The Basics of SEO Services
When it comes to SEO a lot of heads spin and brains boggle. The average business owner in Burlington and even 98.7% of their employees have no idea what SEO is. Even their web developers and online marketers end up frantically looking for answers in books and on the web so they can at the very least give management some answers about SEO.
Well, my ten years plus experience in SEO and my desire to help you make my experience on your website an informative one compels me to give you the basics. The following can be considered the basic building blocks of SEO. Implementing these SEO strategies in your website files is quite easy and will have long-term effects that will become measurable over time.
Either print this page and give it to your in-house web designer follow along below.
Page Names
At first thought it seems that the way you name your pages has nothing to do with SEO. Well it does. SEO is about clarity for you, your users and the search engines. Each one of us wants to clearly know what each of your pages is about.
For example, if you sell cars, new or used, you should have pages named the following way:
New-Cars.html
Used-Cars.html
…and not page1.html or page2.html.
Here are some examples of the improper and proper ways of naming pages respectively;
specials.html
RV-Specials.html
application.html
Credit-Application.html
links.html
Music-Related-Links.html
about.html
About-Pool-Cleaning.html
parts.html
Boat-Parts.html
Also, make sure to make the first letter of each word a capital. This helps your users clearly see what the page is about.
Next: Page Title
The title of the page should be self explanatory but for many people it isn’t so I will make it clear for you.
You will find the title of each 0f your HTML page near the top of the code right between the two following tags, <title>My Page Title</title>.
So what should the title of each of my pages be? The name of your page. Giving your page title the same name as the page substantiates your claim of what the page is about – to users and to the search engines.
Lastly: Headings and Paragraphs
Within the code of your HTML page should be two elements, namely Headings and paragraphs. We all know headings tell users (and search engines) what your page is about and paragraphs explain, explore or discuss the topic of the heading.
The tags for the headings and paragraphs are as follows;
<h1>My Informative Heading</h1>
<p>My paragraph explaining, exploring or discussing the topic of my heading.</p>
Simple isn’t it? Not yet. What should you do with those HTML elements? Add your keywords to them as you did for your page names and page titles. If the name of your page is Music-Related-Links.html and the title of your page is Music Related Links then the value of your Heading should be Music Related Links. naming headings as such gives clarity to your user’s and to the search engines as to what your page is about.
The same goes for the paragraph. Never waste valuable space. Use those same named elements in your paragraphs too. For the music related links example, our paragraph could be as simple as ” you will find many links on this page” or you can take advantage of the opportunity and write “On this page you will find many great music related links that I have complied over the past several months”.
Keywords
I knew you’d be asking what keywords are. Keywords are the words that people use to search for your products or services when they search on Google or other search engine. When someone visits Google looking for boat parts they don’t only type parts into the search box. They would most likely type ‘boat parts‘ into the box. 99.34% of the time the pages that are going to come up first have ‘boat parts’ in the title or several times in the HTML page. Note: if you ever find a page through Google that didn’t have the keywords you searched for in the title or anywhere else on the page but is still #1 on Google it is most likely due to the fact that there are many links back to the site from other sites with, for instance, ‘Boat Parts‘ in the link text.
Before you implement any of the above you have to consider two important aspects of SEO.
The one is with respect to the page names. if you already have a page on the internet named parts.html, it’s not advisable to simply rename the page and trash the old one. Google still has a copy of your page in their cache and if a user searches Google and finds your page that doesn’t exist anymore that will not be a good experience and Google doesn’t like giving their users a bad experience. What you have to do is tell Google that you are replacing that old page with your new one. You can do this by declaring that your page has moved permanently (301 redirect). Preparation for 301 redirecting pages has to be in place first before you launch your new pages.
The second is you need to carefully determine what your keywords are (remember keywords are the words people use to find your services on Google). The best place to begin exploring keywords related to your products or services is with the Google Keyword Tool.
After you have taken the above advice into consideration and have implemented all the changes you should be set for the next phase of an SEO campaign.
