Setting up your website for good SEO

SEO: Search Engine Optimization.  This means optimizing your website so that search engines know what your company is all about and will return your page when people search your key words on the Internet!

There are things you can do to your website to optimize your site.  Setting up your website for great SEO is a great idea when you are in the beginning stages of building your website. That is not to say you can’t add nice SEO content later, but it is really great if you can begin with a clean slate and build your site with this in mind.  Good SEO all starts with good keywords and phrases.  After you have you list of keywords, then you need to add those to your site.  There are places on your website for your keywords and phrases that help more than others.  We can guide you with this.

Types of Search Results

There are basically two types of search results: organic and paid.

Organic results are the result of how Google or Bing views your website. Those companies index your site and come up with keywords that they think your site is about.  We can help you with your organic search result preparation.

If you are looking into paid search results (advertising), we have a great resource for you if you, so please ask us. Although, we will never recommend this type of service if you have not done what we write about below.  Paying someone for search results and not optimizing your site is like looking at your broken home after the tornado went through it, and having the interior decorator over to pick out colors and drapes and furniture before you even build the house.  Get your house or your website in order.  Then hire someone if you are not seeing the results you would like.

Keywords and Phrases

When you create your keyword phases, there are a few things to think about.  Keyword phrases should be in order all the time.  There are “stop words” such as the, is, at, which, and on  which don’t contain value, so it is good not to use those words.  Build your list based on how you think people will search for your company or product.

Next, take your list and GOOGLE THOSE WORDS. When you google those words, look at the resulting list:  is that the list you would like to be included in? Do you find that the result from google is too general and you need to refine your search? If so, then refine your keywords.  Keep googling keywords and phrases until you see a list that you would like to appear in.  Also, try moving the words around in a different order to see a different result.  Sometimes you can include a location or a town in your keywords, but you can fit that in other ways, such as in the footer mentioning the towns you cater to, on your contact page, mentioning the town, or putting the towns in your content on your site.

Here are some guidelines for building your pages for good SEO out of the box.

  1. Use a different keyword phrase on each page/product
  2. Keywords should appear in the first paragraph of the copy to make sure the topic is clear immediately.
  3. The keyword density  – add keywords a few times- at least 2
  4. Body copy has a 300 word recommended minimum
  5. Add a subheading in the copy
  6. All images should have alt tags containing your keyword / phrase.  In addition, name the image your keywords using dashes (-) to separate words (Don’t upload a photo with the name DSC_104862.jpg …. that file name does not  help you at all!)
  7. The keyword / phrase should appear in the URL for the page
  8. The page title should contain the keyword towards the beginning and has a viewable limit of 70 characters
  9. Add at least one outbound link
  10. Meta description for search engines –  The meta description will be limited to 156 chars. This is what will show up in a google snippet. Make it active so that viewers will want to CLICK!

Now, we need to mention that this should be the beginning of your strategy. Google is changing the algorithms all the time.  Presently, what is of growing importance, are your social signals, or in other words, your feedback from social media, ESPECIALLY Google+!  That is a whole other discussion, but start here and then we can talk.

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