Search Engine Marketing
Sweat The Small Stuff
Worried About ranking your website in Google Local and organic search engine results below the Google Local Snack Pack as well?
Than worry about the small stuff because in Google Land your rankings can be buried with the slip of a sitemap or dumb thumbing the wrong keys in your metadata.
Skipping or screwing up on small details such as your H1 headers or getting squirrely and stuffing your keywords in content over and over can bring your search engine rankings down as fast as the next time Google crawls your site. It’s amazing how many sites have so many neat things going for them but blow a few small details preventing them ever ranking like they should.
Pay attention to the details. Below I’ve listed a few common mistakes but hardly all of the details you need to be aware of when building a website that is truly Search Engine Ready.
Here’s a few areas to watch out for – some of the most common areas blown but not all of them. It would take too much space to list everything but these are some big ones:
- No meta description for pages and/or a bad one – The meta description helps tell Google what your page is about and should be kept to about 155 words or less and “naturally” explain what your page is about in a coherent paragraph without keyword stuffing.
- Keyword stuffing – Google no longer has to see keywords in your page content to get what it’s about as long as you can write. Describe your services and make everything relevant and Google will figure out the rest. Start inserting your keywords over and over and Google will drop your rankings
- Speed Baby – Slow loading web page? Bad. Slow loading on mobile devices? Death. Speed it up.
- Junk content – Don’t hire the dollar a page guy from overseas to crap on your website – please. Learn to write good stuff that applies to your industry. Surely you can take the time to do this – if not then pay a great company like our parent company EngineX Design to do it.
- Consistent Blogging – Want to get ranked and stay ranked? Dont’ skip this because if you do you’ll never get there. Monthly blogs are usually enough – just keep them up with about 350 words or more every single month and – eventually – they will help
- H1 H2 headers – Are your base H1 H2 headers set correctly for your page? Your title and subtitle headers are some of the most basic and important HTML markups for your entire site.
- Does your website have a sitemap XML file? Find out – Google it or check out our blogs
- Does your site have a robots.txt file? Google needs this to properly crawl your website. Once again if you don’t understand this – learn or hire us.
The stuff listed above was a bit technical but you need to be aware of it because – probably – your website company is skipping on many of these basics screwing you if you don’t understand what’s going on. I’m not here to sound nice or make everybody happy but most website design companies suck and will half-ass everything they can get away with. Many of them don’t know what their doing either – they suck because most people that hire them don’t understand enough to figure it out.