Louisville SEO

I just took my dog to the pet spa while I left town for the weekend, leaving my business card for emergency contact info.  When I picked her up, the owner and I were discussing how to get the most from his website when I told him I would be glad to help if he ever has problems.  He had read my business card, and knew that I did SEO, to which he said that he had SEO, the Yellow Pages.  I have heard it a thousand times, but it still gets to me…the Yellow Page listings are not search engine optimization services.

So here is the difference between SEO services and Yellow Pages listings:

Steps to On-site Optimization

Though the biggest key to a nice ranking site is good copy, a good quick check on a site to how well the optimization is, is as follows.

1. Does the page title target the most important terms? Not only should the page titles have the key terms included, they should be repeated in varying combinations when possible. Only the first 10 words or so will show up in Google so don’t worry about what the rest will look like… just make it useful. Try to eliminate “stop” words, or words that don’t matter, like instead of “SEO in Louisville Kentucky” just say “SEO Louisville Kentucky”

2. Are all Meta Tags included and targeted correctly? The keyword and description tags should be included and set up to target that page’s specific keywords. Some engines still use Meta tags as a ranking criteria and the description is what will show in the search results. Make this inviting yet focused. It’s OK to use full sentences here, they need to read well in the search results.

3. Are the keywords distributed properly throughout the site? The most effective sites will be set up with individual pages to highlight specific products or services. This allows you to focus a smaller amount of keywords per page instead of trying to stuff a lot onto one. This makes for long boring pages that won’t convert even if you can drive traffic to it. The titles and tags should be different for each page and all keywords for that page should be included in the content.

4. Are all pictures, buttons, and video labeled with proper Alt and Title tags? Though they don’t carry huge weight, alts and titles on pictures can make quite a difference on pages where it is hard to fit in your words. Even on pages with plenty of content, there’s never a reason to let a picture slide without some text attached to it.

5. Is the architecture of the site correct and is there a sitemap? A hierarchal site is best with defined “levels” of importance. i.e. homepage -> categories -> specific produce. Along with this you have to make sure that all links within the site point to the right pages and more importantly, that they all point to something. If a bot runs into a dead link it might just leave the site. On this same note, sites should always have a sitemap so that engines know how many pages there are and what the url for each is.

6. Is the code for the site cumbersome? A quick glance at the structure of the code can be beneficial. You want the code as clean as possible both for load times, browser compatibility, and ease of scour by the bots. Easiest way is to load the index and one inner page into Dreamweaver and scan for highlighted or emboldened text. If you see a lot of useless code (tags with no content), you should probably go through the entire site and remove as much as you can.