It’s not easy to find a good infographic designer (or is it info-graphic?) . So I thought I’d tell you about Matt McInerney at www.matt.cc The guy does nice work, you really should see some of this stuff, here is one example.

A favicon is a small image that shows next to your url on the top menu bar of browsers. It inspires brand recognition amongst your visitors when they land on your site, inspires trust and makes your website stand out when the visitor has many tabs open:

A favicon can also help your SEO efforts since the search engines consider your website more “valuable” when you have one.

How to create your favicon:

A favicon is simply a small image that you have to convert to .ico format. It is easy to do this through the many free online tools out there. One of our favorites that lets you crop, resize and save with the correct extension is http://www.genfavicon.com/

How to upload your favicon:

Once you have created your favicon, all you have to do is upload it to the root directory of your site (Browsers know to look for it there) and also to be on the safe side, add this code to the header of your html pages:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”/favicon.ico” />

Adding a favicon is an easy project that will add immediate value to your website in just 5 minutes!

Don't kick yourself later for not following this advice today

URL’s

Get a list of all the existing URL’s and save a copy. You need to make sure that all your old URL’s stay the same and any new URL’s follow the same structure for consistency.

Meta Data

Make sure to save all your meta title and description tags and that you transfer them over to the appropriate pages.

Content

Save the content, even if you don’t plan on re-using it, you never know.

No Follow Tags

Remember which links have no follow tags so you can implement them in the new site.  No follow tags allow you to keep more link juice (value) on your own site.

Remember which images that may have links have no follow tags so you can implement them in the new site. i.e. BBB.org, TrustE, PayPal etc…

Analytics

Get the analytics code from the current site and put it in ALL the new pages. Once the new site is up, make sure to verify that every single page has the original analytics code. Don’t forget to add it to the Thank You Page so you can track conversions later, using Google Goals in your analytics account.

Live Chat

If you have Live Chat get the code and make sure to transfer it properly.

Site Speed

Make sure that all the optimization done for faster site speed is also done to the new site:  Google has repeatedly commented that site speed can affect the reliability of your site and, by extension, your rankings. If the search robots cannot reach your website due to technical issues—especially frequent issues—it will flag the site as an unreliable resource. Load time also affects the experience of visitors. Pages that take more than 10 seconds to load potentially lose up to 50% of visitors.

To decrease the loading time of your web pages you must minimize the number of HTTP requests made by each page. We recommend the following:

• Compile all CSS into 1 stylesheet
• Compile all Javascript into 1 JS file.
• Prevent Javascript from running before the HTML is loaded.
• Resize images to the max require dimensions so that no browser side rendering is required and image sizes are reduced.
• Fix any crawl errors represented in Google Webmaster Tools

Your website will not appear any differently once these changes are made; however, the load times will be affected positively.

301 Redirects for Duplicate URL issues

Make sure that ALL 301 redirects stay in place.  If you have mutiple instances of the same content on your site on different URL’s like the ones below, it can hurt your rankings. Make all the URL’s point to 1 with a 301 URL redirect.

For example:

www.yourdomain.com

yourdomain.com

yourdomain.com/index

www.yourdomain.com/index

should all point to one URL like www.yourdomain.com

Meta Robots

We recommend adding the following meta tag to each page of your website that relates to the SEO campaign. This meta tag instructs search engines to index the page and follow the links contained within.

The following meta robots tag should be used:
<meta name=“robots” content=“index, follow” />

Image Alt Tags

Remember to transfer over all Image Alt Tags. Search engines use these alt tags to rank your photos which can drive lots of traffic.

Favicon

If you have a favicon transfer it (the little image to the left of the URL bar with your Logo or  white square if you don’t have one made yet.