When it come to prioritizing a to do list of SEO tasks for your new website, perhaps the most important thing to understand (and for some, the most difficult) is that the wording in your title tag and the wording used in your content work in unison with each other as a guide to let search engines know what a specific web page is about and for what keywords it should most likely rank. Keep in mind that each interior page and the homepage have the potential to rank highly for its own keywords or keyphrase. Each page should target distinctly different sets of keywords.
Knowing that, (and taking for granted that you’re already familiar with keyword research) focus on one or two keywords or a single keyphrase per page and use that keyword/keyphrase near the beginning of your title. Also use your keywords/keyphrase in several locations in the text of the page including in an h1 heading and once or twice in each of the first few paragraphs.
limit your title tag to 85 characters or less
limit your title tag of each page to include only the keyword/keyphrase, one or two geographic placenames, and the company name (use the company name at the end of the title).
Balancing all of the above factors and still keeping your page title under 85 characters (including spaces) is what will set you apart from your competitors.
Your meta description tag shouldn’t be longer than 200 or so characters and using a properly constructed sentence or two, it should broadly describe the theme of the page, it should employ your keywords, some keyword variations, thematically relevant terminology, and perhaps, even a call to action. Your meta description makes up a substantive portion (if not the entire portion) of the snippit of info that lies below your link in a page’s listing the search engine results page.
If your site is a year old or less, it is still very young compared to most of your competitors. While your site is maturing, work on some of your social media profiles like yelp, merchant circle, kaboodle, twitter, linkedIn, and Facebook. Develop those profiles fully, get yourself well-versed in how to make full use of those platforms, and use those sites as a means of networking and very gentle marketing.
When you’ve finished with the most important parts of your on-page optimization and in between working on your social media profiles, do this search on Yahoo: link:www.domain.com (replace “domain.com” with individual domain names of competitors that show up in Google’s results for your target keyword searches). The results of those link:www.domain.com searches will show you what websites are linking to your that competitor. While many of those links will be worth little or nothing, some of them will have value–a rough guide is simply does the page that contains the link have any pagerank at all–and if it does, see if that site will include a link to your site as well. (The whole link building topic is too complex to be discussed in any detail here, but call us at Metapilot if you want more help in that area). Besides sites with some page rank, focus on ones that are local to your location.
Since all your traffic won’t come directly from the algorithmic search results, on’t forget to get your site included in the local business/local search/maps feature that Google, Yahoo, and Bing provide. Make sure you get your site listed in those places and to help you show up near the top of those local listings, make sure you submit your site to these places: yellowpages.com, superpages.com, citysearch.com, local.com, and infospace.com.
