How to reach the top in local search – Part 2

This article is part two of a three part series. If you haven’t already, read part one: keyword research before reading this article. If you know about onsite optimisation and want to skip forward, you can go to part three: link building.

After reading part one, you should have a list of three or four keywords or keyphrases that you are targeting. This article looks at what changes to make to your website so that it ranks well.

You’ll need to be able to edit your website yourself to be able to take full advantage of this article. If you can’t, at least you’ll now be able to tell if your web designer or search engine optimisation consultant has done a proper job for you.

The Title Tag

The title of your page is one of the most important tags when it comes to search engines. The title of your page has to accurately describe what the page is about. My recommendation is to have it like this:

[main keyword] [location] | [your business name]

So if you were selling Widgets in Alice Springs, and your business name is Alice Widgets, this is how I would write your title tag for your front page.

Widgets Alice Springs | Alice Widgets

For other pages in your site, I use a similar format. Say you have a 6 page website. Home page, red widgets, green widgets, and widget accessories, about, contact. Here is a list of how I would do the titles for each page.

• Home Page: Widgets Alice Springs | Alice Widgets
• Red Widgets Page: Red Widgets Alice Springs | Alice Widgets
• Green Widgets Page: Green Widgets Alice Springs | Alice Widgets
• Widget Accessories Page: Widget Accessories Alice Springs | Alice Widgets
• About Page: About Alice Widgets
• Contact Page: Contact Alice Widgets

The reason I like that title format is two fold. Firstly, Google sees it as relevant. Secondly, anybody searching for “widgets alice springs” sees that your title matches their search term, and be more inclined to click on your listing.

If you are editing your website yourself, you can edit this between the title tags in your html. E.G. <title>Put your title here</title>.

The most important part of choosing a page title is that it should be unique from other titles in your website. This is extremely important.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are also important for search engines. The meta tags tell search engines what the site is about. In history, these have been abused by people stuffing keywords in their meta tags. Nowadays I believe meta tags are more important again as Google has figured out ways to detect and discount keyword stuffing.

With your meta tag, you want to put your main keyword in there, as well as your business name and a description of that page. Here is an example of what I think is a good meta description tag.

[business name] provides [main keyphrase] to [location]. [unique selling point] [call to action].

To put an example to that, lets go back to our Alice Widgets Example. Here is a what I think is a good description for them.

Alice Widgets sells and services widgets to Alice Springs. We offer a 5 hour on site service guarantee. Visit our website now.

The call to action is actually quite important, because Google actually uses your meta description in its search results page. See the image below:

Title Meta Google

The call to action helps get click throughs from searchers browsing the results.

Here is the code to put into your website if you’re doing this all yourself.

<meta name=”description” content=”[business name] provides [main keyphrase] to [location]. [unique selling point] [call to action].” /> 

Site Heading

The site heading by todays standards appears between the <h1></h1> tags. This should be your business name.

Page Heading

The page heading is usually between the <h2></h2> tags. The page heading should be descriptive of the page, which should also be one of your main keywords.

Page Content

The page content should be written with users in mind, however it is important that your keywords are sprinkled in there. It should be a natural sprinkling, and if you’re forcing yourself to add the keywords in there, your content is probably too off topic to be optimising for that keyword in the first place.

Summary

This article was about what you can do to your website to make it perform better. Part 3 in this series will go into links and how to do link building and offsite optimisation.

Related posts:

• How to reach the top in local search – Part 1
• How to reach the top in local search – Part 3
• Google Adwords Quality Score Explained
• 5 tips for writing Adwords Ads
• Shoppers search online: Take advantage of emerging buying trends