Surprised to find out that good SEO is more about good content than good web design alone?  Well, it’s true.  Many web designers will tell you that they’re going optimize your site to achieve top search engine rankings—and while their intentions might be perfectly legit—the fact of the matter is that a site’s SEO-friendly design & development really only serves to support excellent, keyword-rich content to be contained within a site.

At least that’s the quick version anyway.  Regardless, now that we have that common misconception out of the way, we should move on to the real bread and butter of getting higher search engine rankings…writing good, keyword-rich content.

What Are The Standards Of Good Keyword Optimized Web Copy?

Writing good SEO-friendly copy for your website will generally be a matter of customizing to specific site needs on a site-by-site basis.  However, there are some rather steadfast guidelines to follow:

Keyword Research First – It’s impossible to write good keyword-rich content without having specific knowledge beforehand on which keywords and keyword phrases you’ll utilize.  Many start their research by using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to come up with ideas for some high demand, low supply keywords to use.  Regardless of the method, you’ve got to pick topically relevant keywords to use first.

Write Naturally – Some “over-optimizers” used to suggest that the best way to rank well with good keyword rich content was to use a certain keyword density, or in other words, an exact percentage of how many times the keyword was used in the copy compared to the overall word count.  This is nonsense these days—could even be implied as spam—so avoid.  Instead, try to create a helpful piece of content that you would write regardless; it’s best to write naturally and then maybe go back and add in the keyword phrase you’re optimizing for a few times where it fits optimally.  Never, never over use it on purpose though.

Optimize Your Title & Headings – Definitely use the keyword phrase exactly once within the page’s title.  This is super-important.  You might also use it naturally in a heading or sub-heading within the page copy.  Other than that, just remember: keep it natural.

Use Similar Keywords – If you’re writing a topic focused piece of web content or blog post, chances are already good that you’re using lots of natural related lingo throughout the copy in addition to your optimized keyword or keyword phrase.  This is good—you’ll want to have a few appropriate related keyword variations and relevant similar keywords within the copy.  Again, though, this is almost instinctual anyway when writing topically-focused web content.

The Bottom Line – Keep it natural, natural, natural.  Write what your visitors want to read.  Be sure to answer questions they’re asking and address concerns they might have.  Really work hard to put yourself in the mindset of your target visitor when writing.  By all means, build the content around a specific keyword—and ideally focus on just one main featured keyword per page or post.  But at the same time, never push it to the level of becoming unnatural or spammy.

Follow these simple steps to writing good, keyword-rich content—and of course, make sure your web designer has paid attention to the important supporting factors within the design & development.  With this strategy in mind, you’ll be well on the way to getting higher search engine rankings.

1. Goals.

Without specific goals in mind (in other words, a list of the exact traffic measurements and figures you’d like to achieve), effectively grasping quality SEO results is a misnomer.  Without goals, you might get there, or you might not…the thing is, you’ll never even know one way or the other.  The key to success is carrying out your optimization plans with focus and aim, through measurable and definable goals.

2. A Plan.

Yes, in order to be as SEO-friendly as possible, every website with this vital ambition in mind needs a plan to achieve the actual results they desire.  We make business plans when starting and growing our businesses, we use blueprints to build our homes—why not carefully craft a written game plan for SEO too?

3. Keywords.

Moving on from the conceptual things your website needs to succeed with SEO to the more tangible items used to carry out the plan, we definitely need to include keywords.  Every page of an SEO-friendly website is ideally optimized around just one or two unique keyword phrases.  This means the written content, the meta-data, the image tags, and so on.  Part of your SEO plan will be developing a list of targeted keyword phrases to utilize on your site (and defining where they’ll go).

4. Clean Web Structure.

Using squeaky-clean HTML/PHP/CSS coding (not Flash) is the way to go when creating a website structure that’s extraordinarily SEO-friendly.  Search engines really like to see attention to detail in the coding—this means being fully standards-compliant whenever possible.  Clean web structure serves two purposes with the search engines.  First, they’re able to crawl and index your site better because it is easy for their “robots” to understand.  And secondly, they know that if you pay attention to the details, you’re most likely offering a better quality site than your competitors that don’t follow this principle.

5. Great Content.

What do your visitors come to your site to see?  Content.  What do search engines help their users find?  Again, content.  Coincidence?  Not at all.  Provide great quality content—always go above and beyond and strive to make it perfect.  Be informative, yet different than the masses.  Offer your visitors what they’re looking for and over-deliver in every way with content.

6. Title Tags.

Moving on to the picky details of SEO, there’s one small technical detail that undoubtedly makes more of an impact than all the others combined.  Look at the very top left of your web browser’s window…okay, did you look yet…what does it say?  This is the page’s title tag—and it’s vital to a web page’s SEO-friendliness.  It should be brief, to the point, descriptive of the page’s content, and it should contain the page’s optimized keyword.  Search engines use this to understand your page and also to help them describe what your page is all about to their visitors.  If nothing else, be sure to get this one right.

7. Additional Meta-Data.

Other behind the scenes Meta-data like your page’s Meta-description, Meta-keywords, and image tags are often dismissed these days as being unnecessary.  This couldn’t be further from the truth—search engines today might not take this information verbatim, but it does help define the overall focus of your website’s pages.  It also helps with usability—which is another plus-factor when it comes to SEO-friendliness.  Don’t get spammy with Meta-data or “over-optimize” it, but do be sure to use it accurately for what it was intended for.

8. Balanced Link Profile.

For many SEO-spammers, achieving a great “PageRank” is viewed as the holy grail.  Ignore this strategy and instead focus on building a super high quality balanced link profile instead.  This means achieving a variety of natural incoming links (backlinks) to your site from a good cross-section of relevant authority sites when possible.  And the part that many forget is that it also means sharing a few outgoing links from your own site when they’re helpful to your visitors.  Search engines are smart enough to know that sites with a huge number of incoming links only—especially when they’re built really quickly—are suspicions and unnatural.  Being this is undesirable for sure, because search engines only want to share healthy, natural, organic quality sites with their visitors.

9. Great Navigation.

Having crystal clear navigation throughout your site is extremely important in order to be SEO-friendly.  Your visitors need to be able to make their way around your site with complete confidence.  But also an important factor, the search engine bots also need to be able to crawl your site with ease.  A great navigational structure will help you achieve both.  Also accurately listed under this category is including a search engine friendly sitemap within your website.

10. Activity.

What good is a perfectly SEO’d website if there’s just not any activity there?  Visitors want a vibrant, fresh website environment full of new and updated content (and the search engines know this).  Accordingly, the search engines do give favor to sites that are updated on a regular basis—sites that are full of activity.  One helpful way of achieving this, of course, is to include a blog section in your site.  Keep it professional…but keep it lively as well to look alive to the search engines.

Let’s be clear right from the start…building your new site to be compliant with all of the latest proven Search Engine Optimization (SEO) technologies is vital to your success drawing in targeted, free, organic traffic from the search engines.  Anything less than paying full attention to on-page and on-site SEO is negligent from a visitor-building perspective.

But There’s So Much More Than SEO Alone.

Great SEO, and an ideally optimized and architected website, will help your site prosper.  In a way, getting this right really does lay down a rock solid foundation to success.  It’s the foundation to build upon.  But this is just the beginning.

Also extremely important to attracting visitors is your content strategy.  Whether it’s your existing content—written and otherwise—or the new content that will work best with continual ongoing creation, your content is ultimately what draws visitors in.

Here’s the thing—the SEO just helps the search engines scour your content and helps the visitors find it.  Without great, relevant content, there’s really not much to optimize or for visitors to see.  And this kind of rules out “optimization” when there’s nothing on the site to optimize and organize in the first place!

So, What Makes Good Traffic-Driving Content Then?

First and foremost, quality traffic-driving content is created with a plan.  Some just write new content all the time with a scatter-shot approach—and they might even get lucky and have a few pieces of content that get picked up and highly ranked with the search engines.  But in the real world, the chances of this just “happening” are slim to none.

You’ve got to plan out your content development strategy to great depths in order to increase your chances of finding success by statistically dramatic results.  This involves doing in-depth keyword research to find hot topics to build around.  It involves planning out the categories of your website to be focused and helpful to your visitors.  And if you can stick to a niche with your topical focus…the tighter, the better.

There are countless resources available on the web regarding content planning and development.  Some systems out there cost money, some don’t.  The common thread here is that all too many “systems” promote spammy content development tactics—which in the long run will do you way more harm than good.

Once you’ve found the planning strategy that works for your website (and your style), it’s important to get on a regular schedule to keep the new content streaming to your site on a frequent basis.  One thing that search engines and human visitors alike tend to agree on is that stale, outdated content is simply not worth their time.  So, keep your website up to date and fresh.

Over deliver to your visitors and out-do your competition with your content.  The way most sites underperform these days in this department, it’s not all that hard to gain the edge.  You’ve just got to write so you become the most helpful resource there is on the web for your niche—if your visitors look at ten sites about your topic, you want to be the one out of ten that they bookmark and come back to.  It’s a lofty goal, but one that’s both very achievable and worth the effort.

How Do You Over Deliver This Way?

Well, chances are, you’re already an expert at your topic (your niche).  You’ve just got to find away to pass your knowledge along in order to attract the attention and trust of your visitors.  If you need help, you might start by searching for 10 or so of the most applicable search terms that fit your site.  Look at the sites within the first page search results (not necessarily the Wikipedia listings or Fortune 500 companies that show up—but the smaller companies, organizations, and personal resources that show up among them).  Ask yourself:

• What do they have in common?
• What kind of information are they providing for this search term?
• And most importantly, ask yourself, “How can I provide even better, more helpful information?”

If you do this, you’ll see right away that you can definitely create better content than so many of your competitors in the search engine listings.  In fact, it’s almost too easy!  And the best part is the fact that search engines and visitors alike absolutely love unique, home-grown content.  Think organically and try not to produce overly “corporate” content unless you must.

Follow these tactics, and in harmony with your website’s solid SEO foundation, your content will push you over the edge when it comes to driving organic traffic.  It really works!

Setting up a CMS (this stands for Content Management System) to enable complete management of your new website’s content, or as an add-on to and existing site, has become one of the single most popular requests for web developers these days.

And if you think about it, it really just makes a lot of sense.  Having the ability to manage your site’s content in-house—without the expense of costly web developer fees every time you want to add or edit a new page or a page’s content—is practical, efficient, and can even be fun for the person managing the content.  It definitely takes a lot of the tedious back and forth out of managing a website.

Even though the idea is to enable managing a website by nearly anyone assigned to the task—without regard to their degree of technical prowess—sometimes setting up the content management system can become a little bit too over-simplified.  Clarity and simplicity is certainly a good thing to look for in a custom-built CMS, but you still need to have a robust feature set that allows your website to hold its own in a very competitive online environment.

So here’s our essential CMS advice in this case…Make sure your CMS gives you the ability to manage your own Meta-data on every single page.

By default, our custom-built Sleepless Media CMS gives you the full ability to manage and edit each of the most important Meta-tags, including:

• Page Title
• Meta Keywords
• Meta Description

The bottom line is that too many content management systems skip over this vital integration.  No matter what you might hear, having full access to customize each one of these SEO-essential Meta-tags, on each and every page of your site, is incredibly important.

It’s a well known fact that a Page Title that contains the page’s targeted keyword phrase toward the beginning of its string of words is probably the single most important on-page SEO factor you can control.  The search engines depend on this Title tag to understand your page and what it is about.

In fact, it’s so important that in most cases, the search engines will actually use the Title tag verbatim as the search listing title (the main link that you click on to visit a searched-for website within the search results when you do a search).  This is simply not a place to have an automatically-generated snippet of content inserted by default—you want to customize each page’s Title tag to contain the primary keyword phrase and encourage the searcher to click on your search listing link.

Additionally, having total control over every page’s Mega keywords and Meta description is also substantially important.  Keywords still play an understated, yet relevant role in how some search engines interpret and rank your website’s pages.  And the Meta description is very frequently used by the search engines as a part of your search listing results.  You definitely want to be able to manipulate and manage these components to help get the click and maximize your SEO efforts.

Without a CMS that enables control over every page’s Meta-tags, this is impossible.  Ensure your CMS system includes complete page-by-page Meta-data management capability.

SEO – The commonly used acronym for “Search Engine Optimization.”  Most often used to describe the practice of optimizing a website, through both on-site and external supporting factors, in order to increase the site’s ranking and prevalence in organic search engine listings for specified keywords and keyword phrase searches.

Organic Search – Organic search results refer to the search engine listings that are essentially free.  These are usually the main body of search results shown for any given search query, excluding the paid search results (PPC ads) shown on the side and/or above and below the main body of organic listings.

PPC – Stands for “Pay Per Click.”  This is a method of paid search engine advertising, wherein a website owner bids on ads pointing to their site that are to be shown within the search engine results pages (SERPs) when a certain term is searched for.  Each time a searcher clicks through via the ad, the bid-for or pre-specified amount is charged to the site owner’s PPC account balance.

CPC – This means “Cost Per Click.” CPC refers to the bid or specified cost for each time a visitor clicks through on a PPC ad to the website.

CTR – Stands for “Click Through Rate.”  Basically, CTR is the percentage or ratio of how many times a PPC ad is clicked on by searchers, compared to how many times it is shown or displayed.

SEM – Stands for “Search Engine Marketing.”  Basically, SEM is the practice of using SEO, PPC, and other forms of online search engine advertising and promotion to attract visitors to a website via the search engines.

Backlink – When another site links to your website, this incoming link to your site is referred to as a backlink.  Having quality backlinks that are both relevant and on-topic helps a website achieve better search engine rankings.

Link Popularity – This is basically a relative score of how many incoming backlinks a website has from other sites around the web.  Google PageRank is one popular and reliable measure of link popularity—although it does take into account additional relevancy factors beyond the sheer number of backlinks a site has.

Anchor Text – This is a word or phrase that is highlighted and selected to be linked to another web page or website.  In other words, when you link to another site or page, these are the words that a visitor would click on to visit that site or page.

Meta-tags – These are markups within the code of a website that include components such as title tags, header tags, descriptions, keywords, image titles, and so on.  Correct use of Meta-tags can effectively support a website’s search optimization strategy by providing helpful background details and clues to the search engines about what a web page is about and which parts of the page are intended to be most important.

SERP – Acronym standing for “Search Engine Results Page.”  When you perform a search on one of the search engines, the listings page that comes up for your search query is a SERP.

Search Engine Spiders – Search spiders—commonly referred to as search bots and sometimes as robots—are the programs that the search engines use to analyze and review your website to determine what it is about and how well it should be ranked within the search index.

Black Hat – Black hat is a term commonly used to describe using SEO tricks and techniques that are against the policies of the search engines or are in some other way against the best interest of the visitor (and are simply used to “trick” a searcher into visiting a site).  A few common black hat practices include doorway pages, cloaking, keyword stuffing, and spamdexing.  The bottom line is to steer clear of any of these SEO methods—while they might work for a short-term boost of traffic, they are unethical and will eventually get a site banned or substantially penalized by the search engines.

White Hat – The polar opposite of black hat SEO is what we would call “white hat SEO.”  It is the practice of following the guidelines, policies, suggestions, and terms of service set forth by the search engine companies to maximize a website’s search performance by providing the search engines with exactly the information they want to see in a helpful, organized manner.  Using white hat SEO puts the interests of the search engines and their visitors first and foremost—it helps search engines provide more accurate, helpful, and relevant results to their visitors.  It’s a win-win proposition for all involved.

You’ve probably run across several web designers who insist on using Flash to create websites.  Most have good intentions, but are just not fully aware of the pitfalls that come along with relying too heavily on Flash web design.  Others are probably just really bad web designers altogether.  Enough said about that.

But one thing is true.  Regardless of what you’ve heard, using Flash on the web has some really great applications and some that are, well, just not very good at all.

For example, a couple of good possible uses might include:

• Using Flash for video. Flash-based video has more or less become the iron-clad standard for streaming video on the web.  It works very well.
• Using Flash for image libraries or other “widgets” or “apps.” Flash works nicely as a sub-component in many photo sharing slash portfolio types of website applications.

That said, it’s still probably best to use Flash components on your website as sparingly as possible.  And it’s all for very good reason.  In fact, Google themselves has even laid forth the shortcomings of using Flash on websites.  They spell it out very concisely and clearly here on their Webmaster Central Blog:

As many of you already know, Flash is inherently a visual medium, and Googlebot doesn’t have eyes. Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing. Moreover, textual contents are sometimes stored in Flash as graphics, and since Googlebot doesn’t currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. All of this means that even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links. Worse, while Googlebot can understand some Flash files, not all Internet spiders can.

Now when talking about ranking well in the search engines, it’s hard to argue that Google’s position on Flash isn’t pretty much definitive.  The more you use Flash as a component on a website, the less the search engines are even able to recognize it—let alone effectively rank it.  Search spiders are getting better at understanding Flash, but there are still severe repercussions that can be completely avoided in entirety by choosing to use a more universal web design platform.

In Summary

Even though many web designers insist on using Flash-based websites, it’s just not a good idea if you plan on attracting organic traffic from the search engines.

• Flash effectively prevents search engine spiders from recognizing and understanding your site correctly.
• Without being able to understand your website, the search engines are not able to rank or list it appropriately within their search indexes.
• Flash can also be non-compatible with certain web browsers and mobile browsers (meaning visitors using these browsers will see a blank space or error message instead of the site as intended).

Don’t become overly afraid of using a small Flash component or two on your site.  But just don’t fall into the trap of using it for the entire site…unless you’re trying to prevent visitors.

It’s hard to believe that 2009 is drawing to a close already.  Time flys, and so do plans to grow and improve websites and online marketing plans.  The good news is that with the fresh start of a new year, you can start anew with making improvements to your websites at the same time and not have to feel overwhelmed.  Keeping this in mind, here are just a few small—but effective—ways to improve your website in 2010.

Upgrade to more professional web hosting. Few realize it before making the upgrade, but the bargain-rate shared hosting services that many sites utilize can really adversely effect site performance and search engine performance.  Moving your site to a better web hosting package can be just the performance boost you’ve been seeking—and the price could possibly even be less than you’re paying now.

Continue to expand your social networking efforts. If 2009 was the year of Facebook and Twitter really going mainstream, then just imagine what 2010 will bring for social networking!  The benefits of using social networking to drive traffic to your website are undeniable.  If you’ve already begun, then by all means—keep it up!  And if not, don’t worry…it’s not too late to get started now.  Just try not to put it off until the next new year rolls around.

Integrate CMS into your website. Have a great website already, but beginning to get tired of having to pay the pros every time there’s a small content update to make to the site?  If this sounds all-too-familiar, adding a CMS (content management system) will be the improvement of the year for you.  It’s simply a system that enables you to log in and make content edits and additions with a few simple clicks.  Cost savings and time savings from CMS really add up quickly!

Improve your existing website copy. Speaking of adding and editing your website’s copy, have you given this much thought since first developing your website?  It’s important to keep your website’s written content fresh, accurate, and up-to-date.  After all, visitors and search engines alike practically demand it.

Beef up your site’s security. With a seemingly ever-growing onslaught of security exploits to worry about, web users these days are becoming more and more conscious and wary about what sites they visit and how they transmit information on the web.  Regardless of if your website is e-Commerce enabled or not, you still need to do frequent security audits on your site to make sure your visitors are receiving a safe experience.  Making sure your security certificates are all up to date is just one such example in this department.

Develop an organic SEO development plan. Ready to start improving your website’s organic SEO so you don’t have to spend so much on PPC and other costly paid online marketing promotions in 2010?  Well, the good news here is that it’s simpler than ever to improve your site with quality organic search optimization.  Here are a few SEO pointers to help you get started.  And by laying out a solid plan at the beginning of the year, and working diligently to implement it accordingly, you might even be surprised at how simple, affordable, and downright effective it can be!

Let 2010 be the year that you take your website and your business to the next level (and know that we’re here to help you when you need it).  Wishing you all of the best in the New Year!

Ready to learn the secret that SEO firms simply don’t want you to ever learn (hint: it’s simpler than many would ever imagine)?  Here it is:

About 90% of effective SEO is creating excellent content for your website.

Sure, there are a few technical “housekeeping” tasks that need to be taken care of by your designers—things like setting up clean code and navigation, correctly utilizing Meta tag information (especially when it comes to the Title tags), and a few other additional details.  And when we say that 90% of SEO is the written content, we’re definitely not trying to dismiss this other 10% by any means.  It’s important too!

But Here’s The Truth Of The Matter…

Many SEO companies place so much focus on getting all of the technical details just perfect—as if there were some kind of secret magic formula that only they know about that enables them to launch your site to number one on all of the search engine rankings practically overnight.  There’s simply no such thing.

In fact, Google tells us themselves in their guidelines and help for webmasters content pretty much exactly what they’re looking for to rank a site highly.  And it’s not technical tomfoolery at all.  Instead, their SEO guidelines are based on good old fashioned common sense—providing what visitors want.

Your Visitors Don’t Search For Your Code.

When was the last time you were looking for something on the web and did a search for “<h3>types of widgets</h3><br />”?  It’s probably safe to say never.

People aren’t searching the web for technical details and website code…instead they’re looking for real information.  The kind of information that’s almost always written in words.  This is why your SEO needs to be based around your written content without fail.

So, How Do You “SEO” Written Content?

It all starts with a plan.  Specifically, it’s very important to do some research first to find out which keywords and keyword phrases within your niche are most likely to draw in a steady stream of visitors.  Expert level keyword research will establish a list of potential phrases that are high in web search demand, yet low in supply when it comes to the existing search engine listings.

Each page of your website’s written content needs to take a focus around just one or two very specific niche keyword terms.  The idea is to use your keyword terms naturally in your page title, a headline, and naturally here and there throughout the body of your written content.  Doing this correctly is certainly not considered spam—but do beware of “keyword stuffing,” which is spam.

Most Importantly, It’s All About Your Visitors.

If you follow the simple writing advice above, and over deliver in terms of visitor-appreciated information (and repeat this step very often), you’re going to be producing a website that’s absolutely packed full of something your visitors and the search engines both totally love: unique and targeted written content.  Never again will you need to worry about if you’re using the latest SEO tricks and gimmicks or not.

The best SEO policy is to give your readers well-organized information that they can actually use.  Do this and the search engines will come looking for you naturally.  Because search engines need to please their customers—the searchers—they’re looking to provide them with resources just like your website that are chock full of relevant, quality content!

Does your business primarily aim to serve a particular local area or region?

If so, you are in luck—optimizing your site to really stand out when a locally-defined search is done on your area of expertise is actually much simpler than trying to target visitors worldwide.  By adding a local spin to your site and optimizing accordingly, you’re effectively streamlining your niche (your area of expertise + your local area of service = a remarkably tight niche).  And if one thing holds ever true, it’s that search engines absolutely love niche-oriented sites!

How about a few pointers on how to optimize your website for search engines based on your business’s location?

Tip #1:  Follow The Search Engine Guidelines.

Each of the major search engines has their own specific submission process to get your site listed locally within their database.  Now, some swear by just optimizing your site and letting the search engines find it naturally—but why chance it?  When the search engines ask you to submit your site locally by providing step-by-step guidelines and a form to do it, this means they’re actively seeking your information…by all means share it with them!

Each search engine is a little bit different when it comes to submitting your site locally.  Here are the places to start:

• Google Local Business Center – http://www.google.com/local/add/
• Yahoo! Local – http://listings.local.yahoo.com/csubmit/index.php
• Bing Local Listing Center – https://ssl.bing.com/listings/BusinessSearch.aspx

Simply set aside a few minutes and follow the steps provided.  It’s that easy!

Tip #2:  Use Appropriate Keywords Throughout Your Website.

Using targeted keywords and keyword phrases naturally but consistently throughout your website’s written content is one of the essential ways to tell the search engines what you’re all about.  When optimizing for maximum local exposure, including keyword phrases with several variations of your local city or region, along with keywords that describe your type of business means using phrases like these throughout your site:

• “San Francisco Seafood Restaurant”
• “Santa Cruz Interior Design”
• “San Jose Coffee Shop”

Describing your locale along with your services via keywords helps search engines find your site and list it appropriately.  Just play nice and don’t use these keywords too often or in ways that don’t seem natural to readers.  It’s also a good idea to use your local keyword in your webpage’s title tags (ask your web designer if you’re not sure what this means).

Tip #3:  Include Your Physical Address On Your Contact Page And Beyond.

Seems obvious enough, but many end up neglecting this concept.  Search engines do take into account the address that is listed on your site.  Make sure it’s listed prevalently on your contact page at the very least.  Bonus points go to those that include their address in the footer portion of the site to be displayed concisely on each of its pages.

Tip #4:  Make Sure Your Domain Name Is Registered Under Your Address.

This tip has been debated extensively within the search engine community with no definitive conclusion reached—some say that using private domain registration is just fine in the eyes of the search engines, others swear that using your real address and contact information transparently to register your domain is a must for local optimization (meaning that the address and contact information you provide is displayed to those that conduct a “whois” lookup).

Bottom line?  It certainly doesn’t hurt to give this one the benefit of the doubt and use your business’s real address here.  We do know that search engines use domain registration information when listing and ranking sites, so why not take advantage of the opportunity presented?

Optimizing your website to stand out when a visitor performs a local search is actually much simpler than targeting visitors all the way around the globe.  And remember, even if you do serve customers nationwide or worldwide, it’s always worth optimizing locally too!

Let’s face it…intro pages often look really attractive and can even provide visitors with a thoughtful initial perception of your website (and therefore, your organization as a whole).  But before deciding to follow the bandwagon and go with the same kind of introductory pages that many other sites might be using, it’s a wise idea to step back and take a look at the actual impact that using intro pages has on your website.

Here’s the primary thing you must know about intro pages…

No matter what your competitors-or even your favorite inspirational sites-might be doing, intro pages are indeed bad for your website and for search engine optimization (SEO) too.  If there’s just one takeaway to be gained from reading this blog post, this would definitely be it.

But why are intro pages really so bad for a website?

First things first, they tend to be a distraction for the visitor.  Sure, they might look great and provide a neat little video clip or animated design upon landing at your website’s homepage.  However, most web users are looking to find the information they’re seeking as quickly as possible.

In an era of limited patience, and especially with more and more on the go mobile-device web users out there, having to wait even 5 extra seconds to reach the “bread and butter” of the site they’re visiting can make or break the deal.  It’s true-an intro page can be just enough of a distraction to turn a visitor (a potential customer) away for good.

And one additional thing to note here, while we’ve briefly mentioned mobile device internet users, is the fact that many mobile devices will have difficulty rendering and displaying the typical intro page correctly.  This makes for yet one more unnecessary distraction.

Intro pages are bad for search optimization purposes too.

Because intro pages are frequently and intentionally devoid of any real written content-opting instead to show a flashy graphic or animation sequence-they are more or less completely ignored by the search engines.  These days, SEO looks mostly at the written content of a page to determine what the page is all about and where it should be listed.  When the search engine spider indexes the website and finds an intro page devoid of helpful content or relevant information, it will quickly make the decision not to index the page.  Intro pages and SEO are just not compatible.

In conclusion…

Now again, the premise of using an intro page for your site is probably based on very good intentions.  But you’ve got to admit that you’ve probably even abandoned sites with intros yourself while browsing the web, right?  It’s okay, we all have!

The bottom line?  It’s just best to skip the intros and skip all of the trouble they bring.