Part 2- SEO for your local market

Part 2 of SEO marketing for your local market.

In the first article I wrote about gathering information regarding keywords and using google adwords tool to help you build a list of relevant keywords for your website.
You’ll see what people are searching for and the keywords they use. You are going to build a website or web page around the keywords for your product or service. It’s important to do this research before you create your web page.

Ok, so assuming that you have researched your keywords and you have a list of good keywords to use, then let’s get down to business.

First of all there are several key areas of a web page in which to place your keywords. I’ll list them below.

Title
Meta tags
Description
Alt text
Image names
Anchor text
Robot.txt file
Site map
Content

These are all the places you can use relative keywords in a web page. I’ll go through each one for you.

Title tag.
This information is at the very top of your web browser. You have limited space so use your words wisley. Include the name of your city in this area if you can.

Meta Tags
This section of your html code is where you will place seperate keywords and phrases. Seperate each keyword or phrase by a comma, not a space. Do not use the space bar.

Description
You have a limited amount of space to enter a description of your site, benefits, product or service. This is information that will show up in the search results from a search engine.

ALT Text
Alt text was used when the internet was still in its infancy. It was used in place of pictures because pictures took so long to download. People had the option to turn of images or not download them so that the pages would load faster. Instead you could see text explaining what the picture was.

Include ALT text with all your images. You can see alt text in action when you place your mouse over the image. A little window will pop up with a small blurb about the picture. You can add ALT text to any image. Include key words, your city, and product info.

Some say ALT text doesn't work, some say it does. I say use it anyway just in case. It sure can't hurt. Anything that web crawlers, bots and spiders can find to help list your site, the better!

Image Names
If you are going to have one or two images on your web page, name them a keyword that you will be using. So if yo are going to have an image of a product you sell, name the image accordingly. Don't name images pic1, pic2, ect.. Use a name like domainhostbarrie- (If you are promoting domain names and hosting) This image is named by including the product or service and the area where I am marketing. I live in Barrie Ontario in case you have never heard of this place. Just north of Toronto.

Anchor Text
Anchor text are links. Links on your site page should be a descriptive keyword or phrase. It will help the search engines index your site with relative search results. Your link should contain the same keyword or phrase that is used in the webpage that it is linked to. If your site promotes pet supplies, dog food may be a link to one of your pages that sells dogfood. Don't just name it food, be descriptive and match your link text with the content of the page that it is linked to.

Robot.txt file
This is a small file that tells the search engine spiders how to search your site, which pages to index and follow links from, and which directories on your host server not to include in the search results. You don't want results showing up for a cgi.bin for your images directory.

Sample of robot.txt file

User-agent: *
Disallow:
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

This is a very simple file. Create it in wordpad or a simple text editor, save it as a .txt file and upload the file to your host server.

Site Map
Include a site map, Google loves it! It's a web page with all your links from your website all on one page. It should be listed as a link named site map that links to your site map page. This page includes all the links your website has. Kinf of like a directory or the links contained within your site.

Content
Your contect is just as important as your keywords and and everything else.
Use relative keywords and phrases that you researched before you started to make your website or webpage. Break the content into smaller sections with sub-headings to make it easier for your viewer to read.

I'll give you a basic script for SEO that you can edit and insert into your own webpage. Each page of your site should have all these elements in place, not just your main page or index page.

See you soon!

Mark Austin