The Maine SEO Blog

Lists are a handy dandy thing to have, don’t ya think? They captivate us: the Top 10 Signs Your Airline is Cutting Costs or the Top 10 Things Overheard in Line to See the New Batman Movie.  They are inviting and an easy way to access information. Want to know what else is easy? Doing basic SEO on your own site.

Before you get too excited, I’m not advocating that you never get a professional web design firm to do SEO for you (*cough cough*), but there are a few things you can do to increase your visibility all on your own.

1. Write naturally for both search engines and humans. You want to include enough keywords for the search engines so they know you are optimizing for those words, but not so many that they see you as spam…or worse: your users find your content spammy.
   You may have read that there is a certain number of words a page of copy should be: 250 seems to be the magic number. You’re more than welcome to stick with that number, but in my mind, why not write until you get your point across? If you only need 150-200 words to say what you need to say, it would be silly to continue writing and (most likely) keyword stuffing. Likewise, if you naturally write 400 words of copy, there’s really no reason to condense that. Many of your users won’t scroll, but then again, many of them will!
2. Use keyword rich titles. If you don’t know which one is the title, look to the top of your web browser on the same line as your minimize/maximize/close buttons. Then, look to the right if you use a Mac, to the left if you use a PC. There’s your title!!
   While you’re on a site, it’s not something most people notice. However, when you’re searching it’s the very same title that pops up on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). This is important – think in your own searches how those titles can make or break your choice to click. Would you click on a link if the title is simply “Home Page”? My guess is no.
   Your titles should be keyword rich and different for every page on your site. The last discrepancy amongst SEOs about titles: length. Some say 10 words should be all you have (you’ll notice Google cuts off the title at 65 characters). This simply means you should put all of your important words near the beginning of your title, and it shouldn’t be much longer than those 65 characters/10 words (you wouldn’t want your title expanding off the title bar!)
3. Create descriptive meta-descriptions. Just under the title in SERPs, you’ll see a description. If your site has a meta-description in its code, the search engine will pull that and insert it for the user to see (otherwise the user won’t see it unless you View the Source). If you don’t have a meta-description, search engines will simply pull a piece of your content to show the user. This may be all well and good, but you have absolutely no power as to which piece Google or any other SE uses! So WHY NOT put in a description you actually want your users to see?!
   For meta-descriptions, 165 characters is the limit when Google cuts them off. Again, it’s unnecessary to conform to under this amount. However, it’s always a good idea to insert a marketing message at the end of your description (phone number or address – essentially a call-to-action). In doing so, you’ll want it where users can see it: right on the SERP.

By optimizing your site in just these three ways, you’ll increase your search engine visibility in no time. That isn’t to say that it couldn’t be better still – there are many ways to optimize a site above and beyond these major ones (many having to do with simple usability). But for today, get started on these pieces, it could make all the difference!

Nicki Hicks
Maine SEO

Tags: search engine visibility, SEO

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 1:27 pm and is filed under SEO Lists, Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.