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01 29th, 2009| 
Search Engine Optimisation Tutorial - SEO Local Search
Welcome to Part 2/3 of the Search Engine Optimisation Tutorial - SEO Local Search. Part 1 detailed the research you need to undertake to be able to optimise your website for local search e.g. for the phrase “car valeting west midlands”.
Below i will show you how to use the research carried out in part 1 and implement this into your website to ensure your website is optimised for local search.
1a Firstly sign up to Google Analytics
- Click the link to find out How to sign up and install Google Analytics?
1b Sign up to Google Webmaster Tools
- Click the link to find out How to sign up to and configure Google Webmaster Tools?
1c Finally sign up to Live Search Webmaster Center.
These steps will ensure you can track all your visitor movements whilst on your site (Google Analytics) and will also aid you in the process of managing your website from the back end (Google Webmaster Tools)
2. As soon as Google Analytics has been successfully installed its probably best to let it run for a few weeks to allow the search engines to index your website and find you’re website content. Checking this on a daily basis will become frustrating, so do wait a few weeks and you will begin to get some real data to analyse effectively.
3. Evaluate the design of your website. If you do look in your Google Analytics account and you have a high bounce rate (bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that exit your site immediately), then you need to re-visit your web site design and layout, there is no point optimising a website to attract visitors if they are just going to leave straight away (you only have a few seconds to persuade your visitor to stay - so use those seconds well). If you are weak at design try and look up similar website in the same industry as you, for example a corporate website will have a different feel to a celebrity blog - you need to determine what you target audience expect to see.
4. Check cross browser compatibility. Check your website appears the way it should using Mozilla Firefox 2.x, Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and finally Safari 3.x. Furthermore ensure you check your website on both MAC and PC, again there’s no point spending a lot of time on design if your website doesn’t render properly in all browsers.
5. Visit your HTML code and optimise all of your content as per your research in part 1.
You must ensure that all of the keywords / key phrases you have identified as being important to include in your website are in the correct places in your HTML code.
You must ensure they are present in : -
- Page title
- H1 tag on each page
- H2 tag on each page
- Keywords in body content, preferably once at the beginning, a few times in the middle and then again at the end
- Optimise your URL architecture and website folder structure. e.g. its good practice to use www.fashionwebsite.com/shirts/long-sleeve-shirt.html instead of www.fashionwebsite.com/allclothes/?type=shirts=… and so on.
- Ensure all of your content is at the most 3 clicks away. This can be achieved using a sub menu e.g. Mens Clothes > Shirts > Long Sleeve Shirts - try not to make anymore categories (or clicks) than this.
- Alt image attributes, when you use an image on your page you have the opportunity to give that image an alternative name e.g (alt=”long-sleeve-blue-shirt”), ensure your images include your keyword but only if applicable, its bad practice to name your logo “long-sleeve-blue-shirt” this is known as word stuffing.
- If you do not wish search engines to index certain pages e.g. “legal” or “terms and conditions” pages (there is no reason why you would want search engines to display these pages to your visitors - if your website visitors need to view these page they still can by using the link on your website) just add a simple line of code : - rel=”nofollow”, so a link to your page to terms and conditions for example would look like : - <a href=”http://www.fashionwebsite.com/terms-and-conditions.html” rel=”nofollow”>Terms and Conditions</a> thus ensuring this page will not be indexed by search engines and will mtherefore pass more link juice to other more important pages like “long sleeve shirt” - these are your money pages and should have the most exposure.
6. Decide if you need a meta description - If a meta description has not been used the search engines do a great job of scanning the on page content and displaying appropriate text in the search engine results page for your page description. Meta descriptions are extremely important, you could look at this as your text ad for your website, as this is what people see when searching the Internet, your meta description should persuade the search to click through to your website, it needs to be enticing but factual, furthermore be sure to include your keyword / key phrases - but do not word stuff.
7. This is especially true for SEO local search. At the bottom of every page be sure to include your company / personal address and phone number, search engines are great at picking up phone numbers, postal / zip codes and addresses, this is then relayed back to the search engine local business center, hence ensuring your website appears higher in local search.
8. Before i mentioned using rel=”nofollow”however if you forget to markup a link correctly the search engine still may find a way to index certain pages that you did not want them to. An effective way around this is to add a robot.txt file - Lean How To Make and Upload a robots/txt file . This file allows you to specify what pages you do no want the search engine to index, furthermore including a robot.txt file make tracking search engine easier because they always download this file before navigating your website.
There you have it, carrying out the research in part 1 allows you to implement the correct keyphrases in the right place, ensure you don’t miss out on part SEO For Local Search - Off Site Factors by subscribing to the RSS or email updates.
Do you anymore SEO Local Search tips, if so list them below : -
Technorati Tags: SEO Local Search, SEO, Search Engine Optimisation
