Building an SEO site from scratch

[mustard76]

I am building a wedding planning website for a friend. I need help figuring out what type of content I should include on the site to attract traffic (articles, forums, blogs, etc).

I have built plenty of sites before so I don't need with the technical aspects.

We are most interested in attracting people in the early stages of wedding planning. The goal of this site is to generate traffic for my friend's rental business. We do not plan to put _any_ advertising on the site.

We have a few thousand dollars to invest in this site so I plan to pay wedding planners to blog and write articles for the site. Then, I would like to start a forum for brides/grooms.

We are building this site from scratch and understand that it could take a year or two to attract significant traffic.

[Jill]

Since it sounds like your friend's business is local, don't fall into the trap of trying to create a worldwide or even nationwide site. Keep the site focused on the local aspect, i.e., people looking for renting locally, whatever it is your friend's company rents.

Any articles or blog posts or whatever, should also keep that local focus, and the keyword phrases you optimize for should include the geographical areas the business serves.

[mustard76]

Originally Posted by Jill

don't fall into the trap of trying to create a worldwide or even nationwide site

This is great advice that I had not considered. My friend's business actually serves most major cities in the U.S. because he is affiliated with several other rental operations.

BUT, I still think we should follow your advice because targeting local markets could be a good way to attract niche traffic.

Do you think we should make many small sites (one for each city) or create a national site? What are the pitfalls for building a national site?

Thank you for your help.

[Jill]

You could create a national site, but have specific sections for each state or region. The tricky part of this is to make each region's sub-pages unique. In other words, don't simply "madlib spam," which means to substitute the city name, but keep th rest of the content the same.

[Offtopic]Mustard, I see you are in the Boston area. You may be interested in joining our SEMNE (Search Engine Marketing New England) organization.

[hotwired]

Here's what I do! Works fantastic for "local" (I own a web design, hosting and optimization company and outsource my "heavy" seo but still do local myself)

Here are the basics of what should be done to help your site be found under Google and other engines. Now I’ve gone into quite a bit of detail so I’m going to sum up the most important right now, with no explanation, then go on to explain later in the document:
1. keyphrase in title
2. that exact keyphrase as first thing in description tag
3. that exact keyphrase as first thing in keyword tag
4. that exact keyphrase as first thing at top of visible page if possible, and in <h1></h1>
5. that exact keyphrase at least taking up 5% of the words on the page.
6. that exact keyphrase as LAST thing on page
7. reciprocal links pointing back at you that are relevant
8.
Key Phrases:
pick 6 key phrases that you're convinced people will type in to find your services. People rarely type in one "keyword" to find things, they usually type in a phrase such as "Advertising agencies boston ". I'd advise you to add a geographic location to each phrase as it will be much easier to get you listed well under a "regional" listing than a "national" or "global" listing. In other words, there may be only 10-12 websites competing for the first page of Google under "Landscape Contractors Waterville Maine" but 9,785 competing for "Landscape Contractors". Understand?
Obviously, if you’re target market is not geographic in nature, this is irrelevant. Do try to narrow it down as much as possible, however. Once you pick your keyphrase it will have to reappear several times in the exact same order. (i.e. advertising agencies boston if that’s what you picked, don’t use boston advertising agencies later, keep it in the same order)

Title Tag
Pick the most important phrase for your home page. use it in the title tag followed by a space followed by a dash followed by your company name. example: "Country Bands Maine – Cherokee Band". So again, the formula is keyphrase dash company name. Make sure the keyphrase you picked is the VERY FIRST PART of this tag.

Description Tag
Use the description tag but don't make it too long. And use the words of your key phrase in there. No more than 110 characters and DO NOT repeat your title tag. DO use your key phrase, but just don’t repeat your title tag. It may hurt ranking more than help. Some of the keyphrase(s) written in your Description tag ought to appear in some variation on your page, the closer to the top of the page, the better. Some professionals say 1,000 characters is ok, but I have found that your description is often used on the search page, and they only use the first line or two, so I stick with short, powerful descriptions without superlatives. DO NOT write “Best, fastest, cheapest, etc. as the search engines are getting smarter and tend to “penalize” or at least “ignore” these words. Make sure the keyphrase you picked is the VERY FIRST PART of this tag.


Body Text
Most important of all! (you won’t find this info everywhere) Use the words of your key phrase in the visible readable body text. This is the number one way Google and many other engines find you. The accepted ratio is 7%. In other words 7 out of 100 words should be landscape, contractors or Waterville. This poses an interesting challenge to be creative and write smooth flowing copy while still working inside this "box". Also use bold <h1> or <h2> headers on each optimized page. If a page is about your lawn mowing services put <h1>Lawn Mowing Services</h1>in bold at the top like a “header”. Search engines love this. It’s important to actually use the <h> tag as this is what most search engines recognize. I must stress, however, to always concentrate on content first, then optimization when writing the visible copy for your pages. I’ve made the mistake a couple of times concentrating only on getting my key phrase on the page as much as possible, and the result tends to be awkward and “cheesy”. Again if you can use the <h1> as the VERY FIRST item on your page (or after the header) you’ll be even better off.

Use image alt tags. If you have a picture of something on there, add an alt tag that's relevant to your key phrase. If it’s the page about fertilizing, and you have a picture of a man spreading fertilizer, use something like <img src = “spread.jpeg” alt = “fertilizing services Waterville”>. Again, use your exact keyphrase in at least the first alt tag.

Reciprocal Linking. Very important to have your website appear “important” to the search engines. A search engine “thinks” you’re important when it sees your site “mentioned” on other websites of the same or related nature. But…it thinks you’re spamming when it sees your site mentioned on hundreds of ”guestbooks”, “link farms” and “online casino” sites. There is actually so much controversy around all the reciprocal linking stuff so here’s my rule: When in doubt, do what seems like the professional, right thing to do. Is it right if you are a web design firm to have 125 web design firm links on your page? Uh .. no. But you might have some SEO directories or forums, etc. And just in case everything is true, I try to keep it relevant, jewelry links on jewelry sites, web design on web related, etc. etc.



Use Text links and Menu!
If you have a java menu, flash or something like that, make sure you have plain old, pure text links at the bottom or margin of the page. When a search engine comes to your site, they cannot read that fancy java stuff, so they stop right there. If you have text links at the bottom, they will be able to spider out and index all your pages, some of which will be optimized for different searches. I repeat, make certain every page you want the search engines to see is linked to your home page with TEXT based links. (i.e. <a href = “about.html”>About Us</a> ) Also, if you can do it without being cheesy, make your text links be your keywords or phrases. So instead of Bracelets, the link might be Sterling Silver Bracelets, etc. also good to have your keyphrase be the very last thing on your page. If you can’t you can’t.

Articles: Write articles and submit them. Searchwrap is one place but type “submit article(s)” in Google and see what comes up.


OK!! That's all for now! Any questions, please call any time.
** DO NOT**

use keywords in your meta keyword tags that are NOT in your key phrase or are NOT in the body text of your page. I just learned this one recently. I understand that it can hurt you in the rankings. You definitely WILL NOT find that info. in too many places. I'm now in the process of correcting it on a few of my client's sites. Also, FYI, Google now ignores the keyword tag. (that's the one in the head of the code that goes <meta name = "keywords" content = "blah blah blah">

Use “refresh tags”, redirection, frames, or too much “flash”. Search engines are in the process of updating to be able to handle these things, but right now, static, content-rich pages work best. Trust me when I tell you that flash and animations are more annoying than anything else. I personally have software that prevents most of it from showing up as it’s a distraction to surfing. It impresses the person who creates it, that’s about it!

Use “tricks” like putting your name and website on tons of guestbooks. Search engines are looking for your site to be on other ‘relevant” sites, not just pasted on every guestbook and link farm. By the time of this writing, search engines are beginning to introduce algorhythms which penalize sites for having too many “nonsense” links. Don’t ever put keywords in the same font color as your background. (invisible keywords). This is the oldest trick in the book, is considered “spamming” the search engines and can easily get you banned from Google. Ouch!

AND HERE'S A SIMPLER CHEKCLIST

On Page
1. keyphrase in title
a. keyphrase – company name – location if possible
2. that exact keyphrase as first thing in description tag
a. no superlatives
3. that exact keyphrase as first thing in keyword tag
4. that exact keyphrase as first thing at top of visible page if possible, and in <h1></h1>
5. Keyphrase bold, italic and or underlined on page
6. that exact keyphrase at least taking up 5% of the words on the page.
7. that exact keyphrase as LAST thing on page
8. Img alt tags
9. Keyphrase hyper linked
10. Text menu at bottom if javacript or other menu
11. Homepage should be opted with most important keyphrase

Off Page

12. reciprocal links pointing back at you that are relevant
13. Most important keyphrase on homepage vs. subpages

3 Keyphrases:






3 Lesser Keyphrases

Description Tag
No more than 110 characters and DO NOT repeat your title tag. DO use your key phrase, but just don’t repeat your title tag. It may hurt ranking more than help. Some of the keyphrase(s) written in your Description tag ought to appear in some variation on your page, the closer to the top of the page, the better stick with short, powerful descriptions without superlatives. DO NOT write “Best, fastest, cheapest, etc. as the search engines are getting smarter and tend to “penalize” or at least “ignore” these words. Make sure the keyphrase you picked is the VERY FIRST PART of this tag.

** DO NOT**

use keywords in your meta keyword tags that are NOT in your key phrase or are NOT in the body text of your page. I just learned this one recently. I understand that it can hurt you in the rankings.

[hotwired]

And another thing... the program WEBCEO will pretty much guide you toward these items. there is a free version that should be all you need.
Cheers, Namaste and have a great day!
Ken

[Jill]

hotwired has some good info there, but a lot of it is also common SEO myths.

It would take me all night to go through it point by point and pick them all out, so I'm not gonna...

However, I do want to say that you should never follow any particular formula for SEO. Every site is different. There are no formulas, and no software can optimize your site, only your creative mind can!

There are some good tools you can use, however, such as Wordtracker or KeywordDiscovery for keyword research. Google analytics or Clicktracks (if you have a budget) for web analytics. And some nice firefox extensions that can help you do a little competitive research.

[hotwired]

I wouldn't be surprised if my list was a bit out of date on some points. But PLEASE, do point out some of the more glaring ones if you have time. This list is what i've compiled and about 3-5 years ago it worked like a charm. Not quite as bullet proof now, but if I follow the basic checklist (2d list) I pretty much get #1-#3 on MSN, and 6 months later I'm pretty decent on Google. It's the "competitive" keyphrases that I dont' do as well on now and have hired submitplus.net to handle my more complex stuff, and yes, their explanations of what they do are VERY intricate and "hyper-logical".

[Jill]

Ken it's really just the whole "seo by the numbers thing" that is wrong.

Keywords in the "first" thing in this and that tag. Honestly, it makes no difference. Move them from first position and you won't see your rankings change.

Also, beware of doing ALL of the things you say are good because then your page becomes obviously optimized, which search engines hate. SEO is much more of an art than a science, which most people don't get because they assume search engines are simply computer program.

[gc3833]

I haven't heard anybody mention this, but I've built a few sites (so just my 2 cents), and have had wonderful success with Wordpress by loading it into the root directory.

Add a few key plugins and then just set up pages and post to the blog.

I haven't tried Joomla but I have heard good things about that CMS system as well.

Greg