What is needed for SEO hasn’t really changed all that much in the last few years, and in case you haven’t seen my website submission page I’d suggest at least taking a moment to review it. The link to it is: https://www.ecurtisdesigns.com/website-submission/ Our submission page has information both on SEO and site submission, which of course is needed once a site has been effectively optimized. The first main heading of this page reads “Keyword Selection is Key”, which is really the nutshell of a good SEO plan. What I am noting here is that you need to know what words and phrases you are targeting for and then apply them correctly. One option is to use Google’s Keywords tool, but in most cases I like to search for the best keywords myself, which I explain in this post further down.
The first thing to understand is that the principles of SEO are the same whether your site is the typical “static” type, or of the CMS “dynamic” variety such as WordPress or Joomla. If your site is a CMS then you’ll want to use a quality SEO plugin. If your site is static you simply need to ensure that the appropriate meta-tags are in place on all pages, which for most search engines is:
<title></title>
<meta name=”description” content=”” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”” />
<meta name=”robots” content=”follow, index” />
The “title” tag is shown in the address bar and needs to be kept short, and descriptive (8 words or less). My suggestion is to use this to note your primary services and business region since the title has very high SEO value. Many people want to have their business name in the page title (and sure, I understand why) but most people will search for a business by the services provided within their specific area, not by a company name (which is always included elsewhere in any case). The “description” tag is the next most important meta-tag, which should be a short “readable” sentence or two (not stacked keywords) that clearly identifies the key services or products offered and the business location defined, assuming your services are provided for local clients.
Note: when competing for a good online ranking against another business of related services it is much easier to rank highly if you have defined a specific region for your services, such as Sacramento. Once you remove the location you are now competing against all global business of your services type.
The “keywords” meta-tag was commonly used once (so I included it), but Google (and most others) no longer ascribe it any value. The choice to use it is really up to you. The “robots” tag is important since it is used by the search engines to define if a page is to be indexed (and followed) or not. The options include:
<meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow” />
This tells the search engines to index the page, and to follow the links.
<meta name=”robots” content=”index, nofollow” />
This tells the search engines to index the page, and not to follow the links.
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow” />
This tells the search engines to not index the page, and not to follow the links.
There are numerous other meta-tag options as well, and these very a bit in formatting on whether the page is HTML or XHTML. Additional XHTML options I’ve used include:
<meta name=”keyphrases” content=”” />
<meta name=”subject” content=”Web Page Subject” />
<meta name=”classification” content=”business” />
<meta name=”author” content=”name, e-mail@hotmail.com” />
<meta name=”copyright” content=”” />
<meta name=”distribution” content=”Global” />
<meta name=rating content=”General” />
<meta http-equiv=”content-Language” content=”en-us” />
<meta name=”revisit-after” content=”7 days” />
<meta http-equiv=”imagetoolbar” content=”no” />
Some of these are important since they are used to define the service area intended (local or global), when a page should be revisited (can also be assigned in a sitemap), rating (general or adult), etc. Personally I would just stick with the ones noted initially since they are the common ones so likely to be accepted by most search engines and directories.
Okay, so let’s get back to what works, and what is needed – first and foremost you want to define the keywords (and phrases) that you think someone will use to find your type of business. What I often do is search for a client’s business in Google based upon what I know of the industry, or if new to me, what the client thinks will likely be searched for. For example, if I search for “Sacramento Business Painters” I see my client ranked #6 in the organic listings, and 1st in the Google Review listing (at the top of page). This is good. But if the ranking wasn’t good I will typically look at the bottom of the page where it reads “Searches related to sacramento business painters” and here I see two options that might be useful:
house painters sacramento
painters union sacramento
These are important since they would not be shown if they weren’t popular search queries, which in turn tells me that it would be a good idea to include “house painters sacramento” as a keyword phrase for this businesses website (which was included already). The next thing to understand is that ranking will very a lot in response to how the words are ordered and with the word variations chosen (house, home, business, company, interior, exterior, etc). If I now search for “Business Painting Sacramento” (sacramento added at end of search query instead of first) my client drops to the 3rd page in Google’s listings, and is ranked #23. Wow, that’s a big drop!
The other primary targeted area for this client’s business is for “Residential House Painters in Sacramento”, for which my client ranks #8. Now if I change this to “Sacramento Residential Home Painters” my client ranks #4. Here I noted that Google’s suggested change was to add “interior” which indicates that again that this is a popular search term. All in all my client is doing well since their site has been online for 5 years (their initial ranking before my redevelopment was non-existent). They would likely do better though if there site was updated (the design is the original of 5 years back), and if additional text content was added to the home page which better targeted for these keywords and phrases.
If this client utilized my SEO services I’d start by looking over the top 5 websites listed for each of his primary services and evaluate these sites in a variety of ways as compared to my client’s site. For example:
- How many pages, how are they titled, what are the heading titles, and what type of content is listed on each?
- What meta-tags do they have in place (view source code). How are internal links used?
- Where are they linked to? (Here you can just type in their name and view the first 20 or so sites where they’ve got a link added: I note 20 here since it only pays off to have one’s site linked to it that site ranks well).
- Are they using Social Media, and if so, which ones and how?
- How does the design compare to my client’s site? Is is more engaging, more user friendly?
- What resources does this business provide to its visitors?
There are additional aspects I would check into, but you get the idea. You can learn more about my SEO and Marketing service at https://www.ecurtisdesigns.com/seo-and-marketing/
If you’ve done some reading on SEO then you know that websites with more pages, and ample text copy that targets your services (keywords) will do better in a listing. Evaluating meta-tags can be helpful since your site may be emphasizing the wrong keywords, over-stacking, etc. Since inbound links is one of the primary SEO considerations it can be very helpful to evaluate a top ranked site in this regard. Social Media shares is the #1 SEO criteria currently so it is a good idea to see what strategies they are employing to get visitors to share their content (if any). I have written a lot about social media in my blog so I will leave this here for now. Next I referenced how their design compares? In some cases a website needs to be updated to compete well, or needs a more engaging slideshow, etc. And lastly I asked about the resources provided? The reason I added this is that a website that provides helpful/useful information is more likely to have repeat visits, to have the content shared, and to have visitors remain longer. These are all important SEO considerations.
As for the content itself, it is important that the heading tags be used properly (H1, H2, etc). I have seen many websites where the titles are sized large, such as using a class file to size a title at 24px instead of using a heading tag defined at this size. This is just sloppy coding since the search engines ascribe more SEO value to headings. All the images need to be descriptively named, with “Alt” tags added for mouse-over description (this is for ADA compliance and SEO). Same thing for links. Check your site spelling and grammar, don’t plagiarize (will lower your site’s ranking and it is just good manners), and ensure that your pages have enough text to justify the page (nothing worse than a page looking incomplete). And finally, ensure that there are no broken links, and that your navigation is easily indexed. There is more of course, but I’ve covered most of this elsewhere so I’d suggest reading some of my earlier posts if this is new to you.
