The Maine SEO Blog

We’ve begun, of late, to suggest our clients not only optimize their sites, but their blogs too.  Here are some easy ways to start:

1. Keyword-rich titles. Since your blog titles become your page titles, make them keyword-rich and, at the same time, enticing to your readers.  Using negative titles can often be a good hook (like “5 Ways to Lose Money this Holiday Season”).
2. Optimize your categories. Category names have an obsene about of SEO benefits: they are links, usually apart of the URL, and can also help readers make decisions (for example, when looking into your archives - which categories interest them).  So, category titles should be keyword-rich and descriptive.
   There’s a discrepancy as to whether or not it’s better to assign a blogpost to a single category or more than one.  Typically, your blog will choose which category it is designated to, and Google will index it under that category.  Duplicate content is the issue here, so watch out!
3. Link Building. Ping back your own blogposts as often as you can - as long as they provide a good resource for what you’re talking about.  Link to other sites as you would on your website - to quality sites and blogs.
4. Post often. Blogs tend to get crawled and indexed more because of how often new content is added.  For a new blog, posting 2-3 times a week should be a priority.  After your blog has collected a certain amount of trust and readership, posting at least once a week (depending on how much you have to write about) is important.
5. Bonus out-of-the-box idea: Set your blog to follow comment links. This way, your readers will more likely leave intelligent comments, knowing they get a link out of it - and therefore starting a more interesting coversation.  Of course, you’ll need to monitor your comments that much more heavily.

So if you have a blog or are thinking about starting one, remember…SEO is just as important there as for your website!!!

Nicki Hicks
Maine Blogging

Flyte recently launched a website for Reduce My College Costs, which I’m happy to say has finally been fully crawled and indexed!  We worked with Marc Hill, a Certified College Planner, to both develop and optimize his site.

One of the most important things you can do, and I must pride Marc on this, is to do your SEO upfront.  It’s been my experience that optimizing a site during development will be much easier and more cost effective than “SEO’ing” it later.

For example, we are now converting many of our table-based sites onto CSS platforms (namely, WordPress).  While this particular problem is usually due to the age of a site; had SEO been performed at an earlier stage, it would have increased those sites’ search visibility earlier and saved them money (and who doesn’t want to save some dough these days?!).

Anyway - to get back on track, in this case, optimizing before launch should help Marc in the long run!  Admittedly, I wish I had known how quickly mistakes can make a difference to the price you pay for school.  If I’d only known people like Marc exist before I went to college!

So if you are in the midst of planning to send your child to college, start the process with RMCC’s free college savings tip sheet. Then, work with Marc in order to save on your son or daughter’s education expenses!

Nicki Hicks
Maine SEO

We’ve had a busy few weeks of finishing up SEO Projects here at flyte!  Just yesterday we finished another big project: for Maine Heart Surgical Associates.  As the Cardiac and Vascular organization just recently moved their Vascular & Vein Center to the new location in Falmouth, Maine, the marketing department wanted to optimize for that portion of their site.

So, that’s exactly what we did!  We optimized specifically for their Vascular & Vein Center - starting by cleaning up and consolidating several of the pages, as that was our biggest concern.

Then we hit the ground running with keyword research and other onpage optimization.  The second half of SEO (link building) started with Maine Heart’s intrasite linking, followed by a plan to increase backlinks.  With MHSA’s enormous untapped potential sitting in the writing hand of their surgeons, we suggested they start their own blog.  With the big move to Falmouth, however, that was nearly impossible.  But in the future, you very well may see a blog from Maine Heart!

If you have concerns about varicose veins, PAD, carotid disease, aneurysms, or venous disorders; be sure to check out Maine Heart Surgical Associates and their Vascular & Vein Center.

Nicki Hicks
I can now pronounce ‘Ambulatory Phlebectomy’

This week flyte finished up a Search Engine Optimization project for Newcastle Square Realty, a real estate company in Midcoast Maine.

After researching and identifying what keywords to pursue, we made some changes, targeting those keywords and phrases to increase NSR’s search visibility.  We also did some work on the Newcastle blog, including some basic usability changes - specifically renaming blog categories.  (You’ll find that many SEO strategies increase usability/searchability for both search engines AND web users.)

We made sure that the blog title always comes first in the title before the name of the blog.  A small change, but as I’ve discussed before, changing your titles to descriptive and keyword rich ones is an easy way to increase your search visibility.  Blogs are especially helpful this way - as the blog title becomes the title of the page.

So, looking at Newcastle’s current post, “Fall Comes to The Damariscotta Region” is a much better title than “Fall in Maine”.

If you’re looking to buy or sell property in Coastal Maine, make it a point to check out Newcastle.  Jim Cosgrove is a great guy to work with and sells gorgeous homes and properties all over Damariscotta, Pemaquid, South Bristol, New Harbor, and the surrounding Midcoast area.

If you’re looking to increase your search engine visibility, then make it a point to check out flyte.

Nicki Hicks
Maine SEO

Last night I had my television debut…on Maine based show called 207. Rich did a great segment about Skype, and called me in the middle to show viewers what it’s all about. My very first 15 seconds of fame…how terribly exciting!

Nicki Hicks
Famous in my Family