I was contacted by a business that wanted to leave their current situation (a SEO  / hosting / website management / web design environment) quickly and cleanly. That should be simple, right? The trick was, he didn’t want his current consultant to know until it was complete.

There is an entire industry that does nothing except buy and resell expired domain names, and most of their inventory comes from grabbing the expired domain names of businesses just like yours.

Knowing these ten items below could save you hours of time & aggravation, and save your businesses hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

Google was the first to announce broad support for XML sitemaps, and that has made it easier to submit your site to Google. Their webmaster tools may then be used to identify problems on your site as well.

If you are a web hosting customer of ours, this is an urgent wake up call. By the end of 2006, your site may no longer function properly unless you act now. Microsoft has already discontinued Unix server support for Front Page, and Windows hosting support is likely not far behind.

If you’re used to using http://validator.w3.org/ to try to validate your pages, then you’re going to absolutely FLIP if you haven’t seen this before - http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

Perhaps this tool has been around forever, and people who are “in the know” will wonder where I’ve been hiding that I missed it, but I don’t care. It’s SO useful, and just saved me SO much time, that I had to tell someone about it.

If Google is showing a description for your search listing that you don’t like, then…

1. You have not got a` properly worded meta description tag. If that’s the case, then you should read this - http://www.pdxtc.com/seo101

2. Lately, Google may be showing the DMOZ directory description, instead of the keyword rich description tag you”ve painfully written for each page.

You have to look at your website from a customer standpoint, and make every page have the same identical buttons, all located in the same place etc. That’s important, because people will decide in less than 1/4 of a second if they’ll stay on your site or not.

In your Internet Explorer web browser, do some websites appear to be “broken”?

Do Flash menus and some other web page items frequently have a dotted line around them?

When you put your mouse over them, do you see a small yellow box proclaiming that you should “click to activate and use this control”?

A domain name in your own name costs just $17.50 per year, and web hosting starts at $9.99 a month with PDXTC. Why would you pay hundreds of dollars a year for service elsewhere?

I suppose this is just a commercial, but every single day I see businesses that have been paying a fortune years to the same person or web hosting company, just because that’s where they began.

Is it possible to get a decent website for free? Well, yes it actually is, if you’re willing to spend a little time using some great free software. How little time? A clever 9 year old can have something online for the world to see in as little as 15 minutes.

I’ve noticed that more and more companies are using blogs as their website, as opposed to adding a blog TOO their website. This gives the owners total control over what’s said, and the freedom to update whenever they want, from any computer, with no web designer required.

I have some blog design info here, and below is an entire site devoted to business blog consulting.

Yahoo search marketing has a great article here that explains what to look for and think about when you’re hiring a web designer. Give it a read before you hire a web designer for your next project…