Basic Search Engine Optimization
Most new site owners come to realize pretty quickly that no matter how gorgeous their craftsmanship, their potential customers can't find their sites with a Geiger counter. Depending on how many therapists are practicing in your city and the size of your city, getting your site to show up in the search engines can be a bit arduous.
If you live in a small town with a minimum of competition on the web, you probably won't need to pay a dedicated search engine optimization (SEO) company. By using keyword-laden page titles, good meta tags and a simple site map, you should be reachable. On the other hand, if you are in a saturated market and want your site to be on the first page of Google, you'll need to bring in an expert to employ more aggressive techniques like press release submission, posting articles to relevant informational sites, and maximizing the reach of your blog.
The basics are easy, don't take too much time, and will produce some decent results. Let's take a look at what you can do yourself.
Keywords
The first step is to identify your top 5-10 keywords. Since most bodyworkers have a limited area where they do business, you'll want to use this to your advantage. Use your town's name in your keywords and you won't be competing with every therapist in the country - just the ones in your town.
For example, a massage therapist in Sarasota might use these keywords:
Sarasota massage therapist, Sarasota massage therapy, Sarasota massage, Sarasota swedish massage, etc.
Copy
Go through all the copy you've written for your site and work your keywords into the text. You don't need to repeat them often, but it's a good idea to have them all appear at least once somewhere on your site.
Images
In your control panel, right-click one of your images and choose "Insert/Edit Image". Enter one of your keywords or keyword phrases in the field labeled "Description" on the "General" tab. This gives what's called an "alt tag" to your image. Repeat this for all the images on all your pages. It's a good idea to have the keywords you choose for your images also appear in the supporting copy on the same page - the search engines look for relevance.
This should get you started. Once you've filled your copy with keywords and given descriptions to all your images, it'll take a couple weeks for the search engine spiders to "crawl" your site and add you to their indexes. If you like, you can submit your site manually. Here are a few of the major ones:
Google: Add your URL here
Yahoo: Add your URL here
AOL: Add your URL here
If you live in a small town with a minimum of competition on the web, you probably won't need to pay a dedicated search engine optimization (SEO) company. By using keyword-laden page titles, good meta tags and a simple site map, you should be reachable. On the other hand, if you are in a saturated market and want your site to be on the first page of Google, you'll need to bring in an expert to employ more aggressive techniques like press release submission, posting articles to relevant informational sites, and maximizing the reach of your blog.
The basics are easy, don't take too much time, and will produce some decent results. Let's take a look at what you can do yourself.
Keywords
The first step is to identify your top 5-10 keywords. Since most bodyworkers have a limited area where they do business, you'll want to use this to your advantage. Use your town's name in your keywords and you won't be competing with every therapist in the country - just the ones in your town.
For example, a massage therapist in Sarasota might use these keywords:
Sarasota massage therapist, Sarasota massage therapy, Sarasota massage, Sarasota swedish massage, etc.
Copy
Go through all the copy you've written for your site and work your keywords into the text. You don't need to repeat them often, but it's a good idea to have them all appear at least once somewhere on your site.
Images
In your control panel, right-click one of your images and choose "Insert/Edit Image". Enter one of your keywords or keyword phrases in the field labeled "Description" on the "General" tab. This gives what's called an "alt tag" to your image. Repeat this for all the images on all your pages. It's a good idea to have the keywords you choose for your images also appear in the supporting copy on the same page - the search engines look for relevance.
This should get you started. Once you've filled your copy with keywords and given descriptions to all your images, it'll take a couple weeks for the search engine spiders to "crawl" your site and add you to their indexes. If you like, you can submit your site manually. Here are a few of the major ones:
Google: Add your URL here
Yahoo: Add your URL here
AOL: Add your URL here
Labels: SEO
posted by Drew Moore at
5:19 PM
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