First, look at how people are searching. What are they typing into
Google and Yahoo to look for you? What are you typing in? If you aren't
showing up, these "keywords" are probably missing from your pages.
Search placement is a result of many things working in concert
together, and "search" is a relative term, you and I search
differently. You have to think about "who" is looking for you, how many
other people offer what you offer, and how long they have been at it.
Tricky. Example: If I search Google for Sonoma
Valley Guest Houses...I'm going to have pages and pages of results, all
of which contain some combination of these words. Imagine how many
there must be.
If I search Google for "Sonoma Vacation Rental",
(the term surrounded by quote marks) I will find only those pages that
have those three words together in that order. This exact phrase is
directly relevant to content of the page.
In the first search, the user is looking for "anything" that contains "all" of those words, but not necessarily in any order.
The second search is looking specifically for something, 3 words together, in order.
SEO is a complicated moving target, but there are things you can do.Search engines look at a complex number of things the combination of which determines your ranking and page placement.
Start by asking yourself these questions.1) Home Page: Are the keywords people are using to search included in the text of your page? If they are on the page, are they phrased as you would expect someone to be using them together?
2) How relevant is the combination of all of the text on the page? Is the text on your page, relevant to the title and other text on the page?
3) Do your pages have titles, and if so, are they relevant to search keywords? Example:
a page for your rates may show up in some searches for "rates" if rates
is part of the title, but may not if the page is titled reservations.
4) Is the description provided relevant to the content of the page? Is it repeated over and over on many pages?
Search
engines look at certain keywords and descriptions and compare that with
the content of the page. So you want to make sure you include key
"search" words in both keywords and the description settings for your
pages. They also look for repetition, ...for a time people would trick
the system by using words over and over pushing up their rankings, but
now, there is evidence that this repitition may lower your rankings, or
that search engines may very well ignore repetitive words and phrasing
alltogeher. As I said, a moving target.
Now, apply these rule to
all the pages in your site. My guess is it's not bad, but there are
probably things you can do, or say to get the right search words in the
content of your text. After you get your text squared away, click on
"Page Settings" in the administrative links at the top of any page when
editing.
Use Page Settings to enter keywords, titles and descriptions of your pages
When logged in and editing any page, click the "settings" link at the top of the page
Use the following as a guide for entering the information into the respective settings for each page on your website.
Page AliasThis
is going to be exactly the opposite of the Title. You want this to be
as short, succinct and descriptive as possible without using any Caps,
spaces or special characters. In other words, if you are creating an
alias for your rates page, "rates" is perfect.
Page TitleCreate
a page Title for every page. It is better to have "Alexandra's Plaza
Suite Vacation Rentals, Room Rates and Prices" than it is to have
simply "rates" as the title. This is the opposite of the alias. The
Title is what is displayed at the top of the users browser window when
visiting a page. It should be as descriptive as possible. Search
engines may place some significant relevance on page titles.
KeywordsIf
using the Rates page as an example, you might have: sonoma, rental,
vacation, rate, room, price (in many instances, it is better to have
part of the word than it is to have all of the word...room vs rooms)
Keywords
on the Home page might be completely different: vacation, sonoma,
valley, moon, room, bed, breakfast, activities, square, plaza
How are people who you want to find you...searching? Those are the words.
DescriptionThis
is the description you want to show up in the Google listing for the
page that someone found when they searched for you. They should be
different for every page in your site. The description is another key
place where you want to incorporate keywords. If you can sum up in two
sentences, your business, using every keyword someone might use to
search for you, it probably helps.