Here’s the second in our series on how to make your site “friendlier” to the search engines your visitors are using to find you. In an article in the Homestead Newsletter, we offered members an opportunity to submit their sites for a chance at having them analyzed to see how search engine friendly they really were. Our winner this week is Milton Ridge Historic Chapel. We had one of our professionals take a look at the Milton Ridge site so he could make some suggestions for changing its design to improve its “search engine optimization” (we call it “SEO” for short). Here’s David to give you his analysis and tips on good SEO practice -Rochelle
We all know now that it’s just not enough to have a pleasant looking website anymore. If you want to attract visitors to your site, you need to make sure the search engines are fully aware of your site and what it represents. When people search the Web for what they need, you need those search engines to guide them to you.
I analyzed the Milton Ridge site with an eye to making its design more search engine friendly. What I found can help Milton Ridge specifically, but can also serve as general lessons that we can all use as we build or maintain our websites.
1) Change your title tags – The titles of your web pages are important sources of information for search engines and customers alike, particularly your home page. It’s best to focus on titles that contain two (possibly three) keyword phrases. One should be your brand (probably your company name), and the other a common search term for your business. Since Milton Ridge is a wedding chapel, I ran a couple of searches on wedding chapels and wedding services. It looks like “chapel wedding maryland” (which yielded 12 daily searches) and “find wedding services” (19 daily searches) might be a good fit. I recommend this title tag: “Find Wedding Services at Milton Ridge Maryland Wedding Chapel”. That’s a manageable 61 characters.
To edit your page title, make sure you’re editing your home page, then click the Page Info button at the top of both SiteBuilder and SiteBuilder Lite. In SiteBuilder, a “Page Properties” editor will appear on the right side of the page; in SiteBuilder Lite, a popup will appear. Just fill in your desired text in the “Page Title” box.
2) Add Text Copy to the Front Page: Milton Ridge has an attractive video on their front page. It’s a good selling tool for visitors to the site, but it doesn’t do anything for the search engines to help people find the site in the first place. I recommend that Milton Ridge add a text description of their business on the front page – this makes really good content for search engine spiders. More than that, this is the page where most visitors will land. Text copy will help your customers understand your business and help close sales.
For Milton Ridge, I would at the very least try adding this copy underneath the navigation bar and above the video: “Find all-inclusive wedding services at the Milton Ridge Wedding Chapel. Located in the rolling hills of Maryland, we provide the perfect setting for your wedding and reception. Call us at 240.372.4442 today”. In addition to this minimum amount of suggested text, I really recommend adding even more information and copy relevant to your visitors.
3) Getting Links: Milton Ridge has some interesting partners listed on their services page. Some of them might have their own websites – like the minister, the florist and the DJ, for example – so I’d recommend asking them to add a link from their site to yours. If possible, it’s best that anyone linking to your site uses your keywords as the anchor text for the link. For example, a good link to Milton Ridge would be something like this: “We are a proud provider of DJ services to Milton Ridge Wedding Chapel.”
Here’s a bonus tip: all links to your site should go to just one URL if possible, and it should be the simplest possible. In Milton Ridge’s case, that would be the simplest available: http://www.miltonridge.com. However, Milton Ridge is using a different URL – http://www.miltonridge.com/index.html – to link to their home page.
That would be OK if everyone used that URL, but most sites linking to them will probably opt for the simpler http://www.miltonridge.com. What’s the problem? If someone’s website links to them using both http://www.miltonridge.com/index.html and http://www.miltonridge.com, search engines will treat these as two different links to two different pages. In effect, they’re creating duplicate content and splitting their links into multiple pages, diluting their impact on search engine results.
I hope this second installment of our tips for making your site more search engine friendly is helpful! Here’s my disclaimer: these free tips should help make your website more attractive to search engines, and are provided to help educate all Homestead members on how to design a more effective website. Please remember, they’re not meant to be comprehensive, and I can’t guarantee that you’ll immediately rank higher in search engine results. But I do think they’ll help. Milton Ridge has a beautifully designed site, and these tips should help them attract even more business with very little effort.
April 16, 2008 at 6:05 pm |
Thanks for posting about seo. I do website marketing myself and your blog is great research for my website marketing Video Podcast series http://www.youtube.com/user/PuReWebDev
thanks,
PuReWebDev
April 17, 2008 at 4:51 am |
Ok
April 17, 2008 at 2:38 pm |
The site has made nice use of the template and is lovely. In addition to your comments David I noticed some things that might also benefit them.
The site is currently using a java-script navigation and since the search engines can’t read java it will be difficult (read impossible unless the SE’s pick up a link elsewhere) for the search bots to travel the site and index the internal pages. I would suggest they eliminate the js navigation and utilitze plain text and/or create a site map page with plain text links. There is a tutorial here on how to accomplish that. http://www.homesteadconnection.com/Tut-PlainTextNavigation.html
Photos/images should have alt text. Search Engines are text oriented and a photo or graphic is useless in their ‘eyes’. Alt text is a good place to use (not abuse) your keywords.
They could also benefit by optimizing their photos. Several of the pages I viewed are over 200kb and the Florist page is approaching 1mg. Not good for either viewers or search engines.
And your comment about needing some content on the Home page is dead on. We are all probably a bit tired of hearing that content is king, but it’s a fact and for both viewers and the search engines it’s very important for a site to provide good, quality information.
Thanks for sharing your insight David. Will look forward to the next installment!
Susan
Homestead Connection Forum
April 18, 2008 at 3:51 am |
May I submit this page for suggestions. I just finished it and have done nothing to attract search engines.
April 18, 2008 at 3:52 am |
I hope you will review it.
April 18, 2008 at 7:32 am |
After reading another site evaluation resulting from Homesteads contest I think that the average Homestead user is becoming educated to the benefits of having a well optimized and designed website. This blog is certainly a help to the chosen sites but for many others it might fall short in identifying problem areas in their sites.
Homestead provides a great product and with additional knowledge the sites produced can be truly exceptional.
I would like to invite all interested readers to visit and join the Homestead Connection forum which is free to all Homestead users.
( http://www.readybb.com/homesteadconnection/portal.php ) We have a great deal of information on Site Design and Search Engine Optimization.
Other resources include tutorials to customize and create unique web sites as well as a guide to understanding SEO and how to implement it in to your website.
Judy Long
April 18, 2008 at 6:19 pm |
Charlotte I would really recommend the Homestead Connection Forum as Judy mentioned above. I am confident you’ll find information that will benefit your site not only in terms of SEO, but design as well. The two really go hand in hand.
Hope to see you at the Forum!
susanmj
Homestead Connection Forum Administrator
April 23, 2008 at 8:42 pm |
Great pos, I have actaully had a few websites with homestead for a while and jsut stumbled on this blod and I have found it to be very helpful. if you didnt mind take a look at my site and let me know what you think. we are doing well with the site but can always use more comments to better the traffic.
April 25, 2008 at 3:50 pm |
Thanks for your comment. If you would like to be considered for future SEO posts, please add your url in this comment string
June 9, 2008 at 6:36 am |
thanks for ur info
June 17, 2008 at 8:19 am |
Also worth noting that if you have links to your site already pointing to http://www.website.com/index.html you might want to consider doing a 301 Redirect to the non http://www.website.com/ link, this will show your visitors to the same content and tell the search engines that the content they want to look at is really at http://www.website.com/ not /index.html.
This way you will no longer be showing duplicate content. If you need more guidance on a 301 redirect feel free to e-mail me or google “301 redirect”
Matt
June 29, 2008 at 8:15 pm |
Thanks for this blog. It’s very helpful. I can’t wait to see the reults of the tips.
Theresa
July 9, 2008 at 2:40 am |
Thanks for SEO blog. It’s too helpful.
July 11, 2008 at 1:27 pm |
this is so awsome
September 27, 2008 at 7:40 pm |
I am really interested in building my site and making it better. Please view it and tell me what I can do and how to get more traffic and make it more user friendly! Thank you, Micheal Curatola -Owner ( Curatola Construction & Home Builders)
http://www.curatolaconstruction.com
October 11, 2008 at 11:48 am |
very good article for seo
March 28, 2009 at 10:14 am |
I’m new to all of this and find your information extremely helpful! Thanks so much. If you get a chance take a look at my blog (Gifts Galore by Giftlady) and please let me know if you have any suggestions about what I’m doing. Thanks again! Giftlady
April 12, 2009 at 1:42 am |
Finally someone who can write a good blog ! I loved your post and will be telling others about it. Subscribing to your RSS feed now. Thanks
April 25, 2009 at 11:36 am |
Great stuff. Nice to read some well written posts. A long way between them.