Click on the link to watch the video about: Search Engine Optimization
Page Settings & Search Engine Optimization (SEO)   
About Search Engine Optimization (there are things you need to know...)
About Search Engine Optimization (there are things you need to know...)Summary: 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.
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" Picture_4.png  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 Alias
This 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 Title
Create 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.

Keywords
If 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.

Description
This 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.