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!
September 15, 2008 at 9:46 pm |
nice and informative tips.
October 19, 2008 at 12:35 pm |
I’ve been wanting to contact those of you, the engineers, who decides what homestead will become in the next year or so.
I hope that homestead becomes the top web site building platform for those who want to build a professional looking web site. You guys seem have the way there but the web has changed since homestead first came on the scene. As well, homestead has does a decent job of keeping up but the time is now, to do MORE.
Like “homemade” dynamic sites that can resize. An ability to hand code if that is needed. A chance at working with the CSS’s. Better video integration, audio and flash. If not that, then at least an easier way to switch things over to a more beefy site builder, like dreamweaver.
This would give homestead users more of what it takes to make web sites look polished and professional. Given these abilities, I believe that homestead would soon build beyond what you currently have available in customers and soon start attracting people who would otherwise go out and buy Dreamweaver and build it themselves on another service.
I see this as being the time to expand what you are trying to do and be more inclusive to all those out there looking to create something tangible on the web. I know right now I’m between learning how to better use homestead or buying a more powerful web building and learning how to do things all over again. I believe the second option would weaken your position over time. However, if you started to update and improve the builder, expand it and open it up, while keeping it’s usability easy as it is, I think you guy have a chance of upping the stakes and really setting the tone for years to come.
Google being on your heels is not a great thing, as I’m not the biggest fan of Google. However, they are stretching themselves too thin and this is the time to put homestead out of their reach technologically speaking.
I really like homestead and want to see it grow and be a real asset to the web community and not just another company foot note, like Netscape, AOL or many of the other companies that weren’t smart enough to change with the times.
I would love to know what you guys have planned for things in the near future as well as a few years down the road…
Thanks and I hope this reaches someone who is listening.
October 19, 2008 at 12:40 pm |
PS, I wish I had my last post back so I could edit all my mistakes. Sorry about the sloppy English but hey, that’s just my passion overwhelming my brain.
October 20, 2008 at 8:15 am |
looking forward for more information about this. thanks for sharing. Eugene
October 22, 2008 at 2:54 pm |
Thanks for the helpful write-up. The yoga space keeps getting more and more competitive. -John http://www.theashramyoga.com..
October 24, 2008 at 4:28 am |
Gosh! Why you never told me about this resourceful post? I have been looking for some more tips to take my t-shirt site to the next level. Thanks that I have finally stumbled upon your site haha. Nice tips here. Love love ~
October 27, 2008 at 10:04 am |
The “inurl” command was something I had not seen before, so I learned something new today. Thanks for this informative article.
October 29, 2008 at 5:42 pm |
Great info! I’ll try to implement as much as possible for my brand new site…wish me luck!
Samantha is a lucky individual to get this type of assistance, not to mention, the traffic she will now receive.
Nemi
November 15, 2008 at 3:37 am |
I see this as being the time to expand what you are trying to do and be more inclusive to all those out there looking to create something tangible on the web. I know right now I’m between learning how to better use homestead or buying a more powerful web building and learning how to do things all over again.
December 25, 2008 at 10:08 am |
Excellent post. Thanks for showing a great and easy way to measure your seo and serps.
December 28, 2008 at 12:43 pm |
I agree with everyone.
1. Informative Post and thank you
2. Homestead rocks, but is falling behind. Im already looking for a way to upgrade because homestead cant use any java integrated or flash items. I have now mastered homestead sitebuilder and feel confident in saying that its behind.
Either way, wether you guys keep up or fall behind. I love homestead and what it has helped me to do and love the advice!
January 1, 2009 at 10:40 am |
Thanks for a great article on SEO…I descovered a tool at the Homestead Connection website that is extremely helpful for building directory links. It is located in their forum, on the “Tool Shack” board, the first listing.
Jordy
February 3, 2009 at 1:51 am |
Dear Sir
I am emailing from Ashiyana yoga center in goa, India. Our web site address is http://www.ashiyana-yoga-goa.com. I have just visited your site & would be interested in having our link on your web site
Do let me know how we proceed with this.
Regards
Ashu
For Ashiyana Goa
February 24, 2009 at 10:02 pm |
One thing we noticed is that you didnt choose to match her page content to what her keywords are,
Also it would have been better to use “Instructive Yoga In San Francisco”
because its an action word and breaks up to instructor , information, or yoga therapy.
another tip is to always have your address aoround the top area of your site for better localization.
nice tutorial,
May 5, 2009 at 9:21 am |
Great post. New to your blog, but you have great writing style. You had some very interesting points that I liked. Looking forward to more of your thoughts.