Sacramento Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Guy

Quincy Engineering, a Survey Company in Sacramento, invited me to come to their office for a search engine optimization presentation and training. One of the engineers knew that search engines could drive significant traffic to the website, but the partners were hesitant to invest money in their already stale website. So I was invited to set the record straight. Could a Sacramento engineering company expect to get more business from Google, and how could they go about doing it themselves, without hiring me to do it for them?

First I presented for 30 mintes about how Google works. In simplistic terms the partners easily understood the basics of web searches and what Google looks for on and off of a website in order to rank it well. They immediately saw gaps on the existing site that did not match up with Google’s process – no wonder they didn’t show up for anything in search except the business name.

For the next 30 minutes I showed all the tools I use to assess keywords and links to figure out the best words to target for a website. There’s no point in trying to rank for Sacramento engineering if the term is too competitive to rank on page 1 of Google. We quickly found 5-10 terms for their industry as well as the volume of actual searches being conducted each month. They were amazed at the high volume of web searches being done for very specific terms in their niche and would only need a fraction of that traffic to see a significant boost in business.

In the last 30 minutes  I walked through the strategy and steps I recommended (action items) to update their website and how to create content for the terms we found. These were real tasks they could get working on right away to start seeing results in search engines just by crafting specific content and building links back to it.

We ended with 30 minutes of great Q&A specific to Quincy’s website. I handed out my presentation so they could refer to it later, including URLs for everything I showed in demonstration.

For $250 Quincy got 2 hours of hands-on SEO coaching that they can implement themselves instead of paying one or two thousand dollars for me to do it for them. I simply gave them the tools and knowledge to apply Google best practices.

Simply by writing quality meta data and homepage text, I took a web design company from no rank to rank #3 in under a week for their main keyword (Davis Web Design). That shows the power of keywords when a site is built completely in Flash or images.

Let’s start with internal links, these are links within your post to your own stories and other websites. People usually do a great job of linking to other people’s websites as references, why not our own? For each post, try to add a couple links to another one of your posts. For example, you may hyperlink a word in your first paragraph to a separate post you did on that topic. This not only keeps users reading your blogs/sites, but builds search authority.

The best link to your blog post is from an external site. Although it is not easy to request that another site link to you, it is easy to comment on someone else’s article or blog post and include a reference or link back to your post. For example I can search http://technorati.com or http://blogsearch.google.com for something and find other bloggers talking about that subject. By commenting on other blogs with a link to yours, you add value to their blog while attracting new readers and building search authority.

If possible, you want the hyperlink of your post to be strong keywords and not just a long URL. For example “Check out my similar article on How Google Works” is better for search engines and web users than “Check out my similar article at http://www.zachpresnall.com/2/post/2009/03/how-google-works.html”. You can use simple html code to create this link: “Check out my similar article on <a href=”http://www.yourpost.com”>your topic</a>.

The easiest way to get links to your posts is to add them to social bookmarking sites. I recommend creating accounts with digg.com, delicious.com, stumbleupon.com, slashdot.org, and technorati.com and submitting every one of your posts to them. The fastest way I have found to submit to all these sites at once is to use socialmarker.com. So in less than 5 minutes, you can establish 5 links to your site.

Here is a great tool called website grader that allows you to grade your website on a number of factors. You can even enter competing websites to see how you compare to them. The best takeaway from this report is the number of inbound links, the number of other websites that point to yours. This is valuable because Google will give you a higher website rank just for having links from others.

Check it out and let me know if you need help interpreting your results.

HubSpot Website Grader for SEO