Tech Tuesdays - How's Your Website?

About a year ago I built my current website. It took me a while to get it looking the way I wanted it to look, but I was pretty happy with it when I was done. A few months ago I tweaked it a bit by adding some new pages, moving the menus around and updating my galleries, but it was still pretty much the same site. I thought I had it dialed in. Imagine my surprise when I found out I was missing one of the most basic pieces of content for any website!

I'm not sure how I stumbled across it, but I was trying to change some obscure setting when I noticed that I had no meta keywords. Meta keywords are the words you place in your HTML code that help search engines find and rank your website. For example, I would use words such as "Denver, portrait, photographer" so that if someone Googled "Denver portrait photographer" Google would know that's what I do. Although they have been abused in the past and there is currently debate on whether they're even currently considered by search engines for ranking a website, it doesn't hurt anything to have them in place.

This got me thinking about what else I have let slip or overlooked with my website? Is it as optimized as I thought it was? How much business have I lost by not maintaining my site? Is this why I don't show up in the #1 position on Google?! Yeah, about that #1 Google ranking, I'm going to need a little bit more than a few keywords to get there, but the point is still valid. What other little things can I do to that will add up to make a big difference? I don't know what I still need to do, so I'd better start digging around. Next stop... world domination!