but a qualified and experienced programmer, developer or coder (not just HTML and CSS).  This will ensure you are not pigeon holed into a template, that you have a scalable system that can grow with your business and your team of experts can actually read, change, modify or create new code. You should only have to purchase a website ONCE…ever… from there you should be able to contact your development team and they can help you grow, change and evolve over time.“

GRADE YOUR CURRENT WEBSITE AND DETERMINE WHAT YOUR CURRENT RESULTS ARE:

CLICK HERE TO EVALUATE YOUR PERFORMANCE ONLINE