Some Qualities to Look For:

cPanel: This is a control panel system that you (or your designer) will use to setup email, control usernames and ftp access. The technical side of things is made MUCH easier with this. I won’t work on a site without it.

Fantastico or Simple Scripts: These are services that allow simple one-click access to many of the most popular web site scripts out there, like WordPress, mailing lists, e-commerce plugins, etc. Most quality hosting services offer this.

Unlimited (or essentially unlimited) Everything: All of the services I will recommend will come with Unlimited Storage Space & Bandwidth. They either have unlimited or HUGE amounts of the following: domains, sub-domains, email addresses, MySQL Databases. Some limit you to something like 5000 email addresses, but what would most sites ever need with 5000 email addresses? It is just good to know that you can use as many as you want.

Ease of Use: No real way to tell this until you sign up and sign in. I have learned the hard way that it makes a BIG difference on the time it takes to accomplish basic tasks. GoDaddy? Horrible. Yahoo? Really bad. See more abut that below…

Some Hosting Services To Avoid:

Siteground.com: I had a client who hosted their site there and it was down so often that we had to sign up for a new account and throw away the money they had paid for the year of hosting because it just wasn’t worth having the site there any more

GoDaddy.com: A very popular and inexpensive solution, especially for domain name purchasing, but their site is SO user-unfriendly that it takes FOREVER to find and change anything. I also has a few major problems with WordPress sites so if you are looking to use WordPress at any point, avoid GoDaddy.

Yahoo.com: One of the bigger names in the internet world and they offer a pretty cheap solution that allows you to host some basic sites. It might be fine for doing your first site yourself, but to install and work on a site on a professional level, your web designer needs easy access to things that they just don’t make available or make very difficult to use.

If you host your site at GoDaddy, Siteground, or Yahoo and hire me to work on it, you will most likely end up paying me MORE than a year of hosting at some other places just to mess around with the problems of these sites. While it would seem like a waste to pay for another hosting service before your time runs out, it ends up being better to just make the switch and allow your web designer to work faster & easier (and in the end, allow them to charge you less!).

The Hosting Service I Recommend:

I used to recommend a few different hosting services, but now there is only one – Hostmonster.com

I have used Hostmonster for a couple years now and love it. They offer one-click installation of WordPress (as well as a bunch of other great scripts, like mailing list managers, e-commerce, forums, and more). Their customer service is amazing, with phone and chat support that always answers my questions.

For any potential clients – signing up with Hostmonster through this link is enough to cover the time it takes me to set-up your hosting account. Using this affiliate link allows me to keep the cost to you as low as possible.

CLICK HERE TO CHECK OUT HOSTMONSTER.COM.

There are three sections to the site: the ‘Website Grader’, the ‘Twitter Grader’ and the ‘Press-Release Grader’. I have only used the website and Twitter sections, but would like to focus on how to use the Website Grader and walk you through the results for my site.

First thing is to go to the site: website.grader.com

Once you are there, you will see a form to input your site.

Make sure to uncheck the email box before submitting unless you want to end up on their mailing list. They actually offer a lot of great info, so it might be a good idea. I subscribe to their newsletter and RSS feed myself.

By the way, you will notice that you can tyoe in any site so type in mine if you want to see my whole printout. OR – and this is where the site gets really powerful, it allows you type in competitors’ sites and see how you differ. Give it a shot!

Next, we wait while their fancy animation tells us that our site is being analyzed. It might take a few minutes, so you can go answer an email or grab a fresh cup of coffee and come back.

When it is done you will find a whole page of information that rips apart every aspect of your site and grades it. It starts with the overall grade:

Below that, there is a lot of stuff. I just want to point out a few key areas of interest.

The first section is called the ON PAGE SEO and includes info about the metadata, number of images, number of headings and the structure of the site. It will spell out what is good and bad about each area of interest. For example, it has the following to say about my keywords:

As you can see, it is warning me that I have one too many keywords. I guess I will have to choose one or two to take out.

One element that I never thought of is the age of the domain and the amount of time until it expires. The grader was able to find that my domain expires in less than a year. The search engines actually factor this in when they rank the relevance of a site, assuming that a new site that will expire soon is not serious, whereas a site that has been around and WILL be around is more important. So, if you can buy up that domain name for a number of years at once.

It is telling me that my Google Page Rank is Zero, which is not surprising since this is my newly lauched personal site to showcase my web design and video work, which I get mainly by word of mouth. Google Page Ranks go from 0-10 and you can find out more about how that works here.

The printout goes on to detail whether or not your site is listed in four major search and listing sites: DMOZ Directory, ZoomInfo, DIGG, Del.icio.us. If you haven’t already, go make sure your site has been submitted. You may need to sign up for an account, but most will let you submit a URL. They also mention Yahoo Directory, but I left it out since that costs $299 to submit to. Not worth it for me.

Overall, I think grader.com offers one of the best starting points for improving the visibility of your sites. But strictly trying to enhance your SEO is not really enough anymore. Even this site points out blog listing sites and bookmarking sites, which are sometimes more important, depending on your site.

There are also an increasing number of ways to use social media and word of mouth to get people to your site. For an example of one of the best methods out there right now, I only have to point to this very post. I came across an interesting post on PIF. I commented. I recieved an email asking me to write a guest blog post. Now I have the chance to link back to my site and say, ‘For more information you can check out my post on Why SEO is Not Enough.’

Hopefully this post pointed out a new resource that will help you improve your site and your knowledge about SEO and web traffic. Please explore the grader.com site, they have lots of free articles and downloads (and of course paid services) that will help you along the way to improving the visiblity of your site.