Website Optimization
There are many factors to consider when optimizing your website, way to many to include in today’s presentation, so for today we will focus on some of the things you can do to make your website more search engine friendly. Search engines use what’s called a crawler to crawl your site for terms that are relevant to what is being searched for. In this case we will work with our own site, .indianapolisweddingprofessionals.com, (our Homepage), and will deal only with this page for today’s presentation. Use these techniques on the other pages on your site, but make adjustments in the wording to fit the new page, keep it relevant to what you think a person might search for to find this page.
Things on our site that run in the background that the crawler will crawl are, the page title, keywords, and a description of your site. It is very important that all contain terms that are relevant to what a person might be searching for, but first lets start with the web address.
Your Web Address
This is the first step in getting your site noticed, in the case of our site it’s plain to see. Do a search for Indianapolis Wedding Professionals, we will be Number one in most cases because our name has all the search terms in the web address. When ever possible, try to include terms that you think people looking for your services will use when they search for your services. On our site, we have taken it a step further on the individual pages, indianapolisweddingprofessionals.com/Indianapolis_wedding_photographers, or /Indianapolis_bridal_alterations, or /Indianapolis_wedding_florists and so on. These are all terms that a bride looking for wedding vendors in Indianapolis might use, and as such, should make it easier for brides to find our site using any search terms related to Weddings In Indianapolis, at least that is our goal.
Page Title
This is the text you see in the explorer bar at the top of your browser when a page is open. The page title of a page is one of the most important criteria for the search engines, and it does not necessarily mean your company name, unless you are a big, well-recognized corporation such as McDonalds. Titles should be geared more towards the keywords you are using on your site. In the case of our Homepage, our Title/Titles are: "Indianapolis Wedding Professionals, Indiana Wedding Professionals, Indiana Weddings, Indianapolis Weddings, Central Indiana Weddings, Weddings Indianapolis, Weddings Indiana, Indianapolis Wedding Companies".
Keywords
These are search terms that a person might type when searching for something on the Internet. Keywords should be relevant to the information on your site, the more relevant your site is to what the person is searching for, the higher your site will appear in the search results. These are the keywords used on our Homepage: "Indianapolis Wedding Professionals, Indiana Wedding Professionals, Indiana Weddings, Indianapolis Weddings, Central Indiana Weddings, Weddings Indianapolis, Weddings Indiana" Note that they are pretty much the same as our page title!!
Page Description
This is a description of the contents, products, or services offered on our website and show in the search results when a search is made. These should contain words from the page title and keywords used in a sentence or paragraph, the more times the better. This is a page description from our Homepage: The Indianapolis Wedding Professionals Network is a group of Wedding Professionals dedicated to working together harmoniously to ensure the complete success of the Bride & Groom’s Wedding day. Members of the IWPN are known to be professionals in their fields and are dedicated to helping other Professionals in the Wedding Industry. Members of the group are all full time wedding specialists and must meet quality standards dictated by the wedding industry to join the group. The group works together to insure the highest quality weddings in Indianapolis, and the Central Indiana area.
Know your Competition
When setting up your site, it’s always good to know what your competition is using for their titles, keywords, and descriptions, and your competition is not other professionals in your field, your competition is all the people that list higher then you in the search results for the search terms you are keying on. There are several ways to get this info, the quickest is to navigate to their webpage, then right click on an open area of their page, select View Source, a window will open showing all the info from their homepage, the title, keywords, and description will be close to the top. There is no harm in copying their titles and keywords but use their description only to give you ideas, theirs may be copyrighted, so avoid using it exactly as is. These procedures should be done for each page on your site using keywords that pertain to that page, it is most important not to use the same terms that were used on your homepage, the search engines will know this and throw up a red flag that may keep your site from showing up at all, so bear this in mind!!
Headings and Body Copy
The next area the search engines crawl is the headings and body copy on your page. It is important that your page contain as much information as possible pertaining to and including your title, keywords, and description worded into the paragraphs and sentences on your homepage, The headings carry the most weight, the body copy caries less weight, but is still very important. By placing keywords in bold, it puts priority on those words for the search engines to grab on to. Use these as much as you can in your copy to gain the most benefit.
Getting Noticed on the Internet
After you have finished optimizing your site it still won’t be noticed by the search engines, you will need to get your site listed in what is called the DMOZ Open Directory Project. This is a free listing directory put together by many people that donate their time to keying in all the websites on the internet that submit their information. You can find them by doing a search for " DMOZ Directory" on the Internet. When you get to their homepage, you will need to select the category that best fits your website, then from that page you will want to sign up for their service. Again, there is no charge for this service, and without it you will not show up in any search results. All the major search engines use this directory for their results, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Alexa, and so on. Google uses it’s own set of rules for searching the Internet, in part based on your DMOZ listing, so getting listed with them is a very important step in getting noticed on the internet.
Getting Noticed on Google
I have read many books on optimizing websites, the one thing they all have in common is, "if you only show up in one search engine, it should be Google". Google supplies about 70% of all the traffic that comes through my personal website, for this reason, it is important that you do the things necessary to get Google to crawl you site. The first step to optimize for Google is to open a Google account; from there you can upload the Google Tool Bar. This tool is invaluable in getting your site noticed by Google, from here you can check such things as, crawl rate, search phrases that brought traffic to your site, and many other things that we don’t have time to cover today. Another area is a Google Maps, listing, here you can show the location of your business, upload sample photos, and supply info to people that search for your services. Sign up for Google maps under the Local Business Center on your Google account page. After uploading and installing the Google tool bar, the next step will be to get your pages indexed with Google. This is done by creating a sitemap of your website and submitting it to Google. Go to www.xml-sitemaps.com and follow the instructions for creating a sitemap. There are several types of sitemaps available, .xml, .html, and .ror, these should all be installed on your site. Google only uses the .xml file, the other search engines will use the other two. These should be installed in the root directory of your website where Google can crawl it. After it is installed, you will need to go to the Google Tool bar, click on Sitemaps, and then tell Google where it is located on your Website. Our site map can be viewed at www.indianapolisweddingprofessionals.com/sitemap.xml, you will notice that all of the pages on our site will show up here. It will take some time for all this to show up in the Google toolbar, but when it does, your pages will be indexed with Google and you should start climbing the ladder to the top, again, this is only another step to higher listings in the search results, when all the factors are put in place, it will greatly increase your position in the search results.
Cached Pages
After you install the Google Toolbar, do a Google search for any phrase you wish, when the search results come up you will notice the word cached next to the paragraph of all the search results, by clicking on this, you will see the page as Google sees it with all your search terms highlighted. This can be useful in helping to set up your keywords, and also useful in seeing what you competitions site looks like to Google. Remember that your competition is the companies that appear above you in the search results.
Inbound Links
When your site is crawled, Google also crawls all the inbound links on your site looking for relevant terms, terms that are also on your site. In the case of the Indianapolis Wedding Professionals website, this would be wedding related sites with terms that are relevant to the search terms used in the search. Though any inbound links are important, the ones that carry the most weight with Google are the ones that are relevant to the search terms used. One relevant inbound link is worth 10 inbound links that are not relevant, so choose them wisely. The best way to obtain inbound links is to get listed in as many directories as you can, do a web search for wedding directories on the Internet, most are free to sign up. Remember that it is best to link to sites that are related, or relevant to the information offered on your site. Google uses a term called page rank, this is a measure of how popular your site is, the inbound links add to the strength of your site’s page ranking. You can see the strength of your page rank in the Google Toolbar.
Outbound Links
The crawlers also crawl the outbound links from your site, but they don’t carry the same weight as the inbound links do. The best use of an outbound link is to trade links with other sites, also called "reciprocal links". Using your outbound links to bring more inbound links is a good way to grow your inbound links and the page rank strength of your site.
Conclusion
By putting in place all, or even just a few of these techniques should help your sites placement in the search results. There is also software available that can help you optimize your website, one that I use is called "Web CEO". You can do a search on the Internet for them, most of their plans are paid services, but they do offer a free service that has met all of my needs. This is a very in depth way to analyze your site, and much can be gained by implementing their recommendations, but it is also very complicated to use as it involves digging into the HTML Code on your site, so proceed with caution, and always be sure to back up your info before proceeding, you can always fall back on this should you make a mistake, and you will make mistakes!! The information we have covered is just a small part of the optimization process, there are many other things that can be done to your site to improve your rankings, In the future, I will try to do another presentation where we can go over some of the other factors that will help your site climb to the top!!!
