Your Active Rain Profile - Simple Changes, Great Reward!
The following post was created and posted by Karen George back in the beginning of '07. I had only been following Karen for a couple of months when she had made this post. I knew so little about SEO back then. However, I felt confident that the advice she was sharing not only made sense but... if followed, could lead to good things. It has. Since then, I've shared her words of advice with many Rainers. Today, I want to take the opportunity to share it with as many as I can via this blog post.
I owe a lot to Karen. Fortunately, I was able to extend my thanks, albeit in a small way, before she passed away from cancer. And as Brad Andersohn said in a blog post immediately after her passing; "She was a caring, sharing, wonderful person who we will all miss deeply."
Karen - this is in your honor. Your words live on....
ActiveRain has already thoughtfully added header tags to your profile page, Thank Goodness. ActiveRain is allowing you to have a very valuable search engine tool and it seems about 95% of you are ignoring it.
Take a look at your profile. There are three "heading" tags or <h1> tags on your profile page. (They aren't labeled as such; I only know so because I looked at the page's source code.)
Google reads these to find out what is the topic of that page or article. To Google, these text snippets are marked as headings and there is a bunch of text below them. The Googlebot knows exactly what that heading is: It's a title!
When you first set up on AR (and for many of you, still, right now), there are three potentially-powerful but currently-generic headings on your page, provided by AR. You can't see it, but those three phrases are encased in a beautiful and search-engine-friendly <h1> tag.
They are: About Us, Areas of Expertise and Testimonials. * yawn *
Those are your three headers. Those words right there are looked upon in a special way by the search engines and you aren't doing anything with them.
I would strongly recommend changing your headers to something that is relevant to your business. It only make sense! How about:
- Change "About Us" to "Realtor, Chicago, IL - Bob Smith"
Bam! Your first heading on the page says "Chicago IL" and "Realtor." Google knows what this profile is about! The incredible irony is that the old "About Us" actually did not tell the search engine about you at all. Funny, huh?
- Change "Areas of Expertise" to "Our Chicago Real Estate Services"
Bam! We just worked "Chicago Real Estate" into our second very-important page header.
- Change "Testomonials" to "Chicago Home Buyers Information" and provide links to school district pages, your local association of Realtors, your listings page, maybe some online Chicago newspapers... Be a source of information- Google loves that. That's what Google is all about.
Make your headings (and the text beneath them) rich with information about WHAT YOU DO FOR A LIVING. Don't make Google guess! Provide links in your information-filled paragraphs. (You can have the links open in a new window, so people don't leave your page.) If you are going to stick with the basic headings that are provided for you (and repeated by the thousands on ActiveRain pages)- you are giving yourself a major disadvantage from the get-go. Search engines don't like repetition.
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