Ladies & Gentlemen, Start Your Search Engines

It wasn't long ago that if you wanted to be found by customers you needed to be listed in the phone book.  If you wanted to be found by people in multiple cities you needed to be listed in multiple phone books.  Now, if you ask a teenager to give you a phone book they will look at you with a blank stare, the same look you get when trying to describe a mixed tape.  But that's another story. Here are 5 tips for climbing the search engine ladder without having to pay.

 

1-    Page Titles- One of the most over looked aspects of optimizing your web pages for search engines is having a proper title for your web page. I'm not talking headlines here I'm talking about the bar up on top of the browser that usually says the name of the site and nothing else.  If you have a site hosted on our servers our text editing software allows you to edit the text in that bar to better describe the page people are visiting. For example you could title your page "mycompany.com" or you can title it "my company specializing in this and that serving San Antonio, Chicago, New York, Miami" Now if someone in one of those towns is looking for what you offer which page title is going to be more relevant to search engines?

 

2-    Body Copy - This is a deal breaker for most search engines.  If you are planning on using key words in your Meta tags, which I'll explain later, you need to be sure that you are making every attempt to also use those words in the body of your web sites text.   If you are using a key word in your page titles as described above, you will also want to try and reiterate those words in your text. 

 

3-    Body Copy 2.0 - Another little known secret is the higher your key words are in the text the better your page will be ranked in relation to searches.  I know it sounds weird, but the Search Engines are sophisticated enough now that they can tell that words at the beginning of a page are probably more important on that page than words used at the bottom of a page. Kind of like in a newspaper where the most important info is at the beginning of the story and the other facts are thrown in at the end. 

 

4-      Frequency - The more often you use a key word the more relevant it is to a search engine.  Again a weird trick of nerds creating some kind of super artificial intelligent computer systems, but the search engines can actually "read" your site and keep count of how often a certain word appears on your site.  The more times it appears the more relevant it may be for someone doing a search on that word.  Now you don't want to sacrifice a pleasant looking site for search ranking glory because if you just load your page with key word after key word you may rank higher on the search engines, but if in doing so you make your site look unprofessional, you really didn't accomplish anything if people are just going to leave your site in frustration anyway.  If you want an example of how frequency works take this article for example.  Count how many times I've used the term Search Engines.  By using it so many times, here it comes again, search engines can figure out that this page probably has information on that key word so maybe it should list it for people searching for that term.

 

5-    Meta Tags - Another important or not so important feature depending on the day and whom your talking to, is Meta tags or using key words in the scripting of your web pages.  There has been some debate on the effectiveness of Meta tags with some search engines because of the sophistication in which web pages can now be read.  I believe that it is always a good idea to take advantage of every possible advantage you can have especially when it is available for free.  Again if your site is hosted with us, you have access to creating key words with your text editing software.  One of the main points to remember about using Meta tags is to be page specific with your key words and try to use words that you actually are using in your text.  If you have a page on your site talking about cookies use a Meta tag: cookies.  If on that same page you have a tag for burgers, but the page has no mention of the word burger then it's possible the search engines will penalize you.  They see it as an attempt at false advertising and no one likes false advertising. 

 

This is just the tip of the many different ways to achieve better search engine results, but hopefully you can find this helpful.  If you would like more help on optimizing your pages for search engines contact Your Virtual Marketing Department Marketing Director and they will be more than happy to schedule a meeting with you.