In our last discussion we talked about keyword density and the need to have your keywords appear on your page, frequently but not too frequently. The need to do so early on your page, and some suggestions on making sure you had enough words overall to appear substantive to the search engines and pointed out a need to have keywords that appear in your meta tags also appear on your page.

These are all important factors visible on your page. Today we will talk about three more elements of on-page importance. Your URL, the originality of your content and finally internal links.

You probably already have your URL or web site address. So this first topic may seem pointless, but let’s dig in anyway. If your business is counseling women going through a divorce on their financial matters, you may be better off trying to get www.DivorceeFinancialAdvice.com as your URL rather than www.JBBrown.com.

Way too many business web sites use meaningless business names as their URL in the hopes of creating some branding value. While some will take issue with me here, a URL that includes your major keyword may do you a lot more good, unless your brand is already deeply ingrained in your marketplace. Similarly, MinneapolisChiropractor.com
may be superior to WellnessClinic.com, although MinneapolisWellnessClinic may be worth a shot.

If you are wedded to www. your name.com you might still want to consider buying domain names of the better combinations of your major keywords and geographical areas and redirecting them to your web page. This serves a defensive purpose of keeping them out of potential competitor’s hands. Once you own these domains you can have them point to your existing web site. It’s not the ideal from an SEO standpoint but will help drive traffic to your site for the relatively minor cost of the domain name.

Originality of content shouldn’t be a problem for most business websites. But if your website is a template and you are using essentially the same text as another website, you may not get your site indexed at all. Google and the other search engines want to see unique new content, and not a duplicate of the same old thing. They will index the first copy they find and ignore the duplicates. You don’t want to have your site ignored. Make sure you are not using a carbon copy of someone else’s web site.

They also like to see new content. You can do that by adding new pages on occasion, or by making changes to existing pages. Is there a portion of your page that can be updated from time to time? If so, make sure you do so. This lets the search engines know that your site is active. That said, if you are going to do it, make sure you do. No one is impressed with a site that is talking about an upcoming holiday from two years ago.

Internal links are the links on your site to your various pages on the site. Most web sites have a home page and links on almost all their pages to “Home.” A better strategy is to use your major keyword, be it “Minneapolis Dentistry Home” or “St. Louis Sewer Repair Home.” By adding your keywords, you let the search engines know that that’s what your pages are about. It reinforces all your other keyword efforts.

This may be a bit tricky in some cases where space is tight, but where you can include links within the text of your pages to other pages, you should be sure to use anchor text links like this. Next week we will discuss off page factors. There we will go into more detail on linking to your site. When you are off page you have very little control on what links others will have to your site. When you have complete control such as on your own page, it behooves you to make maximum use of your ability to use internal links that let the search engines know what your pages are about.

—

Don’t forget about my WART Analysis program. For next to nothing I will do a diagnostic of your web page and provide you with my personal advice on steps you could take to make your web page more effective in terms of search engine ranking.

Technorati Tags: Keywords, Linking, Meta Tags, SEO, Web sites, websites

Yesterday, I described a problem that a lot of home stagers and other businesses have. When your web site starts out with a splash page, and/or your site uses a lot of flash coding you can become invisible to the little bots Google and others send around the internet to index sites. And that means your competitors have an advantage over you in terms of their ability to out rank you on Google and the other search engines. That costs you opportunities, and that means less jobs, and less money.

Today, I will briefly share more on what you need to do to mitigate the situation short of redesigning your entire web page. The “on page” factors that the Google Bots look for are just a part of the equation. And while lacking all the umph! having them would provide, you can still get yourself some traction using “off page” factors. There are a variety of off page things to do, but they basically boil down to getting BACK LINKS.

You do this by posting on other peoples blogs, writing articles, posting on web 2.0 sites like Squidoo and others.  When you do, you don’t want to link to your splash page if you have one. Instead link to your home page, or another page on your site that is relevant to the topic.

So, picking on my Friend Allegra again, I would have her sign her posts as “www.styledandsold.com/home.html” rather than “www.styledandsold.com”  It may look a bit odd at first, but it will take google to the page that matters and will count as a backlink in many cases. (not all but that is too long a discussion for now.)

Better yet, are situations where instead of signing with your URL you are able to use an anchor tag.  For example, if you are writing an article to post in an article directory instead of using your url, say Allegra Dioguardi is a Hamptons Home Staging Expert.

In this case, the keywords Allegra wants to rank for on Google is “Hamptons Home Staging”.

If she is on a Blog Site like Active Rain that has a Link tool (Looks like three links of a chain) in its WYSIWYG editor, she would highlight the words Hamptons Home Stager, and then insert her URL as the link, using the /home.html version.

That way when the bots find the link they provide not only a backlink but also identify the keywords at being relevant to the site. This process starts building keyword status for your website.

If you are on a site where you need to use html code you would build the link with a standard opening

<a href=”   and then insert your url, again with the /home.html (Or another page on your site) and end it with a   “>  Once that’s done, you add the keyword you want to rank for—  Hamptons Home Staging and a closing code which is  </a>

So the completed phrase in HTML is <a href=”http://www.styledandsold.com/home.html”>Hamptons Home Staging</a>  When this is put in the HTML of a site, anyone reading the phrase once published would only see:Hamptons Home Staging The words would be highlighted and most people will recognize them as a link. If they click on the link they would be taken to the page.

By virture of this post, Allegra now has a back link to her site.  You want to get as many of these as you can from as many different sites as possible.  Some sites are more valuable than others, but we will cover that in the future.

Focus on your major keyword. For home stagers, the number one word is Home Staging. But as I did for Allegra keep in mind that there are over 6 million web sites with the words “Home staging” in them. You want to rank for Home Staging and your town or what ever the dominant regional term people in your market would be likely to use.

I will be starting my new series on getting ranked by the search engines soon. But since I had several questions on this point I thought I would answer it now.

Technorati Tags: anchor tags, Keywords, Linking, SEO