One of my clients just hired an SEO professional to optimize the website I designed to help its organic ranking. Apparently, the SEO specialist is guaranteeing that he can improve my client’s ranking so it appears on the first page of Google’s organic listings. Of course, they are only guaranteeing a specific search term.
Apparently, this company isn’t charging my client anything unless they can deliver the results he is expecting. I have no problem with this company helping improve my client’s ranking, assuming they are legitimate. However, I am interested in the SEO techniques they are employing.
As near as I can tell, the only significant thing this company has done is to change each html page name to include the name of the city in which my client is based and add more descriptive page titles. Plus, they want to add a lot of new web pages for every specific service my client provides–again, with that specific service in the page name and title.
I realize that Google doesn’t use keywords and appears to rely on page content, titles, and credible in-bound links to determine a website’s ranking. Are better naming conventions all there is to SEO?
At it’s simplest google won’t list your page if the page content text does not list the search text you were looking for.
You can go a looking way in presenting your pages with a decent page title, h1, h2, and relevant content. Hence why this SEO consultant is making dedicated pages for each specific service. It’s so obvious many miss the point.
Covering the basics help you raise above the vast majority or poorly configured pages out there. In a less competitive search area that extra effort just might be page one for some search terms.
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David Owen { Freeway Friendly Web hosting and Domains }
On 29 Oct 2012, at 03:32, RavenManiac email@hidden wrote:
I realize that Google doesn’t use keywords and appears to rely on page content, titles, and credible in-bound links to determine a website’s ranking. Are better naming conventions all there is to SEO?
Unfortunately, most of my clients have set budgets, which to a large degree dictates how many pages their websites can be. If I had unlimited funds I could easily add a plethora of page like the SEO consultant.
Do SEO consultants normally work on a results driven basis? In other words, this person only get paid if they can deliver results.
Quite frankly, I find this whole business of SEO very interesting. Perhaps I’ll learn something in the process.
Depends. It can backfire and you can drop out of national searches or other city’s close by. Google does say wants unique content
Searching for “My Service City” would list far fewer listings in google than searching for “my service” so “My Service City” is more unique and stronger
Sadly there are so many pages on google listing identical services it’s getting far harder than it used to be.
There’s a few basic pointers here:
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David Owen { Freeway Friendly Web hosting and Domains }
For certain market sectors (tailors, shoe repairs, grocery stores etc) people generally want to find a supplier close to where they live or work. If I’m looking for a builder then I’ll more than likely search for “builder south west London” or similar. A builder from China may be cheaper to employ but the commute would be a killer!
Regards,
Tim.
The file name can be a source of SEO “juice”, since it is part of the URL, and that’s counted as high or higher than the Title tag. Be sure to separate logical words from one another with hyphens rather than underscores. this_old_house.html would read as one word, while this-old-house.html reads as three words.
Walter
On Oct 29, 2012, at 2:41 PM, RavenManiac wrote:
Keep in mind that I’m talking html page name, not page title names.
The file name can be a source of SEO “juice”, since it is part of the URL, and that’s counted as high or higher than the Title tag. Be sure to separate logical words from one another with hyphens rather than underscores. this_old_house.html would read as one word, while this-old-house.html reads as three words.
Walter
On Oct 29, 2012, at 2:41 PM, RavenManiac wrote:
So this SEO consultant clearly knows what he is doing. Thanks Walter.
I do when it makes sense to do so. For clients that sell products online (be it digital or physical goods) they often sell over physical boundaries so adding a particular place name won’t really help their business. A web site for a dentist, however, would benefit from targeting visitors from a particular location.
Regards,
Tim.
On 29 Oct 2012, at 18:35, RavenManiac wrote:
So do the both of you include city names in your html page naming?
The overall path length should not exceed 1,024 characters. That’s a really impractical limit, it will exceed the width of the location field in the browser in most cases.
Walter
On Oct 29, 2012, at 6:32 PM, Justin Easthall wrote:
Strange, Google seems to know where I am, and lists those relevant searches
first. While I understand the technical argument, in practice does location
in the url really count that much more? I’m skeptical, mostly as there
seems to me anyways a lot of snake oil being sold as SEO.
Okay, I’ve been monitoring the SEO consultant and I just noticed something else he is doing. Basically, he is adding a meta description for every page of the website, which Google’s SEO Best Practices Guide recommends. I usually only add this to my client’s home page, so I guess I’m learning something new.
However, this is where I’m confused. Basically, he is pulling the meta tag description for each page from the web page’s content, which seems rather redundant to me. Is that effective?
The stated reason for adding a meta description is to restate the content in different terms. If all that your SEO expert is doing it recycling existing visible content, then you’re possibly going to be down-rated, certainly not going to be up-rated. The example I can think of this morning would be to use the meta to say “eye doctor” when the content says “optometrist”.
Walter
On Nov 1, 2012, at 11:57 PM, RavenManiac wrote:
Okay, I’ve been monitoring the SEO consultant and I just noticed something else he is doing. Basically, he is adding a meta description for every page of the website, which Google’s SEO Best Practices Guide recommends. I usually only add this to my client’s home page, so I guess I’m learning something new.
However, this is where I’m confused. Basically, he is pulling the meta tag description for each page from the web page’s content, which seems rather redundant to me. Is that effective?
