SEO High Points - Part One

Good day folks! It's time to start talking about marketing your website. Let's assume you've gotten a site up or have had one up and are ready to start the long process of pointing traffic to it.

Yes, I said long process. If you are anything like me, I am ready to start seeing those traffic numbers rise the minute I hit the "post" button. Unfortunately it doesn't usually happen that way. The process of getting the word out that your here and open for business isn't as simple as putting up an open sign. You have to really work to get that traffic looking at your site. Trust me, as familiar as I am with this process, I am still working on it for this blog.

But everyday I do something else to put it on the map, so to speak. Whether it's submitting it to a search engine or a reputable directory or finding a new inbound link or simply telling someone I am talking to about this very topic, "Hey, check out my blog." Whatever it takes, persistence should be the key.

Most of us don't have all day to sit in front of the computer and find new ways to point traffic to us. But if you commit at least a little time each day, it will pay off.

So, to start, the first thing I would think you would want to be paying attention to is your SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Now there are articles after articles written daily on the best SEO practices out there. I am not about to re-write the book on SEO. But it occurs to me on a regular basis that a lot of small business owners aren't even familiar with the basics. So that's what I am going to touch on in this post. The basics. The high points.

Let's start with the Meta Tags.

META TAGS

As previously mentioned in an earlier blog, the meta tags are lines of "code" within your HTML that tell the search engines who you are and what your about. Two of these tags are called your "Keywords" and your "Description." These are important to have in place for your website.

KEYWORDS

If the spiders from the search engines come crawling your site and you don't have any associated keywords then they will have a harder time establishing your relevancy and a harder time indexing your site. The keywords directly relate to what other people type in to a search engine you. That is to say, if you are in bathtub sales then you would want to make sure that you are capturing keywords that are directly related to how people search for bathtubs online. So words like bathtub (obviously), bathroom remodeling - might be good, tub - in case someone doesn't use the term bathtub, bath tub - as two words in case someone spells it that way. Get the idea? Simply putting your company name and address as keywords is assuming that people are going online to find YOU specifically. It's good to have your name in there in case they've seen another form of advertising for you and are actually searching for you but you also what to throw your hat in the ring with those folks who don't know who you are and are online to do the research about which company they want to use.

There are resources to help you determine the best keywords. Google\'s Keyword Tool is a great example of a resource to help you determine new keywords in your related industry.

Once you have the company name and related keywords to your industry, you do not want to forget including the locations that you will service. In other words, if you are a plumber and you only go to certain cities in your area, you would want to list ALL of those areas as keywords. That's what makes you different than every other plumber on the Internet. Also include the states your service. Where I live we are on the border of Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina. So if your company is pulling customers from all of those areas, you would want to include those as keywords as well as their abbreviations. Don't forget, you are looking at the keywords of your site through the eyes of your potential customer. Some people will type out the whole name of the state, others will simply use the abbreviation. So you want to include both in your keywords. You may even go as far as putting in zip codes. Some people will search using those too.

Things you would want to avoid using as keywords are your phone number (I means who's going to type in your phone number into a Google search? But I want to mention it because a local directory service was offering profile pages with keywords and they included those in the keywords) and your physical address (it's just simply unnecessary). Also you have to consider flooded keywords. A good example of this are Real Estate agents. The word "Real Estate" is a completely flooded keyword. Same with "Insurance." If you happen to be in one of those categories, then you would want to try and find niche words also to make you unique and stand out. Including the cities you cover will help but you might also consider words like "ranch style house" or something. Don't think that people won't search that term and coupled with the city your in and you may have no problem appearing favorably in a search result.

DESCRIPTION

This will be short but sweet. I touched on it in my last post. The description is what sums up who you are and what you do. It's also what the people will read below the link to your website in a search engine result.

If you don't have one, the search engines will simply use part of what's on your first page.

In my case, I got a bit anxious and submitted my blog before I had my meta tags in place thinking it was going to take longer than it did for a spider to crawl it. So now, until the spiders crawl it again, it shows the beginning of my introduction blog. Which actually tells very little about what all of my blogs are about. Lesson learned.

You can still have good search engine results without the description meta tag, but you really want it so that you can control what the people first see when they see you in a search engine.
It's what's going describe how your better or different than your competition.

OK, so when I first started writing this post today I thought I was going to touch on all of the high points of beginner's SEO. But the "experts" say that the attention span of the average Internet user is pretty short. Do you guys agree? Well, assuming that everyone else is right, then I will continue the second half of this conversation in my next post. The topic then will be inbound links. A necessary evil to great search engine ranking. I say evil because it takes time, effort, creativity and persistence to develop good inbound links.

So in the meantime, I will leave you with some links to other very useful articles about the subject. If you have time to read them, then I highly recommend that you do so.

SEO For Local Markets

Local Search Engine Optimization - Revisited

Keyword and Meta Description Tags

8 Useful SEO Techniques That Every Webmaster Should Know