You have a brand new website from Magnolia Web Design, complete with hosting and content management. Just how will your website be found on the internet? What does Magnolia Web Design do to ensure that your great site is found by potential customers? Is it worth the investment?Search Engines do not like under construction sites and we certainly don’t want to upset them so we begin SEO upon completion of design! Many website optimizations such as Meta Tags, page titles, alt image titles and the like are done during construction of your site and prior to the Search Engine phase. Once your site is fully operational and not likely to change in any major way, we begin the Search Engine Optimization phase.
Selecting your keyword phrases is the first step in this process. Let’s use Marvin Chapel FWB Church for example. If you do a search for simply Church in Google, you wouldn’t expect to find Marvin Chapel. You would likely search for Church, Marianna FL or Church, Marianna Florida to find Marvin Chapel. So your main keyword phrases for this site would be “Church, Marianna FL” and “Church, Marianna Florida”. The internet is just too large for one simple keyword so we would select phrases that more narrowly describe our business. There are sites devoted to keywords and keyword phrases that are searched most often in search engines. That combined with your specific industry or organization, brings the competition down from zillions to a handful. There is something unique about every business that sets them apart from the masses. It sometimes takes thought, trial and error to find it but it is there.
The keyword phrases are then constructed into descriptions of your site using the least amount of fluff words and usually using the most relevant descriptive words.
Once keyword phrases and descriptions are selected, your site is submitted to all of the major search engines for inclusion. In general, the major search engines feed to the minor ones thus there is little sense in submitting to the minor search engines.
Good links are like gold in Google Searches and can come from anywhere! Even though Magnolia Web Design is your Webmaster, there are things you can do to help your sites search engine rankings without ever touching HTML. The more RELEVANT links pointing to your site that you have, the better. You can ask your dealers, business associates, or anyone you are in contact with to add a link to your site. One way links (those that point to your site but your site does not point to theirs) are the absolute best but reciprocal links are also valuable, especially when it is relevant to your site’s business. For our local customers who are members of the Chamber of Commerce, we ensure that your link is added to their database. There are tons of places that would be more than happy to add your link to their site.
Other places to consider are, if you have been listed on sites without a link because you didn’t have a site before. Or perhaps you have changed domain names and there are sites listing incorrect links which could easily be corrected. Online yellowpage ads are sometimes interesting to get straight but they do provide a link and therefore worth the time. We do as much of this as possible, although sometimes the business owner has to address the link situation by phone or mail.
Natural linking will come with time and is best accomplished with content. A church for example can add sermons, articles or any number of things on their site for content. Visitors find the article interesting and share it by placing a link on their site pointing to the page on your website. This is another way to help your site in the search engines without doing one html tag on your website. You type the content and email it to us and we will place it on your site within 48 hours (most often within an hour). We love to see your site grow and would be happy to get it on your site as fast as possible. The article, sermon or some other content is added to your site, google indexes the page which in turn causes a chain reaction of potential customers searching for phrases from your article and ultimately end up at your site. You are essentially feeding the search engines!
In order to gain links, we do a lot of Directory submissions. We try to find as many free or low cost SEO Friendly directories and submit each client’s website to them. This is very time consuming but absolutely necessary.
For additional links, we often create a web page within your site for Link Exchanges. We locate other like sites which aren’t in direct competition with your site and exchange links. This is another time consuming task but essential. Before we exchange links we check the content of their site to ensure it is relevant to your industry. We then check to see if they are doing anything that is unethical. Some websites will agree to exchange links with you but they have a meta tag telling the search engines not to index or follow the links. These are unethical and if we were to exchange links with them, it would essentially create a one way link to them since the link on their site pointing to you would not be followed by the search engine. Another trick some websites pull is adding your site to theirs and after a week or so they remove it hoping that the webmaster doesn’t notice. If it is not noticed, then the unethical site is getting a free one way link. There are many unethical sites with many tricks such as this. We try very hard to avoid any associations with these sites. We manually check the links for all of our clients periodically and remove any link exchanges if the reciprocal was removed by the other site. The unethical sites cause the rest of us a lot more work!!!
All of these pains are taken to see to it that your site has as many relevant links pointing to it as possible. You can help your site gain popularity by creating fresh unique content (no copying) and asking others to link to your site!
Search Engine Optimization is a weird science with many changes (staying ahead of the unethical sites for one), twists and turns and as you can see the process takes a lot of man hours to accomplish. Page rank is grown and nurtured with all of these little steps tweaking here and there as we go. You can do your own SEO and there is no reason why you wouldn’t be successful, but for those of you with more important things to do with all this time….. like run your business, then Magnolia Web Design will do the work for you.
In the next article, we will explore Search Engine Placement (SERPS)