Search Engine Optimization

Let's start our search engine optimization discussion with a list of search phrases. What phrases will people looking for your product or service use in a search engine? Make sure you consider using a location name in your phrase if your product or service is locally based. People looking for "swimming pool contractors" will quickly realize they really want a local swimming pool contractor and will add a location as part of a new search phrase ("Austin swimming pool contractors"). Because you want to match the prospect's search phrase as closely as possible, make sure you include the location in your search phrase list if your product or service is locally based. Stay targeted.

Next, take your search phrases to Google, Yahoo, and Bing paid advertising interfaces to see what phrases similar to your list are used and with what frequency. Google Adwords, Yahoo Marketing Solutions, and Microsoft Adcenter all have keyword tools that will give you suggestions and usage information. You will have to create an account (and pay $5.00 for Microsoft Adcenter) but you don't have to maintain an ongoing campaign to use their tools. If they force you to create a campaign, just make sure you pause it or delete it when you have finished using their keyword tool. After completing this step you should have a list of search phrases ordered by relevance to your product (or service) and frequency of use.

The web page title is VERY important when it comes to search engine placement. At this point, you should identify pages of your site that relate to the highest-ranked search phrases and make sure the title of each page includes that exact search phrase. Now, let's not get confused about what a page title is. When you look at a web page in your browser, the page title will be displayed at the very top of the browser window. This is above File, Edit, and View toolbars (click here for an example). The title on the example page is "Web Pro Journal - Search Engine Optimization - First Steps". In the HTML code, this is the text between the <title> and </title> tags. It is NOT visible in the web page window. The page title is used on the search engine results page when creating a link to your page (the blue underlined text - click here for an example). So, you will want the page title to make sense and entice the visitor to click on the link. The page utilizing the search phrase should also have the search phrase close to the top of the page in <h1> tags (header one). The <h1> tags indicate the top level heading on a page (or page topic). Header tags can be styled to look any way you wish, but they do have enhanced meaning with search engines. Therefore, we recommend that you use <h1> tags around your web page heading and utilize search phrases in the heading.

In the next issue, we will discuss content and links.

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