SEO Tips « The Original Boutique Hip Web Designer-Cgonsa.com Blog

Archive for the ‘SEO Tips’ Category

Sep 11

Google Places for your business-local SEO

Thursday, September 8th, 2011

Getting listed, improves your seo (search engine optimization) in local searches. Per Google, studies have shown, 97% of consumers search for local businesses online. A complete and detailed listing in Places can help Google better understand your business and match you to relevant search results too. Using Google Places you can help your business stand out with tools to add photos, videos, get and respond to reviews, or give a shout out to special promos. Using stats gathered you can study keywords used in searches, and where your customers coming from. Google Places is a tool to help with your marketing and seo. Why not get listed today, it’s a great tool and a FREE one!

Getting Started

Posted in SEO Tips | No Comments »

Dec 09

Understanding page titles

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

Overview:
The Page title is the heading that appears in the blue bar border across the top of your browser (for example IE or Firefox). Page titles are found as a META tag in your source code between the <head> and </head>. Page titles are listed first in google search results and what is used when someone adds you as a bookmark or in their “Favorites”.

Importance:

the page title tag optimizes a web page for search engines.
makes that web page stand out from other search engine results. The most important information your potential customers will use to decide if they want to visit your site after finding you in the search results
They are generally heavily weighted by the search engine ranking algorithms.
On the search results page the title is listed on the first line of the search result.

Hints and Tips-

Page titles should be clear, descriptive, fine tuned, accurate, meaningful. They should not trigger a filter in Google’s search algorithm that marks it as looking suspicious. The reader should know by looking at the page title, exactly what is on that page.
Target keyword phrase and put your, most important keywords as close as possible to the left of the title. Don’t waste the first spot with your site name!
Think under 70 characters will be displayed
Concentrate on optimizing for a single key phrase per page title, instead of trying to squish several key phrases into one page title.
Do not repeat the same keywords over and over. Do not keyword stuff in the page title.
Do not use the same page title for all your pages as it could be considered duplicate content and not listed. Each page should be unique and relevant for the content.

written: Jan 11, 2005 at 08:33 AM by cgonsa.com. Updated for relevance: December 27, 2009

Tags: page titles
Posted in SEO Tips | No Comments »

Dec 09

reading googles search results

Sunday, December 27th, 2009

How to read your google search results- above is a screen shot for the keyword search I did using the term, “boutique web designer”.

What you see is the following:

1. For the search term, “boutique web designer”, this indicates cgonsa.com ranks number one in Googles results. The competition for this search phrase lists 13,700 others who target the same keyword phrase. Not bad results, huh? You can get the same results and to help with this a good bit of advice is to practice writing relevant, unique page titles for every page you create.

2. Google pulled the page title I created for my home page from the META tag for this page. If I did not have a META tag for the page description, Google may have pulled this from whatever the open source directory uses (dmoz.org) or other text content found on my web page.

3. Google pulled the meta description (snippet) from the META tag for this page. If I did not have one, they again could have used dmoz.org or any relevent html text content from my web page.

Meta descriptions should be accurate for every page they are created. Do not duplicate the same one over and over. The meta description should accurately describe what one will find on that page. Meta descriptions should be unique and well thought out for every single page so search results are relevant and accurate in Google. Keep them short, catchy (to entice the click through), and accurate.

Here is a resource for you including a YouTube video on the subject, “How Google displays Search Results”.

Tags: google search results, metadescription, page title, snippets
Posted in SEO Tips | No Comments »

Dec 09

Google on YouTube for Webmasters!

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

Google on YouTube.

Keeping abreast of the latest with Google and SEO should be ongoing and crucial to success, so here is the link to their YouTubes for those of you that prefer to watch and listen versus reading. Google on YouTube. I recommend viewing all these videos, thinking of it as as your SEO 101 course. It will provide a strong understanding and foundation jumpstarting your success with your search engine results.

The presenter on the videos mostly appears to be Matt Cutts who if you don’t know already is one of our most important resources to follow. Matt Cutts is head of webspam for Google.

Here Matt Cutts Blog

and….

Follow Matt Cutts on Twitter

Posted in SEO Tips | No Comments »

Dec 09