Location information

Make sure that you include relevant location information on your pages if that is pertinent to your business.  For instance, while you might be happy to sell a widget to someone from Albuquerque, if the vast majority of your business comes from Ann Arbor, then make sure you include “Ann Arbor” along with your keywords and phrases.

If your business is more regional in nature, then make sure you include all of the cities, towns, and counties in the location description.  That way someone searching for Webberville Widgets will be more likely to find your site.

Including dozens of locations on each of your pages could possibly clutter up your site, but there are ways to do it where you can minimize the impact.  Try placing this information “below the fold” – that is at the very bottom of the page where it usually says “Web Design By ….” and the color changes from the color used in the content area to the background color of the page. Who cares if it is cluttered down below – very few people will ever scroll down to see it, but the search engines will take notice, and that after all, is the goal!

Keywords found in page name

Part of making your site relevant to the search engines for your desired keywords is to make sure those same keywords are pervasive throughout your site.  In other words they should appear everywhere you can reasonably fit them in.  In the content, the headers, the page title, and yes – you guessed it – the page name!

What is the page name?  Every page on your site is really just a file stored somewhere on your web server.  Usually the home page is called something like index.html, or index.php, or default.asp (whatever your web server is setup to serve as the default page).  However other pages will have unique names such as about_us.html, or products.php.

In order to spruce up your SEO results you should consider changing some of the page names on your site, or adding new pages, to include your keywords and phrases.

Here are some examples:

Change about.html to about_left_handed_widgets.html
Change products.html to left_handed_widgets.html

For local results add a new page called left_handed_widgets_ann_arbor.html.  Add similar pages for each region or area you are trying to improve your results for.

Make sure you have a page on your site dedicated to each keyword/phrase

Let’s say you have an auto repair shop that specializes in providing service for European imports such as Audi, VW, and BMW.  When people go to Google and search for “bmw auto repair ann arbor” you would like your site to show up on the first page, if not first in the list.

Your current site has a “services” page that mentions that you work on BMW, VW, Audi, and other imports, but you don’t have a page specifically for “bmw auto repair ann arbor.”  Do you see the problem here?  You are hoping to be featured in the search results for a very specific search phrase, but you don’t have a page on your site that was specifically designed for that purpose.

But imagine if your competitor does.  Whoops!

The solution is to create a specific landing page just for “bmw auto repair ann arbor”.  You should go so far as to make sure the filename of the page includes those keywords (e.g. bmw_auto_repair_ann_arbor.html).  The HTML title of the page should also contain those keywords (more on page titles later).  The page should contain a lot of text that contains the phrases BMW, auto repair, and Ann Arbor.  Each one of those phrases should also be included in an HTML H1 header tag.

Try to include some specific information as to what advantages your facility would offer to someone with a BMW.  Do you have a BMW certified technician on staff?   What makes you so good at repairing BMW’s as compared to anyone else? The more information that you can provided, the more opportunities there are for you to include keywords, and that will help improve the relevance of your site for those particular words and phrases.  You might even go so far as to reserve a keyword rich domain name such as “bmw-repair-ann-arbor.com”.

Now go back and do it again for all of the other keywords and phrases that you are trying to optimize.