NotaryBids.com Blog

I came across this post on another blog recently and I did not make a note of the blog address so I could give credit where it is due, However I felt this is an excellent list of best practices when starting your website or making it more search engine friendly. Enjoy!

Domain Name

Your domain name should be about your product, not about you. It should say “www.widgets.whatever”, not “www.the-great-us.whatever”.
Where you make blue widgets and your keyword research has established that people are indeed searching in quantity for the term blue widgets, then your domain name should be “www.blue-widgets.whatever”. Use of the hyphen is deliberate. Engines see hyphens as a separator between words. Don’t forget, the human eye can seewordsjoineduptogether as being words joined up together. An engine can’t do that. We can’t have spaces in domain names though (a technical thing) so the obvious compromise is to separate the words in the domain name by a hyphen. Not by a dot (.) or by an underscore (_), but by a hyphen (-).

File Name

Again, blue-widgets.htm or .html, .php or .asp, (or whatever according to format) for preference.

Title Tag

Your subject or service should be first, your company name second, if at all. Remember, if you’re Joe Blow and you make widgets, the public will be searching for widgets, not Joe Blow. They never heard of you to look for you, right? So the layout is as follows; “Blue Widgets from Joe Blow Services, the Best of the Blue Widget Makers.”

Description Meta Tag

Same rules; product first, your name second. So it’s “Blue Widgets Customized to Your Specification, from Joe Blow, Home of the Quality Widget. Also, it needs to be long enough for Google to be able to fashion a decent-sized snippet from it. If it’s too short, only a few words long, Google will look elsewhere on the page to source its snippet. This means you relinquish some control over what appears there.

Keywords Meta Tag

Blue,Widgets,Quality,Specifications” etc. Whatever you do, don’t be tempted to shovel in every possible related word you can think of, I’ve seen sites that have lines and lines of these, the same ones on every page. A few pertinent ones on every page please, with variations according to the content of the specific page. Separate them either by commas or by spaces, not by both. It used to be said that you only need to include any one keyword once as the engines would parse them into any possible phrases. Lately there are suggestions that Yahoo wants to see comma-separated phrases. perhaps it would be as well to include just that.

Head

Javascripts and CSS styles usually go in here. They need to be externalized into an external file and referenced accordingly. I used to not bother with either a doc type or a charset but I include both religiously now as validation lately receives wider acceptance as important.

Header Tag

There’s several Header Tags, varying from Most Important (H1) to Least Important (H6). Your keyword or key phrase need to be the first words in the first Header Tag, which should be an H1 tag. The tags should be used in order of descending importance, i.e., your first tag should be the H1 tag and each following tag should be in series, use next a single H2 tag or a series of H2 tags. Don’t start with an H3 tag, then use an H1 tag etc. This will just confuse the engines about the relative importance of your site’s content.

First Paragraph

First words in the first paragraph are your key phrase.

Bold

They’re in “bold”. Or “strong”.

Text Content

Sprinkled liberally throughout your page is your key phrase. If it feels right, then it is. If it feels right and it’s only mentioned twice in a 10,000 word document, and it feels right, then it is right. It’s the document that’s wrong. You’ve written a document that, let’s face it, can’t include your key phrase to any great extent because your document isn’t actually about the subject, is it? You may have started out with the right intentions, but you seem to have got lost along the way. I’ve done it - no reason why you shouldn’t either. Perhaps you can take this page, run a keyword analyzer over it and find out what it’s actually about then you can use it as a related page in your site. Remember, you’ll always need more content. Home, asleep in bed, you’ll always need more content. To sum up, if it’s mentioned ten times in a document that’s one thousand words long, and it feels right, then it is.

Graphic Content

Keep your graphic file names brief and inclusive of a keyword. Alt tags for ordinary graphics are lately being considered relevant again for seo purposes so it’s best to include a keyword.

Internal Graphic Links

Remember that in a graphic used as a link the alt text counts for seo purposes just as normal anchor text does in a text link. Alt=”widget site - large blue widget” would be preferable to alt=”here is a picture of me and Sharon at the beach on holiday in Blackpool last year and if you look closely, you can see I’m holding a widget”.

Internal Text Links

Use keywords in the anchor text throughout. Don’t link to “home” link to “blue widgets home”. Who searches for “home”?
Don’t link to “seminars”, link to “blue widget seminars”. Who searches for “seminars”? Include your keywords in your links. Take this important opportunity to remind the engines what your site is about.

Headers/Footers

Notice the layout of the pages here? I use the same sets of links in the header and the footer. This gets them all in twice (at time of writing - the site expands almost daily so I’ll have to re-think soon) and it’s perfectly legitimate.

Tables

If you’re going to use the traditional table layout, remember to build your table so that the actual main content appears to the engines before the list of links to the left does. Search Engines will expect important information to appear first. This won’t be so important if all your links include related keywords as I advise above, but it’s still worth bearing in mind.

I’m pleased to announce some exciting changes I made recently to the home page, the home page title tag as well as to the home page keywords (by keywords I mean the keywords tag in the html) and the description tag in the html also. I also made a slight change to the “Theme” of the company which could also be considered the tagline. Keep in mind this is all in line with a new SEO Strategy we developed in earlier posts to bring the site up higher in the search engines.

Title, Description, Keyword Tags

Lets start out by showing you what these actually look like from the code in the page:

This is what the “title” tag looks like: <TITLE>NotaryBids.com - Home, An Automated Mobile Notary Signing Agent Search System</TITLE>

This what the “keywords” tag looks like: <meta name=“keywords” content=”Mobile Notary,Signing Agent,Notary Signing Agentr,Mobile Signing Agent,Certified Signing Agent,Notary Database,Notary Search,Notary Locator,National Notary,Notary Directory,Notaries,Alabama Notary,Alaska Notary,Arizona Notary,Arkansas Notary,California Notary,Colorado Notary,Connecticut Notary,Delaware Notary,District of Columbia Notary,Florida Notary,Georgia Notary,Hawaii Notary,Idaho Notary,Illinois Notary,Indiana Notary,Iowa Notary,Kansas Notary,Kentucky Notary,Louisiana Notary,Maine Notary,Maryland Notary,Massachusetts Notary,Michigan Notary,Minnesota Notary,Mississippi Notary,Missouri Notary,Montana Notary,Nebraska Notary,Nevada Notary,New Hampshire Notary,New Jersey Notary,New Mexico Notary,New York Notary,North Carolina Notary,North Dakota Notary,Ohio Notary,Oklahoma Notary,Oregon Notary,Pennsylvania Notary,Rhode Island Notary,South Carolina Notary,South Dakota Notary,Tennessee Notary,Texas Notary,Utah Notary,Vermont Notary,Virginia Notary,Washington Notary,West Virginia Notary,Wisconsin Notary,Wyoming Notary” />

This is what the description tags look like: <meta name=“description” content=”NotaryBids.com is an innovative, new, completely automated national notary signing agent search system. Our automation saves lenders, title companies, escrow companies and others time and money by locating and contacting mobile notary signing agents for them!” />

In any search engine optimization (SEO) strategy this is the first place you need to start!

Here are some best practices for these 3 very important components:

• Use a unique description for each page. Make sure the description does in fact describe the page content. But write it with the search engines in mind. Depending on the search engine it may be what people see as a summary of your site on the search engine results pages. (SERPS) Also be sure to load it contains your keywords.
• The title should contain the website name “NotaryBids.com”, the page name or purpose and then a short description including keywords as to what the page is about. Keep in mind your visitirs will see this in the top of the browser.
• The keywords list should include all the possible keywords your site is about starting with the most important and separated by a comma. Spend some time on this one and be sure you have a solid list of keywords (you can also include short 2 -3 word phrases) that a person that is searching may use to find your product or service.

Next lets talk about the other changes/upgrades I made to the home page. The first and most noticeable one is the list of states you can now find there. I decided to make a change to the overall business plan to support a much more aggressive search marketing plan. I am now allowing public access to the notary database similar to what other notary directory sites allow. In simpler terms that means someone that needs a notary can come to the website and with a few clicks find a notary and view their contact info. This is a big step but should help bring more business to our notaries.

From an SEO perspective the change added many important keywords to our home page, the states! During the development of the list I also created a new page that lists the most popular states and cities where notaries are needed more often. You can view the new Find A Notary By State or Popular City feature by clicking this link. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

These two pages and more I’ll be adding add terrific new content and keywords to the site along with some desired functionality clients look for!

- Chris

It occurred to me today that I forgot to share one very important fact about this effort.  THIS BLOG is part of my my overall strategy!  Creating this blog, promoting it and doing regular posts to it are an important part of SEO for several reasons. 1) Link building, look over this blog and you will see tons of links to NotaryBids.com.  Each of those links helps…2) Blogs have powerful tools and features designed specifically for SEO like RSS, Pinging services (check out the menu to the left) and just the well known fact that blogs get indexed very quickly in search engines because the content constantly changes.

An interesting note slightly off topic: As of today this Blog is showing a Page Rank 3 and it has only been in  existence less than a month!  That may have something to do with why NotaryBids.com seems to have made a jump up in the search results.

In conclusion, if you don’t have a blog get one!  Just go to WordPress.com to use their hosted solution or WordPress.org to download the script (like this blog) and install it on your own web server.  There are also hundreds of WordPress Themes to choose from for just the right look.  If you find you would like to install your own WordPress blog like I did but need assistance feel free to contact me and I will assist you.

Blogs have become very well known for their impact on SEO. Search engines love them! Forums also…I have witnessed this first hand via Google Alerts. A few nights ago I did a post on a forum site and within an hour I received a Google Alert about that post! Crazy…I have wanted to start blogging for quite a while and I have messed around with it some (like my ActiveRain Blog) but I didn’t really know what to blog about that I was passionate about and what would also fuel my business interests.

Recently I met Arnie Kuenn of Vertical Measures (www.VerticalMeasures.com) and I started learning fascinating information about how professional SEO (Search Engine Optimzation) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) companies do what they do. I guess you could call this information “secret” but it’s all available on the Internet. You just have to know where to find it and what actually works and what doesn’t. I won’t be giving away all the secrets but I will be sharing enough information where you may want to stop back by from time to time. In addition, you also have to know what NOT to do because there are some shady tactics out there commonly referred to as “Black Hat” (super shady) and Grey Hat (Questionable) that may get you removed from Google’s index or possibly Yahoo. OUCH!

This blog is going to serve several purposes for me, NotaryBids.com, our notaries and our clients. The first is it in itself will improve NotaryBids.com’s position in search engines by adding numerous pertinent links from this blog to the notarybids.com site. That means more traffic and exposure which means more business for us and our notaries. It will also have “fresh” content on a regular basis which the search engines also love. Secondly it will be an ongoing diary of where the NotaryBids.com site is ranked in the search engines starting from this post to the day we are listed on the first page of search engines based on our key word and key phrases (I hope!). My hopes are that others will find this blog useful and interact with me and each other about this topic so we can all share ideas and learn from each other. Finally, the effort I am about to undertake will provide a working environment to implement all the awesome knowledge I am gaining about SEO, SEM and web site publicity.

So, here we go! Wish us luck…

- Chris