As everyone now knows, having top rankings on Google can literally make or break your business. However, so much has been written about optimization and there are so many SEO companies out there providing differing messages that the average consumer is now really confused about how to get their site to rank.
Below, I have listed the top 3 things you can do today to get on your way to better rankings. This article is purposed for San Diego businesses but could really be used for any business looking to rank in their local city.
- Keyword Strategy - keywords are the backbone of any good SEO program. However, finding the right keywords takes a good marketing foundation and a ton of keyword and competitve research. If you choose the wrong keywords, it will mean that your optimization is essentially a waste. Optimizing for “san diego hotel” for example, is way too broad and way too competitve a term. Optimizing instead for “san diego ca hotel” would provide much more targeted traffic that would be much easier to obtain than going the other route. Spend lots of time on keyword research, it is the most valuable thing you can do!
- Title Tag- The title tag plays one of the most vital roles in your optimization effort. Placing your primary keywords at the start of the tag is best but remember to keep your tags short and sweet. Also be wary of adding any extra words to the tag so that you don’t end up watering down the weight of the words. Also, less is more – so do not try to optimize for more than 2-3 words per page but remember plurals are different words and are treated as such by the engines. Back to our example, the title tag should read “San Diego Ca Hotel, San Diego CA Hotels”. Anything else is extraneous. Finally, ensure that the tags are relevant to the content ony our page – this is crucial to improved rankings.
- Robots, XML Sitemap- A robots.txt file is a place on your site where you can tell the robots what pages to crawl and what pages not to crawl. Most importantly, you have an opportunity to tell the robots to crawl your XL sitemap, thereby ensuring that all of the pages of your site can be indexed. if you want more information about robots files, go to http://www.robotstxt.org/. An XML sitemap is also critical because it is here where YOU tell the engines how many pages you have in your site, what pages of your site are the most important, and how often to crawl them. Here you put the control in your hands, rather than the engines.There are a gazillion free tools out there that can help you create an XML sitemap but we like Vigos http://www.vigos.com/products/gsitemap/.
Try these steps out first to see if you can make any traction with your SEO program. there are, of course, many other steps that need to be completed to ensure you rank but these steps should be a good starting point.
Tags: Search engine optimization, SEO, seo basics
