Grand Rapids Website Design Blog » SEO

Sitemap Usage Post – SEOmoz

Casey Henry — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 02:05:59 +0000

I recently had the privilege of having my post on the use of Sitemaps and the affect on crawl rate published at SEOmoz.org. Feel free to head over the SEOmoz and read the post and let me know your thoughts.

Do Sitemaps Affect Crawlers?

Increase Your Website’s Position

Casey Henry — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 05:46:24 +0000

I’ve been working with a client who hasn’t been happy with their position in the search engines. The clients website was not designed by GR Web Designs and did not have any SEO work done on it. After doing a complete redesign and implementing a bunch of SEO techniques their rankings improved.

The next big step was to gain backlinks for their site. Backlinks are links on other websites that point to your website. A good way to gain good backlinks are to join discussions in forums about your industry. Another great way is to have your clients put a link on their website for you. Also take a look at business directories that offer a chance for your business to add a link.

Content is most important in SEO but a close second is the amount and quality of backlinks point at your site. Take advantage of clients offering free links pointing to your site!

Small Business Websites

Casey Henry — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 03:58:56 +0000

Small businesses often have a very small advertising budget. I recently had a client who was paying almost two thousand dollars a month for a spot on Yellow Pages website. The salesperson who sold the ad advised them they would be in the number one spot on the Yellow Page website in their area. The owner thought this was amazing and thought the customers would come in by the thousands. I talked them into letting me add a website tracker to their site to see what their customer base was.

Two weeks later, he couldn’t believe the reports he was seeing. The website was getting less than 10 visits a day, most of them from search engines and not from the Yellow Pages website. He was also tracking the number of phone calls and asking where they got information about the business. Most stated they found his website using a search engine and clicking on his website.

I showed him there are nearly 2.4 billion searches on Google every month and the Yellow Pages site couldn’t compare to that. For a fraction of the price, his business could be on the first page on Google search and get more traffic then the Yellow Pages website could ever provide. We sat down and came up with some keywords that he felt customers would type into Google to find his business. Within months he was ranking on the first page for many of those words and was getting almost triple the amount of traffic per day for a fraction of the price.

To those small business owners that are looking for a less expensive way to expose your business to a large customer base, remember that most people are using search engines to find information. A small number of people are looking in places like the Yellow Page, so why pay a large amount for a small amount of exposure.

Content, Your Key To Better SEO Results

Casey Henry — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:27:17 +0000

So you have this great website but none of your current or future clients have seen it or know about it. Having a great website that has no Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is like placing a billboard in the middle of the wasteland where no one can see it. SEO helps your current and future clients find your products and information about you. We won’t overwhelm you with all the different techniques out there but we will tell you some things to do to help your site be found.

A great way to increase the amount of clients going to your website is to update your content. Content is king in the internet and search engine world, content is the text on your website that your clients read on the various pages. Before you start writing the content to place on your pages you should sit down and think about what your clients will type into search engines to find you. A list of 20 to 30 will give you a good start, those will be your keywords.

Your content should have 2 to 3 of those keywords integrated into it, per page. A very important point to remember is not to make your content unnatural to read. If you cannot make the keyword work for your content, you need to rethink either your keywords or your content. You should be able to read your content and not have your keywords stand out.

You can spend a ton of cash to have professionals write your content for you but we believe YOU know your business the best and you will be able to write the best content. We will gladly help you integrate your keyword list into your content. Also try to be original because search engines know and penalize content that may be duplicated on the internet.