Making Your Site Search Engine Friendly and rank well on your search terms

This is an area of web development that is vastly overlooked and mostly mismanaged by web designers and companies that still think that stuffing key words or creating landing pages actually makes a difference in your search results.

Below is a synopsis of what you can do do and how we can help. We will guide you through the process and teach you how to do this yourself. Who know your business better than you. SEO companies and fees are expensive and unnecessary and there is nothing here you can't do given the time and the right approach.

The Facts

The facts are that Google wants you to have as little to do as possible with how they display search results. They do this by focusing "off-page-relevancy factors". Basically things unrelated to what you can directly effect.

Some elements like page meta-tags for title and key words contained in the URL are still very important - but the most direct way you can improve your search results is to have a well organized, well coded site, with lots and lots of good content. The bigger the site the better. Attractive design and good photos might keep the visitors interested when they find your site, but they do nothing to help them find you.

The Content

In most cases information is why people visit your site, if all you do is say "Here I am, buy from me!" then your site is nothing more than an advertisement. Inform, educate, teach and entertain. Keep your site up to date and current, new pages will ranker higher in the search results. Search results can change by the hour, so be aware that once you attain a certain level of visibility you need to do the work to keep your site there. Post on social networks, indexes, business partners and customers sites, then post links to their sites. Especially sites that get a lot of traffic.

About Google

Google looks for similarities in content between sites and will assume that others who see the linked sites also want to find your site, hence giving you the benefit of any rank or traffic that might associated with  that site.

The people who visit your site the higher the site will rank, the snowball effect is a very real factor in search ranking. For instance if you were to do a key word search and then find the information on the 3rd page of Google and not on the first 2 pages, and pattern of others repeating the same behaviors gets recorded, it makes sense for Google to move that page to further up the ladder.

Google's main concern is the searcher not you, the better the search results the easier things are to find the longer they remain the top search engine in the world.

Having said all of the above below are few things that you can do to directly effect search results. These are what most web developers and SEO companies have done in the past and have a limited effect but worth noting and help you start to understand the process of getting found online.

 

Here are the steps we need to follow to help me get you “well” listed on Google and other search engines.

1. Open your browser to Google search page, think of two or three word phrases which you could
use to find your service or products, write these down and try them in the search box. ( single words
are to broad)

2. When the search results are returned look at each entry which you would consider a competitor, if
your business is local make sure you limit your search using a city or town or geographic area.
Competitors from Ohio are not your concern and you most likely do not want business from Ohio.
(Example: landscaping Boston) in cases where you are using very common words like landscaping
you might need to be more specific like( residential landscaping Bos ton). If you are small business
you’ll need to try and get search results with other small business. ( competing with Home Depot is
not an option)

3. The general idea is to find your competition, that is companies that not only do what you do but
also are competing with you directly( Example: the guy you just lost work too). Getting higher on
the search page for a major national brand and expecting to compete with them locally is
unrealistic. They have a lot more resources to throw at this problem. You want to be in the same
company as your competition or better. ( note: do not include search results which are “sponsored
links” these are paid listings)

4. How people search for your product or service is not going to be obvious – the best approach is get
a group of people (not in your field) to help you and gather the best key phrases from everyone,
you’ll be surprised how those not in your line of work find your business.

5. What is a good key phrase? One that gives you a majority of search results which contain links to
companies exactly like yours, that means the same size, same type of services and same client
base, same geographic area. ( this is the key)

6. You need to guess how people will find your services and what key words they will use to find
those services, narrow this list to about 12 or less and pick 3 top search phrases, these are the
ones we will focus on and hardwire into your web site.

7. Typically it is possible to get at least one of three to pay-off, but we should be able to be found
using the other two as well, but they may appear further down the list or on other pages.

8. It will take at least a few weeks to see if these efforts pay-off as Google and other search engines
do things on their own schedule. ( Google gathers data about your site and stores it in a database this what
people search, nobody searches the internet in real-time)

9. This process is repeated until we get the search results we are looking for, and then we need to
monitor the effectiveness using an online statistics application (this is usually included in your hosting) .
The search engines change how they search constantly and will continue to evolve, so we need to
reset these factors periodically.

Other effective means of improving search ranking are:
1. Register a URL which contains part or all of the search phase which one might use to find your
business. residentiallandscaping.com

2. Use these key phases in the text of your site so that they are integrated into how you talk about
your business.

3. Get your site linked from other sites that have high traffic, if a client has a web site ask if they will
add a link to your site. You then add a link to their site you have reciprocal links. You will get the
benefit of the high traffic site and are favored by Google. This includes any professional
organization or just about any site that has more traffic than you. Be careful when solicited to add
links to your site with promise of giving you free traffic, these are leach sites and are setup to steal
your traffic and kill your search ranking.

4. Pay for position – you can pay about $500 a month and get at the top of Google( based on how
many times a visitor clicks on you site), however recent investigations have proven that at least
20% of the traffic from these paid links are fake and generated by third party (paid affiliates in the
far east). Millions are being wasted on paid ads that do nothing.
The majority of sites on the internet do not take advantage of any of this so there is very good chance that if
you do this correctly you will not only get more traffic but also get more business. That being said it may do
nothing at all, some companies pay teams of people thousands per month to monitor and adjust their search
engine rankings. How Google and others search the internet is a trademarked secret. The best approach to
improving your ranking is understanding how people find you and doing the best job possible and that your
site helps Google and others , identify your site as being relevant to the searches that people do. Remember
search engines want to find you, that’s what they do. If you make it easy it will be easy for people to find you.