Did you know that your most important keywords on your website don’t actually show on your website?
These keywords are the ones that you use to spell out to Google where you want to show up when people search on Google.
If you are a plumbing company, your keywords on your homepage should include your name and say something along the lines of Plumbing Company and the cities that you serve.
If you are a real estate agent, your keyword should say Homes for Sale or Real Estate Agent, along with the cities that you serve.
This way, when someone searches for a plumbing company or a local real estate agent, your website has a good chance of being in those results.
Maybe not page 1, but somewhere in those results.
To check to see what your keywords are, all you have to do is open up your website. Take your cursor and hover it over the tab at the top of your browser. You should get a pop-up description that shows the full text in that browser tab. (See screenshot.)
These are your keywords.
These are the words that you are telling Google you want to be found under when someone searches.
So, if your keywords don’t say the name of your profession, then you most likely don’t show up very well on the search engines when you search for something other than using your proper name.
These keywords are the words that you want to be found under when people search that don’t know your name. Of course, you do want to be found on Google when people search for your proper name as well, but these keywords should include industry terms that your prospects are likely to use.
Before you email your webmaster to tell them that you need to change your keywords, you’ll need a few guidelines.
For one, make sure to use proper capitalization and punctuation. These are keywords for the search engines, but human beings also read them. These keywords show on Google in the search results as the blue link that people click on, in addition to the browser tab, so you want to make sure they read nicely as well.
Another thing to be mindful of is the length of your keywords. Most articles you read on the Internet will tell you that most search engines read up to 60 characters. You can actually go a little further than that. We set our maximum at 80 characters.
Getting to the first page of Google is not easy. Step one is onsite SEO, which is basically the opportunity to place keywords on your web pages to tell the search engines the search phrases where you would like to show up.
But it’s not going to get you to the first page in most cases. Anyone can do it, and it’s typically pretty easy to do with a little bit of guidance. It’s the first thing you should do though to try and rank higher on Google.
It’s not the last thing you should do though. Getting credible websites to link to you is one of the best ways to push yourself up towards the top.
Article by John Kitts, Founder of CityScoop
At CityScoop, we screen and select only one expert per city to be our local blogger for our national news syndicate. Having a blog on CityScoop gets you a highly credible link that pushes your business up to the first page, guaranteed, for less than $100 a month. (Visit https://cityscoop.com for more information.)