How well is your site performing? Can your customers find you on the web? Very often the answers to these questions are “not very well” and “no”. Search engine optimization can deliver targeted traffic — i.e., customers looking for your services in your market area — if done correctly, ensuring that your site’s pages appear at the top of the results when people search online using the relevant keywords.
Search engine optimization (SEO) involves examining every element of your site to make sure it will be ranked highly by the main search engines. If you target the right keywords, you will see a big difference in the amount and quality of traffic you receive.
Beware of the SEO snakeoil salesmen!
The SEO business is notoriously rife with companies and individuals who make outrageous (and untrue) claims, guaranteeing their clients’ websites will rank in Google’s and Yahoo’s top three spots within a week. Here’s some advice: if anyone tells you something like that, end the conversation immediately because you’re wasting your time.
The truth about getting a good SE ranking
The truth is, getting a favorable position in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing is usually an ongoing process. This process involves monitoring your site’s statistics, learning how people are finding your site (or determining why they’re not finding your site) and making continual adjustments to its content, structure, meta tags and keywords.
Don’t give up — a good or even great SE ranking is within reach
Using my tried-and-tested methods, you’ll usually see an improvement in your search engine ranking within a couple of weeks. To reach a goal of say, a first-page ranking for a specific key phrase, may take a bit longer but can usually be achieved within a few weeks to several months.
Some of the factors that affect search results include:
- Keyword-focused anchor text from external links — External links, also called inbound links, are other sites that are linking to your site. The wording used within that link is important. If it contains key words or phrases, it’s that much more powerful. For example, if the link reads “one of the best Italian restaurants in Northern New Jersey“, that’s a lot more potent then something like this: “For the best Italian restaurant in Northern New Jersey, click here.” See the difference? One link contains valuable key words and the other doesn’t. And that makes a BIG difference to the search engines.
- External link popularity — The popularity or relative authority of site that is providing an inbound link to yours of great importance. For example, if you’re an architectural firm, having a link to your site from The American Institute of Architects (AIA) website is going to count for a lot more in the eyes of the search engines than if, say, carlsonwebdesign.com links to you — not that that’s a bad thing, but you see what I mean. The AIA obviously has a lot more “link juice” within its field than my website does.
- Keywords and Key Phrases within the Title Tag — The title tag is a part of those XHTML documents of which the pages of your website are comprised, and it resides near the top of those documents in between the <head></head> tags. Yes, I know this is techie-talk, but it’s really not terribly complicated stuff. This is actually a relatively easy fix and does a great deal of good for your search engine positioning, yet most sites miss this. The title tag does not appear directly on the pages of your website, but generates those words that you see within the browser bar at the very top of your screen. Often it says something very obvious and completely useless to the search engines, like “XYZ Company — Home Page”. This title tag should contain keywords, NOT your company name. If you have to have your name in there it should be last, as so: “Bergen County plumbing companies, north Jersey plumbers, plumbers in NJ — XYZ Plumbing Corp” (without the quotation marks, of course). The title tag is the first thing the search engine bots read when crawling your site, and you need good keywords and keyphrases in there. For futher information about optimizing the title tag for better search engine results, click this link.
- Competition for a specific keyword/phrase — Keyword competition has a major bearing on your site’s chances of getting a top SE position. I’ll explain this concept further by way of example: I had a client who sold a very specific product for which there was little competition; less than a dozen other companies manufactured this product. Thus, it wasn’t a great challenge to see to it that his site ranked at the top of all the search engines. Shortly thereafter, I obtained another client, a law firm, that wanted to get at the top of the first page of the search engines for the key phrase NJ law firm. Big difference, as you can see. There are quite a few law firms in New Jersey, and as I’m sure you can imagine, NJ law firm is quite a competitive key phrase.
In the case of my law firm client, I advised that we focus on a specialty and specific geographic area. After asking a few questions I learned that most of his clients were local, in Bergen County and the surrounding north Jersey and southern NY state region, and his practice specialty was in divorce law. Still a competitive niche, but a lot more feasible than “NJ law firms”. The lesson? If you’re in a competitive market, drill down to your niche market and work on making headway there. Once your site’s been around for a while and you have a good number of websites linking to you, then you can start expanding to a wider audience. A word of advice: getting a lot of visitors to your site is not as important as getting targeted visitors — i.e., people who are in your area and looking for your specific services.
Do you need professional help (with your SEO, I mean)?
Each of these four search engine factors that I mentioned above are vitally important, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg and I don’t want to turn this section of my website into a tutorial. As Sean Connery, one of my all-time favorite actors (along with Chuck Norris, of course), said in one of my all-time favorite films, The Untouchables: “Thus endeth the lesson.”
Suffice it to say that there’s a lot to this constantly-changing field of search engine optimization and Web marketing, and there are many large companies that charge very big dollars to provide this service — as well they should, if they’re doing a good job. Because it’s all about Return On Investment, right? If you’re paying your SEO specialist $2000 a month and they’re bringing in $5000 a month of website-generated business to you, then that’s a good ROI, correct?
However, I can understand a company not wanting to commit such large financial resources to something as difficult to guarantee as SEO. That’s why I prefer to start with a low monthly fee (quarterly commitments are discounted), giving you the opportunity to see if I’m worth my salt, as the old-timers used to say. If you feel that I’ve done well for you after three months then at that point we can discuss a plan that is suitable to your needs. That’s as fair a system as I’ve been able to come up with, to both my clients and myself. If you’re interested in talking with me or receiving pricing, contact me at by phone or email at your earliest convenience.
Wait a sec — how about I provide a few examples?
I’ve been successful at getting my SEO clients on the first page of the major search engines, and for some very difficult and competitive keywords and keyphrases. Here are some examples:
- The Dog House Saloon & Grill in Washington Township, NJ currently ranks very highly on Google and Yahoo, which comprises 93% of the search engine traffic (about 82% for Google and 11% for Yahoo) for the key phrases: bergen county happy hours, bergen county bars, live music bergen county nj, bergen county bbq, best bbq ribs in northern nj, and many other sought-after keywords and phrases. Considering how many bars with websites there are in the highly-populated Bergen County region of northeastern NJ, that’s not bad, if I do say so.
- Horseless Carriage Carriers is a nationally known company based out of Paterson, NJ. I did extensive search engine optimization when I redesigned their site, and they currently rank at or near the top of the first page for all the major search engines for such popular key phrases as classic auto transport, enclosed auto transport, classic car storage company, and many other important search terms within their aggressively competitive industry.
- Washington Township Swim and Recreation Club is a project that I did free of charge a couple of years ago for the town swim club to which my family belongs. Currently, it ranks within the top three positions on Google, Yahoo, and Bing for the key phrase nj swim clubs — and for numerous variations of that phrase. To give you an idea of how competitive a key phrase is nj swim clubs, it returns between 11 million and 13 million results on each of the three major search engines. The site I built for them comes up between #1 and #3. Again, not to toot my own horn, but…not bad!
If you want your website to be seen and found by your customers, call a pro — Call Carlson!