With a dodgy economy and marketing budgets low/cut/non-existent, it makes a lot of sense to focus on simple, inexpensive things that have a potentially high return on investment. Enter search.
Below are a bunch of practical, free* tricks to help you bump up your search performance. They’re not-too-time-consuming and in a lot of cases, you won’t need any technical expertise at all.
The first step is to find out how you are doing currently. Pretend you’re a potential customer and see if you can find your business through a search using obvious terms. If you’re in the top three results already—go have a latte, we’re done here.
If not, here are seven simple ways you can increase your search relevance and visibility:
1. Give your Meta Data some love. Meta Data consists of description and keywords. The description is that little blurb underneath your link on search pages. It describes the content of your site for search engines. This information is coded in to the site, generally by the webmaster or designer. You want to write your description in terms that are relevant to search. For example, if you are a photographer, try something like “Joe Blow is an award-winning design and advertising photographer in San Francisco.” Lead your description with the most absolute relevant terms about you: perhaps your location, your service/occupation and your name. The description should make some kind of readable sense, also. Think of it as a text ad for you.Next up, keywords. These are the phrases people type in to find what they’re looking for and they are also coded into your Meta Data. Some of them are obvious (like scrapbooking club); some are a little out there (like memory album.) The point is, put yourself in the place of someone who’s searching and try to imagine what they could conceivably search for. The nice thing about keywords is that nobody sees them except you and the bots. So, you don’t have to toil over well-crafted sentences; you can just pile in every smart way you can think of to describe who you are and what you do.
Not sure what to say? See what your competition is saying in their description; and work from there. Try and own their a**es by writing a better description. Yeah, Search Smackdown!
2. In a crazy competitive category like, say, business presentations, you may have to accept that it’s going to be tough getting onto the first page (because you’re competing with 186,000,000 other results.) So, try using keywords and phrases that are a little less popular (example: budget binding) and your chances of appearing on the first page increase hugely.
3. The content on your site should follow the same basic principles. Google crawls your site copy, so make sure you have descriptive data that includes things like your name and location, such as "romantic restaurant in Mendocino". Also include descriptive passages that reinforce your search words, but make sure not to upset the clear communication of your message or brand. And don’t overdo things (I’m a baker in Palo Alto. Did I mention I bake—in Palo Alto?) It will work against you and the bots will ignore you.
4. Search bots follow links, so the more sites link to you, the better results you’ll have. This isn’t as complicated as it sounds. List your url on your personal profile on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter or your blog (if you have one.) Also, register on local business directories. A lot of listings are free, such as Yahoo! business directory; so, as they say, sign up today. Speaking of which, remember to update your listings and get friends, family and customers to write you a review and give you some stars. It’s almost like having a mini-site on Yahoo!
5. If your site isn't even showing up in Google search, register with Google. Otherwise known as indexing yourself. It’s the metaphorical equivalent of grabbing Google by the hair and sticking its nose in your site. Have your Webmaster set up a Google account, click on Webmaster Tools and add your url.
6. Be sure your images have good descriptions. That way, they’ll show up in Google Image search.
7. Search engines have a hard time searching Flash sites. So, if you want to boost your performance, have at least some of your site copy in html.
Last but NOT least, your site has to sell. Now that you’ve put all this effort into getting people to your site—keep them there, engage them, inform them, give them what they want. A good site has a clear, intuitive and attractive flow and effortlessly moves the visitor closer to making a purchase decision (even if there is no direct e-commerce functionality.) This is a push! specialty—but that’s a whole other blog entry…
Any one of these tips could improve your search showing but they actually work best when used together; and they work equally well for Yahoo! and other search engines. The reason we focused on Google is because it’s by far the most popular engine; it has really useful easy-to-use tools; and it updates the quickest (usually within a week.)
To prove that this malarkey actually works, we set ourselves the goal of improving search performance for Allen Meyer—a ridiculously common name (sorry, Allen, but it is.) Out of 19,300,000 results, we got his personal site to number three on Google—and that’s without expensive techniques like Comprehensive Directory Registration. Happy searching!
*If you’re html phobic, you may have to toss your web designer some scratch.