Web Traffic Part 2: 5 Simple Steps to improve Search Engine Ranking

Yesterday I talked about what NOT to do for SEO. There is a list of common mistakes and practices that will actually harm your search engine ranking. If you missed it, go back and start there. here’s the link: [link]

Here’s what I’ll be talking about over the next few days.

• Part 1: SEO – Why your web traffic sucks(The Bad News)
• Part 2: SEO – 5 simple steps to improve search engine ranking(The Good News)
• Part 3: WordPress
• Part 4: Noah Photo Blogsites
• Part 5: Social Media and Networking.(How twitter and facebook can change your life)

I’m gonna skip over the introduction to SEO talk that I gave yesterday, and assume that you either already know it, or just read about it. I’ll talk instead about a simple well-known marketing concept: Know your audience. I know it sounds simple enough, and everyone knows it, but what have you done to implement it? Yes, It is important to run your business in a way, and present yourself in a way that holds true to your personality. But when you are building, or re-building your website, you need to take into account what you are actually selling, and to whom you are selling. Can you identify with your client? Can your prospective client identify with you?

In an ideal world we would be able to do business with people just like us. We wouldn’t have to change, we would be able to do whatever we wanted. But since we don’t live in this ideal world, we have to make compromises. We actually need to draw in the clientele that pays the bills. And how we represent ourselves, and what we know about our clientele is paramount.

When I was developing my Noah Photo Blogsites I made sure to talk to multiple photographers. Ask them what they wanted in a website, and took all that data, and tried to make it as best as possible. I found out that they wanted to be able to control the look of their site without having to touch a single line of code. An easy to use admin section that they could change a few things here and there easily. WordPress was the obvious choice for the platform(this is what I use, and the platform is incredible.) But I was able to make the blogsites to the standards that photographers desired and required.

Step 1: Keywords(not the meta tag ones)

You might be wondering why I’m talking about marketing and branding when I should be talking about SEO. Well this principle applies with SEO. Especially what KEYWORDS to be using. Now I’m not talking about Meta tag keywords, I’m talking about the search words with which you want your clients to find your website. You need to find out what your future clients will be searching. Are they looking for “unique family portraits in Canoga Park”? Well, you need to actually write those exact words inside your website. Whether they be in an introduction, or inside of the text in your site. Refer to them a few times. Mention Canoga Park at about 3-5 times. But no more than that. If you write that you make unique family portraits in Canoga Park a bunch of times in a row, you will be marked as spamming keywords, and your search engine ranking will drop.

You’re gonna want to sit down, and write a list of keywords that you will be using. Call past clients, and ask them what they would search if they were looking for a photographer. This might take a little time, but it will definitely help clarify what you will actually be writing in your website.

Then you are going to want to actually sit down and write your website content in a way that makes use of your keywords. I could go into a ton of detail about keyword saturation and proximity and such, but until you get the basics of SEO down, that would be pointless.

Step 2: Is your site clean?

I want you to go to http://validator.w3.org/ and see how many errors or warnings your website contains. You are going to want to fix these. The cleaner your website is, the better your SEO ranking will be. Mind you, this is not the end all to SEO. This is simple just a step that you want to take to improve the health of your site. The incredible thing about WordPress, is that it is such a robust engine, and that it has the cleanest mark-up, and coding of pretty much anything around. That’s why blogs or blogsites hosted by wordpress far outweigh the competition in search engine friendliness.

Step 3: You URL (www)

What does your URL say about you? Is your web URL simply http://www.yournameherephotography.com? Yes, this is good for ease of use, and I’m not gonna tell you to get rid of it. But what about forwarding it to a more search friendly name like www.noahphotographyincanogapark.com. Basically you would be hosting your site at www.noahphotographyincanogapark.com but keeping your url for email purposes and for ease of use. Nobody wants to type in a huge URL, that’s why I send everyone to http://www.losangelesportraits.org it’s easy to remember and fairly short.

The reason that you want your site hosted on a URL that is search friendly is because the spiders love text correlation. They want to see that your URL has a correlation to your Page title, which also correlates to the page description, which correlates to the actual text in your website. Which I’ll get into in the next step.

Step 4: Page Titles, Descriptions, and Text.

Just as important as your URL, if not more so, is how you use your page titles and description, along with how relevant they are to your text. you could have the perfect url, title, and description, but if they aren’t relevant to the text that’s actually on the page, you’re kind of screwed.

I go to a lot of websites where I look at the page title, and see “home” or “about” or “blog” as the page title. That’s good at describing where you are, but honestly this isn’t usually a thing that people look at. I usually use my page title to quickly, in a few words, describe my page. Each individual page. not just a generic “noah photography, weddings, portraits and products in Los Angeles.” Although that is a good title, and it describes what I do… it will usually only work well on the about pages, or pages that describe what you do in your business. So for each page or post that I write, I will create a custom page title that quickly sums up what the page is about. for this page I wrote the following as my title:

“How to optimize traffic to your website, and get them to stay longer. SEO, WordPress, and Noah Photo Blogsites.”

So along with the page title you’ve gotta have your description. This is where you describe your page in 160 characters or less. for example:

“A 5 part tutorial on driving traffic to your website and getting them to stay there longer. SEO, WordPress, and Noah Photo Blogsites. (SEO for photographers)”

You see how this describes what I’ll be talking about in these articles? What you want to do is make sure that these two have a good relevancy to your actual page. So Ideally, If you want people to search “unique family portraits in Canoga Park” you want to have Canoga Park, or Portraits in your URL. Then your title would also contain “unique family portraits in Canoga Park” and then your description would be something along the lines of “Noah photography specializes in  unique family portraits. Located in Canoga Park, we serve the whole San Fernando Valley.” Now the content of your page needs to reflect the search words. If you use this foursome(URL, title, description, and content) wisely, your search engine rankings will improve drastically.

I know that this sounds difficult, but with WordPress, there is a plugin called “All in one SEO Pack” that makes this incredibly easy. Each page or post can have it’s own title, description, and obviously you control the content. Next turn on your WordPress permalinks, and you’ve got your URL working for you too.

Step 5: Get a Blogsite

I know this might seem out of order, but the other 4 things you can do without getting a blogsite.

What can a blogsite do for you and your SEO? Well like I said before, WordPress has a plethora(yes I said plethora) of tools at your disposal to implement and create a unique blog. In my opinion, the blogsite is the best bet for SEO. It brings everything together under one umbrella. Now, like I said yesterday, a free blog hosted NOT on your site will do nothing for your search engine optimization. You want to go to WordPress.org to download and install your self hosted blog. It’s absolutely free.

As you know, spiders LOVE text. And with a blog, you are continuously adding more and more text to your  website. The more and more search relevant text you have on your website, the better.

So you ask, why a blogsite rather than a blog that is separate from your site? There are a lot of reasons, but in short here’s a few.

1. If you have a flash site, the search engines will have a harder time finding your blog unless you have a landing pages… and don’t get me started on landing page… Web traffic HATES landing pages.
2. You are going to have to duplicate everything that’s on your flash site to your blog anyway. A lot of people don’t have flash installed on their computer, and they aren’t gonna install it just to view YOUR site.
3. If you still have a static HTML site why not just make your life easier every time you want to change something or add a little bit of text, or just add a whole new page?
4. You have a lot more consistent look and feel. You don’t have to worry about branding your website and blog the same…. it just happens automatically.
5. They’re free! what more can I say? if you can follow a few fairly simple instructions, you can install wordpress in under an hour, and be blogging by dinner. YOURSELF!
6. You can get great pre-designed themes for your blogsite. Specifically the Noah Photo Blogsites. While not free, they are a cut above everything else that’s out there(I might be a little biased.) I don’t say this without caution of course. I can back it up. The reason they are so great, is the static front page and the incredible customization that is possible with them. Look around at other blogsite themes that are available, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. You go to the front page, and it’s a BLOG. and it scrolls on forever, and it takes a minute and a half to load. Sure, it’s great looking, but it’s not a true blogsite. You are looking for a blogsite, where you can have a slideshow on your front page, or a promotional video(coming soon.)

So will you get a blogsite? Do it today!

That’s gonna do it for today, but Stay tuned for tomorrows article on WordPress, and find out how it can make your online presence so much easier and better. I hope you learned something today. I know that this isn’t the be-all, end-all, of SEO… Far from it. But it is enough to give you a very large boost in the right direction.

I’ll see you tomorrow!

Part 3: WordPress – Read it Now!

Your email: