Posted by admin on July 28, 2010 under Bing, Google, Search Engines, Web Design, Yahoo! | 
As of this writing there are 3 major search engine players and they are Google, Yahoo! and Bing (previously called Live and before that MSN). I would say “in no specific order”, but that would be untrue. The order I gave them to you is the order that people use them. When you build a website, you have to let the search engines actually know about it and that process is called indexing. Think of a library. Your website is a book. The library is the internet. The librarian is the search engine spider and the library computer the librarian uses is the index (just like it is in real life).
If you were to write a great book (your website) and put it into the library (the internet), you wouldn’t just simply walk in and put it onto the library shelves. Nobody would find it unless it’s in the computer system. The only way that people could find you is if the librarian (the search engine spider) looks at the book to find out what it’s about and then puts it into the system (the index) so that people could find it. Then people could come into the library, put in what they’re looking for, find your book and check it out. And if more people check it out, the librarian makes note of that and will steer people to that book more often since she’s seeing that more people like it. That’s also why it’s important that your book is clear on what it’s about so that it can be properly indexed. In short, you have to make sure that the librarian knows your book exists. Simply building a website that is out on the internet means nothing. Ok. Enough of that analogy.
The way you do that is to submit the website to the search engines either by hand, using a submission service, or letting them find you via a link posted on another site that is already indexed like someone’s blog, link page, etc.. It’s been debated as to which is best and it truth, it really doesn’t matter although having the spiders find it on their own is supposedly a better option. Hogwash. It doesn’t matter how it gets there.
Once a person goes to a search engine, they simply enter the keyword they’re interested in and the engine returns a list of results based on a variety of factors. These factors are things like the age of the website, how many people link to it, the content of the website, what the page actually says, whether the page is even relevant to what they searched for and so much more. In some cases, the search engine will completely ignore the site age, and inbound links (links on other websites that link to yours) and just let it rank well because it thinks it’s very relevant based on how you placed text on the page.
Essentially, you could outrank a site that’s WAY more relevant than yours simply based on how you set up the page, adjusted your title tags, etc. And that’s what I’m primarily going to focus on during this SEO guide. How to get ranked as quickly as possible even though you haven’t set up any link partners, barely have any inbound links, how to structure your site and text, information, body text, etc to get quick results. I’m not going to ignore the important things, but you want quick results and that’s what I plan to give you. This is not about cheating the system. It’s about structuring your website to rank well on the major search engines and giving them what they want. Well most of what they want.
I will preface this by saying that there have been some sites that just can’t be helped at all. Sometimes well established sites are the worst to pull out of the mire. Especially ones with dynamic databases where the content is built on the fly based on what the person wants to see because there’s so much information that you simply could not build physical pages for each possibility. For instance, if you have 50 states and 10 categories, then you would have to create 500 physical pages so that each state has a page for each category. That’s mostly why databases are created is to alleviate that problem and give the user what they want on the fly. If they search for Georgia Photographer, the site goes to the database and pulls the names of the photographers from Georgia and just creates a page dynamically. Those could typically have the worst SEO nightmares sometimes. If that’s you, don’t lose heart. Make sure all of this other stuff is in line first.
Posted by admin on July 27, 2010 under Coding, SEO, Web Design |
The biggest issue that almost all clients who come to me for SEO help have is their title tags. For those not versed in html coding, there is a tag in your code that says <title> then has some words and closes with </title>. Most businesses are putting their company name in this tag and maybe a “Welcome to my website!“ The text that is in this tag appears at the top of the browser window. The problem with this tag is that most people fill it with worthless text that doesn’t benefit their site. Search ANY keyword you want in Google and you’ll see that the keyword you searched for is in the title tags of everyone on the first page of the search results. And Google even highlights them by bolding the text.
Putting “Welcome to the my Company” in the title tag is costing you greatly. Google looks at the title tag heavily. SEO guru Brad Fallon used the title tag trick early on to rank for “Coolest Guy On The Planet“. No one else had put that in their title tag and the result was that when someone searched Google for “Coolest guy on the planet“, he came up number one because he was the only one nutty enough to actually put that text in his tags. In your case, you are probably competing for something a little more widely used like a dentist office or maybe greeting cards. So let’s look at a couple things with the title tag.
First thing to say about the title tag is that every character is golden. Use your title tag for keywords only. I can’t stress this enough. Don’t use your company name, don’t say “Welcome to..”, etc. It’s a waste. If they’re on your website, they will see your company name and you can use your meta tags to welcome them if you must (that will be discussed in Step 3), so again, only use keywords in your title tags. There are arguments that using your company name promotes branding, but my vote is to ignore that advice.
Here are three programs you can use to find out what the best keywords are to chase for your business.
- http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com
- https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
- or download the Good keyword Tool Here.
Make your list and then you can proceed with wild abandon.
Assuming you’ve done that, let’s pretend that your business is greeting cards, use one of those programs to look to see what people are actually searching for. Pick out the top 20 or so and then analyze each page of your website to see where the best fit is for those keywords.
To start, if the service you provide is local, then you have a good advantage because you can use keywords like “Atlanta Dentist“, or if that’s proving too competitive, then you can use your county name like “Gwinnett County Dentist“. But you’ll use your top 3 or 4 general keywords on your home page title tag. So instead of your title tag saying “Welcome to my website”, it would say something like “Atlanta Dentist | Gwinnett Dentist | Atlanta Dentistry“. This way Google knows that the page is about dentistry.
The other trick is that each of your pages should almost serve as a “home page”. So it’s not just that first main page that people could come to, but any of your pages. So make sure that you do NOT copy the title tag from your home page onto all of your pages. That will have a negative effect and accomplish nothing for you. Make the title tag on your page on orthodontics contain orthodontic keywords. Each page should be different. For pages that are what we refer to as “no money” pages like your terms and conditions, privacy policy, contact page, etc, just use the most general keywords from your list. Be sure to mix them up. The other thing to be careful about is that the page actually is about what you indicate in the title tags. So if you have dentistry keywords in your title tag, make sure that page is about dentistry. Having mention of those specific keywords from the title tag in the actual text of the page is important.
Businesses that aren’t local are a little tougher because your products can be purchased from anywhere by anyone and is not strapped to a locality. You don’t get the benefit of using a location in front of your keyword. Atlanta dentistry is pretty competitive, but nowhere near as competitive as just dentistry by itself. You’ll want your keywords to focus on some of the low hanging fruit. In the greeting cards example, maybe you’d want to focus on “sympathy greeting cards”, “my first birthday greeting cards”, etc. Those are less competitive than the broad “greeting cards” which you can use on your no money pages.
We’ll touch on title tags more heavily later off and on in various lessons because you can’t just use them willy-nilly. Google is more interested in relevance and if you’re keywords don’t match what’s actually on the page, you’ll fail miserably. Yes, content is king no matter how cliche it may be.
