And now part eight.
This is part eight of a ten aprt series on how to increase your website rankings on Google. That being said, there are tons of things webmasters can do to help their sites perform better in search, so this list is not by a long shot finished. It is, though, what I think are the top ten strategies for better search engine-and by "search engine" I mean "Google" - placement.
8. Frequently Updated Content
You could start a site, slap some content on it, and let it sit there in cyber space. It'll be indexed, most likely. But you really expand your credibility as a devoted, relevant source if you update regularly. In addition to spiders, it gives people a reason to come back, too.
Having new content on your website is important for search engine rankings. Search engines are more likely to crawl your website and crawl it more often if you change your site often. Being a home inspection website though, how is that possible? You put up a few pages on your site describing you, your business and what you do, and that's about it. What is there to change?
The trick is called RSS, which now stands for Really Simple Sindication. I'm going to show you how to add news stories about your local cities to your website, and have them AUTOMATICALLY UPDATE THEMSELVES, WOHOO!!
So, I'll create an imaginary new page, Shreveport.html and set the design to look like the rest of my site. At the top I'd write a few things about Shreveport, maybe the population, my favorite restaurant, whatever. Then under that we're going to add news stories about Shreveport, La!
You can get RSS feeds from multiple sites like Google News and Yahoo News. I'll use Google News for this email.
There are two ways to do this, the easy was is listed now, I'll post the more complicated way tomorrow after I do a few things to make it easier. It won't help your ratings as much but it MUCH simpler. The easy way relies more on the paragraph you type ABOVE these news feeds for the SEO and the feeds just make the page look more relevant.
Steps for the easy way:
1. Go to http://news.google.com/ Type into the search box the name of your city: "Shreveport" you might want to use Shreveport, Louisiana if your city is a popular name (yes, I'm talking about those of you who live in Springfield). Note put the city name in quotes if it's two words and you want them to appear together.
2. Click Search News
3. A page will appear with stories about Shreveport. Scroll down until you see the word RSS on the left hand side.
4. Right click on the word RSS and click on "Copy Link Location" in Firefox or "Copy Shortcut" in Internet Explorer.
5. Now go to http://www.rss-info.com/en_rssinclude-simple.html
6. Right click on the empty line next to RSS URL and select paste. My url looks like this: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=shreveport,+Louisiana&ie=UTF-8&output=rss
7. Now the other options are up to you. You can change the width, color and more.
8. Click create html.
9. Copy the code in the box and paste it on your site where you want the stories to appear.
You can see an example for what I did here: http://www.ezriderhomeinspections.com/shreveport-bossier-home-inspection-rss.shtml
Try it out and let me know how it goes. I will be posting the second method tomorrow and explain the difference. If you feel you are a total beginner to web design and you're using a site like grassfrog, you must use the method above. The main difference is the code above is pure javascript so search engines really don't see the text from the news stories (but your users will), so make sure the paragraph above it includes your city name a few times. The alternate method will actually include the text for search engines to see.
Don Rider
Bossier Home Inspector
Bossier Home Inspections
Shreveport Bossier Inspections
Shreveport Bossier Inspectors
Shreveport Home Inspection
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