Search Engine Optimizations

[dcmeagle]

Hi Guys,

As many of you already know, I help out on several of the other forums with any website or computer related questions guys have. I've also written quite a few articles directly for home inspectors on how to improve your website rankings. If you have any questions or want a quick review of your site, feel free to ask here and I'll write up a few things I see you can do to improve your rankings.

I get a few emails a day from people asking if I'll perform SEO on their site. Just to let you know, I don't do this any more as I'm working about 20 hours a day and have way to much going on to perform the service. I'm happy to provide assistance here on the forum as it takes a lot less time to send you in the right direction than to do the work it takes.

Quite a few of the guys here have already implemented tips I've talked about on other forums (I recognize quite a few of you) and have gotten themselves to the top of Google.

Dominic

[randynavarro]

Hi Dom:

We've chatted briefly before over at ASHI.

I'm not having much luck getting my site higher. Can you take a look?

[dcmeagle]

Originally posted by randynavarro

Hi Dom:

We've chatted briefly before over at ASHI.

I'm not having much luck gettting my site higher. Can you take a look?

Hey Randy,

Sure thing. Give me a few minutes to look it over.

Dominic

[dcmeagle]

Randy,

I see you made changed to the way your pages are named, which is excellent.

I just saw this first part of your site which is VERY BAD: You have this hidden at the top of your site: "A home inspector providing home inspections in Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond, Issaquah, and all over the Eastside and Snohomish county." It's the same text color as the background color which makes it invisible. This can cause you to instantly get BANNED from Google as they consider it fraud. Make sure to remove it ASAP!

The word Seattle is only on your home page once and it's the only city name mentioned. This means that it's the only thing you're going to come up for, and not that high. You want to get it on the page a few more times.

Remove the hyphens (-) from your description tag (shows at the top of your site. You only want the hyphens in your page URL.

Your description is much better: "Providing home inspections in Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond, Issaquah, and all over the Eastside and Snohomish county." and to actually make it effective you have to use the same words on your site itself, which you've done, nice job.

You've done a good job of getting "home inspector" and "home inspection" onto your home page.

Your contact information page is a giant image. Make sure to get some text onto the page. I'd remove your contact information from the image and add it manually. Make sure to list some cities on that page too.

You have a decent number of links pointing to your site, but most of them are from here or AR. Make sure to keep building those.

Remove your company name from your page title, no one's searching for it, so it just dilutes your ranking. Change it to something like your description: "Providing home inspections in Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond, Issaquah, and all over the Eastside and Snohomish county" would be much better.

One of the other weaknesses of your site is that it doesn't have much content. Your fighting for a very large area, which means there are a lot of inspectors trying to get to the top for "seattle home inspector", you need to beef up your site so Google thinks it's more relevant. Make sure any content you add is not just plagiarized from another site as that will hurt you as well. You can rewrite stuff, that's fine.

Give those changes a month, check your rankings now and then and see how it goes. You should definitely move up. You can post your rankings here now for comparison.

Dominic Maricic

[John Dirks Jr]

I would love some free advice.

My site has only been up for 6 months and my traffic has slowly but surely increased over time. Maybe you could spot a sore thumb or two anyway.

Can you take a peek at my site Dom?

[dcmeagle]

Originally posted by AHI

I would love some free advice.

My site has only been up for 6 months and my traffic has slowly but surely increased over time. Maybe you could spot a sore thumb or two anyway.

Can you take a peek at my site Dom?

Sure thing. I have a few things to finish up first. I'll check it out after and post back in a bit.

[sepefrio]

I'd love to read some of your articles, can you post some links?

[randynavarro]

John:

He already has. Go to the link on his post and you'll see a selection for "Website Optimization Tips."

Dom is very generous with his time and knowledge. He's helped several folks over on the ASHI board.

[dcmeagle]

Originally posted by sepefrio

I'd love to read some of your articles, can you post some links?

What Randy said. On the left side it says Website Optimization Tips. You'll see I help out guys no matter whether they use our software or not as long as I have time. I actually helped a guy today from another forum get his radon machine working. Never worked with one before but had it fixed in about 5 minutes.

I was a computer/math teacher for a long time and like to help out. The information I give out in places like this helps my competitors out too, yet I give it out freely.

If you have any questions on the articles feel free to ask them here.

[dcmeagle]

Originally posted by AHI

I would love some free advice.

My site has only been up for 6 months and my traffic has slowly but surely increased over time. Maybe you could spot a sore thumb or two anyway.

Can you take a peek at my site Dom?

Hi John,

Nice site overall. You have a good amount of content, which is helpful. There are definitely a few big things you can do to change your site around. The fact you have the word home inspection in your domain name is VERY good.

1. Your site

tag control what is shown on the very top of your site. This is one of the top 5 items that control what controls what keywords your site comes up for. Right now you only have your company name there. You actually want to remove your company name as no one is searching Google for your company name, and instead replacing it with something like "Performing Home Inspections in Arundel, Baltimore, Baltimore City, Calvert and surrounding areas." Don't list more than 5 or 6 cities. What happens is Google looks at the percentage of the phrase being searched for i.e. ("Baltimore Home Inspection") in your title tag. The more things you list, the lower the percentage. If your site system allows it, you can actually list a few different cities on each page, just make sure your main ones are up front.

2. Make your URL's include keywords and use hyphens, Google does not count an _ as a word separator (due to programming logic). Instead of

 www arundelhomeinspection.com/Rates.html use www arundelhomeinspection.com/Home-Inspection-Rates.html . 

By doing that you're letting the search engines know your site has to do with search engines.

3. Your description text is way too long and doesn't target in on what people are searching for. Make is more like the title I pointed out in #1. It needs to contain what people are searching for.

4. Same thing with your keywords. You shouldn't have more than 7 or so keyword phrases, you have a lot more than that. They should be things like "baltimore home inspections", "arundel home inspections".

I actually did SEO on a site for a guy near you. http://www.richnspect.com , you can check out his site and look over what I did. Another guy actually made the site so I only had limited control over what I could change (for example the home page should really have more text instead of being an image).

Go to Google now and search for "Arundel Home Inspections" and a few other phrases. Write down your rankings and check them once a week. Make all the suggestions above and keep an eye out for what I mention to the other guys.

[John Dirks Jr]

Thanks Dom, I'll take a look into changes by following your leads.

Through its members, TIJ scores again. [:-thumbu]

[Owl HI]

Good advice, thanks for the tips, Dominic!

[^]

[dcmeagle]

Originally posted by AHI

Thanks Dom, I'll take a look into changes by following your leads.

Through its members, TIJ scores again. [:-thumbu]

Glad to help. If you have any more questions as you go along, let me know.

I know some of you guys don't like this site, but they gave me a great opportunity to film a show on Search Engine Optimization for inspectors which I couldn't get elsewhere. There's no reason why you guys shouldn't check it out and benefit as well. Hopefully you can handle staring at my mug for 10+ minutes, hahaha. Check it out http://www.nachi.tv/episode24

[John Dirks Jr]

Dom,

You talk about

tag control in item one of the post you made about my site. I understand what you are saying. I have a question. In that title area, is it ok to have an image with the title written on top of it. Mine is that way now but since I was going to make the effort to change things, I was just wondering. I do plan to change the image and text in that area per your suggestion. I wanted to make sure that images in that area won't hurt.

Thanks again, I'll get to working on it soon. While I'm not crazy about the limitations of GoDaddy's Website Tonight, I do like the fact that I'm in full control of constructing and editing and all that.

I may decide to rebuild at a different server in the future. Do you know of any good places I can get a package deal on the hosting, tools and templates that will allow me to be my own webmaster. Maybe something with more available features than GoDaddy.

[dcmeagle]

Originally posted by AHI

Dom,

You talk about

tag control in item one of the post you made about my site. I understand what you are saying. I have a question. In that title area, is it ok to have an image with the title written on top of it. Mine is that way now but since I was going to make the effort to change things, I was just wondering. I do plan to change the image and text in that area per your suggestion. I wanted to make sure that images in that area won't hurt.

Thanks again, I'll get to working on it soon. While I'm not crazy about the limitations of GoDaddy's Website Tonight, I do like the fact that I'm in full control of constructing and editing and all that.

I may decide to rebuild at a different server in the future. Do you know of any good places I can get a package deal on the hosting, tools and templates that will allow me to be my own webmaster. Maybe something with more available features than GoDaddy.

We actually opened up our web hosting service recently to the public. All inspectors get 3 months free to try it out (no strings attached). It was built from the ground up for inspectors after a bunch of guys complained about the same thing as you. You can read more about it here: Home Inspector Website Hosting

I'm actually filling out the link to be added to TIJ right now as well.

Regarding the title tag. It should contain nothing but text. It basically should look exactly like this:

Performing Home Inspections in city 1, city 2, city 3, city 4 and surrounding areas

It should also be inbetween the

tags on your website.

Let me know if I can help you with anything else!

[Nolan Kienitz]

Originally posted by AHI

Thanks again, I'll get to working on it soon. While I'm not crazy about the limitations of GoDaddy's Website Tonight, I do like the fact that I'm in full control of constructing and editing and all that.

I may decide to rebuild at a different server in the future. Do you know of any good places I can get a package deal on the hosting, tools and templates that will allow me to be my own webmaster. Maybe something with more available features than GoDaddy.

I've been using Go Daddy for many years with no problems. I started out with their 'website tonight' packages and moved to more control of my own by using MS Frontpage for all website construction and I just use Go Daddy as the server.

Works very well for me at this time.

[StevenT]

Hi Dom,

Great to see you here at TIJ. I see you are now working about 20 hours a day. I'm glad you have been able to slow down a bit.

Guys,

Dom has helped me set up my EIFS website. As I mentioned in other threads, after about 3 or 4 weeks, I show up #1 when I do a search in any area that I have targeted.

[dcmeagle]

Hey Steven,

Nice to see you too Yes I'm trying to cut down to 20 hours. That 23.5 hour schedule wasn't working out for me. Lol.

[John Dirks Jr]

What about posting testimonials from past clients? Is this a good idea or bad idea?

Dom, check out my header and see if it looks any better to you. I drastically scaled back on the keywords too. I still have to work on putting keywords into the hypertext.

[dcmeagle]

Originally posted by AHI

What about posting testimonials from past clients? Is this a good idea or bad idea?

Dom, check out my header and see if it looks any better to you. I drastically scaled back on the keywords too. I still have to work on putting keywords into the hypertext.

Testimonials are always an excellent idea from the standpoint of hooking your client. It can help with your SEO as well if you include the city that the client is from.

I would take the NAHI and ASHI inspector phrases out of your keywords, they are rarely ever going to be used. The average home buyer has no idea about associations so they aren't going to search for it. It would be much more powerful to use some city or county names there instead.

Your header looks better, you have keywords up there now and it's not invisible text.

I'd definitely work on renaming your page url's still.

Your page title also needs updating (one of the top ranking reasons).

You're getting there!

[randynavarro]

Dom:

Do sites get dinged for making changes?

My site's going down, not up.

[dcmeagle]

Originally posted by randynavarro

Dom:

Do sites get dinged for making changes?

My site's going down, not up.

Yes, often times when you make any sort of change you'll go down for a few days then go up higher than before. I've never really found a good explanation for that but it's pretty common. Download a program like WebCEO (get the free version) which will make it easier for you to track your rankings across all the search engines for the top 5 terms your aiming for.

[John Dirks Jr]

Here's another question about changes. If a person has many changes to make, is there any advantage or dis-advantage to making the changes slower over time, or is it better to do them all at once?

I mean, make some changes, wait a couple of weeks and make some more...and so on. Or, do it all at one time.

[dcmeagle]

Originally posted by AHI

Here's another question about changes. If a person has many changes to make, is there any advantage or dis-advantage to making the changes slower over time, or is it better to do them all at once?

I mean, make some changes, wait a couple of weeks and make some more...and so on. Or, do it all at one time.

Just do it all at once. You're going to end up with the same ranking either way at the end.

[Mark P]

Hi Dom,

If you get time would you please take a look at it www.ahis1.com and provide any feed back.

I’ve made most of the optimizations tips you have articles on over at http://www.homeinspectorpro.com/ - I think? Except for “Insert free content the harder way (more effective)â€