Barton Consulting

In a recent article on WordTracker, Rachelle Money, discusses whether or not Web Designers are clueless when it comes to SEO.

From the article,

Most people are only enlightened about SEO once their expensive website has failed to get them traffic and/or business. (Chris TT)

Which is a very true statement. Many people pay thousands of dollars for a very beautiful website, then feel burned when nobody comes to visit there website.

You can’t just build a website, and expect traffic to come. You need to optimize your website so that it can be found, and you need to market it. Ala Search Engine Optimization, and Search Engine Marketing. In addition to SEO, and SEM, you need to use Social Networking appropriately to drive traffic to your website.

So, when looking for SEO Consultants, what do you look for? Whether your in New York, Michigan, or Idaho Falls, You need a Search Engine Consultant that knows what there doing.

Pay a company monthly and expect to see the results improve, if they don’t, you’ve got the wrong company. (Chris TT)

Before going with an SEO Consultant, take a look at their previous work. What are they ranking for, what are there clients search engine rankings. Pretend to be a customer to one of their clients. Can you find their clients in the search engines? That says a lot about the company.

Location doesn’t matter much, they can be in Michigan, New York, or Idaho for that matter. What matters is that they actually do good SEO work.

When you’ve finally decided on an SEO Consultant. Pay per performance is really the best way to go. Nobody needs to be stuck with an under performing SEO consultant.

Now web designers themselves, can truly be clueless when it comes to design. Especially if there only skills are photoshop and flash.  Look for the whole package; A team of designers, programmers, and SEO consultants.

(Give us a call 888-379-1357, or send us an email and let’s talk SEO)

Like it or not, Google ranks content in the search engines based on the number of inbound links to a website. Because of this, ranking high in the search engines (Google in particular) is a popularity contest. [Insert Flashbacks of Highschool Here]. Makes sense, if something is more liked by more people, it should be ranked higher. The drawback is, that this encourages Search Engine Spam (spam bots, paid links, fake blog posts, etc).

For small and medium sized businesses this makes ranking high in the search engines rather difficult. Because your competing with the entire world for keywords for a local market. Which could be a good thing, if you can rank high in the global market, offering products and services that are easily exported, you can increase your revenues exponentially.

But what if you only want to stay local. How can you optimize your web site for Google Local Search? It’s all about the keywords, and the link context.

Let’s say your a Graphics Designer, and you specialize in making Websites for people in your local area. Graphics Designer is going to be a very difficult keyword to rank high for. Especially if your just starting out today. There are hundreds if not thousands of Graphics Designer websites out there on the web. You’re competing with some power house companies located in New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, etc with an already large client base. For someone located in Idaho Falls that will make it very difficult for you to rank high for the keyword Graphics Designer. What you can do though, is focus on the keyword Idaho Falls Graphics Designer. There are a lot less Graphics Designers in Idaho Falls than there are in Chicago, or Los Angeles.

So once you decide the keyword(s) your going to focus on, You need to start getting others to link back to your website, with those keywords in the text of an anchor tag. This is the links context.

We all understand that the standard anchor tag is <a>. The text between the beginning <a> and ending </a> is the Link Context.

So if your website is http://barsult.com (funny, mine is), you’ll want an anchor tag like this for Idaho Falls Graphics Designer. <a href=”http://barsult.com” title=”Idaho Falls Graphics Designer”>Idaho Falls Graphics Designer</a>. Notice the title and href attributes. Don’t forget them.

Most people tend to set the Link context as the name of your company. Unless the name of your company has the keywords you want in it, this is usually not a good idea. Use the text outside of the anchor tag to mention the name of your company.

Here’s an example:

Barton Consulting, LLC an Idaho Falls Graphic Designer has graphics designers that have been creating websites since 1998.

Now go out and get others to link back to your website properly. Just remember, there are fewer people searching for Idaho Falls Graphic Designer than there are searching for Graphics Designer. So you’ll probably want to target more than just one city. Around Idaho, you’ll probably want to target Rexburg Graphics Designer, Rigby Graphics Designer, Boise Graphics Designer, Twin Falls Graphics Designer, and Pocatello Graphics Designer.

You’ll obviously know what cities to target in your area. The good thing/bad thing, depending on how you look at it, is that Google knows where the websites are that think back. Google can recognize which ones are really located in the area you’re searching for. So a link from an Idaho Falls Hospital is going to help you better than some random website in the United Kingdom.

1. Remove &raquo; from your Wordpress title
   Change calls to wp_title() to wp_title(”").  Depending on your wordpress theme, you may also want to move  the wp_title to be right after the <title> start tag
2. Add noindex to Archives
   To Avoid duplicate content issues.  An easy hack is to add the following code into your header.php file.
   <?php if(is_archive()){ ?><meta name="robots" content="noindex"><?php } ?>
3. Use rel=nofollow in Anchor tags
   Not all content is created equally use rel=nofollow when linking to unimportant content on your own site.  Such as Terms of Use, Privacy policy pages.