Local SEO for Vancouver Business: Quick, down and dirty

How do you indicate to a search engine that your webpage is about a certain (insert your keyword phrase) subject, so you rank well? Here’s 11 fresh, “proven to work today Sept. 2009″ ways to clearly indicate what your pages are about, so you rank higher immediately.

Bonus New, New Thing: On Site Video and SEO

SEO experts are chiming in that, in as little as one year from today, without onsite video – you will not rank. Wow! Even if it takes longer than that, clearly video is rapidly gaining importance.

[mc src="http://www.youtube.com/v/39ip0XowwRA" type="youtube"]SEO Expert about the value of Video[/mc]

Check out Reel SEO for a treasure trove of information about this!

1. More content, and exclusive material

Applicable, distinct information and more of it, always helps rankings. What’s new, what’s cool, what’s secret, etc., these are all interesting to humans and thus, the search engines.

2. Frequency of publishing

Frequent and regular(!) additions to your content is best. How much? As much as you can manage – 2X daily, daily, 3X weekly; more is better! (I know – it sucks!)

3. Keyword Phrases in Your Web Address

Having keywords that describe your site in your URL (website address) helps. For example: http://www.vancouverlocalseo.com Pick your highest traffic keyword phrase, if it is available. This is still an important part of the ranking criteria.

4. Keyword Phrases in Title tag

This tag lives in the Head area of your html code and it shows in search results as your page title.

A general guideline to follow is that the further up a page of code your keyword phrases live, the more important they are. This is like when you start reading a book page and the headline is most important.

So the Title tag is very important and for best effect SEO wise, it should be short with the keywords at the beginning.

5. Keyword Phrases in Anchor text

Keywords in anchor text from other internal pages on your site is an important criteria. It indicates that this page is authoritative on the given subject. Takes some planning, but it works well.

6. Heading tags

This used to be more important than it seems to be now, but keywords in headings is still a useful way to further indicate what your page is about. It is also a great way to create other headlines and sub headlines to make your text more human friendly.

7. Keyword Phrases in Alt text

Search engines do not read images (yet) but they do spider image descriptions in the Alt text. Use keywords in those descriptions.

8. Keyword Phrases in Meta Description tag

This is the only meta tag that does anything. Sometimes a search engine publishes this text on the search result page, so it is worth the effort.

9. Keyword Phrases starting your content

Start your content text with your keyword phrase. Some people will insist you put it also in the middle and at the end, but I feel that once you’ve started with the phrase just write normally and let it reoccur naturally. Careful about overuse though!

10. “Good” code

Your site must be spider friendly – no broken links, 404 errors (page not found), excess javascript on the page, text alternatives to flash content, etc. Run your site through a code checker to find errors and get them fixed!

11. Sitemap

A fresh, always updated sitemap is very important – html or (better) .xml version.

Call us to help you with this.