SEO Techniques - Small Changes for Big Results

It takes more than just a crafty title tag to start crawling up the Google search results ladder!  Here’s a brief rundown of a few basics that all work together to help your site be more visible in those (here comes the big buzzword) organic search results.

It takes more than just a crafty title tag to start crawling up the Google search results ladder!  Here’s a brief rundown of a few basics that all work together to help your site be more visible in those (here comes the big buzzword) organic search results.

1. 

That being said, a quick refresher on those title tags… The title tag is the portion of web page code that appears at the top of the browser, and also as link users see in their Google search results.  Keep them simple, concise (10-15 words long), relevant to the page they’re on, and user-targeted.  You absolutely can and should use different title tags on different pages or sections of your web site - think of the title tag as, literally, the title for that web page and its contents.  Don’t forget to think like your customer - someone looking for a local shoe store won’t just type in “shoe store”, they’ll type in “Charlottesville shoe store”, or “shoe store Charlottesville” to narrow down their search.

2. 

Next comes the “description” meta tag:  if the title tag functions as the title of your web page, the description tag is a descriptive and accurate summary of that page’s content.  It’s that little snippet of text that shows up on the search results page, so it’s important that it be informative and relevant.  Like the title tags, you should have a unique description for every page of your web site.

3.  sitemap.xml
Will a site map help your Google results?  Not necessarily…having a site map doesn’t guarantee you any better results than not having one…but what it will do is help search engines find all of the pages of your web site, especially if your site has many pages (ecommerce site owners, this usually means you!) and potentially confusing navigation. 

4. 

Take a good, hard look at the content on your site - is your content easy-to-read, user-friendly, and descriptive?  Is the relevant text part of the content, or embedded in an image?  It’s a fine line between having your search keywords appear often enough to help your search results, and having them appear too often so that they actually end up hurting your results - so the best answer is to make your content user-friendly.  Chances are, if your user has to see “Charlottesville shoe store” fifty times on one page of your site, you’re hurting both your chances of a sale AND your search engine ranking.

5.  Guerilla Marketing
If you build it, they will come?  If only!  Now that your site is done, the code is clean, and the content is concise - you still need to get out there and do some marketing.  Get your URL listed on local business sites (Charlottesville folks, don’t forget places like avenue.org, incharlottesville.com, and the like.)  Should you have a blog?  Maybe…but be realistic:  if you don’t have time to keep up with it, maybe find a relevant blog already out there that would be willing to post an article or at least your URL on their web site.  Don’t underestimate the social networking tools out there, and use them intelligently- for example, if you’re posting a new product announcement on your facebook page, don’t forget to link back to your website!  And don’t forget good ol’ paper marketing- include your website URL on your business cards, stationery, receipts, bags, etc….