MacDonald on Marketing

Posts Tagged ‘search engine optimization’

Welcome to SEO Tuesdays. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of creating a website that enjoys good search engine rankings for the search queries your potential customers are likely to use when searching for products or services your business provides.

Last week I talked about keyword research and showed you how to come up with a list of about a dozen keyword phrases to target. The idea is that when somebody goes to Google or some other search engine and performs a search, these are the phrases for which you want your site to be ranked well. Now you may be asking, “Okay, what do I do with the keyword phrases to make that happen?”

Search engine optimization efforts can be roughly divided into two separate categories:

• Onsite optimization, the changes you make to your actual website to improve its ranking; and,

• Offsite optimization, everything else you do to help improve your search engine ranking (most of this work involves developing inbound links to your site from other sites).

Today we’re talking about onsite search engine optimization. Both onsite optmization and offsite optimization are critical in search engine optimization. Think of onsite optimization in terms of the foundation of a house. A foundation is not a whole house, and similarly, onsite optimization by itself will not make you achieve your search engine optimization goals. However, without properly optimizing the coding of your website, all offsite optimization in the world will not give you high search engine rankings.

Onsite search engine optimization is a complex subject, and many businesses opt to hire a search engine optimization professional to make the decisions about onsite search engine optimization and implement the coding changes. However, if you are starting from zero and do not have the budget for outside help, here are the basics to help get you started.

First, make a list of all your site’s pages. For each page, choose two or three of your keyword phrases that most closely match the theme of the text content. Repeats are okay. We’ll call these your target keyword phrases.

Even if you are not comfortable editing your site’s HTML code, the information below will serve as a guide so that you know what to look for and how to instruct your web developer to change your site. For each page, here are the elements that should contain one or more of your target keyword phrases:

URL: The URL is the address of each page of your site (starts with http://). Ideally, each page of your site should have it’s most relevant target keyword phrases as part of its URL (e.g. www.thisisyoursite.com/target-keyword-phrase.html). If your site has already been online for more than a few months you should consult a search engine professional before changing the URLs of any of your pages to avoid losing the search engine benefits that you may have already developed.

Title tag: The title tag is the piece of code that determines the title of your page. You can see the title of any page at the very top of your browser screen, above all your toolbars. Your title tag will also be the title Google uses when displaying your site in search results. The title should be summary of the content of the page and it must contain one or two of your target keyword phrases. Keep the title length to one reasonably short sentence.

Meta description tag: The meta description tag will not be visible on the page itself, but Google and other search engines may display it as the description of your site in the search results. Therefore, this is a good opportunity to persuade searchers that your site has what they are looking for. Write a short paragraph, one or two sentences, that ideally contain your target keyword phrases and make a well-written summary of your page.

Header tags: Header tags go around the headings in your page’s content. Search engines treat headers as an important indication of your site’s content. Make sure your headers include your target keywords.

Text content: As mentioned above, your target keywords should be related to the content of the page itself. Therefore, it should not be difficult for you to make sure that the target keywords appear naturally in the text of the content of your page. Make sure you have at least three to four paragraphs of content on each page.

Image ALT tags: The image ALT tag is meant to contain a description of the image to which it relates. If you are using the Internet Explorer browser, you’ll see the ALT tag pop up when you mouse over an image on a web page. Starting with your target keyword phrases for the page, work in ALT tags for each image that are accurate and also contain your keyword phrases. Once you have used up your two target keyword phrases for the page, move on to other keyword phrases in your list of 12 in order to create the other ALT tags for images on the page.

There are some other important things to know about onsite search engine optimization:

Site navigation: It’s very important that some of the navigation elements on your site are hyperlinked text rather than images. If your main navigation uses images in order to look nice, make sure you at least have a text footer menu. If you can use a target phrase in the navigation links pointing to your pages, even better. If your site has more than 10 pages, a site map would be good idea.

A word of caution: Keyword stuffing is the name for packing too many keyword phrases into your URL, title tag and other page elements. More is not always better and keyword stuffing frequently results in lower, not higher, rankings. Don’t keyword stuff — stick to one or two keyword phrases for each element of your page. About a decade ago meta keyword tags were important to search engine rankings, but because of rampant keyword stuffing and spam almost all the search engines now disregard meta keyword tags. If a service provider tries to convince you that he can get you to the top of the rankings just by manipulating your site’s keyword tags, run — you are being scammed.

Next week we will talk about some of the ways to start building your offsite optimization strategies. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed in your reader or sign up for free email updates at the upper right of this page.

Do you have any onsite search engine optimization strategies to share? Please comment!

Google Maps information is now frequently showing up at the top of the Google search results page for user searches that include place name keywords. This post explains how to get your business into these Google search results.

Ever do a search on Google and get images, news, YouTube videos or maps at the top of the results? This is thanks to Google Universal Search. The pictures to the left (click to enlarge) show examples of these results.

If you’re a small business owner with a bricks and mortar location, here’s how to get your site into the Google Maps results for searches that include local keywords.

Go to Google Maps Local Business Center and enter your business information (name, address, website, etc.) into the form. Then you will be able to upload photos, videos, select categories, tell customers your payment options, business hours, and more.

How does Google make sure that your location information is accurate? Google will actually mail you out a postcard containing your PIN: your listing will not be activated until you log in again and enter your PIN.

One of the most exciting new features (see the second thumbnail) is the way Google indexes reviews of your business from many different websites. Soon we’ll be talking about social media and ways to turn your most loyal customers into evangelists for your small business.

Did you find this tutorial helpful? Make sure to add our RSS to your reader so you don’t miss future posts.

Have you added your business to Google Local Business Center? Please comment below to let me know the results.

Planning your small business website?  Choosing your site’s domain name is one of the most important decisions you will make.  You’ll want to get this right the first time around, because your domain name will be the foundation of much of your online marketing.

Here are eight tips to help you through the process:

1.  Always choose a .com domain name. People assume that your domain will end in .com, so if you choose a .net website you may end up sending your customers to your competitor.  The only exception to this rule is if you exclusively do business in a country other than the United States.  In that case, your country-specific domain (e.g. example.co.uk or example.ca) would be better.

2.  Your domain name should contain your brand or business name, especially if you have a bricks and mortar business.  This will make your domain name more memorable, and also reinforce your branding.

3.  Keywords in your domain name can really boost your eventual search engine rankings for those keywords.  If you have a short business or brand name, consider adding a keyword to the domain as well.  For example, GreenPointHats.com instead of just GreenPoint.com.

4.  Forget about hyphens. Hyphens confuse your customers and they will end up typing in the non-hyphenated domain name instead.  Choose MyGreatWebsite.com instead of My-Great-Website.com.

5.  Shorter is better, but shorter is not everything.  Try to keep the domain three words or less if possible.

6.  Make sure that your domain name is spelled like it sounds, without any possible ambiguity.  Watch out for words that sound the same or words that are tricky to spell.

7.  Register your domain with a reputable registrar. I always recommend GoDaddy.com for domain registration (but not webhosting).

8.  Register your domain name for at least several years at a time. Domains that have a long registration period tend to end up with higher search engine rankings in Google.  Make sure you keep your email address, phone number, and mailing address up to date with the domain registrar.  Your registrar must be able to contact you for rebilling when your domain name registration expires!

Stumped?  Nameboy.com and Bustaname.com are a couple of fun tools that can help you find available domains.

How did you choose your small business domain name?  Please share your experiences and ideas in the  comments below!

Photo credit:  Chrstopher