Recently in Design Tips Category

I had a client contact me the other day asking to help optimize his site. The word optimize is something I think about a lot. What does it mean really? I would say it means a lot of different things to many different people. Probably easier to start with what is not optimized. I would say its important to have your code as lean as possible. This means externally mapped CSS and for the love of all that is holy - no tables! 

Check out a post on our web design tutorial blog on the best way to move your domain name. This will be a multi part post, covering each step. In this step we show how to forward all your old links so they will still work. This is mega-super important for SEO!

When it comes to SEO there are a lot of mixed opinions out there. I certainly don't believe I know everything or that may methods are 100% correct. I believe that know one really knows what is the ultimate best practice out there. Not until Google releases their source code for the search engine algorithm, and I don't see that happening any time soon. What I did want to go over is a few techniques that I use commonly. Hopefully they will help you with your websites.

Tell the search engines what you are

Let's say you are a personal injury lawyer and your law practice is in Maryland. You have to let the search engines know that. There are a few places to put this information.  First of all is the title of the web site. At the begining of the page inside the <title></title> tags make sure you tell the search engines why type of service you represent. Don't spam it, but give a few phrases, such as:

<title>Maryland Personal Injury Lawyer - Maryland Car Accident Lawyer</title>

This is your first chance on the page to really tell the search engines who and what your page is about.

Next up - lets put some text at the very top of the page. Did you know that the search engines give extra weight to the very first lines of text in a web page? Think about it - the most important information is typically at the top. Even more weight is even if the top text is an <h1> tag. This is a technique that I use often. Take a look at http://www.foranlaw.com you will see at the top of the page several links to sections on their web page. The links are also carefully chosen. The link text is also a popular search term; 'Maryland personal injury lawyer'.

Tip: Put links at the top of the page that contains text how you want to be found.Link that to pages on your site with text rich with those keywords.

So if you want to be found when someone searches for 'Maryland personal injury lawyer' you better have that phrase throughout your site. In places as I described, title tag, h1 tags, etc. Not only that you need content that talks about those words. More to come, stay tuned!