Increase Search Engine Rankings - Learn our top ten!

TOP 10 SEO TIPS – Compiled by Lawrence Media Group

Becoming visible to search engines is critical to a successful online marketing campaign.

If you want to increase your search engine rankings then follow these recommendations. If you do not have a webmaster to implement these changes or make sure you are optimized for search engines then please call us at 1-888-275-4814.

1. Be sure your address and a list of cities you serve is listed at the bottom of your page. Search Engines will look on your home page first to see where you are located. Make it easy for them to find where you are located so they can report back to potential clients searching for you by location. Check out http://www.tcsidingprofessionals.com/ for a sample.

2. Be sure to sign up for Google Maps/Local and Yahoo Local. These are free directories that allow you to be listed at the top of the organic rankings for the city that you service. Go to http://www.google.com/local/add/lookup?hl=en-US&gl=US to sign up for Google Local. For Yahoo Local go to https://edit.yahoo.com/registration?.done=http://local.yahoo.com/&.src=lcl&.intl=us

3. Create a Blog. Blogs are very effective in creating trust and driving search engines to your website. If you don’t know what a blog is then you can go to http://www.lawrencemediagroup.blogspot.com/ and read all about it. We recommend a Blog for 2 reasons. The first is to drive search engines to your website an second so you can communicate with your customers on a more regular and personal level. Blogs also allow feedback from readers and becomes a very simple ad efficient way to have a personal relationship with your reader.

4. Make sure you have a Site Map on your page. Sitemaps, as the name implies, are just a map of your site - i.e. on one single page you show the structure of your site, its sections, the links between them, etc. Sitemaps make navigating your site easier and having an updated sitemap on your site is good both for your users and for search engines. Sitemaps are an important way of communication with search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. The steps you need to perform in order to have a sitemap for your site are simple. First, you need to generate it, then you upload it to your site, and finally you notify Google about it. Notifying Google includes adding the site to your Google Sitemaps account, so if you do not have an account with Google, you should open one today. As a matter of fact Google will want its own site map called an xml site map.

5. You can improve the rankings of your website by increasing the number of
high-quality sites that link to it. Establishing a reciprocating links program is a good way to go about this. If you belong to any organizations that post a membership directory, make sure your website is listed. Try creating an Our Partners or an Our Friends page on your website.
Contact service providers in your area and ask them to put your link on their site and you will put their link on yours. Link swapping is a very effective SEO tactic.


6. May sure your site has been submitted to Google, Yahoo, MSN and other popular search engines.

Google: free Submit your site ; paid Premium SponsorshipsOpen Directory (ODP): How to suggest a site - Free (and very important!)Yahoo: Free URL submission for inclusion in Yahoo! Search (Yahoo! registration required)Inktomi: Add URL - Free (currently used by MSN and also Yahoo)Ask Jeeves: Answer Link - PPC ; Premier Listing - PPC ; Site Submit - Paid inclusionLooksmart: Submit URL - PPC ; Zeal Add URL - Free for non-commercial sitesOverture : Pay-for-Performance - PPC ; Site Match - PPC ; Content Match - PPCFast: AdBuyer - Paid Placement ; InSite Search Engine Submission - Paid inclusion Mamma.com: Collection Submission - Paid inclusionInfoSpace: Add URL - Paid inclusion

If you have your website link on other sites, most likely you will not have to do this as your site will be submitted when those sites get reindexed. But it wont hurt to do it once. But you do not need to resubmit, unless you make changes and want them registered as close to immediately as possible. Otherwise, the major search engines will come back periodically and re-crawl the site.

7. Be sure your Meta Data is keyword optimized and page specific for every page. Most developers just use the same meta data for all of the pages. But you will rank higher if you have meta data that is unique to each page. ie. meta description, meta title and keywords. If you wish to be on the first page of the search results, you must include your keywords in your Title tag and these keywords must be in the content of that page.

8. Nomenclatures: Whenever possible, you should save your images, media, and web pages with the keywords in the file names. For example, if your keyword phrase is "golf putters" you'll want to save the images used on that page as golf-putters-01.jpg or golf_putters_01.jpg (either will work). It's not confirmed, but many SEO's have experienced improvement in ranking by renaming images and media. Also all images must be assigned alternative text descriptions called Alt Tags so they will become visible to search engines. Without Alt Tags your images are invisible.

9. It would be a waste of your time to optimize your website for keywords that are not even being searched for. Therefore you should invest some energy into finding the best keywords. There are several SEO tools available on the Internet to help you find the best keywords. Tip: Don't be deceived by organizations that require you to register first. The two most popular resources are WordTracker and Yahoo!. Because Yahoo! has a man-made database that truncates plurals, many SEO pros prefer to use WordTracker (WT).

10. By far the easiest top 10 SEO tips you will ever do as it relates to search engine optimization is include a robots.txt file at the root of your website. Open up a text editor, such as Notepad and type "User-agent: *". Then save the file as robots.txt and upload it to your root directory on your domain. This one command will tell any spider that hits your website to "please feel free to crawl every page of my website".

BONUS TIP:
11. Optimize your code for higher rankings.Use correct HTML code as HTML errors negatively impact search engine promotion and turn away human visitors. The W3C offers a good free online validation tool that spots coding errors. Of particular importance is the H or heading tag that tells search engines how you have structured the importance of your content.Remove extra code. Replace lengthy JavaScript functions and CSS definitions with calls to external files. This moves important page content to the top of the page, makes maintenance easier, and decreases page file size.

External CSS file linked to all pages that use styles
External JavaScript file linked to all pages that use JavaScript functions
Minimal use of FONT and other deprecated formatting tags to reduce page file size
Do not depend on the DHTML menu alone for navigation – provide additional links throughout the body of the page, through breadcrumb and footer navigation links.Dynamic URLs and frames - best not use frames at all and keep dynamic URLs to a single ? parameter.'


If you need help implementing any of these strategies please contact me at 1-888-275-4817.

Thank you and I hope this post is helpful.

Jonathan Lawrence
Lawrence Media Group
http://www.lawrencemg.com/
http://www.lawrencemediagroup.com/
214-215-6048
972-818-8273 x111
jonathan@lawrencemg.com


*I would like to thank Google Webmaster Tools, Steve Wildmann SEO Specialist, Paul Slack at WebDex, Ed Taylor and Canadian based The Wire for help creating this document.

What is a Blog and How Can It Help Your Business?

I decided to write this article because it has come to my attention how little many of us in the contractor community know about this huge phenomenon called blogging, and how this usually free and simple practice can actually grow your business.

Blogs are simple programs that allow anyone to quickly and easily publish content on the web. The main goals of a blog are to express your thoughts, communicate ideas and even talk with your customers, or as a vehicle to promote your product or services.

If you want official definitions here are a few:

blog: an online diary; a personal chronological log of thoughts published on a Web page; also called weblog; typically updated daily, blogs often reflect the personality of the author.*

blog: a shared on-line journal where people can post diary entries about their personal experiences and hobbies; "postings on a blog are usually in chronological order" [syn: web log] **

blog: a blog (an abridgment of the term web log) is a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.***

*Webster's New Millennium™ Dictionary of English, Preview Edition (v 0.9.7)Copyright © 2003-2008 Lexico Publishing Group, LLC
**WordNet® 3.0, © 2006 by Princeton University.
*** From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Producing a blog or blogging is an immensely growing practice because it is so easy to set up and is usually free. As of June 2008, Technorati, an internet search engine for searching blogs, indexed over 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.

So, if you are wanting to reach internet savvy homeowners, a blog is a good idea.

There are many places to sign up for a blog, and it is usually fast and simple. Here are a few that you may want to consider:

www.blogger.com Owned by Google

www.blogstream.com

www.blogster.com

These blogs are free but some will contain advertisements. I like Blogger the best. Blogger requires no advertisements and it is very easy to set up. I like the fact it is owned by Google.


USING YOUR BLOG FOR BUSINESS

There are two main reasons why I recommend blogging.

We all want more leads, and in today’s economy every lead is becoming more and more precious. A blog creates another page on the web that gives positive information about you or your business.

1. Blogging generates more leads by driving search engines to your website. This is a proven strategy; the idea is that when a homeowner searches for your services using Google, Yahoo, or other search engines (for example typing in roof replacement, dallas, texas) there is a good chance that your Blog will show up as a search result -- hopefully ahead of your competitors. The homeowner clicks on your Blog, reads the article, and then is directed to your website to learn more about you.

It is important to know that search engines are looking for fresh content and want to give the person searching the best possible search result, so you must keep your Blog current and have it updated at least monthly. This also means that it is important to make sure that your blog is optimized for search engines. This involves making sure that your blog contains the most popular keywords that homeowners use to search for your services so your blog can be found by the search engines.

2. The second reason blogging is a good idea for your business is because it allows you to easily share your thoughts about your services and yourself in a simple and more personal way. The homeowner is hoping to find a contractor he or she can trust, and a blog will allow you to help them understand a little more about you as a person and not just as a business owner.

Blog Ideas:

· announce a recently received award
· announce a special event
· mention community involvement
· announce addition of a new team member
· announce birth of a baby
· announce a new product or service
· announce anniversary of long term employee or retirement

The bottom line is that you can write about anything, and if you are trying to establish trust and confidence, letting the homeowner understand a little more about you as a person will go a long way. You are more than just a contractor. You are a real person trying to provide a quality service with honesty and integrity.

One interesting benefit of a blog is that readers can respond to your blog and post their comments to what you have to say. With most blogs, you control who can read and write to your blog. You can choose whether you want to allow comments and you can delete any comments you don't like. This is a good feature in the event that someone decides to take advantage of your blog by posting false and negative comments about you. So you will want to review your blog on a regular basis and monitor all feedback if you decide to allow readers to post comments to your blog.

I have set up a few Blogs for some of my customers and you can see how they are using them at:

www.francisharvey.com
www.villagebuilders.ca
www.advancedroofing.biz

After we set these blogs up we created a link on their website called Our Blog to allow homeowners to find it easily when they visit their site.


CONCLUSION

I hope this article has been informative and helps you understand blogging and how it can help your business. If you have any questions blogs or comments about this article, please let me know.
I can be reached at jlawrence@lawrencemg.com or directly at 214-215-6048.

P.S. Please contact me for help setting up your first blog.