Build Your Site For Humans and Search Engines
ByOne big stumbling block local businesses have is there web site. Most are lucky to have whatever they have up on the Internet at all. Only a very few have gone the extra mile to learn and/or pay for a well optimized website. By “optimized”, I mean a web site that has been created with both human visitors AND search engines in mind.
I want to make this statement perfectly clear: You MUST design your website for both humans AND search engines.
If you want to learn how to create and manage your web site, great! If you want to pay someone to do it for you, great! Either way, just make sure your business has a well designed site. Your web site plays a key role in how well your business does with local search marketing.
Not only can a well optimized website attract new customers all by a well ranking site in your local business listings (those listings right there by the Google map in a local search) can GREATLY influence your local business ad rankings! High ranking local business listings, especially in highly competitive areas, almost always have a well optimized site associated with them.
What do I call a well optimized site? First, it is not JUST a brochure site. No matter how “pretty” your site is, if the search engines don’t care for it, they won’t rank it well and no one will ever see it. Whoever creates the site MUST understand the fundamentals of SEO (search engine optimization). Do not create a site without this knowledge. It’s far easier to do it right the first time than to go back and fix a poorly designed site. Learn about SEO before beginning your site. If you already have a site on the Internet, you should still learn SEO so you can modify it and make it more search engine friendly.
A well optimized site will have at least 4 or 5 pages of content optimized for carefully researched keywords. I won’t go into the details here for selecting the right keywords, but be aware thisi is a key part of a successful site. More pages are better, but 4 or 5 are the minimum. A page of content consists usually of 400 to 700 words. Yes, content is king! Content is one of the main factors search engines use to rank niche sites. Your site, when optimized for a specific city, is considered a “niche site” regardless of how popular the overall service or product is.
You can use a blog platform such as WordPress if you like. It is easier to learn than making regular static web sites. However, it too requires specific knowledge on how to optimize it for the search engines. I can’t emphasize enough how vital it is that you don’t simply create a website for the sake of “having a website”! You want people who are looking for the products and services you offer to find your site.
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Hi Steve,
I have been a subscriber to your adsense emails for a long time now (under adsense@dasher.com.au), and have finally developed my own site. I have a lesson i learnt to share with you, but also asking a question at the same time….
Our site http://www.regosearch.com launched 3 weeks ago, it is an aviation aircraft registration search engine which through feedback from all over the world is very good, better than the government ones.
We designed it to cover several countries, and the URL for each registration is unique /aircraft/au/FFL the last few letters are the rego. This gives us 450,000 pags on our site, all with the details of each aircraft, so apart from the field labels the data is unique. When we submitted out sitemaps to google (heaps fo them) google started crawling and indexing at a high rate of around 30,000 pages per day, our result ranking went to the top 3-5 of the first page in most of our keyword areas and visits went from 0 to 700 per day in just 10 days….. awesome growth across 95 countries. At this point Google had indexed 145,000 pages.
all was well untill we did an update, on the aircraft details page we turned the owner / operator into a link to the search results for all other aircraft with the same owner / operator. At around the day after google started to reindex the new pages, all of a sudden we disappeared from the results pages and plummeted to 100 visits per day. Some searches still place us high, but not all like before…….
My only idea is that due to the link we added to the details page Google may have thought it was internal link spamming? We also noted in webmaster tools that there were some DNS errors on one day.
Google abruptly stopped indexing and hasn’t since 10 days ago, but we have seen the Google bot visit our site regularly…… though we are still low on the search results page 🙂
Any ideas? only 2 thongs occurred, the links and the DNS issue (no idea why the DNS issue)
Regards
Darrin
Hi Darrin, I don’t think you did anything to cause it. It is very normal for Google to first place a page high in the rankings only to move it down very quickly into the slot it thinks is most appropriate. That happens all the time actually.
Just keep getting quality backlinks to your site. That will be the most important thing you can do for it now.
I’ve always struggled to create blog posts which have good SEO but are still human friendly. LSI, which I learned about from yourself Steve has been very useful though. I still sometimes create SEO pages which aren’t ideal for humans and other times create great human readable content and pretty much forget about SEO in those posts. Just as an aside, Google dropped my daily organic search traffic from 400 a day recently to about 100, no idea why but it doesn’t appear to be anything I did, frustrating though. Thanks for the post, as ever it was very helpful and interesting.
I’d not worry to much about the on page being perfect. It doesn’t have to be and it alone won’t get you anywhere. Make them human friendly, scatter the keyword here and there (NOT too much)….keep it natural, etc. Then hit the backlinking hard.
Can you tell in your Google Analytics exactly which keywords have stopped ranking….and thus caused your drop in traffic? Use Google analytics to figure out exactly what happened. Then you can address the why of it all.