Something you’ll want to add to your site is at http://addthis.com, which is a little button that allows users to bookmark your webpage in Facebook, Digg, My Yahoo, etc. More crosslinks back to you for free and constant brand exposure to the users that “add” you.
A key ingredient in a high search ranking is how many links you have from other websites. An easy way to do this is do a search to find yourself just as you would expect your customers to do. Maybe the search is “daycare in Davis”. A lot of the top results you will see are directory listings that aggregate all of the local daycare services. Most of these directory services will allow you to post your business to their listings. Post to as many of these FREE services as possible, making sure to include your site URL in each post.
Top websites are more than a pretty design, they choose the right keywords for search engine optimization (SEO). This means they focus on words that are in demand and deliver high ROI potential.
The topic of the keywords you choose must:
Keywords must be in demand. A reasonable number of people must be searching for information about your theme. If your keyword topic is too narrow (ex., a niche service in a very small town ), there is not enough demand to generate traffic, even if you rank #1 in search engines and everyone clicks your link.
Keywords can’t be too broad. If your keyword topic is too broad, the competition will make it too difficult for you to rank high in search engines. The supply, or number of competing businesses, is just too great. Broad topics usually have major competitors. For example, it would be impossible for a small business to rank #1 for “baby gifts”. Creating a site about a niche within baby gifts is your best opportunity… You most likely offer a specific baby gift, perhaps embroidered baby bibs or custom baby receiving blankets. The competition will be less intense. So it will be easier for your specific product page to rank highly with the free search engines.
Those who find you will be highly targeted. Someone searching for embroidered baby bib will find exactly what they are looking for on your site, as well as be interested in your other products. It is far easier to presell those searching for keywords related to narrow topics than broad ones.
Keywords must deliver high ROI potential. Don’t optimize your site for embroidered baby bib if you barely make any money from selling product. Choose your highest margin product and optimize for that, maybe its a more expensive product or set of items like an embroidered bib, blanket, and towel package.
Here is the free tool I use to figure out what search keywords to optimize for your Sacramento website. Google the word “keyword” and you’ll find the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Why am I telling you my secret? Well, it takes a lot of experience to use the tool to your best advantage. Picking the right keyword is the most important part of the whole search engine optimization process – you need an expert like me to insure you don’t pick the wrong word and waste time and money trying to optimize for it.
Here is how to use the tool, in case you want to explore and do some pre-work before you contact me. Think of a search phrase you want users to type into Google to find your site. Example: Sacramento architect. Type this into the box and click get keyword ideas. The results will show you the average Google search volume for that phrase and related phrases. You can see that “Sacramento architects” gets more searches than “Sacramento architect” and “architect in Sacramento”. It also shows that users may search for “architecture design” and “architectural firms”. All of these are ideas of key phrases for you to optimize.
This is a simplistic example, but does give you options and help demonstrate how important your choice can be. For example architecture versus architectural or architect versus architects can make a huge difference on your ROI. It does not take into account how many other sites are competing for the same phrases (that is another tool, and another blog post).
I’m helping a friend with his movie website. Its a romantic comedy – very funny, you should check it out at herminorthing.com. We talked about how to best optimize this site, and my suggestion was to target each individual actor in the search engines. It would be too difficult to rank high for a generic terms like Romantic Comedy or funny movie. Instead, focus on an actor, because actor names are highly searched. People like me will watch a movie specifically because a favorite actor appears in it, sometimes without knowing anything about the movie. So if you can show up in search for “Christian Kane movie” you have a good chance of reaching a qualified audience that already likes his work.
So how do you optimize for each actor? First create an individual page for each actor, since the actor name is the keyword we are optimizing for. This goes for any website, you MUST create a unique page for each keyword you want to rank for. That’s because Google will figure out that your page is dedicated to that topic, and therefore assume the user is looking for that page. If your page has only a small mention of the actor, it won’t show up in Google when users are looking for pages about that actor. Users are looking for pages completely about the actor, with the actor name in the title, headline, and using his name all over the page.
Lastly, Google wants to know that “the Internet” finds your page valuable. Google measures this by counting all of the web links that point to your site. If you have 100 other sites that link to your page, then Google thinks it must be a good page. So your last step is to get as many links back to your actor pages as possible. You can do this through social networking sites like MySpace, your personal blog, comments in other people’s blog, ads on Craigslist, listings in movie directory sites, etc. Oh, and WIKIPEDIA, since every actor probably has a Wikipedia page. Get your actor page listed from as many places as possible.
This technique can be applied to almost any topic, not just movie websites or actor pages.