You want the best result for your customer yet the market, both local and international, is flooded with the same product or service you are providing. What can we do to ensure that your web site reaches the first page of the major Internet search engines?

The Title of Your Web Site

The contents of the title of your web site is what you see at the very top of your browser. Pro Web Marketing will include keywords in your title that specifically describe your business, and if necessary, the location of your market. The title of your web site is also what people will see when they are viewing a listing on the search engines. So, the title needs to be kept clean, precise to the business, and professional looking to the viewer.

Description and Keyword Tags

Each web page on the Internet contains specific coding, which directs the browser to view your graphics and text. Every web page in your website should include a code for “Meta Description” and “Meta Keywords”. Meta Description is used to describe what your site is all about. For example, if your web site is for a vacation rental site, you would want your description to include the location of your rentals, surrounding cities, type of accommodations you offer, such as cabins, hotels, or condominiums, and so on. It should be brief yet specific, as this description will be displayed under the title of your web site in the search engines. Meta Keywords is used to tell the search engine that individual keywords a searcher types into the search engine is include in your web site. More importantly than keywords with most search engines is what is in the body of your text seen on your web site. We will get into the importance of that later on.

ALT Tags or Alternative Tags

Most web sites also include graphics and/or photographs within the web site. A search engine cannot see your image as part of your web site. However, if an ALT Tag is associated with your image, it helps the search engine find more keywords that associate your web site with what the searcher is looking for, as the ALT Tag is a text description of your image. For example, you have a picture of a 23 foot Maxum boat on your web site, but the name of your image is image.jpg. There are millions of image.jpg’s out there in the World Wide Web. You can narrow this down by creating an alternative tag (ALT Tag) name for your image by calling it “23 foot Maxum boat”. Now the search engine can see that there is a text description of the image, which is used to describe the image in text format versus image format and can be included in the search as text on your web site.

Text vs. No Text

Although Flash may be a beautiful way to display your web site page, most search engines, at this time, do not index them unless only part of the page includes a small flash presentation and the rest of the web site page is text oriented. Search engines index your web site page by the text presented on that page. The more descriptive you are about the product, services, and location of your business using text, the more apt you are to be indexed by a search engine when an individual types in their keywords.

At Pro Web Marketing, we strive to ensure that your web site is optimal for search engine indexing. However, we cannot guarantee that your web site will reach the No. 1 position, but we will try to position your web site as best we can against the vast amount of competition on the Internet.

1.) Keep it simple

Most people have trouble remembering their mother’s birthday, let alone a long, complex domain name.  Try to keep it down below two or three words, if possible.

2.) Relevance to Industry vs. Company Name

This is one of the points where it isn’t so clear cut.  If you can get your exact company name as your domain name, that might be a good idea.  However, if your company name does not say anything about your industry, you may wish to add a key word at the end of it, so long as it doesn’t make the domain name too lengthy or hard to read.  Example – a company named Excalibur that does web design may wish to get the domain excalibur-design.com, as it adds some relevancy to their domain name.

3.) Geographical Area

Pro Web is located in Traverse City, and so are many of our clients.  Often, the client can’t get their business name as a domain, as it is taken.  Many times in this case we will append the domain name with “tc”, standing for Traverse City.  This is a good way to let your customers know that you are a local business.

There are other important factors to consider, such as which top level domain you wish to use, hyphens, numbers, etc., but these are the three main points to think about when choosing a domain.