Another thing many people don’t realize is that you really do get what you pay for. Most of those one low monthly rate companies don’t have many options, forcing you to choose from a most times hideous library of templates and little to no customization options. Those drag and drop design services appeal, but it really doesn’t do justice and will cost you more money in the long run. Designers have experience with making aesthetically pleasing websites, but they also have experience with something called user experience design, usability and accessibility. Not only are drag and drop options limiting your ability to design your site, but unless you know any of those web design principles – you will most likely not develop your site properly. This will end up costing you business down the road, and it was supposed to be so easy and cheap, yea right.

I wanted to keep this a quick read so I won’t touch on the many other hidden dangers with all these Instant Click / one low monthly price websites. Most individuals and firms charge an honest amount for their service and you really do get what you pay for. Do your research and understand the big picture before you follow the masses blindly. Oh, btw … we offer a free web design consultation. In this consultation we identify your business needs and provide a step by step informative ‘plain English – no nonsense’ analysis. This is an honest consultation to help you identify your needs and understand the associated costs. You can take the information and walk away, but we think you’ll be pleased with our services and prices.

The Big Picture

Is your website running on a content management system like WordPress or is it old fashion using static html? If your using WordPress, install the All in One SEO Pack Plugin. Those of you with static html, you’ll have to install an FTP client like FileZilla and use your generic text editor such as NotePad or TextMate. How to use these tools is not what this article is for, but if you’re stuck leave a comment and we’ll help you out!

Search engines are constantly updating the criteria used to rank the order a set of websites appear in organic search results. This criterion is often based on content and various markup (code) that tells a bot how important a particular piece of content is. There are individuals who can get you listed in the top 10 organic search results almost instantly for the less competitive terms, but it’s a short lived victory. Once the criteria are changed by the search engine, you will quickly lose your spot. Instead of fighting to keep up with all the changes, you should focus on creating informative, valuable, engaging and keyword rich content.

10 Tips to Help you Gain Search Engine Visibility

Through Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

1. Use relevant and keyword rich Title tags (64 Character Limit)
2. Use the relevant meta data tags: Keywords, Description and Geo meta data.
3. Make sure your markup (code) is clean and error free so robots can easily crawl your site.
4.Use the header tags!
5.In HTML images have something called alt, USE IT!
6.Use links properly.
7.Generate a sitemap.
8.Generate a robots.txt file.
9.Submit your site.
10.Track the results.

An important item I must point out is that these tips are based on the assumption that you’ve already completed your keyword research. If you have no idea what that is, leave a comment and we’ll walk  you through it.

The Title Tag and Meta Data

The title tag should be limited to approximately 64 characters. If you have to go over the limit, put your important keywords towards the beginning.

Your description should appeal and engage the person searching for whatever subject they might be looking for. Sometimes people will decide not to click on your site listing based on what they see in the description. It is a common suggestion to limit your description to a maximum of 140 characters. Anything over this and it will get cut off with the ellipsis (…).

The keywords/phrases should be limited to about 5 – 10 and be relevant with the content that specific page is designed for.

Geo tags tell a search engine about your location. There is a belief that this will help your site place higher up on the organic listing for people searching in the same area you specify in the geo tags. I personally like to include an address as well (in the content of the website). You can use a free geo meta data generator.

These tags no longer carry as much weight as they did 10 years ago in the grand scheme of things because of abuse. I still strongly believe it is worth the time to add them to your pages because you never really know what’s going on under the hood of each major search engine. Google especially, is working towards a system that ranks pages based on content, quality of content and search relevance. Providing that extra bit of information (truthfully, not manipulating it) will only help.

Clean Code and Semantically Correct Markup

Will Boost Search Engine Visibility

Run your web page(s) through a css and xhtml validator. Fix any errors found!

You are probably scratching your head right about now…what in the world are these guys talking about…semantically correct markup. Calm down, it’s just a fancy buzz word used in the industry to indicate the proper use of page elements like headers, images, links …etc

Use headers such as H1, H2, H3, H4 … as much as you can, but be realistic with it. A header is a header, use it as intended. In other words instead of putting a header inside a paragraph tag, use the H1. If you have sub sections in your content, use some H2s and H3s. Each header should contain a keyword/phrase (or multiple if you can). Don’t stuff keywords just to add keywords. Be creative and obtain an even balance between robot and human. For instance, ‘iPad iPad Accessories Review of iPad’ would not be human friendly.  ‘iPad and iPad Accessory Reviews’ gets your keywords in there, but it still makes sense to a human. Do not stay fixed on the keyword selection in the example, it’s the concept I’m trying to communicate here.

I want to SCREAM every time I see a site that has click here to learn more as a link. Why not use ‘Learn more about Dr. Janes ground breaking cancer research’ instead.  It tells the person what they are clicking to learn more about, and most importantly it’s helping your site get ranked higher in the search engines for the keywords/phrases you use in the link. Use keywords/phrases in links when possible. A general rule of thumb that seems to be working is to limit links to a maximum of about 8 – 10 words. Oh and don’t include the punctuation inside the link either.

The last thing to touch on: images. Add the alt (alternative text) attribute to your images and populate it with relevant keywords. It helps search engines get an idea of what the image is about, but it also provides screen readers with a description of what the picture is about. You might be wondering, well how many words should I put in there. Try to put the more important keywords towards the beginning, and write what you need to so that it makes sense. This is a quick description of what the image is about, not an in-depth analysis of the image.

Submitting Your Site to Search Engines

Before you can submit your site, you need to create a sitemap and a robots.txt file. You can use this generic robots text file for search engine optimization. If you are using WordPress the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin is perfect. For static websites, visit a free sitemap generator to produce and download your sitemap file. Once you have your two files, upload them to the root level of your directory. The same directory your home page is in (usually the index.html or index.php file)

This is an area you might get lost; if you need help, post a comment, and we’ll help you out as much as we can.

Once you have the robots.txt file and sitemap situated, you can go ahead and submit your site. Most search engines feed off each other. This means that the main search engines feed the smaller, less popular search engines. The following will definitely cover you for Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, AOL Search, HotBot and Dogpile. Just visit the following links to submit your site. You won’t see  a  link for every search engine listed because some feed off of the search engines you already submitted to.

Google:  https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url

Bing/Yahoo: https://ssl.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx 

Measure the Progress of

Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

It can take months before you see results and work your way towards the top. Search engine optimization takes time. I’m not going to get into detail about how you measure results because it’s much more complicated than a simple article, and Google already has a solid how-to on tracking analytics for search engine optimization.

The main tools used are Google Analytics and Bing Webmaster.

Again, if you have any questions or get stuck during your trek through search engine optimization, post a comment and we’ll throw you a life saver to keep your head above the water.

Still feeling overwhelmed?

Talk with an SEO specialist; schedule a free 30 minute search engine optimization consultation.

Business owners often find themselves asking, “What is the best way to market my business?” “Why is my current marketing strategy failing?” More often than not, the answer is that the business does not have an effective marketing plan.
No matter how wonderful your company’s product or service is, if you don’t advertise, nobody will know about it. The goal of any advertising program should be to cost-effectively reach the largest audience possible and attract new customers. If done correctly, advertising can be a wonderful investment for your small business; if done poorly, advertising can become a huge money sink.