Search Engine Optimizations

[dcmeagle]

Originally posted by AHIS

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€

[dcmeagle]

Hey Mark,

Sorry it took so long to get back to you. It's been a crazy few days.

I can see you've made a lot of the changes suggested. Your page title looks great.

Your description tag needs to be updated, make it something like your page title as this is what shows on Google and is important for matching searches. Right now you have:

which doesn't help you since no one's looking for you by company name.

Good usage of city names on your home page.

Your keywords could be updated. Make them more like 'Belleville Home Inspetor', 'Home Inspections in ...'. List about 5 phrases

I see you're using alt tags for your images which is excellent (most guys miss that opportunity).

Right now on your home page you have two

tags. You actually only use one. Then you use

, etc. It's best to actually get key phrases into your h1 tag as google considers it important to your sites relevancy. I'd remove the h1 tags around your company name and leave it on your description of areas you service.

I see you have a decent number of incoming links to your site which is good. The more the merrier.

Other than that you're looking good! You might want to add a few additional pages of content.

If you have any more questions, let me know!

Dominic

[Mark P]

Originally posted by dcmeagle

Hey Mark,

Sorry it took so long to get back to you. It's been a crazy few days.

I can see you've made a lot of the changes suggested. Your page title looks great.

Your description tag needs to be updated, make it something like your page title as this is what shows on Google and is important for matching searches. Right now you have:

which doesn't help you since no one's looking for you by company name.

Good usage of city names on your home page.

Your keywords could be updated. Make them more like 'Belleville Home Inspetor', 'Home Inspections in ...'. List about 5 phrases

I see you're using alt tags for your images which is excellent (most guys miss that opportunity).

Right now on your home page you have two

tags. You actually only use one. Then you use

, etc. It's best to actually get key phrases into your h1 tag as google considers it important to your sites relevancy. I'd remove the h1 tags around your company name and leave it on your description of areas you service.

I see you have a decent number of incoming links to your site which is good. The more the merrier.

Other than that you're looking good! You might want to add a few additional pages of content.

If you have any more questions, let me know!

Dominic

Thank You - Thank You - and and as my Japanese wife says Thank you Berry Berry much![^]

[Mark P]

Originally posted by dcmeagle

Hey Mark,

Right now on your home page you have two

tags. You actually only use one. Then you use

, etc. It's best to actually get key phrases into your h1 tag as google considers it important to your sites relevancy. I'd remove the h1 tags around your company name and leave it on your description of areas you service.

Dominic

Dom a follow up question.

My home page is made up of 3 documents: header, footer, index. I just edit them in notepad using html, upload them and I guess they are joined together as one source page...?

One of the h1 tags is in the header doc

Accredited Home Inspection Specialist, Inc.

and the other is in the index doc

Providing Home Inspections and Radon Testing to Belleville, O'Fallon, Collinsville, Edwardsville and surrounding Metro East Communities

Should I still remove the first h1 tag (

Accredited Home Inspection Specialist, Inc.

) since when I view the source online all my pages have 2 h1. If so should I replace (h1) with something different so it does not loose the formating?

Lastely can you take another look at my key words. I'm not sure about comma (,) placement between city names, and if I have to much, or is there such a thing as to much?

Thanks Agian.

[dcmeagle]

Originally posted by AHIS

Originally posted by dcmeagle

Hey Mark,

Right now on your home page you have two

tags. You actually only use one. Then you use

, etc. It's best to actually get key phrases into your h1 tag as google considers it important to your sites relevancy. I'd remove the h1 tags around your company name and leave it on your description of areas you service.

Dominic

Dom a follow up question.

My home page is made up of 3 documents: header, footer, index. I just edit them in notepad using html, upload them and I guess they are joined together as one source page...?

One of the h1 tags is in the header doc

Accredited Home Inspection Specialist, Inc.

and the other is in the index doc

Providing Home Inspections and Radon Testing to Belleville, O'Fallon, Collinsville, Edwardsville and surrounding Metro East Communities

Should I still remove the first h1 tag (

Accredited Home Inspection Specialist, Inc.

) since when I view the source online all my pages have 2 h1. If so should I replace (h1) with something different so it does not loose the formating?

Lastely can you take another look at my key words. I'm not sure about comma (,) placement between city names, and if I have to much, or is there such a thing as to much?

Thanks Agian.

Hi Mark,

You don't want to have more than 5-7 phrases (separated by commas) for your keywords. Go with phrases like "Belleville Home Inspector"

Go ahead and use H2 for your company name (so remove the h1 from those files). It's not unusual for sites to pull from separate files and combine into one page. If it messed up the formatting then you need to look at the css file controlling your site and copy whatever is set for your H1 to your H2 tags.

[John Dirks Jr]

Dom,

First of all, thanks for all the advice. I changed some stuff but have more work to do. Try this link and you can see how I have changed the url titles. They are all the same except for being numbered differently at the end.

http://www.arundelhomeinspection.com/Ma ... ion-7.html

This one above is the "rates" page. In addition to adding Maryland-Home-Inspector to the url, I also have begun to add it to the viewable title when the page comes up. Is doing this helpful as well? Check the above link to see what I am asking about.

[dcmeagle]

Originally posted by AHI

Dom,

First of all, thanks for all the advice. I changed some stuff but have more work to do. Try this link and you can see how I have changed the url titles. They are all the same except for being numbered differently at the end.

arundelhomeinspection.com/Maryland-Home-Inspector-7.html

This one above is the "rates" page. In addition to adding Maryland-Home-Inspector to the url, I also have begun to add it to the viewable title when the page comes up. Is doing this helpful as well? Check the above link to see what I am asking about.

Hi John,

Having Maryland Home Inspector - Rates at the top is a good idea. You can go further by saying 'Home Inspection Rate in x,x,x, and surrounding areas'. As far as the naming goes, I'd make a small change. Instead of arundelhomeinspection.com/Maryland-Home-Inspector-7.html , I'd use arundelhomeinspection.com/Maryland-Home-Inspector-Rates.html , arundelhomeinspection.com/Maryland-Home-Inspector-Sample-Report.html , etc. The numbers don't really help you out.

[John Dirks Jr]

Originally posted by dcmeagle

Originally posted by AHI

Dom,

First of all, thanks for all the advice. I changed some stuff but have more work to do. Try this link and you can see how I have changed the url titles. They are all the same except for being numbered differently at the end.

http://www.arundelhomeinspection.com/Ma ... ion-7.html

This one above is the "rates" page. In addition to adding Maryland-Home-Inspector to the url, I also have begun to add it to the viewable title when the page comes up. Is doing this helpful as well? Check the above link to see what I am asking about.

Hi John,

Having Maryland Home Inspector - Rates at the top is a good idea. You can go further by saying 'Home Inspection Rate in x,x,x, and surrounding areas'. As far as the naming goes, I'd make a small change. Instead of http://www.arundelhomeinspection.com/Ma ... ion-7.html , I'd use arundelhomeinspection.com/Maryland-Home-Inspector-Rates.html , arundelhomeinspection.com/Maryland-Home-Inspector-Sample-Report.html , etc. The numbers don't really help you out.

Excellent, and thanks again Dom.

On your suggestion of the small change to the url titles, there is problem. I tried to do it like you suggested. For some reason, godaddy's website tonight limited the number of characters I could use. I felt that Maryland-Home-Inspector is the most important part so that is why I did it that way.

I could drop "Maryland" to provide enough spaces but I think that that word is more important to me than "samples" for instance. Keeping the word "Maryland" in there will get me more localized hits. Is my thinking correct on this?

[dcmeagle]

Originally posted by AHI

Originally posted by dcmeagle

Originally posted by AHI

Dom,

First of all, thanks for all the advice. I changed some stuff but have more work to do. Try this link and you can see how I have changed the url titles. They are all the same except for being numbered differently at the end.

arundelhomeinspection.com/Maryland-Home-Inspector-7.html

This one above is the "rates" page. In addition to adding Maryland-Home-Inspector to the url, I also have begun to add it to the viewable title when the page comes up. Is doing this helpful as well? Check the above link to see what I am asking about.

Hi John,

Having Maryland Home Inspector - Rates at the top is a good idea. You can go further by saying 'Home Inspection Rate in x,x,x, and surrounding areas'. As far as the naming goes, I'd make a small change. Instead of arundelhomeinspection.com/Maryland-Home-Inspector-7.html , I'd use arundelhomeinspection.com/Maryland-Home-Inspector-Rates.html , arundelhomeinspection.com/Maryland-Home-Inspector-Sample-Report.html , etc. The numbers don't really help you out.

Excellent, and thanks again Dom.

On your suggestion of the small change to the url titles, there is problem. I tried to do it like you suggested. For some reason, godaddy's website tonight limited the number of characters I could use. I felt that Maryland-Home-Inspector is the most important part so that is why I did it that way.

I could drop "Maryland" to provide enough spaces but I think that that word is more important to me than "samples" for instance. Keeping the word "Maryland" in there will get me more localized hits. Is my thinking correct on this?

I would make sure Maryland is on a few of the pages. But for the rest I'd go with things like home-inspection-sample-reports, or get some of the city names in there. Or even Washington DC if you inspect down there.

I'm surprised GoDaddy limits the number of characters, that seems silly. I know there's no limitation on our system as I've seen guys with REALLY long titles (too long). Make sure you have Maryland and your city names, in your description tag, your keyword tag, and throughout your entire site. I'm worried that Google might see having Maryland-Home-Inspection in EVERY page's url as spamming (I'm not sure, but just a guess). That's why with guy getting new sites I tell them to get it into their domain name, like http://www.homeinspectoratlanta.com . That way the page url's can focus on cities or other terms. If you've had your site for over 6 months though, you want to keep the domain name as age is an important factor in rankings as well.

Dominic

[John Dirks Jr]

I can understand why too much of one thing might hurt. I'll mix it up some. There are different places I can use these area specific words.

> browser title

> heading title

> url filename

Dom, can you assign an order of importance for these three?

Also, I can set the frequency of the expected changes to notify the search engines. Can these settings have an affect on ratings?

What about assigning the priority levels for each page? I have 10 pages on my site. Regardless of which page makes a relation to a specific search word or query, I would prefer that all traffic be first directed to my home page.

If I assign maximum priority to my home page and minimum to all the others, can I expect that no matter which page causes a hit, the searcher will be sent to the home page first?

[dcmeagle]

Originally posted by AHI

I can understand why too much of one thing might hurt. I'll mix it up some. There are different places I can use these area specific words.

> browser title

> heading title

> url filename

Dom, can you assign an order of importance for these three?

Also, I can set the frequency of the expected changes to notify the search engines. Can these settings have an affect on ratings?

What about assigning the priority levels for each page? I have 10 pages on my site. Regardless of which page makes a relation to a specific search word or query, I would prefer that all traffic be first directed to my home page.

If I assign maximum priority to my home page and minimum to all the others, can I expect that no matter which page causes a hit, the searcher will be sent to the home page first?

The priority stuff really doesn't do much of anything. What's going to determine what pages are returned are #1 the page that other websites link to (your home page), and #2 the page the matches the search best in all ways. Changing the frequency won't really affect your site either as a home inspection website typically is not going to change very often (unless you get some news feeds going).

As far as importance goes (this is my opinion and observations, neither Google nor any of the search engines will ever tell you exactly what's most important):

1. URL

2. Title Tab

3. Description Tag

4. Heading Title

Remember though that any words you use in #1-4 HAVE to be contained on the page in the main body text as well to make it effective.

[John Dirks Jr]

Dominic,

Thank you very very much for your help. You insight and willingness to share you knowledge in this public forum clearly defines good human nature.

I have seen dramatic improvements in my traffic stats already. This even includes the fact that I ditched much of the non-area specific stuff and replaced it with the opposite. After doing this, I would have expected my over all traffic to drop, although the lower numbers would be expected to contain a greater volume of area specific hits.

I don't quite know why after all, but my hits in the short term are up sharply. We'll have to let it roll for a while and see how it works out over the longer term.

Once one gets their site ranked well, how much trouble is it keeping it up there?

[Zibby]

Hi Dominic,

When time allows would you please take a look at www.SanAntonioTexasHomeInspector.com and provide any feed back.

[dcmeagle]

Originally posted by Zibby

Hi Dominic,

When time allows would you please take a look at www.SanAntonioTexasHomeInspector.com and provide any feed back.

Hi Zibby,

Sure thing, I'll check it out some time today when things quiet down here.

[dcmeagle]

Originally posted by Zibby

Hi Dominic,

When time allows would you please take a look at www.SanAntonioTexasHomeInspector.com and provide any feed back.

Nice site design overall. It has a nice look.

A couple of notes.

1. Your urls should be changes to be SEO friendly. http://sanantoniotexashomeinspector.ipo ... hoose.html is not as powerful as http://sanantoniotexashomeinspector.ipo ... tions.html

Note the second one gets keywords into the url which must be separated by hyphens for full effect.

2. Why do you just have a subdomain of .ipower.com. You won't rank as high as if you had your own domain. Hosting is chaep and one inspection difference could cover a year of hosting.

3. Your keywords and page description could use some work, read my comments above or the articles on my site for more.

Other than that you're not looking too bad. There's some more thing you can do like alt tags to your images and stuff, but the above is the most important.

[John Dirks Jr]

Dom, you still there?

I have a question about browser titles. If you click my page link below you will see my browser title has hyphens separating the phrases. Is this ok or is a blank space between phrases better?

Thanks

[dcmeagle]

Originally posted by John Dirks Jr

Dom, you still there?

I have a question about browser titles. If you click my page link below you will see my browser title has hyphens separating the phrases. Is this ok or is a blank space between phrases better?

Thanks

Hey John,

I'm still here

The way you have the hyphens should be ok, though I know commas would be ok. Sometimes I see guys who try Baltimore-Annapolis which I advise against as the search engines might look at that as one word. You have Baltimore - Annapolis which the search engines should definitely be able to differentiate between.

Dominic

[John Dirks Jr]

Thanks Dom. I am learning from your answers and I hope others do as well. I have more questions. Are you ready to shoot me yet?

1. When a browser title is so long that the later parts of it are not actually viewable when the page is up, do the search engine crawlers still recognize, log and credit you for the parts that are not seen by the public?

2. Sometimes we decide to share links with other sites in order to help our ranking. When we display the others links on our site, does it matter if we spread them out over the sites pages or can they be grouped in one place? To simplify, is one way better than the other?

3. I own a few domain names that I am not using right now. I also have credits available from my server to host the names. Is there a good way to utilize the domain names with a primary purpose to increase the rating of my business site?

4. Does it hurt ranking to have a large blank space between a pages content and a link posted way at the bottom of a page? The idea by doing this is to fulfill the requirement of posting a shared link, but not have it close to your sites actual content.

[dcmeagle]

Hey John,

I thought I had responded to this last week, I must have not hit submit or something.

1. You don't want your browser title to be longer than 64 characters. Google will show the first 66 but will crop to the last complete word.

2. Do not put more that 25 or so links to other sites on one page. That turns your site into a link farm, hurting your rankings and theirs. I always suggest to the guys using our hosting service to split up the categories by State or Province.

3. The only way is to actually put a different site up on each name. Read this article I wrote about multiple domain names: http://www.homeinspectorpro.com/Search- ... sites.html

4. To be honest, I doubt it would hurt it. Search engines should delete the extra white space anyways so they wouldn't notice. Run your site through a spider simulator like this: http://www.iwebtool.com/spider_view to see what your page would look like.

Dominic

[John Dirks Jr]

2. Do not put more that 25 or so links to other sites on one page. That turns your site into a link farm, hurting your rankings and theirs. I always suggest to the guys using our hosting service to split up the categories by State or Province.

Great advice Dom. Look at this example in the link below. There are more than 30 links on this page. They are listed under different states but nonetheless they are still on one page. Are you saying that it would be bad for me if my link was listed on this page?

http://www.homeinspectionservices.com/h ... anies.html

[dcmeagle]

Lol, I wouldn't want to be listed on that guys page for personal reasons, but that's a different story. You can probably read about it in the archives here or on a few other forums.

Here's a loose definition of a link farm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm . Link Farms used to be purely sites where every site linked to each other, but it's really become a term now for pages with just tons of links listed, usually automatically. As Google is quoted at the bottom ,they penalize people who are on link farm pages. There is no 'exact' number that's been given on when a site crosses the link and a page has too many links. It is known that the more links on a page, the less valuable having a link on that page is. Google might start calling a page a link farm at 20 links or 100 links, no way to know for sure. That's why I say, play it safe and break things up into different categories.

Right now that site wont hurt you. If he gets a lot of links all listed on that one page, it might.

[Michael Carson]

I am gong to use the google webmaster site and use some of their tracking tools, etc. to see what they suggest as well. I am going to implement some of the things I have read here today and see what happens. Thanks to Dom for helping everyone.

Originally posted by 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.

[exploreparadise2]

I’m looking for a way to determine what keywords are searched most frequently in my area on Google. For example, is Home Inspection more frequently searched than Home Inspector? Is a city more often searched than a county, etc. Does anyone know of a method of finding that; free software maybe?

Thanks,

[lannes1]

Hi Randy;

when you have time please check my web site.

Thank you

Jory lannes

lannesgroup.com

[randynavarro]

You mean Dominic, don't you?

Although it's easy to understand the effect I have on people wherever I've been - I'm just always on their minds. . .