I haven't blogged for a while because I'm in the middle of moving cross
country to Portland, and my computer is packed. ;/ But I found a laptop
& will write a quick blurb about some basic search engine
optimization techniques and web marketing. In my case, I was asked by
my dad to soup up
countrysidemanor.net, the web site of Countryside
Manor, a retirement home our family runs. I haven't started yet (oops) but here's the basic plan...
Make the site useful
If the site isn't useful then your other marketing efforts are wasted. Some basic tips:
- Keep the page size small. Don't clutter it (especially the home page) with huge graphics, flash movies, etc.
- Make it easy for people to contact you. A prominent "Contact Us"
link that takes the user to a page with address, phone number, business
hours, and a link to maps & directions (e.g. mapquest.com) is
helpful. To get a maps & directions link, go to your favorite map
site, enter in the address, copy the URL from the browser address bar,
& link to that from your site in a new window.
- Have a site menu with easy to understand links. Don't make people
scroll over icons or colored boxes or otherwise have to guess how to
navigate your site. Clearly labeled links and sections work best.
- Don't
leave "under construction" or "coming soon" lying around. If you don't
have time to build a page, don't link to it. Also, get rid of broken
links.
- Spend some time thinking about what information you want to
provide and how it should be organized. You can start with a bulleted
outline (just like you might have done for high school essays) to
organize your ideas. Your web site shouldn't look messy or cluttered.
Optimize for spiders
Next you'll want to ensure that spiders and search engines are able to
crawl your site and understand what it's about. Some suggestions:
- Make sure that you can reach every page on your site just by
clicking links. A good test is to turn off javascript on your browser,
and just use your mouse to get around your site. If you can't reach a
page without filling in a form or using javascript, then spiders can't
either.
- Don't use querystrings if possible. Spiders a less likely to go
to pages wuth querystring information. You can read up on mod_rewrite
or "url rewriting" if you want to use querystrings but not have them
appear in your URLs.
- Make sure the HTML in your pages accurately reflects what's in the page. Specifically
- Ensure each page has a descriptive TITLE tag
- Add a META Keywords and META Description tag to the HEAD section of your page
- Make proper use of header tags (H1, H2, etc.) to group the information on your page.
- Your title, headers, and meta tags should contain action verbs, nouns, and other relevant words that people may search on.
- The more content (aka text, not images) that's on your pages, the more likely spiders are to index it.
- All images should have ALT tags.
- Make sure your domain name isn't going to expire. ;) That
happened with the Countryside Manor retirement home site ... a squatter grabbed the
.com domain name when it expired (the expiration notices got lost in
the mail during a registrar transfer snafu). Unfortunately, the
squatter wanted $3000 to give it back, so we bought the .net domain
name instead, and paid it up for 10 years.
Help spiders find your site
Lastly, you'll want to help spiders find your site, usually by getting other sites to link to it. Some ways to do that are
- Submt your site to search engines directly. For example, you can submit to Yahoo, or
submit your site to MSN.
- Add your site to web directories. DMOZ (the Open Directory
Project) is a large, free directory you can list your site with. Also
try Yahoo Directory. Plus, do a web search on relevant sites (e.g.
"retirement home directory") to get a list of other sites you can
submit your web site to. In my case I found 5-10 different sites that I
could get countrysidemanor.net listed on. Some of them cost money, but
many were free.
- Contact other web masters and ask them to link to you. This is
called a "link exchange." Look for related web sites and contact the
web master, asking if they'd be willing to link to your site and in
exchange you'll update your site to link to theirs.
- Start a blog. You can sign up on Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress, or
some other blogging service, and have the blog hosted on your web site.
Your blog will usually have a RSS URL, which you can then submit to
numerous blog directories such as those listed by Robin Good at the RSS
Top 55.
If you write something interesting or useful in your blog, you might
even get people to link to it for free and say something nice about
you. :)
So, the above is a basic strategy you can employ when someone asks
you "Hey, can you put my site on Google?" I didn't bother going into
paid placement like with Google's
AdWords, because you can get a lot of
mileage out of good ol' SEO. Remember, there's more to SEO than
keywords and META tags ... it's about getting lots links to your site from other sites, and
then making your site a place worth visiting in the first place.