Homestead Blog

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.

I’m excited to introduce a new feature to the Homestead Product Blog that we plan on making a regular thing – SEO analysis of members’ sites. We ran an article in the latest Homestead Newsletter about Search Engine optimization (SEO), and offered members a chance to submit their sites so we could choose one and do a detailed evaluation of it to see how well it followed good SEO design guidelines. Here’s David, our in-house SEO, to give you the results. - Rochelle

Most of you know that it’s not enough to have a great looking website. If you want to do anything more than impress your friends with your site, you’re going to want to attract visitors to it. And that means making sure the search engines know about your site, so they can direct customers to it when searches are made. And that means making sure your site is designed properly to work well with those search engines.

When we offered to do a detailed analysis of a member site to demonstrate good SEO design, we got a lot of submissions. Our first winner is Luminous Day Spa of San Francisco, California. I took a look at that site with an eye to optimizing its interaction with those crucial search engines, and here’s the result:

How it ranks now

First of all, the site is listed, and that’s good. Here’s how I found out: I entered site:luminousspa.com in the Google search window to find the pages they’ve indexed. Here are the results.

However, there’s room for improvement. Being listed is important, but ranking high in your business category is what you’re after. This site doesn’t rank very highly for its own brand keyword - its name: Luminous Day Spa. Your goal is to be #1 on the list of results on your brand keyword; here’s how this site currently ranks in search results on the Google search engine, and here’s how it ranks on Yahoo’s.

What Luminous Day Spa should do

1) Optimize for your brand name.

2) Identify an additional keyword that you want to rank highly for. Small sites should have only one additional, or a maximum of two, to avoid diluting the effect. Your additional keyword/phrase should be relevant to your business, have built-in popularity that will generate traffic, and yet not have too much competition (if you’re a real estate site, choosing “real estate” is not the best idea because all your competitors will be using the same phrase).

For this site, I’d consider using Day Spa San Francisco. The search engines have enough flexibility that they can “rank” you both for those words and for variations like day spa San Francisco, or spa San Francisco ca, etc. We used a free online tool to help identify new keywords for Luminous Day Spa; here are the results. Whatever keyword/phrase you choose, make sure you stick with it and optimize your site for it.

Tips for Luminous Day Spa to rank higher for their keywords

1) Remove the splash page. A splash page is often used as a sort of pre-home page, and visitors often find them unnecessary at best. They’re not ideal for search engines either, and they’ll just ignore any Flash or image content on them anyway.

2) Generate a “sitemap” for your site, and submit it to search engines. A sitemap is just what it sounds like - in a special format - and it can make your site easier for visitors to navigate your site, and easier for search engines to “crawl” so they can rank it properly.

There are websites out there that will generate a sitemap for your site for free. Here’s the sitemap one of them created for Luminous Day Spa. Instructions on the site make it easy to integrate a sitemap with your own site.

3) Use title and description meta tags – you can reread Lloyd’s earlier post in this blog on how to add meta data to your site.

• For titles, keep them to a maximum of 60 characters, making good use of your keywords and placing them as close to the beginning of the title as possible. For our example, I might try this title, which you’ll notice is my suggested keyword/phrase, plus the added State:

Luminous Spa | Day Spa San Francisco California CA

• For descriptions, keep them to fewer than 160 characters. Again, make good use of your keywords, and make sure you include your unique selling proposition, and your call to action. For Luminous Day Spa, I might try this description:

Visit Luminous Day Spa and enjoy our premium therapeutic massage services and treatments today. Our ultra-elegant facilities are located in San Francisco, CA

For both titles and descriptions, make sure each page has individual content. Luminous Day Spa should only use the recommended title and description for their Home page, and then vary them to describe each page uniquely.

4) Change the page header to an image, and insert an alternate image tag like this - Luminous Spa | Day Spa San Francisco California CA. Consider adding your phone number and address in text form to your header image so they appear on all pages.

5) Try to incorporate your keywords in various forms two to three times in the writing on each page, like San Francisco, CA Day Spa, and Day Spa In San Francisco California.

6) Add this keyword-rich footer to your pages - Copyright© 2007-2008 Luminous Day Spa, San Francisco California CA.

7) Ask the Homestead Help Center for help in doing what’s known as a “301 redirect” or “permanent redirect”, so people clicking on http://luminousspa.com will be automatically directed to http://www.luminousspa.com. These two pages are treated uniquely by the search engines. By combining them, you remove the risk of duplicate content and point all links to one canonical page.

(Update: Unfortunately, 301 redirects are not currently possible at Homestead.)

8 ) Any URLs used on your site should be written in lower-case letters, and hyphens should be used. For example:

• http://luminousspa.com/Policies.html should be written as http://luminousspa.com/policies.html

• http://luminousspa.com/giftcertificates.html should be written as http://luminousspa.com/gift-certificates.html

9) Provide “alt tags” for each of the images used on your site that describe what activity they represent. Make sure you caption them with good descriptions. For the Luminous Day Spa site, the ‘spa pictures’ tab could especially use this treatment. No pun intended.

Some additional tips to help site usability for Luminous Day Spa

1) Luminous Day Spa has a “Join the Mailing List” feature. Good idea, except that it’s an image, which will not help your search engine ranking. Consider using a link, not an image, to get people to join.

2) Bonus: Add an ‘About Us’ page, and post customer testimonials – these function as confidence builders for your visitors.

The importance of Links

The steps we’ve just gone over can work a lot of magic on the Luminous Day Spa site to increase its profile with those all-important search engines. And there’s another way you can increase your site’s search engine ranking: getting links.

Links to your site from other sites are very important. They’re commonly called ‘inlinks’, or ‘backlinks’, and they can be a key indicator of site popularity to search engines when they rank search results. The idea is that if people link to you, they must know about you and think enough of your business to provide easy access to your site.

We tested the Luminous Day Spa, and found just a couple of those important inlinks to the Luminous Day Spa site. Here are the results of two tests, the first using the “www” prefix on the URL, the second without the “www”. Notice how the search engine treats those URLs differently:

• Result using “www”
• Result without “www”

Getting Links

What’s the solution? There are a couple of easy methods you can use to increase the number of people linking to your site:

• Online directories provide a place for you to advertise your business and provide links to your site. Make sure they’re not just fee-based directories that let any site in. The more selective the directory, the better it is for SEO ranking.
• Encourage others to link to your site: partners, your vendors, local business associations, customers, friends… and don’t forget your own personal website and those of any of your other business owners!

A final note – managing your online reputation

Business referral sites like Yelp.com and Yellow Pages sites are rising higher in Google and Yahoo search engine results pages. Here are a couple of quick tips on using them to help manage and boost your reputation:

• Ask your customers to visit those sites and provide feedback on your business.
• Make sure the information they have on your business is correct.
• Provide links on your site to them, so your visitors can see what others are saying about you. For example, you could say “See what people are saying about us at Yelp.com” on your site, and make Yelp.com a link to the appropriate page on Yelp.com. These kinds of links are excellent confidence boosters for your customers as well.

And make sure you update and work on your site regularly, because if it becomes “stale” both search engines and your customers will lose interest in it.
That’s about it! Luminous Day Spa, congratulations on a visually pleasing site, and I hope that these tips will help you get the attention from potential customers that it clearly deserves. These tips are designed to help you get traffic, but also to improve the experience your customers have while on your site. After all, at the end of the day, you want to turn traffic into customers who will enjoy your site and keep coming back.

We’ve been working hard behind the scenes on some exciting products to help our members get more visitors to their websites. Here’s Amr & Lindsay to tell you about one of the latest- Rochelle

A short while ago we released an online directory that is exclusively open to Homestead member sites. Only Homestead members can place a listing in it, but it’s open for browsing to anyone when they’re looking for products and services. To give you an idea what a listing looks like, here’s an example:

Tens of thousands of people visit Homestead.com daily, and that number continues to grow. And they all have easy access to the Homestead Directory, and therefore your company profile and your website. And because listings in the Homestead Directory are limited exclusively to Homestead members, you’ll stand out as one of a select number of businesses within a specific category. In other words, you won’t be drowning in a sea of your competitors.

We’re also working on increasing traffic to member sites listed in our directory by promoting it to the major search engines. When someone is looking for a travel website, we want one of the first options they see to be the Homestead Travel and Recreation Directory (one of the major categories within our directory). If you’re listed there, your site could get some very valuable exposure.

Our goal is to help you gain a stronger presence online, and to create an entry point for you into the world of search engines. We know a lot of members are busy running their businesses, so we wanted to make it easy to get their sites some immediate exposure. Getting listed is easy – just fill out some simple information and your listing will be online within days.

For more information about the Homestead Directory, just visit homestead.com and click on the Get Traffic tab at the top of the page. To visit the directory itself, go to directory.homestead.com.

So come check out the directory and get yourself listed!