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Titles are an important factor in ranking well. Think of the newspaper, if they didn’t have titles for the articles, then no one would read the articles. These titles help the search engines identify relevant pages to deliver to the search engine user. If you don’t have a title page that includes relevant information for the search then your page may not be shown to the user. Your title should help the search engines identify your content and it should clearly be related to the content. You can put your business name in the title, but my recommendation is that you put it after your key phrases and descriptive information.

To improve your page names, you first need to determine what the page has for a focus. The content and title should clearly indicate this to you. Now, review the page name in address bar of your web browser. Is the page name similar to the content? Does it give you a sense as to how close the content will be to the subject of the page? A page name of abc.html is not nearly as good as dog-treats-for-your-pet.html if your content is related to the type of dog treats you can feed your pet, or other treats you might give to your dog. Abc.html should be modified. To do this, on most sites, you simply copy the page, paste it again, and rename the file. Then you upload the new page to your site. Now you need to link the new page from all the other pages that point to abc.html. One point I want to make and be clear on, do not remove the abc.html file. You may be getting rankings and traffic from search engines delivering users to this page. You should eventually remove it but you first need to redirect the traffic going to the abc.html page to the newly named page. To do this you need to utilize something called a 301 redirect. This will direct the search engines to update their page from abc.html to the newly named page. Once you do the 301 redirect, you can remove abc.html

You need to understand where your website ranks and for what key phrases it does well for. Once you have identified what you want to show up for, start running ranking reports. Any reputable SEO company can run a ranking report for you for under $100. Sometimes it can be as low at $20. But you can do this yourself for free if you have time. Simply type in the key phrase into the search engine and start going through the pages. On Google you want to look for your domain in the “green” text under the description and link. Keep moving through the page results until you find something. This could take a while. Once you get through 10 pages, and then try another key phrase. If you are ranking above 100, then just mark 100 for the ranking result on a spreadsheet. Use this spreadsheet to track your results for all the key phrases. This will create a baseline to show you if things are improving over time. Don’t expect big jumps in your rankings

In order for you to improve results on your site you need to determine what you want to show up for. One great way to do this is to review your competitor’s website, and view their major topic points. In addition you can view their Meta keywords which are sometimes a good indicator for what they want to show up for. To do this, go to their site, then click on view in the menu bar of the web browser, choose source and it will open a file in notepad. Look in the top 10 lines of the code for Meta keywords, here you should find what they want to show up for. This is good information but now you need to start finding out what your prospects are searching for. It does you no good to want to show up for something that no one is searching for. Go to www.wordtracker.com, they offer a free trial and you can follow their trial instructions and find out some great details. Word Tracker can be expensive for the small business, but if you use the trial during the trial period, you can get a great deal of keyword and key phrase information out of it.

You need to know who your competition is and what websites they own and operate. Many of your competitors will have multiple websites, this is the new thing out there. They focus each website on a division of their business. Make sure you review each and every website that they have in detail.

Not only review their products and services, but also the USP (Unique Selling Proposition), and find out how you can effectively compete on the web. Don’t expect your web design company to do this for you unless you are willing to pay them to do it. In almost every case, the business owner, is the ideal person to be reviewing their competitors websites. Take notes when you are reviewing the site, this way you can refer to the notes when you begin making changes to your site(s).

Do not be afraid to act upon your notes and have your web design company make changes to your site to effectively compete. Be sure to have a clear discussion with the company to make certain that they understand the intention of the change and can also review the competitor site to see how they are handleing the back code portion for you to compete naturally in the search engines.

Many studies have been done regarding submission forms. It’s been proven that 3 data collection fields are ok, however when you go to the 4th field, the ratio of completed forms drops by over 50%. This is a key determining factor in how many fields your form should be.

In almost every case, you are going to be calling your prospect anyway, so why should you make it more difficult for them to get information or get you to call. Just get their name, phone number and email. That is sufficient. Then follow up with them as you normally would. I would rather call many people and find out more information, with the prospect that I will get the business, than call less than half of those people because I lost the opportunity to contact others due to a lengthy estimate request form.

Remember that people are busy and they really don’t want to fill out lengthly forms on websites. They also have some anxiety over having to fill out the form a second time if it doesn’t work right the first time.

Building links from other websites is a key to getting traffic. Google sees links that point to your site as an indicator that your site is important. It is also important to note the text used to point to your site. Be sure to use the same text, when possible, to point to your site.

The question I always get is who do I approach to get a link to my site. Instead of approaching other sites, simply do a search for "free directory" and you will find many different online directories similar to the yellow pages. Use these to gain inbound links to your site. Many of these directories permit free listing with no link back, which is ideal.

Focus on adding at least one of these free links per week. The more the better. If you are asked to link back, that is ok, add it to a links page. However, if you are asked to pay, skip that site and move to the next one. Paid links are not worth it, there are far too many free options out there. Once you add your listing, many of the sites will offer upgrades for additional money, this is up to you to upgrade or not. Generally speaking, take the free link and move on to the next directory.

Here are a couple directories that we own that you can post your link for free (you may already be there so be sure to check first), www.worcestercountybusinesses.com, and www.northeastbusinessdirectory.com. Finding directories is not too difficult, it just takes some time.