SEO Services
If you own a business in Marin County then you must carefully understand your position in the major search engines. There are a handful of Marin's small to mid sized companies that are actively managing their SEO either in house or by hiring a firm, but for the most part there's a lot of room for improvement. I say this as gingerly as I can but let's face it...The Marin Real Estate is some of the highest priced in the country, but when it comes to Internet real estate (domain names) it couldn't be more like the wild west. We could so easily blame the local rogue web developers who pull down their actual income working full time jobs outside of the cyber world only to pick up a web gig ever so often...but the real issue is the mind set of our local small businesses with regard to the Internet but we are starting to se this change.
The Internet is not what it was during the dot com boom. There has been plenty of settling and now a great number of us that really understand the web can harness it to drive meaningful and highly targeted traffic to your website. For those of you that haven't planned to invest in SEO, I want you to know it's more affordable and valuable than you might realize. Much of the really rewarding search engine optimization can be done quickly and easily. But the biggest point I want to stress is that you must take action, you must do something.
You must have some interaction with your small business website. It is absolutely critical in this economy and market to be in front of people. SEO does not have to be a scary term or a term that automatically makes you think about having to spend big bucks. The truth is - as Google will even tell you - most of the meaningful on page SEO can be done to your website in a weeks time. Depending on how competitive your vertical is you most likely can dominate page one in and around Marin with some very basic and easily crafted SEO. But keep in mind soon this will be very difficult to do because the ones who act now and educate themselves on the importance of on-page optimization, backlinks and overall SEO are the ones that will lock in those coveted top positions and have a stronghold on that valuable traffic. Even if it is only a few hundred people a month it adds up to thousands a year.
In the spirit of Marin I must also mention the importance of us claiming our own stake on the internet. The better we market our local websites through SEO the less other larger websites who have nothing to do with Northern California will be taking all of our local search traffic. This is a time where we must act as a community and share links with each other and begin to rethink the way we look at our websites. So I have stressed the importance of SEO for your organization, now let me share with you some important factors that go into a top ranking. You may be surprised that with a little nudge you could have a whole new stream of new customers discovering your product or service right here in beautiful Marin county via their mobile phones, personal computers and iPads. Now if you are not technologically savvy that is okay, you still get points for reading about geeky SEO stuff so just copy and paste this list and email it over to your webmasters. Or you could always just hire us!
Must Have On-Page SEO checklist:
1. Page titles with keyword at beginning of title
2. Hand written meta description with targeted keywords
3. Meta Keywords are dead. Don't use them and if you did remove them. They could actually hurt your ranking.
4. Text in the form of an article like this one you are reading - make it informative and content rich.
5. Add alt tags and descriptions to images
6. H1 tags for article heading (like you see above)
7. Name images with keyword in image title
8. Keyword in url - this is hugely important. For example if you were targeting "potting soil" you would want your URL to contain those keywords such as this www.your-domain.com/potting-soil.html
9. Keyword in your menu navigation. Instead of the word "services" in your header menu you might want to name a few of your services as parent items of the menu such as "tree delivery" or "hybrid fruit trees" ...rather than a less specific keyword such as "tree services"..
10. Domain age: you may not know this but just like a home you may have purchased 10 years ago no doubt went up in value so did that little 10 dollar domain you purchased back in 1996 or 97 or 2004...domain age is a key factor in a good SEO ranking as it shows that you are established and not a fly by night operation. Even if you have a domain that hasn't been developed it is still incredibly valuable for the simple fact that it will pull rank over other sites that have the same amount of on page SEO and content but are younger.
I encourage you to perform some related searches and see where your competitors stack up online. I also ask that you take time and read about SEO. I really like the team over at seobook.com - they offer a great deal of top notch advice and I highly recommend their blog. There are many hundreds of pieces to the big search engine's algorithms and I have listed off ten that can dramatically boost your websites search engine position.
I hope you enjoyed this article and should you have any further questions feel free to contact us. We'd be happy to hear from you.
In the meantime here are some useful links to educate yourself on SEO.
Matt Cutts Google Blog
SEOmoz Tools
Bruce Clay Website
Google Page Speed Firefox Plugin
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Analytics
The scope and detail of work we perform for our SEO clients is much more involved than the basics listed above. We are happy to meet with you and show you how we can help you generate more business from the internet. Feel free to contact us here.