An Introductory Guide -- and a Basic Review

-- for Webmasters, Business Owners, and Real-Estate Professionals --

• How do your web pages get into the web-search engines, so new customers, as well as existing clients, can find you?
• What determines your appearance in search engine results pages?  (SERPS)
• Can you control your appearance, and improve your ranking in those search engine results, without breaking any rules, and trump your competitors?

 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a complex art, and its world is constantly changing, day-to-day, month-to-month.  Here's an introduction for beginners, or an intermediate review for more experienced webmasters.  It's distilled from my own reading and local small-business website experience, over the past several years, in the school of hard knocks...  mistakes were made, lessons learned!  Here are some highlights.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Local-Business Professionals

Table of Contents

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0. Introduction - Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

1. WebSite Preparation 
2. Search Engines
3. Web Directories, Inbound-Links, and PageRank
4. Forums, Groups, Wikis, WebRings, and Blogs

For more info, see:

Real-Estate-Marketing--Hints-Tips-Links

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1. WebSite Preparation 

 

Of course, you have already carefully chosen a relevant, keyword-rich, search-friendly domain name, and registered it.  Beware when you're searching to find new domain names -- some domain-search tools will trigger a domain registrar to grab up those good names you are thinking about, before you even have a chance, and then you'll have to pay much more. 

• Naming your domain?  What keywords would your future clients be searching on?  It's gotta be more about them than about you.  Be local.  Be relevant.  Be memorable, pronounceable, spellable, and short as possible.  Having one domain name for your professional, personal branding, and another domian for geographic appeal, is a good strategy.  (You can have a different landing page for each domain name.)
  

• For help, use this tool, with your relevant keywords.  It's considered a safe tool, until proven otherwise:  Domain Tools Keyword Suggestions and Domain Name Search Tool  -- this tool filters out unavailable choices, which saves lots of your time trying for domain names that are already taken.  Also, it uses synonyms for your keywords to get more possibilities you may not have considered.  It'll give you suggested names in batches of 20.

• WHY do you need a keyword-relevant, interesting domain name?  To get more traffic, from any and all sources, that's why!  Again, to grab an audience, it's gotta be about THEM, not about YOU, for best results... unless they already know you... you need to entice them to TYPE in your domain name... if they see it in PRINT.  Make it interesting, and relevant.
  

• Need to research the registrar info, whois, to reconnect with your old domain name?  KLOTH.net can help you.  http://www.kloth.net/services/  That can also help you troubleshoot basic DNS setup problems, too... try the Dig tool.

Also, you've created a few inter-related, content-rich, visually-appealing web pages, and have carefully named each one using relevant keywords in the text contents, img tags...  Use your keywords everywhere:  in your Text, Headings, Titles, Descriptions, URLs.  (Dashes in URLs are best, never use spaces, avoid underscores.)  Avoid keyword stuffing, the ratio of keywords to text should not be too great.  Lists of keywords may be penalized unless there is readable, interesting text included.

You've linked your pages together, with an inviting landing-page (also called a home-page, or main-page -- but don't waste your precious url keywords on ubiquitous names like those!)  Finally, your web-pages are uploaded to a web-server, and any web-browser can display them on the worldwide web, www, or whirled-wild-web.

Before you submit your site to the search engines, and try to get at least a few inbound hyperlinks from other websites, be sure that your web pages are ready for indexing, and ready for the public.  Not perfect, just ready... 

 

Here are some universal HTML structural tips:

 

• The HTML TITLE tag:  Give each and every page a unique TITLE tag. 
• It's the "Headline", or label, for each web page,
• automatically used in the web browser's title bar,
• also used by search engines to "label" your site, and as
• headings for bookmarks/favorites whenever a user saves a link.

... So, use your TITLE tag to "Brand" each of your webpages.  

... Use the vertical bar | to separate phrases.  Consider using at least one common keyword or keyphrase to brand your entire site, and one unique keyword in each page's title tag, to distinguish it from all the rest of your pages. 
... Put your most important words first!
... Your Title should be no longer than 50-70 characters. Shorter is better.

• Google truncates near 62 characters with ... ellipsis.

• Beyond that limit, keywords may count, but keep it short.
  

Examples: 

John Doe, Real Estate  |  Los Altos, California  |  Listings

or

John Doe, Real Estate  |  Los Altos, California  |  Biography, Testimonials, Services

or

John Doe, Real Estate  |  Los Altos, California  |  Blog
 

• The Meta Description tag is  displayed in search engine results, and by some directories.  If it's missing, the search engines may use the first 140~150 visible characters, generally, but that may also depend on the actual search query terms.  Description should be no longer than 140 characters.

 

• The Meta Keywords tag is not so important, since Google does not fully exploit it, but the actual use of keywords in your text is very important! Be sure to use your most important keywords in your URLs, Titles, Descriptions, HTML headings (H1, H2, ...), IMG ALT text, and in the readable text for your web pages.  Use several variations: synonyms, singular, plural, ... Think about how your customers or audience will search for and scan the results, and design for them.  Avoid keyword spamming, and very long lists of keywords.  Use up to a dozen relevant keywords naturally in your readable text on each page.  Only put a keyword in the tags if you use that keyword in your readable text, a mis-match may cause you a penalty in SERPS and Google PageRank. (Some have reported penalties for using keywords in your HTML header, if they are not found in your text...)

 

More on meta tags here... [wiki] and here. 

 

You also must always have some relevant text: content that is readable, and worthwhile for your audience or customers.  That text clearly helps your search engine positioning.  Is your web page interesting enough to be link-worthy?  Is there web-robot-readable, keyword-relevant TEXT in all your pages?  Did you use keywords in those ALT-text tags in your images? 

Do you update your content often, perhaps weekly, or monthly?  Blogging is one way to do this in a structured, disciplined, professional fashion.

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2. Search Engines

 

Web pages are crawled and indexed by web-robots, aka search engine spiders, such as Google, Yahoo, MSN-Live-BING, Ask.com and A9.com, to name the most popular of many, many search engines.  There are also consolidators, such as Dogpile, Jux2, and AllTheWeb, which combine results from several of those top search engines.   Do some searches, check your listings from time to time, and compare those search results with your competitors' or colleagues' results.

You may submit your new website or home-page URL here: Google, Yahoo, and MSN-Live-BING.  It may take a few days -- or weeks -- to see any results.  After that initial delay, new sites may rank high on Google for a few days or weeks, then may go into the "Google sandbox" for 2 - 6 months, where their ranking may be penalized.  Periodically updating or adding content, and gradually getting more and more new back-links, may help you minimize this "Google sandbox" phenomenon.  Submit your home-page, and make sure it has HTML hyperlinks to all the interesting pages on your site (via a visible site-map, or menu-bar.

Dissatisfied with your Google search results?  Help Google improve!  CLICK ME...

To get and to keep your website listed, you will need at least one back-link from another website that is already indexed.   (See Web Directories, below.)  If the pages with back-links to your website are highly relevant, good quality, and hosted on different ISPs, different servers, different IP addresses, different subnets, all the better for your pagerank!

Google: About half of all web searching is done via Google, and the other half is distributed among all the others.  Some useful Google resources include:

• Use the Google search keywords site: or allinurl: or allintitle:  to check all your webpages in Google's index.   
• Google Group for Webmaster Help, where webmasters can discuss Google changes, problems, and solutions.
• Matt Cutts Blog, a Google employee who enlightens the public on what to do and what to avoid, to get your site and your webpages listed, and improve your position in the Google SERPS.
• Google Local, a free business listing and mapping service.
• Get a Google account, and upload a key, so you can get all the valuable statistics and status info from the Google Resources for Webmasters.
• Use the Google toolbar for suggesting keyword phrases while your're searching, and for inspecting PR for any page you are viewing.  There are many tools that partly automate this process, some free, some costly.

Google Business Listings:  more later...  

and your free listing in

1800GOOG411  aka  1-800-GOOG-411

Google Analytics:  more later...

Google AdWords:  more later...

Google AdSense:  more later...

Yahoo:  more later...

Yahoo search often discloses more links than Google or MSN-Live combined, to investigate back-links, use Yahoo and type in:

linksite:www.your-domain-name.com

linkdomain:www.your-domain-name.com

Yahoo Local... business listings... basic listing is free, extra features at a fee.

MSN-Live:  more later...

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3. Web Directories, Inbound-Links, and PageRank

There are hundreds of factors that determine Google PageRank (PR) -- but it is largely a function of (1) your text content and (2) the quantity and quality of hyperlinks into your website or webpage, sometimes called back-links or inbound-links.  For those web pages that link to yours, both their reputation and relevance are very important.  PageRank denotes reputation, keywords determine relevance.  The more highly reputed and relevant those pages are, the higher your website will be ranked in search results, for certain keywords and phrases... but there are caveats, and some factors are not in your control.  Yahoo uses a similar technique called WebRank.

 

One source for back-links can be regional or topical web directories. Because listing in the the Yahoo directory is very expensive, and DMOZ/ODP listing is very very very slow, or impossible, many alternative web directories have sprung up.  One way to improve your search engine results is to get listed on a few directory pages that have:

• good pagerank, PR 2 or 3 is very good for a directory page,
• relevant categories for your specific subject matter and keywords,
• not too many links, 50-100 -- or less -- per page, and
• free listings...

With the exception of Yahoo's directory, paid links may actually harm your pagerank, and diminish your position in Google SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) according to Matt Cutts.  A predominance of links from pages with PR=0, that have little or no content or relevance, too many links, or be in a "bad neighborhood" may also hurt your Google results, or even get your website banned from Google.  Avoid "link-farms" with no relevant content.  Adding a few directory listings per day (or per week) will improve your search engine position, but ading too many (20? 50? 100?) in a short time (days) may harm your results.

The HTML Anchor Text for your back-links is very important, too.  "Brand" those links with your business name, and some of your keywords, whenever possible.  Have a variety of anchor text and descriptions ready.  Don't use the same text for all your directory submissions, rotate variations from a list. 

Some free directories require reciprocal links, some do not.  Reciprocal links are not as valuable as one-way links.  Create a webpage for those reciprocal links, and make sure it gets indexed by linking to it from your home page.  Google's ranking algorithm may actually penalize excessive reciprocal links, it seems incestuous or suspicious to them.

Build alliances with webmasters who have relevant, related, or domain-specific web pages... find useful directories...  community resources...  get some back-links into your web pages, and let the link-juice flow!

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4.  Forums, Groups, Wikis, WebRings, and Blogs

Having a blog where you create content that interest your clients, and your alliances, and adding new content to that blog on a regular basis: daily, weekly,  monthly, or quarterly...  can earn you some points with the search engine algorithms.

Join some relevant forums, groups, and webrings, and post comments on other's blogs where links are allowed.  Post a few useful items each month.  Don't spam.  Some wikis and blogs now use nofollow, so they will only be useful for traffic, not for pagerank.  Web-rings are one of the oldest, free techniques for building links and sharing traffic.

Create your own blog, write topical material often, and your search engine results will blossom.   Host a discussion forum on your site, and let others contribute fresh content that also feeds the search engine spiders.  The time you will invest, a few hours a week,  pays you many dividends in traffic and page-rank, bringing you more customers.

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5. For more info...

SEO articles, forums, and tools are good resources for webmasters, for example SEO Chat News, SEO Chat Fourms, and SEO Chat Tools are among the best.  There are many other good ones, such as the We Build Pages tools.  My dynamic collection of SEO resources can be found here.

There are web experts who specialize in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) which includes SEO and paid advertising to increase your web traffic.

Where to find good directories and get inbound-links?  Search on your target keywords, check the top few websites. To see where they are listed, check back links into those top web pages, using SEO tools such as Back-Link-Watch, which analyses back links and displays their "anchor" text, pagerank, total outbound links on that page, and nofollow flag for each inbound link.

Spending a few hours every few weeks will help your local small-business, organization, or business-professional website get more traffic, and capture new clients for you!

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:: Some Useful Web Directory Resources ::

::  MerchantCircle  ::

 

:: Search Engine Results :: Web Directories :: Directory Submissions ::

:: 496367739091949805 :: (c) G. Fanucci 2007, 2008 ::

 :: Dir1-Links :: Random Links :: Misc ::