Internet Marketing Toronto – Post 3: On Page Optimization
In our previous post we walked you through a complete review of your competition from a keyword perspective and showed you which key elements to keep track of. In this post we’re concentrating on the on page optimizations you’ll need to make to your website in order for the search engines to recognize your intent to rank locally.
You should pay particular attention to the following on page elements:
- Flash
If your site is in Flash have it taken out of Flash by a competent developer – and give them this information when they work on your site to ensure it’s constructed properly. - Titles
Title tags are arguably the single most important on page factor for getting your website to rank for your chosen keyword. The title is displayed in the search engine results pages (SERPS) and the search engines first hint at what your web page (website) is about. You should write a compelling title tag for every page of your site and be sure to include the most important keyword for that page towards the beginning of the tag. In this case be sure to use Toronto as part of the title tag. I also like to include the phone number “… | 1 888 123-1234” at the end. Why? sometimes when people are looking for you they just want to contact you – the fewer clicks the better and if that means they can dial you right of the SERPS – that’s OK!Now you have a title that contains your keyword, your local geographic qualifier “Toronto”, your phone number, and it needs to be compelling enough to cause searchers to click your link and visit your site. - Descriptions
The description is possibly the second most important on page factor. Be sure to write a compelling description – in most cases it’s what’s displayed right beneath your title in the SERPS and it should reinforce the message in your title by expanding on the keyword topic and geographic qualifier. It’s with this description that you have the best opportunity to write something to compel searchers to click on your link vs the other 10 on the page. - ALT Text
ALT Text is the text which displays when an image is missing or images are turned off. Only add ALT Text to images which convey information to the end user. Do not add ALT Text to images which are used to construct the graphical look and feel of your site. So, good images for ALT Text include navigation bars which use images – repeat the name of the image but expand on it to. For example “Contact Us” as an image could have an ALT Text of “Contact Our Toronto Chiropractic Clinic”. This gives you an opportunity to relay relevant information to your visitors which includes the search engines! Other candidate images include photographs in banners, before and after shots, logos, sponsors, suppliers, charts and graphs, etc. - Titles For Hyperlinks (Anchor Text)
Text based hyperlinks cannot have ALT Text, but you can specify a title attribute. As such the same rule applies to text based links as it does to images with ALT Text. Write a compelling title tag for each link on your site and use it to explain what the user will find if they click the link.Anchor text in this case is any text in the body of a page which has a hyperlink on it. For our purposes here you should atleast have one anchor text link in the first paragraph of your page that is the most important keyword you are optimizing for including the geographic qualifier of “Toronto”. Link this to your product or service page that describes your product or service. Take the time to write the title tag so that it expands on your keyword and compells the user to click the link and visit that page in your site. - Contact Us Page (hcard)
The purpose of ranking on the first page of the search engines is to get customers, leads, prospects etc. right? So make sure you have given your visitors every opportunity to contact you. For starters include your phone number in the top of every webpage in your site as HTML text – people like to copy and paste it and they can’t if its an image.Now lets consider your contact page. You should include all of your points of contact including phone, toll free, fax and email addresses for relevant departments in your company. Now – be sure to format this information using the hcard syntax. Each of your addresses should be marked up as a separate hCard and for our purposes here we’re assuming you have a Toronto based address. hCards are address marked up with a syntax that defines your address on a web page and eliminates the guess work for search engines – now they know exactly what your address is and they can give you the credit for it. Yahoo! announced support of the format recently and we can only assume that Google and MSN are adhering to it too. I’ve provided examples for syntax which you can cut and paste (and edit the contents) directly into your site. I’ve also included the CSS styles to format the address and contact information to suit your own site.Finally you should provide a contact form which emails the information to a designated person(s) in your company (follow up is crucial) for those people who a) don’t want to call and b) may not have an email client handy to send a regular email message. Keep it simple – name, email, phone and comments. Get their contact information and then collect the rest of the information you need! Keep the form validation simple so as to not frustrate visitors and filter HTML from the comments field (on the server side) to prevent scripting errors and to reduce spam. - Google Map on Contact Us Page
The more Google knows about your website and business the better. Configure a Google Map of your location and embed it into your contact page using the HTML code provided by Google! It’s convenient for your visitors and Google knows about it too! - Contact Information (hcard) In Footer
Now that you’re familiar with hCards – place one for your Toronto address in the footer of every page. Remember we want to make it simple for your visitors to contact you!
Download: Example hCard
Download: Example CSS for hCard
Here are three good links for more info on hCards:
hCard Authoring | hCard Generator | hCard Viewer (paste in http://www.sparkinternetmarketing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/contact.html to see the hCard extracted from the sample)
Up next: Post #4: Analytics Integration. You need the analytics to track the success of your search engine optimization efforts and we show you how to easily integrate it into your site.
