Alabama Search Engine Optimization | Point Clear Websites

Spend a Little Time Making Your Website Better

You’ve created a great website, and you’ve told all your current customers about it. But now you’ve noticed that it hasn’t brought you any new business in a while. You search for it on Google and Yahoo! but it’s nowhere to be found. What can you do?

If you want to quickly freshen up your website there are a few simple, high-priority steps that can be taken. This generally takes about 5-10 minutes per page and will probably boost your search engine rankings at least a little.

Titles. In the <head> section of your web page code in between your title tags [ <title> </title> ] you will find your title. Every page has to have a unique title. Period. There can be some shared words, but no two pages should have the exact same title. Generally, only the first 65 characters are indexed by search engines, and the words at the beginning (the left) are weighted heavier than the words that get tagged to the end. Mix the titles up too if you have a brick-and-mortar business with a specific geographical location (neighborhood, city, state, etc.), don’t always put the location first in the title. Put it first in some titles, in the middle of others, and at the end of your 65 character limit on other pages.
Remove any duplicate content. If your website has the same paragraph on two or more pages, remove the paragraph from all but one of the pages.
Replace any vague or fluffy expressions like “happy day” or “good times” with specific details about your business or website.
Remove any duplicate META data. Look at your keywords and descriptions in the <head> sections of your pages. No two pages should have identical keywords or duplicate descriptions. If you really don’t want to spend any time, then on any less important page that has the same META tags as another page, just remove the <meta name=”keywords”> and <meta name=”description”> tags altogether. It is better to have no META data than to have duplicate META data.
Keywords are really of lesser importance, but if you want to clean them up, make sure you only use commas to separate whole phrases, not as you would normally use them (i.e. separating city and state abbreviations). Also, there are so many websites out there in cyberspace, that you will want to be as detailed as possible with your keywords. Instead of<meta name=”keywords” content=”cars, miami, florida, green, alternative fuels”>it is better to have<meta name=”keywords” content=”green cars in miami florida, florida cars that run on alternative fuels, miami green cars”>.Only the first 265 characters are indexed by search engines. Capitalization does not matter one way or another.
Place ALT tags inside all of the image tags. This means wherever you see something like this:<src=”image.gif”>Add a descriptive tag such as:<src=”image.gif” alt=”description of image”>
This is especially important if the image is part of the navigation menu.
Continuously add new content and new pages.

If you want to take SEO seriously, there are a couple of conditions whereby you might want to reconsider rebuilding your site from scratch:

Your whole site and/or the navigation system is built in Flash
Your whole site and/or the navigation system is generated by automated scripts
Your site uses frames to navigate from page to page.

The next step would be to get backlinks.

Contact me if you want your site to perform better in the Search Engine Results Pages. I can provide you with ways of driving more traffic to your site as well as ways of measuring the ROI of these procedures.