Palm Springs Web Design - www.urlidiots.com Original Blog Post - urlidiots.com/index.php/Blog/Entry/palm-springs-seo-tutorial-part-1 SEO Tutorial (Part 1) (14:38) (start) What I am going to go over today is a little bit of basic SEO. I’ve had some clients recently and when I either talk to them on the phone or meet them in person, they’ve got some misconceptions about SEO. I wanted to cover what my approach is and my stance is on search engine optimization. One of the things I had a client that I met with yesterday who had signed up with the company (I won’t mention the company’s name), what they do is they guarantee first page results on Google or you don’t pay anything. They charge you a $600 setup fee and then they charge you $200 from then on out. The guarantee with that, what they do, after talking to the client, is they actually ask for 50 keywords. When you have 50 keywords to go after, the difficulty for getting all 50 of those keywords is insane. But to get just one of those keywords to #10, to get your website to #10 for just one of those keywords is enough to satisfy the terms of their guarantee and they don’t have to refund you your money. The other thing, and probably the more important thing, is that for whatever keywords you go after, unless they’ve got enough searches per month, you are not going to see any traffic from those. Additionally, if you are not really in the Top 3 for a keyword that gets plenty of traffic, your site will not get any traffic either. If you hire an SEO company and they get you to #6 or #7 that only gets 200 hits a month, you are likely to see little or no traffic to your website. It’s important to go after keywords that are targeted to your industry and targeted to your location. Here in Palm Springs and Palm Desert I like to tie keywords to the location, to Palm Springs or Palm Desert or La Quinta or wherever you are at. All that being said as well, I want to discuss this a little bit. Typically what I do is I try to go after 3 keywords. Three keywords allow you enough flexibility to rank well for a couple different keywords, which is nice. You don’t know which of these three you are going to rank well for. If we are going to do a website for a plumber, 3 of the keywords I might go after here locally would be Palm Springs Plumber, we’ll go after Palm Desert Plumber and maybe we will do Plumbers in Palm Desert. From the top of my head, I don’t know how many searches are done per month for these three keywords – Palm Springs Plumber, Palm Desert Plumber and Plumbers in Palm Desert. But what we will do is the way SEO works offsite. Let me step back a second. Let me go over onsite. This is one of the things that most people come to me and they say, “I want to make sure that I have the words Palm Springs Plumber in my domain name.” That is important initially but really after six months in the long run it doesn’t matter at all. Just think of monster.com and what that has to do with jobs. There’s a ton of websites out there that are just jibberish – Yelp, Facebook doesn’t have anything to do with the name. The actual words ‘Facebook’ has nothing to do with social media. In the short term, yes, using keywords as part of your domain name is important. In the long run, not really because what is really important to Google and the other search engines is what your site says but even more importantly, what other sites outside of your site have to say. What we are going to do is I am just going to explain how we would use Palm Springs Plumber onsite and then also how we will do it offsite. I am going to start off by just covering a couple of things that you can do onsite, what matters and what doesn’t. Google just released a 10-minute video a few weeks ago that covers SEO for small businesses. They change their algorithm a couple hundred times a month but maybe once or twice a year there is a major change that will shift Google rankings for a lot of websites. The most recent one was Penguin. The one before that was Panda. What they did was, with Penguin, they took sites that are over-optimized and they dinged them because people were manipulating the system. If we are going to go after Palm Springs Plumbers, you are going to have some text and then you are going to put the keyword in and then you are going to have some more text, more text, do another keyword, more text, more text, keyword, and so on and so forth. There is a specific ration that Google is looking for and if you inundate your text on your website with too many keywords, Google is going to ding you and you are not going to rank well. Even if these are different keywords, if this is keyword 1, this is keyword 2 and this is keyword 3, although that might be okay. If you do it too much, they are going to ding you. That’s why you need to spread this around a little but you want to do related keywords that’s going to draw the same

Be the first to comment