This can kind of be a trick question.  Obviously, in the perfect scenario, you want your customers to search for you on Google, Yahoo!, whatever and find your call to action page right away.  But that’s not always the case.  What if they land on your home page?

Many businesses focus nearly all their efforts, especially link building efforts, on their home page.  So it’s very common for searchers to land on your home page when searching for one of your products.  But if you’ve got even just 100 products, you aren’t going to be able to list them all on your home page.  So how much time do you have before they decide to give up, hit the BACK button, and abandon your site?  You’ve got about 3 clicks.

One Click or Less

The perfect scenario is that the searcher lands on the product/service page for which they are searching.  If you’re selling  many types of widgets:

• You should have separate pages for each type of widget you sell
• These pages should be clearly labeled (meta description, title tag, H1 tags) as such
• Searchers will find these pages in Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc
• Searchers will click the BUY button. You’re happy.
• You ship the widget. They’re happy.

Unfortunately, what usually happens is the searchers end up on your home page.  Not the best possible scenario, but still ok.

Finding the Way

Most natural links point to a website’s home page.  These links, when accompanied with decent anchor text, can help your home page rank for multiple words.  There’s nothing wrong with that.

Over time your site may rank for widgets, blue widgets, and maybe widget problems for example.  Since the information on your blue widgets isn’t on your home page, a person landing on your home page is forced to find them.  This is where your site navigation becomes important.

Site structure is a completely separate blog post, too deep to go into here.  But it suffices to say that a good structure built up front will help you keep more customers on your site for a longer period of time.  The quicker they can find what they came for, the better.

Into the Funnel

And as I said before, the most they should have to click before finding the blue widgets page is three times.  If they have to click more than that, it’s very possible that they’ll end up heading back to the search engine and going to the next result.

Check out your website.  Pick out a few products, then start at your home page and see if you can get to a call to action button in three clicks or less.  Examples of a call to action would be:

• a Purchase/Buy button
• a contact form (“for more information”)
• a Click to Call button
• a Request Catalog button (not the best but at least it’s something)

If you pass that test for your products, then try this:  Go to a random page on your website.  Now try to get to those same products in three clicks or less.  Can you still get there?

Why do this?  Easy.  You have limited control over what pages the searchers are going to land on.  So you need to make sure your entire website is navigable within three clicks or less.  You’re going to need a lot of funnels.

Fixing It

If you do these tests, and have to click four or five (or more!) times before finding what you need, there’s a real good chance you need to rethink your site structure and navigation.  Before you go all gung-ho and start moving things around, you really need to be careful that you don’t do it wrong.  Moving pages without telling the search engines where the pages are moved to can just kill your rankings.  There are steps involved, plans to make, and redirects to build.  Contact a professional that can help you keep that Google juice flowing – like me!

We’ve got a bit of a unique situation here.  Our fair city is one of the few that is searchable in many different ways – saint louis, st louis, stl and so on.  But does it really matter to you how people searching for local merchants?

You better believe it.

Paging Doctor Lou

Looking up a search like saint louis orthodontist and st louis orthodontist may look pretty much the same, but there actually are differences in rankings, sites listed and ranking order.

Do the same thing for stl orthodontist and you’ll not only get s different set of results, but Google doesn’t even provide the 7-pack of local listings.

All three searches are different. So what – right?

In This Case, Hoarding is Good

Have you seen that show where they go into people’s houses that hoard things?  There are items stacked on everything.  You can barely navigate the homes most of the time.  Well, when it comes to visitors and rankings, hoarding is good.  You want all the visitors for all the related queries, no matter how they decide to put in the Saint Louis part.

If they put St Louis,  you want it.  If they put stl, you want it.  So optimize your website and build links for all versions.  Rank for them all.

Zip it Up

Don’t forget zip codes.  I was very surprised at recent data that showed the amount of people typing in service 12345.  People are typing in services and products and tacking on a zip code so they can only get local queries.  If you offer a local service or sell a certain product at a brick-and-mortar store, you should consider ranking for zip codes, too.

Paid Listings Matter, Too

If you’re one of the crazy few that are putting money into PPC instead of SEO, you should note that having all versions of Saint Louis in your keyword list isn’t going to hurt you any.  Same for zip codes.  Do it.

Don’t have time to rank your website for all these local phrases?  Hire me for your local SEO efforts and watch your competitors weep!

So you realize that there are things you can do to your website that will help increase your position in the overall search engine rankings – but let’s think a little bit bigger.  Ok, a lot bigger.  What can you do on other people’s websites that will influence what the search engines think about your site?  Anything?

Yes, lots.

The Queen of SEO

In the world of search engine optimization, there’s a saying that you’ll undoubtedly hear at every Internet marketing conference.

Content is king.  Links are queen.

It’s true.  Building great content is the first step to online domination and the second part to that is building links from other websites back to yours.

One Way Streets

The best sort of link is a one-way link.  That means that the link comes from another website and points to yours, but you aren’t reciprocating that link back to them.  It’s one way only.

To the search engines, each one-way link counts as a ‘vote’ for your website.  The more votes, the more likely you are to win, right?

Getting One Way Links

There are some pretty easy ways to get one-way backlinks.  These include article writing, directory submissions, buying links, and simply asking for links.

Going into each one of these will take a lot of writing, so I’ll link to each of these below and you can read at your leisure.

Link Building with Articles

One Way Links with Directory Submissions

Here’s a great SEO tip that nearly no business owner is aware of.

Did you know that a simple 4 lines of code can help your website move up the rankings?  Those lines can take any visitor that comes to your site by typing in domain.com and automatically forward them to www.domain.com.  Of course, domain is your website address.

But why would you care if they typed in the w’s or not?  Well, you might not care, but the search engines do.

To most all search engines, anything before the domain.com is considered a subdomain.  There are tons of subdomains out there, and they have their great uses.  For example, most hosting companies use mail.domain.com as their incoming and outgoing mail addresses.  Perfectly good example.

But when it comes to the www. part, search engines see things a bit differently.  To them, the www and non-www versions of your website are copies of each other.  They are two different websites, each with the exact same content.

I’m Seeing Double

The search engine’s “job” is to provide their searchers with the best results possible.  So they love original content that hasn’t been copied from other places.  Since they spider your website, and see the same exact content on “another website” (even though it’s yours), they penalize the domain for having duplicate content.  And duplicate content, to them, means you’re copying from someone else.

Worst of all – it hurts your ranking.

Fixing the www problem

As I mentioned earlier, there are just 4 lines of code that can fix most websites.  You put these lines of code in your .htaccess file, (just step 1) and bang – you’re in business.  Problem is, many business owners have signed into some crappy web design service and they can’t get anywhere near the actual server to fix this.  So we’ve got to find another way.

Luckily, there are other ways.  One is the canonical tag.  This simple fix can help you “teach” the search engines what’s the best way to index your website.  More information on canonicalization can be found at Matt Cutts’ website.

You can also set your preferred domain in the Google Webmaster Tools section.  Click on Site Configuration and then Settings.

This will help Google know what you prefer for the best way for them to access your website.

No Matter How You Do It, Just Get It Fixed

While the latter two things will help your website, the best one is still the modification of your .htaccess file – something many business owners can’t get to.  To do that, you’ll need to call your web person.  And if they don’t know how to do it, you’ve got the wrong web person.

Did you know about this simple fix? If not, that’s ok – there are professionals that do.  When you’re serious about hiring a professional to help you dominate your industry online, hire me.

Sometimes I meet a business owner that has done a little research, changed a few things on his/her website, and is really proud of being on the second page of Google for one of their industry’s terms.  But how many Internet searchers actually go to the second page of a Google result?

The Internet has definitely cultured a great bit of impatience, particularly when it comes to finding information online.  We want the right information, and we want it now.  Searching the Internet through search engines like Google, Yahoo! or Bing (or the thousands of other choices) will usually yield good results, but they aren’t perfect.

On average, only 11% of Internet searchers go to page two of a SERP – search engine result page.  So ranking on page one gives you nearly 8 times the amount of traffic that a page two ranking will give you.

Even worse – only 3% of that 11% go to page three.  That means that a page three ranking is virtually useless.  While it may bring you a visitor or two a month, it’s not doing you much good.

Spiders on the Web

The average ‘stale’ website gets visited (aka spidered) by the search engines every 4-6 weeks.  Since the website hasn’t changed in a long time, there’s no real reason for them to come by every week and check for new content.

This is pretty typical of businesses.  They get a website:

• because they heard they needed one
• because their competition has one
• because all the cool kids have one

There’s no thought put into the website beyond the fact that they needed one, and in most cases business owners didn’t even put much thought into who they hired to do it.  Total waste of huge opportunity for revenue growth.

Getting to Page One

Since the average website isn’t going anywhere fast, getting the search engines to take notice of it can take some time.  A lot of time.  If you started making changes to your website today, there’s a high possibility that the search engines won’t even notice those changes for up to a month and a half.  Even then, noticing and doing something (ranking you higher) are two different things.  If you’ve optimized your home page for the term blue widgets, and currently you aren’t listed in the top 100 results (10 SERP pages) for that phrase, a move into position 89 isn’t really doing you much good, is it?  Sure, it’s a step in the direction you want, but it’s not producing any traffic.  So how do you get to page one?

Ah, that’s the golden question, isn’t it?

The way to a page one result is through constant and consistent pressure.  Blogging weekly will increase the search engines’ awareness of your website.  They’ll see that ‘movement’ and start to visit your website more often.  They’ll start to rank your site because there’s real information (content) that’s valuable to their searchers.

That change, along with link building, onsite optimization, and a ton of other things will get your site moving in the right direction – up!  But don’t think it’s a one time or quick fix.  If you do, you may see some very short term rankings, but you’ll fall right back in the no-traffic-pit.

Why Most SEO Contracts are Long Term

A good SEO will require (at minimum) a six month contract.  Personally, I won’t take anything less than a one year commitment from a new client.  Why?  Well, just like I said earlier – six months of work might get you to page three or two of a term.  It’s still useless unless you’re happy with sitting at 11% of your potential.  I’m not happy with that.  A one year commitment tells me that the business owner understands that they are investing in a long term strategy, not a short term bandaid.

Want to find out more about Search Engine Optimization for Small Business?  Contact me and let’s talk!

Many business owners are surprised to find out that changing just a few things to their website can result in a decent raise in their overall site rankings.  What they may not realize, however, is that there are more than just a few things that Google measures when ranking their website against their competition.

The complex algorithm that Google uses to determine where your website should rank contains over 200 parts. So while those few things you’ve done will bump up your site a little bit, there’s still a lot to be done.

And no, no one but a very select few know what all 200+ parts are.  If you come across an Internet Marketing guy who claims to know the secret, you should run the opposite direction.  Google isn’t in the business of sharing their trade secrets, and with good reason.

The latest addition to the 200-part algorithm measures site load time.  That means that slow loading sites will actually be penalized in their ranking if they take longer than average (1-2 seconds max) to load.  If your site is taking a while to load up, you’ve got something else to fix.

A business owner should be aware that there are a ton of variables involved when building a website that ranks well for industry-related terms.  If you’re in the position of needing to hire a  search engine/Internet marketer, ask them if they know just how many parts of Google’s algorithm there are.