It has become pretty clear to almost everyone that online search has eclipsed yellow pages advertising as having the best value and greatest results. Even for local business. Thirty years ago it was not unusual to see business paying $3,000 per month for a full-page front section local yellow pages advertisement, even in a town of only 200,000 residents.
Today Google can have similar value but at a very much lower cost, free. Even if you pay someone to build your site, the payback can be as quick as 3-4 months from increased business. I have a client, Dennis Grimes, that wrote that his businesses’ new website cost payback happened in just the first week. And the best part of good structural and content SEO is that it continues to provide dividends, for almost no expense, long after the website goes live.
But, the main purpose of this post is to point out that not only is Google the new yellow pages, and organic search is meaningful yet free advertising if done correctly. And that you can do it yourself in many cases. Google has a great do-it-yourself guide, and it’s free, titled “Google’s Search Engine Optimization
Starter Guide” which you can download from this link (pdf). It is an excellent resource, understandable to the website novice and useful for the experienced as well.
Mihaela Lica at SitePoint.com provids a good discussion of the three most important on-page SEO opportunities identified in the Google guide in her post “On-page SEO – The Google Way. They are simple and inherently present in every website. And often under utilized in many websites, even I have found WordPress based websites. They are:
- Most importantly, create a unique, accurate page title that communicates the content of each page. How many times do you see a website where the main page is simply titled “Home” or “somedomain.com”. I see even sites provided by professionals with this error. And the page title is arguably the single most important SEO related element. Lately now, I normally like to have the page title also set in <H1> header tags, making it even more useful in SEO.
- Make use of the “description” meta tag to accurately and uniquely accurately each page’s content using 160 characters. In the sites I create there is now a separate field for entering the page description for any page and post.
- Improve the structure of your URLs to reflect your page content and be “friendly” to the site visitor. avoid having links with just numbers and symbols. Use words separated by hyphens. This is the purpose of WordPress’ pretty permalinks function. It also one of the nice benefits of Facebook’s custom usernames for profiles and pages.
Just using these three elements on multiple pages in your website can make a big difference in many cases. It may not be possible to do in some Flash based websites, but you should be able to accomplish it in most others. If you have any questions about your website or your businesses’ search marketing opportunities send me an email.
Related posts:
- “WordPress Takes Care of 80-90% of Search Engine Optimization” says Matt Cutts of Google
- Real Estate Website SEO search engine optimization
- Optimizing Google Places for Local Search Marketing Results
- Selecting a Domain Name for SEO and Search Marketing Maximization
- The Power of Organic Search Ranking Compared to Adwords – a 9 to 1 Favorite!
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