SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION SERVICES

IJDesign offers Search Engine Optimization services (SEO) with all website design projects. We can recommend how to really optimize your website content to assist with searches, and we also build all websites with SEO in mind, adding Title Tags, Meta Tags, and Alt Tags to all the pages.

Here is some information that I provide to my clients to help them think about how their site can be fully optimized for search engines:

Content:
Content is king when it comes to search engine optimization. Search engines like Google Yahoo and MSN love fresh new content that is changing on a daily basis.

Quality Content

Quality Content: Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content. Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

Keywords: Try to use text instead of images whenever possible to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images. Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags in the HTML are descriptive and accurate.

Frequency of updating content: Adding new content to your pages is important. Each time you add or change content on your site, search engines treat it as new content, and this may bring your site higher in rankings.

Keyword Driven Copy - incorporating keywords throughout the content in your webpages further helps search engine crawlers index your pages according to the topics.

Use Blogs or Bulletins:

Add PHP Forums or Bulletin Boards or Blogs: Each time someone posts to the forum the HTML changes and the search engines treat it as new content.

Make Content Easy To Find:

Text Linking within a website: Make a site with a clear hierarchy and use text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Use Specific Page Titles & Alt Tags: Make sure the page titles on your pages are specific to the content. For example, a florist’s pricing page title could be: “Colorado Wedding Flowers Price List”. If key search words or terms are used a page titles, your pages are more likely to show up when these terms are searched.

Sitemaps: A simple HTML sitemap, which should include links to all the pages on your site, will help Search Engines quickly index your content. You should also create a sitemap file for Google that you can submit to them. These can be generated automatically through software such as Google Sitemap Automator, which automatically creates a sitemap.xml file by crawling your website.

Incoming Links:

Incoming links are the links pointing to your site’s pages from another site. When certain words are used in the text of those links, your site is more likely to rank well for the words that were used. It is important for links to be from relevant sites to your business. That means if you have a Florist business, you should get listed on sites such as Wedding Directory Websites or with Floral Association websites. In 2009, it is said that 70% of Google's current algorithm focuses on incoming links to your website, so the more websites that link to your website, the more valueable Google see's your site as being, and ranks you higher in search results.

.edu Links - Getting links from .edu websites are also valueable, as they are looked at by Search Engines as high value as they are often regularly updated with fresh content and are highly used sites.

Updated Websites - Links from websites that are regularly updated with fresh, quality content are valueable as search engines favor updated informational websites.

Link Building - entice other websites to link you by creating content that appeals to others, such as "Top Ten Reasons to Recycle"

Social Media - Social Media is becoming very valuable now in link building. It is very good to have Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace or others mention your company or services and link to your website.

• URL links - where the “anchor text” is the URL of a web page. For example: “View the floral gallery of colorado wedding flowers at http://www.florist.com/wedding-flowers.htm”

• Title & Name links - where the anchor text is the business name or the title of the web page. These links may contribute to the page’s ranking, depending on the words used. For example: “Donna’s Floral Shop”

• Best Keyword Researching Tools - Google AdWords Keyword Tool is a wonderful free tool that allows you to type in keywords that you want to research, and it will return a number of related keywords and data on which keywords were searched most often by users in the last month. Yahoo Advertising also has keyword research tools, and there are also paid services such as Word Tracker and Keyword Discovery that can be utilized. However, free is actually just as good in this case, as Google's Keyword Tool is

Google Trends is also a good tool to research keyword searching trends over a period of time.

• Length of Domain Registration - the age of the domain name, aka - the time that you've had your website live, is very relevant to search engines - the longer the better! There are some who believe that the longer you have your domain name purchased into the future (10 years from now) that it also helps, but there is no specific data that it helps directly with the search engine ranking.

• Landing Pages - Creating pages that are specific to a search that you want to be ranked for is very valueable, and can help you focus on multiple keywords / keyphrases that you want to optimize.

• .com versus .org / .edu / .us / .net - The extension of your website does not affect search engine ranking, but it can confuse users. I typically recommend using .com if at all possible as users will often type in .com by habit even if they knew your website was .net.

• Domain Name - having keywords in your domain name does have some effect on search engine ranking.

• Automatic (301) Redirect - When launching a new website to replace an existing website, using 301 Redirects is very important. Search engines need a 301 Redirect to help them crawl to the new pages.

• Anchor text links - these are linked words that link to a specific page related to the words. For example, a florist could have other sites link the text: “Green Website Design” to the homepage of the design website. This link incorporates good keywords that are searched often. These links may contribute to a page’s search engine ranking, and as a result, “text links” have become a major obsession in the SEO community.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Top Ten FREE Tools:

Market your company's website for free on Google with these free tools.
These top 10 tools will explain how to get to the top of Google searches – for free!

People are searching Google by keywords / keyphrases, they are looking at the organic "free" results and the "AdWords" that are located above and to the right of the natural results.

Many studies show that the large majority (up to 70%) of user clicks are on the top three natural result listings in Google (not the paid Adword banners), so natural results are very valuable. Why are free listings better than paid? First, you don't have to pay Google to have your website listed. Second, the free listings are viewed as more credible than advertised results, so people will click on the natural "free" listings rather than the ads.

1. Google's Keyword Tool: This is a great research tool tells you what people are searching on related keywords. It's a free tool that allows you to enter in your keyword / keyphrases and it will show you all related searches, and how many people are searching keywords that are related. You can use this tool by sorting by Global Monthly Search Volume to get a sense of the number of people searching specific keywords related to your entered terms. It also gives you the "cost per click" average of how many other companies are paying a lot for specific terms, so you knw

2. "Website Content" in the Keyword Tool: This tool look at your website (or a competitors) and it will tell you what Google thinks is your text content. If you do not see the keywords you think are important to your site, then you know that your site is not optimized for those terms, and you need to work on your website content. If you put in a competito's website, you can get great keyword ideas that you can use for your company website.

3. Wonder Wheel: Located underneath "show options" on Google's search results pages. This is a great tool that shows you related keywords on your entered terms. It's a fun tool that gives you great keyword ideas.

4. Google Webmaster Tools: This is a free tool (signup through Google) that will allow you to submit Sitemap.xml files. This tool also will show you diagnostics (how many times Googlebot is looking at your site), view keywords that Google sees your site as optimized for and much more.

5. Google Analytics: Setup a free account, login, this tool gives you javascript code to add to your page and it will provide all sorts of information about your site, including Traffic Overviews, non-paid visits (by keyword), Referring sites, Direct Traffic info, and much more.

6. KeywordSpy.com: This free tool allows you to enter in your competitors' websites to get a list of keywords used by your competitor sites and what even see all the Google ads they are running. You can use this tool to use your competitor to get keyword ideas.

7. XML-Sitemaps.com: A free tool that will generate a Google sitemap for you automatically. Once this is generated, you will need to upload the sitemap.xml file to your website. Third, you can then submit your new sitemap into the Google Webmaster Tools (see #3).

8. Firefox Rank Checker: To get this free tool, visit SEOBook.com, sign in for a free account, and then download the Rank Checker tool. This tool will tell you the Google ranking (position) of any website (yours or competitors) for specific keywords. This tool will show you where you stand, and where your competitors stand in search engine results. The tool will show you side by side your rankings versus competitors sites, you can save the searches, automate them, save results to excel, etc - a great tool for showing a side-by-side comparison of your website to competitor sites.

9. Yahoo Site Explorer: Site Explorer can be found on Yahoo, it is another free tool that allows you to "Explore URLs" to show how many links are coming into a website. Remember, Google ranks sites higher for having more incoming links, so this is a good tool to see how many incoming links a website has. This is a great tool to use this to find websites that you can also have link to your site.

10. SEOCentro.com Meta Tag Analyzer Tool: This tool will go out and analyze a website's HTML structure, and show you the title tags, description meta tags, and keywords. It will also show if the title tag is too long, and shows keyword density (how many times a term shows up on the page). You can use this tool again to research your competitors to see what they are doing on their site, or to look at your website and understand your page tags better.

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Hiring A Company for Search Engine Optimization

Professional web design companies will incorporate the guidelines mentioned above when designing your website.

If you are providing the content, make sure to use keywords in your copy. Researching keywords is always a good idea, we can offer you keyword researching tools that you can enter in keywords or phrases and it will tell you how many times a keyword or phrase has been searched in the last month. Plus, it will give you related searches. This can help assist you in writing copy that incorporates highly searched keywords and therefore will help in search engine rankings.

Please contact Idelle Fisher of IJDesign if you are interested in ecommerce website design with green in mind: 720.260.3541

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