The Maine SEO Blog

When’s the last time you revamped the copy on your website?

The leaves are in the midst of falling, and now might be the perfect time to rework your website a little.

It’s about the title

It’ll be the first place any SEO suggests adding your best keywords, the title is the easiest way to increase your search engine visibility. If you don’t want to (or need to) do a lot of copyediting, this might be the perfect place to start. For some ideas, you might want to head over to Google Insights or Trends for what’s hot right now.

Content

When it comes to the copy on your pages, you know your business far better than anyone else could imagine to. However, the point is to see your company through the eyes of your customers. Optimize for the keywords they’re searching for. Do you come up in a Google search for the right queries? Move through the site like they do. Is it easy to navigate? Think like your customer.

‘Tis the season

You might need a change simply due to the nature of your business. Do you notice your customer flow changes seasonally? If you run a lodging or hotel business, the answer is obvious; but for other companies it might be more subtle. Update your copy accordingly.

Blogging makes it easy

This is where a blog comes in handy. Even if you do have a blog, you should still spice up your copy and titles every so often. But with a hot topic or news, you won’t have to as often. Just blog about it! That post has the ability to rank (just make sure you funnel people from your blog to your website).

Give it a facelift

There’s no need to update every page on your website, but maybe a facelift here and there – starting with the homepage – could really do some good! Search engines love fresh, unique content. Then again, maybe your copy is perfect the way it is. Either way, pay it a visit every once and again and just read it through. Make sure everything is still accurate and up-to-date.

Nicki Hicks
Content is the Spice of Life

Photo Credit

A few months ago, one of the folks I follow on Twitter posted a link to Wordtracker’s Keyword Questions, a great little tool that gives you insight into the world of long tail search. Or, as Wordtracker puts it: “find the questions people are asking in your market”.

It uses questions people have actually searched for and – bonus! – how many times within the past year they’ve been searched for. But don’t let the low number scare you – 1. we are talking about long tail here and 2. this is the number of people who used this exact wording.

Here are the questions about keywords:

And here are some about SEO:

The questions on social media were particularly interesting:

It just goes to show you…it might be worth taking a look at the keywords before you write your next blogpost, article, and especially webpage in order to target the long tail. Interestingly enough, as I was writing this, Jill Whalen posed a question to the Twitterverse about this very topic. Here are some of the responses.

Nicki Hicks
Long Tail Searcher

Dear Confused,

Although you can perform SEO at any point before or after the launch of a Web site, I can think of three good reasons why it’s better to start with SEO:

1. It’s less expensive. A good keyword analysis (an important part of a healthy breakfast an SEO package) will drive your content and your copy; if you do it after the site is built, you’re in effect doing the work twice.
2. It’s market research. A keyword analysis may uncover some opportunities that you hadn’t thought of yet; new topics to cover, even new services to offer.
3. It will help focus your social media strategy. You can take your optimal keywords and start working them into your tweets, your Facebook fan page, your YouTube videos and your LinkedIn profile…all things you can be working on while your Web designer builds out your new site.

There is some parts of SEO that can’t be performed until after the site is launched, specifically a link building campaign. Obviously, other sites, blogs and directories won’t want to link to a coming soon page; they’ll be looking for something of value if they’re going to be linking to you.

Rich Brooks
SEO for Small Businesses

Allow me to preface this by saying: SEO is an art, not a science. So my recipe for title perfection needs to be experimented with – you will have different results with every industry. That said, titles are important. It can be argued they are the most important.

As always, start by figuring out what your customers are searching for. If you don’t optimize for the right words, then you really don’t have a shot at even being a choice on a search results page.

Keeping in mind what the page is about, here’s a hand-to-the-forehead thought: you’ll want to incorporate those keywords in the title. Now you sit down to write that fabulous title tag and wonder how long should it be? SEOs disagree about this, but: there is no correct length to a good title. Google allows for 65 characters to be shown in the SERPs and, as far as I’m concerned, it’s not a big deal if the title is 65+ characters. My rule of thumb? The same as copy writing: as long as it takes to get the job done.

That said, don’t create such a long title that expands past the width of my browser (in a wide screened Mac, to boot). Along the same lines, please please PLEASE don’t stuff the title full of every synonym for your keywords that you can think of.

Alright, so what have we got now? A bunch of really great keywords. Now, put them together in a way that makes sense – something that accurately describes the page.

This next part is your choice: your company name. The thing is, as long as you have a fairly unique name, you’ll rank well for someone searching for your name. I tend to put it in every title just for good measure.

Finally, I put in the location. Obviously this would only apply for local businesses. The thing to remember is that local search is dependent on more than just the title; but having it here is absolutely helpful.

Last but not least, is the way it looks – and most people quite honestly may not think about it, but would you click on a ReSuLt tHaT LoOkEd lIkE ThIs? My personal preference is to capitalize the first letter of words that make sense – much as you would for a blog post title. Then separate major “sections” (in this case: keywords, company name, and location) with a mixture of colons, semicolons, hyphens, and vertical lines: whichever you prefer.

So, in the end we have something that looks like this:

Really Great Stupendous Clickable Exactly What I’m Looking For Phrase: My Company – Where I Am, USA

Nicki Hicks
Page Title Extraordinaire

Dear Nicki,

Are there any advantages to purchasing a domain with strong keywords and redirecting it to my website?

–Wondering in Wisconsin

Dear Wondering,

No, there are seemingly no SEO advantages. But let me take a step back. I would argue that if this was a new website, then you might as well go with a keyword rich domain. There are still discrepancies as to whether or not search engines actually pay attention to keyword rich domains. Humans, however, might click on a keyword rich URL before what I would call a spammy-looking domain.

The only way this strategy might possibly work is if a) you promote those other sites for tracking purposes or b) other websites link to your other domains (assuming they use keyword rich anchor text) and the link juice would thereby be passed to your current website. But, why waste the in-between domain and simply worry about promoting your current domain and getting keyword rich backlinks to your actual site?

The thing is, if you’re doing all the right things at your existing site, there’s no need to start building a network of keyword rich redirects.

Nicki Hicks
No Need to Red Flag Google