My company currently has four openings for SEO clients.  There are some restrictions, but if you are in the Saint Louis area, and are in need of professional SEO services, please contact me.

As a followup to my first post Five Things You Can Do to Your Website Right Now to Achieve Higher Rankings I thought I’d give you another five. Hopefully you’ve already done those, and you’re ready for a few more. Here goes:

1. Add a meta description tag to your home page
   Really you should add a custom description to every page on your website, but at least you need one on your home page. Put in a few keywords, and remember that this description is what shows up in the ’summary’ area of a SERPS page. So you’ll want to make it something that encourages searchers to click, yet it needs to be accurate and informative as to what your website it about.

   <meta name=”description” content=”Find custom widgets in various colors. Build your widget online and have it in a week. We offer free shipping of widgets to all US locations.”>

2. Modify your .htaccess to avoid duplicate content penalties
   Many people don’t realize that yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com can be considered two separate websites to the search engines. So just publishing a website creates an instant duplicate content issue - one you can fix with .htaccess

   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !^post$
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com [NC]
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301]

   What? Don’t have the ability to modify or add a .htaccess file? You need to get a better host. May I suggest my company, Lighthouse Technologies? Very SEO friendly and customer support is awesome </plug> =)

3. Add text navigation
   Many businesses get caught with this one - they build a nice website with pretty navigation buttons along the top or left and don’t have any text versions of the navigation. This can cause problems - search engines can’t ’see’ graphics.
   While the page looks good, and it functions well, the search engines really need to assign a text name (or anchor) to each page of your site. It can do that if you have a text link to each page.
   If you have a site with the scenario above, consider simply adding a sitemap, a page with text links to every page on your website. Another easy way to fix this is to add text links to your main navigation pages along the bottom of your website. Not many people scroll that far down, it won’t look that bad, and the search engines will be happy with you.
4. Add (and verify) your site to the search engine’s “tools” programs
   This is an easy one. Submit your site to Google’s Webmaster Tools and Yahoo’s Site Explorer. They’ll give you a little snippet of code to add to your home page, or a file to FTP up, and then you’ll be verified as a ‘real human owner’ of your website.
5. Remove staging files/sites that are online
   Here’s a good one for web developers. Often we create subdomains or own entire domains that are particularly for staging/building new sites. We send these links to our clients and have them check out the site, submit changes, etc. Then when the real website launches, we forget to go back and delete the staging version. Suddenly, we’ve got more duplicate content issues.
   NOTE: A good developer will add a Disallow to their robots.txt file for the subdomain anyway, but I’d be willing to bet few do.

I know these aren’t the easiest 5 things you can do to help your site rank, but they aren’t all that hard either. Do some or all of these things and your site will continue to creep up the SERPS.

Most people hire a web designer based on a very fragile set of criteria, mostly because they have very little knowledge of the design process or industry.  Since about 95% of “web designers” don’t understand the marketing side of web design, they fail to realize that they are not helping their clients by ‘doing what they do’.

It’s really no fault of their own, heck for years I was just that.  I’d pump out a site a week. Clients were happy to have a site, and I was happy to have their money.  They ended up with an online brochure.

An online brochure is ok if that’s all you want, but most likely you want more than that.  A $2000+ investment ought to do more for you than just look pretty.  It should bring you revenue, customers, or members.  Whatever your goal is with your business, your website should simply be another means of getting that result.

With that said, here is a list of ten things most businesses can do to their website today that will help them rank in the weeks to come.

1. Fix your title tag
   Search engines read this tag to help it decide what your website is about. So put something that makes sense; something that a potential customer would type into Yahoo to find you.
   Something like “Bob’s Widgets - Widget Repair and Manufacturing - St Louis Missouri” is better than “Welcome to our Website” or “Home”
2. Don’t waste real estate
   If your designer thought it’d be cool to put a bit of blank space at the top of your page so that it looks ‘centered’, he was wrong.  Since everyone around the world uses different screen resolutions, its pretty much impossible to vertically center your website copy on every one of them.
   Sure, you can build it for the most common resolution, but why?  Just put your info at the top so you’ll be sure that everyone can see it.
3. Put your contact info on every page
   This should be a no-brainer.  The purpose of your website is customers, so make it as easy as possible for them to get a hold of you!
   To further this point, make sure your contact page has a form they can fill out to get more information.  You need more than just an email address, because many people don’t know how to configure their browsers to handle email links.  A form they can fill out will make sure you don’t lose that technically-challenged customer.
4. Get yourself a real street address
   This is one many small and home-based businesses overlook.  They’ll use their home address or a PO box, which is actually losing them customers.  Go up to the UPS store and fork out the $8 bucks a month for a ‘real’ mailing address.  Then put this address into Google maps, Yahoo Local, Yelp, Insider Pages and others.
   People like playing with maps, and with SmartPhones getting overly popular, you’re going to need a real street address to capture those users when they type ‘Widgets in St Louis MO’
5. Get the visitors email address
   Face it, they came to your website for a reason.  Even if they’re remotely interested, you’ve got a lukewarm lead.  Offer them a free whitepaper on ‘Trends in Widget Colors’ in exchange for them signing up to your newsletter.
   Then, of course, don’t forget to do a newsletter at least once a month.  Market to those leads!
6. Bonus tip: Get rid of Flash
   No matter how cute, and no matter what designers say, Flash still sucks when it comes to ranking your site.  “cute” don’t pay the bills.  Ranking does.

Many small businesses intend on staying small.  They are run by one or two individuals whom are more than happy to simply increase their customer base and revenue to a particular point, but no more.  They aren’t interested in growing beyond their means.

It’s not that they aren’t interested in growing - quite the contrary.  But many Mom & Pop businesses want to simply earn a nice living off their business and go home at the end of the day.  They are interested in growth, but not to the point of them turning into full-time managers.  They prefer to get their hands dirty.  They don’t want to manage people.

I have several clients like this.  Some have services that requires them to physically visit a property to perform, and others have a local business that requires the customer to actually visit their location in order to complete the transaction.

So when these types of clients hire an SEO, they will naturally start to see nationwide traffic, whether they like it or not.

I recently started doing SEO for a company that provides bounce-houses and other inflatable items for birthday rentals, etc.  This client is already ranking nicely for her related terms in the Saint Louis area.  But over time she is also getting more and more traffic (and requests) from other parts of the country.  She’s starting to rank nationally when, in reality, she doesn’t want to.

So, is this a problem?  Perhaps.  It depends on how/if the small business owner is interested in expanding.  Does she want to start another office in Chicago? Grand Rapids?  Does she have the financing to buy another entire set of equipment for another location?

Most likely not.

So then the question becomes simply: Do you ignore these requests, or is there a way to profit from them?

Ignoring them would be a bad idea, even if you’ll never make a dime off the contact.  Heck, they’ve already been exposed to your brand name once, you should at least reply with some sort of ’sorry we can’t help you’ message.  Get your brand in front of them one last time.

And if you start getting more and more of these requests, what can you do?  Do you start an anti-SEO campaign?  No way!

You could start a website similar to Service Magic and get people in your industry to sign up and pay you commissions whenever you send them an out-of-town lead, but do you want to be burdened with yet another part of something that isn’t part of your main business plan? Again, probably not.

Now, if your company provides products, and you start ranking nationally, all you have to do is start contacting your vendors about drop shipping, etc.  You’re in a good position.

Ranking nationally, especially at this time, when SEO is really still not very well-known, can be a good thing.  It (hopefully) opens your eyes to the global potential that the Internet can provide for your small business.  It may even change the way you look at your small little shop - going from local to national - but is that what you want?

On Monday when I ran my ranking reports for my clients, I noticed a bunch of red X’s (dropped) on their Yahoo! rankings.  Since these clients have consistently been ranking in the top one or two positions for various local-related terms, and they’re still in the top slot on Google, I thought it was just an error with my ranking software.

However, it looks like other people are starting to experience the same thing.  Dammit.

So ok Yahoo!, you’ve totally dismissed some good local websites from your index.  Will they be back, or do you think your new (crappy) results are better?  Are you penalizing us for optimizing our clients to rank for “service + town name” searches?  Or is there something else going on?

Personally, the clients that took the biggest hits for me are all relatively new sites (2004+) .  They’ve just recently (within the last 4-8 months) done a redesign and are not listed in a ton of IYPs.  Is this the problem?  Is age an issue here?

Instead of good quality websites, should I be more concerned about Yelp, Local.com and Mixx?  That seems kind of backwards to me.