This weekend I will be speaking at the Pet Sitters International Regional Conference. i plan to speak to pet sitters about generating more website traffic from search engines by strategically using keywords in their content.
Here is a preview of the transcript.
Good morning everyone.
I’m here to talk to you about getting the most out of your website by generating traffic through Search Engine Optimization.
At first I’d considered discussing features that can be added to websites to make it easier for your clients to interact with you.
However I had a chance to look over several of your websites.
And I found that many of you already have these features in place, and that most of you have very well-built websites.
So, instead today I want to talk to you about getting more traffic to those sites.
Many of you might have a well-built website, but are the maximum number of visitors seeing it?
Today I’m going to talk about a couple of ways that you can help insure your website is reaching the most potential visitors.
Because, more traffic to your website means more potential clients.
More clients equals more sits
Which, means more revenue.
So what are some means of drawing more traffic for your website?
Two points I want to cover today are:
Using search-friendly domain names.
And, Using search-friendly content.
Let’s face it; people do judge books by their cover.
The same holds true for websites and their domain names.
A domain name can either make or break a website.
Your domain name not only gives access to your site, but makes a statement about your business.
So, what should you do, or not do, when choosing a domain name?
The first and most important point to remember is that your website is a part of your business, not the whole business.
With websites like Google, flickr, and Yahoo! the website is the business.
These websites have strange domain names that don’t necessary relate to their business.
I mean, what’s a Google anyway?
The point is that these are not brick-and-mortar businesses; they function primarily in cyber-space.
However, as pet sitters, all of you are dealing with real people and real situations out in the real world.
So you need a real solid domain name.
You also need a domain name that conveys information about your business.
Obviously you need a domain name that relates very closely to your business.
Ideally this should be as close as possible to your actual business name.
Now I realize that many of you already have domain names that are closely linked to your business name.
And I’m not advocating abandoning your current domain.
Not at all.
But having an extra domain name, formatted as I’m about to show you, is a great tool for generating extra traffic to your site.
So what are some other things you can do to make your domain name better?
A question I often hear from pet sitters is, “How will clients find my website in a certain area or geographical region when searching online?”
That’s when you need a domain name that conveys info about your location.
For example, let’s say that your business is Pet Nanny.
And you wanted www.petnanny.com as your domain.
The Pet Nanny is a fairly common name for a pet sitting business.
PSI has a number of members registered under that business name.
So with a lot of pet sitters scrambling to get that domain, someone is going to get left out.
But with a slight change to the format you can get the domain that you want while at the same time drawing more customers from search engines.
By adding information into your domain name that conveys your location, you will draw more relevant traffic and have less dead leads.
Let’s say that your business is the Pet Nanny and you’re located in Washington, DC.
So, you chose www.petnannyofDC.com.
With a domain like this you are more likely to get relevant traffic from clients looking for a pet sitter in Washington, DC.
At the same time this eliminates the likelihood of someone in California coming to your website needlessly.
They will be able to see from your domain name that you are in Washington, DC.
A better choice for them might be www.petnannyOC.com.
So you see, just a slight tweak to your domain name can make finding your website much easier for your potential clients.
Now, let’s take this idea one step further, by making it easier for search engines to find and categorize your website, which by extension will draw more potential clients to you.
Now what I just showed you will do a lot of good for your search engine rating.
But there is one other technique that you can use to give yourself a leg (or in this case a paw) up on the competition.
This technique involves breaking the domain name down to separate each individual keyword.
Let’s take the Pet Nanny for example again.
www.Dallaspetnanny.com is a great domain name.
It’s got the business name.
It also tells about the businesses location .
However, the whole thing is run together.
Which means that it is not as easy for the search engine to distinguish the keywords.
However, a simple tweak of adding a hyphen between each keyword will help the search engines better categorize your site.
So, now that you have a domain that will put you in higher ranking with search engines, we need to move on to the body of the website, and how we can use that to draw traffic as well.
This is where Relevant Content comes into play.
Back in the old days. The days of Web 1.0 as they say. Search Engines categorized site based on keywords attached to a website.
However, spammers started abusing this and so Google and Yahoo had to build smarter programs.
(I’ll show you an example of this in a minute)
These new programs, which are called Web Crawlers, literally read the content on websites to look for consistency and for reoccurring keywords.
Now, these Web Crawlers look for keywords in content, such as articles, paragraphs, and so forth.
So by relevant content, I mean text that relates to the subject of your website.
The whole idea is to make sure that the keywords you are using are consistent with your website, so that you show up in the right search.
So, if your website is about pet sitting, the text on your website should be relevant to pet sitting.
Keep I mind that it’s the job of the Web Crawlers to scour the internet constantly “reading” content on thousands of websites and categorizing them in google or yahoo!s databases.
And the more often a keyword appears on your website the better your search rating.
So, don’t go and just start posting keywords without relevant content.
Place your keywords inside of content.
When you have a real website with a real purpose behind it—such as promoting your business—it’s really easy to include keywords.
The following is a piece of content I wrote up as example of how easy it is to place keywords that search engines will recognize into the content of your website.
In the following paragraph I’ve underlined the keywords that a search engine Web Crawler would recognize and categorize.
“In this example I will be talking about using keywords for search engine optimization (SEO). When you are a pet sitter, you want to emphasize the fact that you do sitting jobs for cats, dogs, birds, etc. The more your content mentions these things, the more likely you are to get a higher search engine rating. A lot of you ask about SEO for particular geographical areas. Let’s say that you are in the Piedmont Triad area of North Carolina. This area includes King, Winston-Salem, Greensboro, High-Point as well as Kernersville and Oak Ridge to name just a few.”
As you can see I’ve placed several keywords that identify services as well location into a single paragraph.
Imagine what you could do with several paragraphs, writing about what you do in you business.
Remember the Web Crawler programs search for relevant content.
Now, what do I mean by legitimate lists?
On the right you have a list that is recognizable by people and search engines as content-relevant.
Clearly it is an informational list that is relevant to your pet sitting website.
The list on the left, however, is the kind of list you might see on a spam site.
It starts out with related words, but even these are jumbled together, and are obviously intended for the search engines’ WebCrawler programs.
You’ll also notice lower down the list words that don’t relate to pet sitting start to show up.
I mean is Brittany Spears relevant to pet sitting?
That’s how spammers draw extra traffic to their sites—by tricking people into going there.
You probably won’t see this sort of thing very often for two reasons.
One reason is spammers usually make the text the same color as the background, so you cannot see it with the naked-eye.
But while you and I can’t see it, search engine web crawlers can.
That’s when you start getting banned from Google and Yahoo!
So, if you make a list, make sure it’s relevant to your content.
That way Google and Yahoo! are happy and you are getting traffic from people who are looking for a real pet sitter.
So, now that you are getting all this extra traffic, how are you going to keep track of it?
Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking website visits from multiple angles and levels.
The really useful area of Analytics as it relates to our topic today is the ability for you to view reports of where your traffic comes from.
Analytics can track visits that are generated by search engines.
It will even tell you which keywords people are using to find you site.
And how many people use a particular keyword.
Google Analytics is completely free to set up and use.
All you need to do is sign up for an account.
Once your account is set up, you will need to place your unique tracking code into the HTML of you website.
Your tracking code is unique to your website, and Google will provide this to you during account set up.
So using keywords in your domain name and content will greatly increase traffic to your website.
And Google Analytics can help in keeping close track of the newly generated traffic.