Our tips on Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, are among our most popular, so we asked David to pick another Homestead website customer for an SEO review. Up this time: Samantha Ostergaard Yoga Therapy. These tips are specifically written for that site, but the fundamentals used apply to everyone. Happy SEO’ing! – Rochelle.
Hello again! We’ve selected Samantha Ostergaard for our next Search Engine Optimization case study. Samantha is a Homestead customer based in San Francisco, where she specializes in yoga therapy.
We’ve covered a lot of SEO basics in my previous posts, first with SEO checkup – Luminous Day Spa, then with Make your website search engine friendly – 3 tips for Milton Ridge. For this post I thought I’d concentrate this entry on some slightly more advanced SEO techniques that can really help Samantha’s site, and yours.
Keyword choice
For her title tag on the front page, Samantha chose ‘yoga therapy’ as her main keyword. There’s a really useful tool I like to use for researching how popular different keyword choices are online called the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. It can give you advice on what keywords to consider, and now it even tells you the number of searches that were made on each!
Using that tool, this is what we find:
Keyword analysis - yoga therapy
‘Yoga therapy’ seems to be a highly competitive word, meaning that you’d have a lot of competition from other websites for people searching for that word or phrase. What does that mean for you? That it would be hard to stand out of the crowd of competing sites if you optimized for that phrase.
Instead, ‘integrative yoga therapy’ or ‘yoga therapy training’ might be better keywords—less competition, and still quite descriptive:
Keyword analysis - integrative yoga
Notice that competition for ‘yoga san francisco’ is relatively fierce, but dramatically less so for a semantic version – ‘yoga in san francisco’.
Looking at Samantha’s website with this knowledge in mind, we recommend that she optimize it for this keyword string: ‘integrative yoga in san francisco ca’:
- This works well as a description for what she has to offer, which will help get her more qualified traffic.
- By using that string she can get her traffic from multiple keyword strings (‘yoga in san francisco’, ‘integrative yoga’ and ‘yoga san francisco ca’).
- At the very least, we recommend that Samantha change her title tag to: ‘Samantha Ostergaard | Integrative Yoga In San Francisco CA’.
Getting links
I next checked Samantha’s backlinks (incoming links to her site) using Yahoo! Site Explorer, and got these results:
Inbound links
When I checked she had only 26 external links, mostly from faves.com and yogafinder.com. Samantha definitely needs more links, so we recommend she list her site in these directories: Yahoo Directory, Business.com, Best of the Web, Joe Ant, and the Intuit Business Directory (of course).
Remember, all links are not made equal. A link from each of the domains above is equivalent to a handful of links from smaller sites. Always try to get a link from high-traffic, high-trust domains, or from sites that cover the same topic as your business.
Another note: while you have to pay for these links, they don’t guarantee inclusion. Your site must be professional and well-made. This is why the search engines trust them.
Get more links by participating in topical sites
As I mentioned above, links from smaller sites that are topically similar to yours are pretty good too. To get links from these places, look for community sites where you can start engaging and participating:
- With blogs, you can start by commenting on posts. While links in the comments are usually not followed by search engines, they do tend to attract some traffic. More importantly, commenting will get you noticed and hopefully featured in a post in the future.
- With forums, your membership (and your reputation) establishes over time. Once it does, you can add a link to your own site on your forum signature.
How do you find these sites? A simple Google search for ‘yoga forums’ or ‘yoga blogs’ is often sufficient. Another variation is using the inurl: command, which can help identify which URLs in use have certain words contained in them. For example, if we do a Google search for ‘inurl:forum yoga’ and ‘inurl:blog yoga’, we’ll find examples of yoga sites that have ‘forum’ or ‘blog’ in their urls, which indicate that they might be yoga forums or blogs. Look them up, and see if you can participate in their communities.
Try it yourself
With just these few simple steps Samantha can increase the traffic to her website, which is always good for business. Try these tips yourself, and see if you can’t raise the profile of your own site!
