SEO Tips for Beginners

Diana,
After talking with Annette last night I ran across an article on search engine optimization for beginners and I thought it might be of interest to you as you venture into web design for clients.

Paul

Diana,
I agree with Paul ...that if you are designing websites for small businesses you should know something about search engine optimization. How the site is designed will have an effect on whether it will rank well in search engines. This may be more than you want to know, or more than you need if you're designing sites for small, regional companies that will not need to rank highly on search engines, though they would do well to get on the local search results.

For example, besides placement of the keywords in the meta tags and alt tags, the location of the keywords in the text on the actual page does play a small role. It's best to have the main keywords near the top of the page. The article is right about keyword frequency...not to overstuff the pages, but what happens out there in the real world is keyword frequency does matter, but only relative to the other websites that rank in the top 10 spots for that keyword. You have to do what they're doing. I have a piece of software that will tell me this. Oh, and each page needs a minimum amount of text on it so when the search engines spiders read it they can tell what the page is about. The minimum is between 250 and 500 words.

Also, all sites now need an xml site map, which is like a table of contents. That site map needs to be submitted to the search engines and updated if you change the title tags. You can get one made for free at www.xml-sitemaps.com then submit it to Google Webmaster Central. The site also needs to have plain text navigation, usually at the bottom of each page, because search engine spiders cannot read navigation buttons (which are images or Flash).

All images need to have "alt tag" for 2 reasons. They are required for browser compatibility and they are required for people who are blind (their computer reads the pages aloud to them and so they need to know there's a button there). Oh, and as far as images on a webpage, images are usually large and slow loading files, so always compress images before putting them on the page or keep the use of images to a few. If your page takes longer than 8 seconds to load on the slowest dial up modem, you lose about 80 percent of visitors....they won't wait.

I have made search engine optimization my area of expertise in the last few years and would disagree with the article Paul sent you on one point...that of inbound links. For high rankiings, depending on the keyword, getting quality, relevant inbound links is essential for high search engine rankings.

The other things that affect search engine rankings are the amount of traffic to the site, the age of the site, and the competitiveness of the keywords. I tell my clients not to expect their site to get high rankings until it's at least 3 months old. If they need to generate traffic right away, I recommend a Pay Per Click advertising program like Google AdWords.

Finally, what the article overlooks is that not all the client's desired keywords are something that people are searching, so when writing for the web, I help my clients select keywords that are being searched at a high frequency, so that the site will get traffic. There are alot of keyword selection tools available for free, like WordPot, WordTracker.

This is probably more than you need to know, but if you continue designing websites, clients will be asking you the next day after their site has gone live why they can't find it on Google (answer: it takes a few weeks for Google to find your site, then index it).


Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

SEO Client Signs $50,000 in Businesss in 2 Weeks

Okay, I have to brag on one of my clients, Florida Federal Criminal Defense Attorney, David J. Joffe. Due to his aggressive search engine optimization contract with Girl Geek Web Designs, he was signed on a ton of business in the last 2 weeks of January 2008. By my calculation is was about $50,000 in new cases.

Go, David!


Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Add Tags to Your Blog Posts, Images and Videos

As you might know by now search engine optimization is a dynamic environment, as thing change periodically and new avenues of boosting rankings come into existence. Recently Google started including and ranking Blogs, Images and Videos in their search engine result pages (SERP's).

So make sure your web designer is adding alt-tags to all your images, and that you are tagging your blogs and videos with your most important keywords.

Thanks for reading!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Getting High Rankings in Google

Dear Girl Geek,

I want you to optimize my website, so I will get high rankings in Google. How would you go about doing that?

Larry

Hi Larry,
My understanding is that you want your site to come up on the first page of organic search engine results on your desired keywords. The goal would be to have that happen on Google primarily, but also track rankings on Yahoo and MSN - the other main search engines. In addition, to get immediate traffic to your site you want to set up a PPC program through Google, which you may or may not want to continue once your site is ranking well in the organic results.

Note: Well established, relevant, busy sites with lots of links pointing to them get highly ranked in Google. So the strategy would be to draw alot of targetted traffic to your site via quality inbound links and referrals from search engines, social networking sites, blog postings, classified ads, and referral sites (such as Psychology Today, professional organizations, and educational sites). The site would be optimized for your desired keywords. The final strategy is to add fresh content to the site at least once a month to give search engines something new to rank and keep people interested in coming back to your site.

Here's what I'd need from you
1. Login information for your site, so we can upload changes and add a contact form

2. the age of your site - new sites take longer to get well ranked

3. a list of DESIRED keywords that you want your site to rank well on. You mentioned using WordTracker, so I'd like that list and any additional keywords you think someone looking for your services might use.

4. A list of any of the social networking sites your listed on, i.e. LinkedIn, Ryze, Zoom, Squidoo, Zandz, Digg, Merchant Circle, etc.

5. A list of all the domain names you have pointing to your site

6, a description of your niche...as detailed as you can, i.e., age, location, income, educational status, race, marital status, etc.

7. a list of links from any educational institutions you have been or are affiliated with, so we can ask them to link to your site

8. a list of professional organizations you are affiliated with for the same purpose.

In preparation for SEO and PPC set up, what I'd do is

1. Do a brief review of the site to make sure it's search engine ready and all browser compliant, i.e. check to make sure there's no funky code, no slow loading times and that the internal navigation is set up properly and the outbound links are relevant

2. run an inbound links report on your site and those of your 2 top competitors on each of your desired keywords, to generate a list of websites from which we can request links to your site.

3. create an xml site map for your site, so that all your internal pages can get indexed by the search engines

4. Set up Google Analytics and conversion tracking on your site, so we can monitor the progress and outcome of the SEO and PPC efforts

5. run a baseline ranking report for your desired keywords to see where you already rank in Google, Yahoo, MSN. I'd make a list of the top ranking sites on those keywords for later use in setting up the PPC program.

Setting up a PPC program

I usually have people start with Google AdWords because that's the search engine most 70% of people use.

For PPC, I'd
1. create a campaign structure by logical groupings, such as by topic or service specialty

2. create a list of phrase match, geo-targeted keywords with a traffic report and minimum bid recommedations. You can establish a monthlybudget that you want to spend. I can generate a recommended budget based on getting the most views possible.

3. Write a minimum of 2 ads per ad group with alternative wording, using your most important keyword in the ad title and body.

4. create a local business ad for each ad group, such that your ad appears with GoogleMaps attached, so people can see where you are located

5. add conversion tracking to see how well each keyword performs

6. set up regular reports to see how ad groups are performing

Ongoing SEO strategies

1. continue to slowly add relevant inboung links with high PageRank. If you add links too fast, Google gets suspicious.

2. add fresh content to your site regularly, probably via a blog. Google owns Blogger.com and so considers it a prime link into your site, especially if you continue to let them host it remotely.

3. post your site on local online classifieds, like Craigslist.

4. post your site on social networking sites

5. suggest you start posting comments to relevant blogs of possible referral sources. I can do some research and suggest some of those.

6. submit your site to specialty search engines or vortals, where applicable

Thanks for asking!


Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335