If you are a business owner, one of the first things you probably did when you started out was launch a website sprinkled with keywords. How are potential customers going to find you otherwise? Well, they probably aren’t. Unless your website is optimized for search engines, you are basically invisible online. After all, how do you usually find businesses online? You do a search. And how many listings will you look at once a search engine has generated a list? Exactly. If your website does not immediately appear at the top of the list, well, like I just said, you are invisible. Not good.
Posted by Gerlos to Flickr
Oh, and by the way, my website is not optimized for search engines, so don’t feel bad.
Time to get found online, which means calling in an SEO expert. Meet Harry Books, President and CEO of Search First Marketing. Harry has been doing this for a long time and has delivered over 200 SEO training seminars to over 6,000 business owners. Needless to say, he knows his stuff. There’s so much stuff to know, in fact, that it quickly became clear that this topic would require two posts. This is part I and will focus on on-page optimization. Part II will focus on links.
Here’s what I learned from Harry:
First, some background on SEO. The reason you want your website to be found is to convert leads into new customers rather than just increase traffic. Makes sense, right? If you’re getting 100 hits on your website a month, but none of those hits are turning into customers, well, you’re just wasting your money. SEO can help with a bunch of things: the messaging on your website, landing pages that keep visitors on your website, call(s)-to-action, and tracking and reporting.
It can sometimes take up to 6 months for SEO to work its magic, but results often start appearing much more quickly than that. For instance, Harry just did a month end review for a client who had a 65% increase in Google traffic after just 2 months. Not too shabby!
Anyway, let’s talk about on-page optimization. The biggest mistake people make on their website is giving every page the same title, like your company name for example. When search engines look at a web page, the title determines what that page is about. So your title page should include the name of our company plus your location plus what your business actually does. So a spa’s home page would be titled “Spa Aqua—Washington, DC—Luxury day spa in the heart of Georgetown”. (Tip from Harry: Keep the titles under 65 characters, including spaces.) Since each page contains specific content, each page would have a unique title based on its content. Keep in mind that search engines tend to reward pages with more content (more means at least 250 words).
To fix this every-page-with-the-same-title problem, you need to create uniqueness for each page on your website. This requires someone with expertise, as it gets a bit technical. You need:
- A title tag.
- A meta-description tag (this is buried in the code and is for search engines).
- Meta-keyword tag (this tells search engines more about your site).
- Page headers (more HTML stuff).
- Alt-tags (alternate text for images, which gives the search engine more information about the image; since a search engine can’t see the image, this helps them contextualize the image and gives you optimization credit).
So, now that we’ve covered text, would you believe that many experts estimate that only 3 of the top 10 ranking criteria are based on on-page elements. The rest is all about links, those that are from and those that go to your site. I’ll cover that in my next blog post, and I’ll cover PPC (pay-per-click), which is a more cost-effective way to go if you’re on a limited budget, in an upcoming post.
Don’t forget that Network Solutions also offers an entire array of online marketing solutions, including SEO, PPC, email marketing, local search visibility, and more. Maybe one day I’ll get myself organized and actually invest in some search marketing tools. If you are not generating the kind of traffic you need to grow, think about getting yourself some SEO help, whether it’s from Harry, Network Solutions, or someone you meet while you’re out networking.
Google+
