Search Engine Optimization

If people aren’t finding your site, it’s not doing you much good. We can help you bring more visitors to your website.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engines constantly change their methods and priorities for ranking a site. Outdated optimization strategies can cause search engines to penalize a site!

We can raise your ranking in search engines by using legitimate methods of optimizing your site for keywords that viewers are using. We can also research which keywords are most popular, and find neglected niches you can exploit.

Reaching Page One on the Search Engines

Google™ and the other search engines give higher preference to sites that are:

large (have many pages of content)
fresh (have new content every week or month)
popular (have lots of incoming links from high quality sites)
relevant (words on the site match the search words or phrase)
optimized (make smart use of html code and site structure)

How can a small site with stable content compete with the big, established sites? Here are five strategies for reaching page one on the search engines.

First, have plenty of content that is useful to visitors.

Offer “free tips” or in-depth information that helps potential customers understand the quality or the context of your products or services.

Second, expand your site with new content.

Adding fresh content over time will automatically make your site bigger, as well as showing the search engines that you have something new. Press releases, reprints of published articles , and archives of e-newsletters are a great way to do this.

Third, get more incoming links.

Establish an ongoing program of getting links from other sites. The more links, the better, but the quality of the site that links to you is important. Those with a high page rank—at least a 3 and preferably a 4 or higher—give you a stronger boost. Links from sites with a page rank of 1 or lower can actually hurt your ranking.

By setting a goal of getting just one link per month, at the end of a year, you can have a dozen incoming links; at the end of four years, you can have almost fifty. Every incoming link from a high-quality site will raise your site closer to page one.

Put yourself in the shoes of a search engine looking at two sites with similar content. For one of them, thirty other sites on the Web have said: Wow, there’s something useful here, I’ll make a link to it. But the other site has no incoming links. Which of them would you put on page one of your search results?

Fourth, focus on the best keywords for your situation.

Search-engine-wise, it’s better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small shrimp in a big ocean.

If you have a large, established site, then you are in a good position to compete for a keyword phrase like free monologues. If you have a small, new site, then you need to Think Niche, something closer to small animal boarding in central Massachusetts. Given that the Web is a huge and growing ocean, look for the ponds where you can compete effectively.

Use keyword research to find out what people are really searching for, and to discover keyword phrase niches that few other websites are exploiting.

Last but not least, make sure your site is optimized for those keywords.

Here, the term optimized has several meanings.

Optimized code takes full advantage of the way search engines view different html tags. For example, text that is bolded, or in a list, or in a headline, is given more weight than text inside an ordinary paragraph.
Optimized page structure has individual pages for each keyword phrase that people use in searches. In other words, it is far more effective to have several individual pages about apples, oranges, pears and cherries, than to have a single page about fruit.
Optimized keyword density means that a page about apples really uses the word apples, not round red objects where eating one a day keeps the doctor away.

For two sites that are otherwise equivalent, the optimized site will jump way above its unoptimized sibling.

Each of these strategies will help raise your site higher in the search results. While no one can guarantee that you will reach page one for any particular search phrase, using all five strategies is the best approach possible.

Some case studies

StagePage Playwright Geralyn Horton wanted to attract more viewers, especially drama students. Her website was already substantial, with many one-act plays, several full-lengths, and more than 200 theatre reviews she had written over the course of several years. Her site also had a dozen incoming links. We optimized her code and added fresh content several times a month. Result: The site now sees *1500 visitors per day*.

SupplementQuality.com Begun in 1999 with 50 pages, this site has now grown to 400 pages about the quality of dietary supplements—from regulatory and manufacturing issues to scientific research and editorials. By publishing information that other sites find valuable, it has attracted many incoming links. Its page code was optimized beginning in 2001. Result: This site now sees 20,000 visitors per month.

Red Pony Farm With a small site and only one incoming link, Ike and Martha Myers needed a niche keyword strategy. Rather than compete for dog boarding or pet boarding, we chose small animal boarding in their local area. Result: Search engine traffic began attracting customers within the first month the site was up. The site continues to attract owners of the same breeds of dogs shown on the guest pages, for a small but steady stream of new customers.