Collections Insider

In my first article, I introduced a minimum of twelve mistakes commonly found with small business websites resulting in poor search engine rankings. In part two, I’ll break down each of these areas in more detail and provide a few examples for clarification.

To be found online, your website’s content and a proper design around it is key. In other words, building a website with the mindset of being found in a search is the first priority. But don’t panic, your current website may not need to be entirely redesigned. It may only require some enhancements to its content and structure.

I know what some of you are thinking: “I don’t know how to make changes to my website”. If that’s the case, you hired a webmaster or you know someone to make changes to your site, correct? Okay! Problem solved, now let’s move on.

In order to begin to take account of your current website’s issues, there are questions you need to ask yourself first:

1. Where is my targeted ad area geographically? In other words, are you looking for business in just your city, state or region or are you national or world-wide?
2. What is the ultimate goal of your website? Is it to click on a shopping cart link that leads to a purchase, complete a Contact Us form, a simple phone call?
3. What are keywords and key phrases used in your business? For example: if you are an attorney in New Jersey and you want to target Personal Injury cases, then “Personal Injury Lawyer/Attorney New Jersey” is your main keyword phrase to build upon.
4. Once you know your keywords and key phrases, do you know your competition found ranking higher than you for the same search terms? Make a list of the top websites that rank on page #1 of the search results. In my next article, I’ll show you how to examine their site to see why they are there and how you can learn from them.

Mistake #1: Wrong title used in the title bar.
Open your website online. Look at the very top left of the screen. In the blue bar in white lettering above your web browser window you will see what is called your title bar. This is also the same text link your customers click on when they find you in their search results. Usually I’ll find “Home Page” or just a non-keyworded business name. If your business name does contain keywords or a key phrase, by all means use it. Would you like to see just how important the title tag is? Search the words used in your title bar now and watch what happens. You may be surprised at the results.

The title tag, as it’s known in HTML language, is probably the most important yet often misunderstood and often overlooked optimization trick known. The content you see here MUST contain your first two, three or four keywords and relate to the theme of your website. It shouldn’t be longer than roughly 60 characters, and avoid using special characters. It is okay to separate keywords with the pipe character “|” though. Don’t just change the title tag on your home page either. Change it on every page to reflect that page’s content. This gives you more landing pages to be found in a search.

The title tag looks like this in your source code: <title>Your Website Title</title>. You can view your source code (but not edit it) by going to “View” on the top browser window menu, click “Source”. What you now see is your actual website code, same as what a search engine spider sees. You should find your title tag near the top somewhere. Your webmaster can easily edit this tag in seconds and put it online.

Example of a better title for Steve’s Carpet Cleaning Service: “Carpet Cleaning in California | Commercial Residential Cleaning CA”. Try to think of your title bar text as a headline that uses keywords you wish to be found for. You should see better results fast from this one trick alone. Important! Avoid repeating keywords. “Carpet Cleaning Carpet Cleaning Carpet Cleaning, California, California” will most likely get you penalized for spamming and possibly dropped from the search engine entirely. Search engines are smart. They know when you are trying to deceive them too and will drop you like a hot potato.

Check out what Google has to say about optimization at this link google.com/support/webmasters/.

Mistake #2: Your domain gets renewed every year
Your domain name is your website’s .com, .net, .org etc. web address name. Most people purchase and register a domain name for only one year then renew it every year when they receive a reminder to do so. What they don’t know is that Google and some other search engines regard your domain as a possible “fly-by-night” website due to a less than one year renewal period. Websites come and go everyday. Google values older websites and rewards them with greater page rank. Older is more than two years old. It can take a new domain’s website over a year just to get established. If your website is already old, that’s great. Just pay to renew your domain for more than five years to show you are in it for the long haul. It is well worth the investment. Again, ask your webmaster to do this if you do not own your domain.

Mistake #3: Too many images, not enough content
If your primary keywords are part of an image or in your logo, then search engines cannot read them. So if your website header image contains your business name and it is also your search term, you need to have your name in text too. Avoid images as text replacement. If your webmaster knows CSS, he or she can create background images behind the text and make it look as if it were all in one of the same. Think text, not images.

Mistake #4: Not using the Alternate text tag
If you do need images, use the “Alt” tag and/or “Title” tag where appropriate in your HTML code. This is that little yellow box that appears when you place your mouse pointer over an image or a link. This has two benefits: one is that it is extra metadata content readable by search engines and two, it allows for visually challenged users using text readers to hear a description of your image. Again, talk to your webmaster. Use alt text for images.

Mistake #5: Navigation content, not images
Navigation blocks are common artistic design elements on websites. But again, if the text in the navigation contains keywords, it is best not to imbed it inside an image. It is also smart to use alternate text and title text for links, similar to those used for images.

Mistake #6: Too many keywords used too often
Yes, you can overdue it with keywords in your content. You will be considered a spam website if you overdo it. Usually a good rule of thumb is to have keywords consisting of only 3% to 7% of the website’s content but this varies with your market. In Google, try a search for “keyword cloud” then find out what the percentage of keywords is on your website and check against you highest ranking competitor as a gauge. The keywords and key phrases you are optimizing for should have the highest percentages.

Mistake #7: No theme for the website
Search engines, like people, want to know what your website is about. Don’t disappoint either of them. Use the Title bar tag and meta description tag to your advantage. The description tag is usually just under the title bar tag in your source code. It should be short and highly descriptive as this is what most search engines use in the search results to describe your site. Google doesn’t rely on this tag. Instead it uses excerpts from content usually near the top of the page. Because of this, it is important that the first content placed on your website effectively describes what your website is all about with as many keywords and key phrases as possible to set up a proper theme.

Mistake #8: No document structure
A home page should set up like that of a book’s table of contents. If you use Microsoft Word, you may be familiar with heading styles such as “Heading 1”, “Heading 2”, etc. Google actually advises webmasters to use this hierarchy in their content so search spiders can establish the theme and content order of your website. In fact, when looking through your content in the “View Source”, somewhere in your code you should see code tags like <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc. For example: our carpet cleaning website example should contain:

<h1>Carpet Cleaning Specialists in California</h1>
near the top as the main title to support the theme, then possibly followed by:
<h2>Carpet Cleaning Services</h2>
then followed by the content that the carpet cleaning services title introduces

This change usually involves minor adjustments on your website so it shouldn’t be too hard for you webmaster to add these hierarchy tags.

Mistake #9: Geographic keywords not being used
Are you national, world-wide or just regional? The countries, cities, towns, counties, states, etc. all contain search terms that people use everyday. Think about it. Wouldn’t you narrow your search for something by location first? Make sure your areas are keywords and part of your content.

Mistake #10: Poor placement of keywords and key phrases
Many websites use navigation links across the top of the page in the form of tabs or on the sides in columns. This is okay as long as these navigation links contain keywords you are trying to optimize for and are not unreadable images. This is not good if your navigation just says “Home”, About Us”, “Contact Us”, etc. Instead, try “Carpet Cleaning Home”, “About Steve’s Cleaning Services”, etc.

It is important to understand that search engine spiders read in this order: from left to right, top to bottom. The most important keywords of any website must appear closer to the top of the page’s content. If your navigation is the first content it finds, you should either move it elsewhere, preferably to the right column, or create keyword rich navigation title links. Search engines also place importance on keywords in bold and italics so have your best ones in your top content somewhere. Example: “Steve’s Carpet Cleaning services the greater Los Angeles region. We specialize in carpet stain removal”, etc. You get the idea.

Mistake#11: Wrong content being used
If the content on your web page doesn’t relate to the theme of your website, then why is it there? This could be considered as spam if you’re not careful.

Mistake #12: Lack of quality inbound links
I can write an entire series of articles on links alone. It is important to know that the links coming to your website should be from preferably high-ranking, quality websites with content that relates to your content. The hard part though is getting these links. To put a positive spin on this, your website can lack quality links and still rank rather well if everything else is done correctly or you have little to no competition for your keywords. In reality though, your website will never rank as well as an identical site with lots of quality links.

A good way to start getting links is to reciprocate with your business partners. You get a link and so do they. Everyone’s happy. Another way is to create articles in a blog with a link back to your website.

The best links are those that happen naturally without a return link. If you get links coming to your site from a higher page ranking website than yours, you will get visited more often by search spiders and also get a higher page rank. Sounds simple, but getting those links are tough. Avoid buying links or placing too many at one time. Google likes to see links to your website build naturally over time and therefore places more emphasis on them as a result. By all means avoid link farms, or websites that link to everything. This can seriously deteriorate your web rankings.

Most of the mistakes covered here can easily be corrected, however some may involve some serious redesigning. It is best to consult with your webmaster and be sure they understand how and why to do these changes first. After changes are made, it may take months to start getting results to have patience. The reason being is that search engines that haven’t visited your website for some time may not crawl through your entire website next time around unless it sees something of interest, usually a title or description change, to schedule a more recent and thorough crawl of your website. That, my friends, is ultimately what we’re shooting for.

About the author: John Kelly is a free lance web designer and search engine optimization specialist. His niche is small business website optimization and consultation. He is also the webmaster and I.T. specialist for YourCollectionSolution.com.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Website Tips. 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.