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.

It all starts at the source

Use Good Source Code

Behind the nice pictures and words on your website there is something called “source code.” It’s the strange language that programmers use to tell your browser what to show you. It does a lot of other things, too.

You can see what source code looks like. When you’re looking at a website, go to the “View” menu and choose “Page source.” If you’re not into coding or html, close the page source window quickly and get back to looking at your web page. That stuff’s for programmers.

Good source code is clean and concise, without bugs. It loads quickly when you visit a web page. When you hire someone to design a website for you, make sure they can tell you whether they will hand code your site in html or use some page layout software. If somebody is charging you to design your website and they say they are going to use page layout software to do it, make sure they are using a professional designer and not one of those that tout themselves with “design your own website in minutes!”

If you hire someone to do SEO work for your website, keep in mind that they should be checking to see if your source code is any good. If they don’t at least raise the topic, you might want to consider a different SEO firm. At SEO Ann Arbor, when we undertake to help someone with their SEO, we always evaluate their source code to make sure it doesn’t hinder their search engine results.

What is the ONE thing I can do to optimize my site?

Let’s face it, SEO can be confusing. There are a dozen major things, and dozens of minor things that can and probably should be done to optimize your site. Worse yet, many of them are time consuming and involve disparate skills. Still, you have to start somewhere, and we get asked all of the time, “what is the one thing I can do to optimize my site?”

The answer is simple. Write! People use words to search the Internet. When I am looking for someone to install a sprinkler system at my house, I don’t upload a picture of my brown lawn to Google and hope they figure it out. No, I type in “Ann Arbor Sprinkler” or “Sprinkler System Installation.” Google and the other search engines understand text. Sure, there are other things that can help, but one of the biggest factors in convincing Google and the other search engines that your site is pertinent for a given set of keywords, is to make sure that your site contains those keywords.

If you install sprinkler systems in Ann Arbor, then make sure that your website liberally mentions that fact. Again and again. For any given set of keywords, you want them to appear at least once in the page title, once in a header tag, once inside of paragraph text, and also in the name of the page. We call it 4 in 1 optimization. You’ll call it “magic” once you see how well it works.

I should be doing this today!

I was talking to a client the other day who had just seen a presentation about SEO. He had been vaguely aware of SEO before, but the presentation really hit home. He was all excited afterward and had a bunch of questions for me, which I was more than happy to answer.

After answering his questions and explaining a bit more about how it all worked, he told me his big realization was that “I should be doing this today. If I don’t, some of my competitors will, meaning that I lose business.”

Exactly. So, are you on page one of Google? If not, then SEO is something that you should be doing today… Questions? SEO Ann Arbor can help!

What is Search Engine Optimization?

And Why Your Ann Arbor Business Should Care ... A LOT!

Basically, Search Engine Optimization [SEO] is the art of making sure that when people search for products and services related to your business, your site appears on or near the first page of results.

The Basics of Search Engine Optimization

There are a few basics that have a big effect on where your site shows up. For example, every business owner in Ann Arbor should have a good HTML programmer review their website to make sure the source code is efficient and that there are no obstacles to prevent the search engine robots [sometimes called “spiders”] from finding all the key information on the site. You should also do a careful review of what words people are typing into Google and the other search engines to find businesses like yours. There are many free tools that you can use to make sure your website contains the most important keywords, but an SEO expert will have access to some tools you may not, and will also be able to better analyze the data to help you decide which keywords to focus on. You will also want to find ways to get as many related websites as possible to link back to your site.

101 Tips That Will Rocket You to Page One of Google!

There are countless smaller tasks that can add up to big results for your website. SEO Ann Arbor uses a punch list of 101 action items that we apply to our clients’ sites, and if you have enough time, energy, and money, you could probably do the same. Not all of the action items are strictly SEO-related – we also focus on making sure visitors to our clients’ websites find something that makes them want to do business with our clients. A few of the areas used by SEO and web-marketing experts like SEO Ann Arbor are:

• Include location information on the home page
• Include descriptions of potential client categories
• Include a prominent call to action
• Employ social media to get more links and more traffic to your site
• Write a blog to get current information in front of your web visitors

You Need to Get to Page One

SEO is critical for every serious business in Ann Arbor, and everywhere people search the Internet. Did you know that according to some experts, 95% of real traffic to websites comes from the results on page one of search engine results? That means if your business appears on page two, you are competing for the leftover 5% of potential customers. If this seems extreme, think about the last few times you searched for a product or service on the Internet. Like most of us, you probably went to Google and typed in a word or words that you thought would get you to the businesses you wanted. When you found one or two likely listings, did you keep scanning through the results? We don’t either, and most people who use search engines (which is almost everybody these days) click through to the first likely listing they see.
Here’s one last example to show you how powerful being atop the search listings can be. After we did a complete search engine optimization on one of our Ann Arbor client’s websites, a new customer called to arrange a visit to their business. At their first meeting, the customer said, “We were looking for your service, and when we searched Google, your website came up number one. I guess God meant for us to do business together.”
You can’t buy that kind of marketing power ... actually, you can. Our client had us use every resource at our disposal to make sure their website was number one on Google, and it created the most powerful impression possible on that particular customer. Three years later, 90% of that client’s business comes from search engine results. They tell us it was the best marketing money they have ever spent.