Tips for marketing your website locally
Does your website list the city or cities you serve? If the answer is no, then you are missing an easy but very important way to optimize your website for search engines so that your website ranks higher in search engines. In my experience, I’ve found that adding the city name in the title, description, and META keyword tags along with including the city name multiple times on the home page can be enough to get the first page ranking of your website for your service in your city.
Importance of META tags:
While META tags have been abused and don’t carry the weight they once did, they are still an important part of on-site optimization. To place your META title, description, and keyword tags, you’ll need an HTML editor like Dreamweaver or you can edit it in notepad for PC. These tags are placed at the top of the code within the parent tag. If you don’t feel comfortable doing this, ask a webmaster to perform this update for you. Simply update the page with the city names and save the page.
List of Cities:
Another tip is to add a list of cities you serve at the bottom of your home page. This technique will help increase the chances of your website appearing in a variety of localized searches such as “Fort Worth graphic design” or “Plano graphic design.”
Find the right keywords:
Be sure to include the most popular keywords for your industry. You may be wondering, how do I know which are the best keywords to use? One of my favorite tools for identifying the best keywords is the Google Keywords tool. Locate the search volume associated with each keyword and identify the ones with the highest search volume. Make sure to use the most popular keywords consistently in the body of your website text, as well as in the META title, description, and keyword tags. Using these tips and techniques is sure to align your website with the exact search terms your potential customers are using to locate services like yours.
Get incoming links:
To be successful online, you will need inbound links from other websites. You can use web 2.0 sites like Squidoo to create a “lens” or blog post on a specific topic. Squidoo accounts are free and Google is constantly looking for new content on Squidoo to search the content of its database. “Evergreen Landscape Services” is a perfect example of a landing page that uses a keyword phrase that someone would use to locate landscape services in Evergreen Colorado. This helps your Squidoo page rank and can also be a promotional asset online. On the page you have links pointing to the main website, as well as supporting information about their services. You can customize your Squidoo pages to post images, copy, listings, Amazon product sources, eBay product sources, and much more.
More incoming links:
The more incoming links pointing to your website, the better your ranking will be. I would recommend signing up for a free Tumblr account. Create unique content to post on your blog and link back to your website as you generate new content. Once again, Google loves Tumblr and will index the content. You can link your Tumblr blog to your Facebook and Twitter accounts so that every time you post to your Tumblr blog, that content is sent to Twitter and Facebook with a link to your Tumblr blog. This helps ensure that Google and other popular search engines like Yahoo and Bing pick up and index your blog content.
Ping… Ping… Ping…
My final tip is to ping your web 2.0 sites by inserting their URL into the Page2RSS.com home page. This will help you get any content you generate on web 2.0 sites indexed by Google and other popular search engines.
If you follow these simple search engine marketing tips, you’ll be on your way to higher search engine rankings and a much-improved online search presence.