SEO

Keeping Your Website a Fine-Tuned SEO Machine

Cars need tune ups and airplanes go into the hanger to get optimized for the next flight. If you are a web owner that has the “upload it and leave it” mentality, consider adding a weekly or monthly tune up to your website. Ten to fifteen minutes here and there can only do one thing—make you more successful.

1. Start small with the meta information.

a. Examine your Title meta tag on each page. Do they describe the page contents? Do they contain the right keywords to drive traffic to that page? Is at least one part of the Title geo-specific? Example, “Attorney, Los Angeles, CA” and not just “Attorney” or “Lawyer” for “My Law Firm.”

b. Examine your Description meta tag. Make sure that each page, if it is at all possible, has a different meta tag description. Google does not like repeated information.

2. Check your links. Use a free online program to make sure you don’t have any broken links. Go to your favorite search engine and type in “free link checker” and use one that looks good to you. You never know, in the course of making some quick updates the week or month before, you may have simply mis-typed a hyperlink address. It's always good to make sure your site is clean and free of broken links. Both search engines and visitors get irked when the link does not work.

3. Do a little marketing. The quickest and most intelligent way to jump-start your SEO is to follow your competitor’s lead. Either you, on your own, will become savvy enough to eclipse them or you won’t. The same applies if you hire an SEO firm. It’s that simple. Pretend you are someone looking for the goods or services you provide and begin typing in keywords to Google. Observe which companies come up on the first and second pages of the search results and study them. Study their page content, page titles, file naming conventions, meta descriptions, online advertising placements, and especially their back-links. It may take several hours of detective work for each website to do this, but you will find with great certainty what you are up against and the extent of hours and dollars it will take to compete for your relevant set of keywords.

Steps 1, 2, and 3 can be repeated daily, weekly, monthly—whatever your schedule allows. The next 2 steps go a little deeper into your maintenance plan.

Google Analytics. It’s free, it’s easy, and it’s extremely useful. If you aren’t paying an SEO company to handle your website, you should definitely take advantage of this amazing tool. You sign up for it here: www.google.com/analytics/. Google will give you a unique code to put on each page you want to track. You don’t need to be a programmer to figure it out. It’s just a few lines of script that you paste into your webpage exactly where Google shows you to do it. It really is as easy as it sounds. And what do you get? You find out how many people are visiting your website, what keywords brought them to your website, what websites referred them to your website, where they are from, how much time they spent on your website and much more. This is an amazing free treasure trove of information. You will find out if the people visiting your website are, in fact, the type of visitor you are targeting. If not, all you have to do is tweak your Title meta tag and your content to let the search engine know, for example: you want people who were searching for ”logo design” not ”graphic design” or “child therapist” not “couples therapy.”

The Alexa Factor. Alexa monitors traffic levels for websites, while arguably a flawed system, it is still used as a measuring stick to gauge your website. For instance, websites with advertising can often charge more by having a better Alexa ranking. But why should you care about Alexa? Let’s say you own a flower store in Boston. You go to Alexa.com, look up your competitor, and find that they have an Alexa ranking of 79,000 and you have one of 8,500,000. This is a quick indicator that THEY and not YOU are getting all the flower shop web traffic in the area. Additionally, the more traffic you get, the more likely your organic search engine results will increase. Marketing activities that increase web visitors will give you a better Alexa ranking. Across the board, SEO experts agree that if you download the ”Alexa Toolbar” and visit your website once a day, encourage friends and colleagues to download the tool bar and visit each other’s websites—that this will increase your Alexa ranking, too. It’s a simple thing to do, but don’t expect dramatic results. But the best use of your time is simply to get targeted visitors to your website through standard marketing channels. That is always the bottom line.