In the post SEO part 1, I reviewed the difficulty in being located in a relevant organic (non-paying) search for your service on search engines like Google and Yahoo. As an example for the term “florida mortgage” Google has 5,560,000 listings.
In SEO part 2, I showed how the title with meta tags (the hidden markers that search engines use to index you site) help define your site.
In this post I'll try to bring it together by showing how those elements combined with your content and Alt Text create the information that the search engines use to determine how relevant your site is against searches.
I'm going to continue to use the same site used as the example in part 2, NetOriginator.com, to help demonstrate how all the elements work together.
Is everything on the site complete and perfect? No (is it ever?). I'm currently working on refinements to improve the ranking on key searches. But it will work for the information we are discussing. By the way, the sites current ranking on Google is not bad. It has top 5 to top 20 in most key searches for a very hard category to get top ranking in - net branch.
For reference
Here are the links to the first two parts of the post.
So far I have my title,
"Mortgage Net Branch"
and my Meta Description Tag
" Mortgage net branch manager opportunity, loan officers - the net branch manager career opportunity. More than a mortgage job"
What should my text or content be about?
They should be all about the title and the description.
My main headings should be my primary key search terms.
The content should be about my key search terms, it should be informative using simple words. The important item here is that the key search terms should be used as much as possible. Be repetitious – it’s OK to say the same thing several different ways. As long as you incorporate the key search terms into the sentences.
There are two elements that we have not discussed yet. One is the most overlooked and the other one is considered important but is not.
The most overlooked, Alt Text. Photos and graphics all have a place holder for Alt Text descriptions.
On the home page the Alt text for the main photo on the page is in the html
"<img src="images/layout/photos/corpteam.jpg" alt="Net Branch Mortgage " width="300" height="162" hspace="5" align="left">"This is an important piece of the puzzle that many web designers ignore. If you try the image search on Google or Yahoo you will see how the Alt text tags are used for indexing. These links and phrases associated with Alt text help with your site relevancy ranking. To see the Alt text for any graphic – hold your cursor over the picture.
The other element is Meta Keywords. Until recently this meta tag was considered very important. For the sample site the key words are: “mortgage net branch, net branch manager, mortgage job, mortgage opportunity, loan officers, mortgage career”.
Google and Yahoo no longer use this information. But other lesser known search engines do use them. Many of the Internet Directories use the key words as the index for searches. So you should include them.
The robot crawler software that Google, Yahoo and the other companies use to index websites is relentless but are like 5th graders. You do not want to "talk over their heads". Speak in plain language. Do not use obscure or tricky wording to say something. The more straight forward, direct, and simple the better results you will get.
The crawlers look at the content and the other info we have discussed and make statistical assumptions based on relevancy. They determine how many times the words in your title and description are used in the content of the page.
I see a lot sites that have the company name as the title.
“Jones Mortgage” or “Home” or even “title” and a description tag that says “We have the best loan rates” or it still has the instructions from the web designer “place description here” (I really have seen this).
Then the content is a bunch of disconnected statements that do not bring home the title or the description. The only way a site like this will get high ranking is by paying for it. Have you checked the pay per click prices for any real estate or mortgage search phrase lately?
As you can see this is not rocket science. There are basic rules of engagement that you have to follow if you want to achieve good search engine ranking. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about any of the information in these posts on SEO.
I always welcome comments and subscribers.
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