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Is Your Website Optimized?
Ok, here's something for you to consider with your website. Have you ever tried searching for it? Try and see what you find out. You may be surprised. What's the point of having a website if no one can find it? Not much really. With a few adjustments, you can maximize the hits to your website, which is crucial if you want traffic and more business. If you don't know where to start read on.
Here's an excerpt from a thread discussing search engine optimization. This comes to us courtesy of Riff.
"Google spyders read words, so that's what you need: keywords. Flash is compiled words much like a computer program, and is just mumbo jumbo to the spyders.
So what are the best key words to use? Of course, photographer, photography, photographers (those are 3 different keywords). The type of photography you do is good as well. With these keywords, you're competing with a million other photographers around the world though. The really, really important keywords are location, location, location. Not just city and state, but every surrounding town as well. "Gainsville" is not a very good keyword for 99.9% of photographers out there...
So where do these keywords go? In the text that makes up your information; the words your visitors are reading. But there's a lot more places to put them, as Peter touched on.
The title of your webpage is the most important place. I recommend not using your business name there, but instead, put the keywords people are going to be searching for. Here's the title of my webpages: "Holland Michigan Photography, Family & Wedding Photographer, West Mi" People won't type your business name into Google unless they already know you, and those aren't the people you're trying to get to your website through SEO.
Don't forget to put keywords into your ALT tags for your images. Titles for your link tags. When a spyders sees a word that is bold or is in a headline, they carry more weight and get noted as being more important.
Peter also mentioned two very important things: well written and compliant html and sitemaps. Google loves these two things.
Another thing that will help a lot is hosting your own blog. Don't let blogspot or blogger host it! Get all of those juicy keywords on your website--on your domain.
If you want to do a little investigative research on your area, Google as if you were a potential client. What websites come up high in the results? What are your competitors doing to get those rankings? Your browser's "View Source" can be your best friend
Get listed in all of those free link farm sites like Marketing Tool and WedDj and OneWed, etc etc. Links to your site tell Google that your site is really important. Trade links with local vendors. Getting a link from Oprah's website will help immensly
A book that helped me a lot was SEO for Dummies. There's tons of books out there that can help spell this stuff out more specifically.
How many clients does your website have to generate to make doing this worth it? If you snag one bride, that would go a long way into covering your time. But if you put in the time, you're not going to get just one bride, I can promise you that!
One other thing to keep in mind is that SEO takes time. A lot of time. Not just making the changes to your website (which isn't too bad), but it takes the spyders awhile to promote your site up the rankings.
So yeah, it takes time and patience and some studying and work on your part. But it will pay off. Plus, if it was so dang easy, everyone would do it."
To read more from this thread, click here.