Whats next in SEO

The future is friendly...well at least for SEO (search engine optimization). Perhaps I should use that term loosely, however it is now becoming easier for the owner of a website to do their own SEO. SEO has changed dramatically over the years, and the rules seem to change everyday. Back in the day, you needed a degree in gibberish just to make sense of it all. Now days, there are programs and online SEO tools to help you get your site ranking up on top. Many of them for FREE! I'll list a couple of my favorites at the bottom of this post. There are still many determining factors behind what will affect the ranking of your site. The largest contributing factors are SEO, links, and site content. To get top ranking in highly competitive industries a site needs lots of "on-topic" pages of content, relevant incoming links from a variety of sources, and, solid site optimization. Refer to Team Gophers post on website optimization here. Now if you all have read my posts in the past, you will now that I will always say, "SEO and site content go hand in hand". Your site can have the best content and be the most informative site out there, but without proper SEO that is relative to your content it may go unnoticed. In short...make sure that your content includes your keywords in your SEO. Keywords + Keyword Placement in Content = Happy Site. If you have heard of people using links, or linking systems to gain higher ranking for their site, you probably think of SPAM sites. Google and Yahoo are now throwing out penalties to sites that are cramming links of no relevance. But, there are good linking practices that can and will help your site. Here is a very basic example of an inbound link coming from The Lawn Blog to Gopher Forums. The Lawn Blog has a link the Gopher Forums. The Lawn Blog is a blog / article site that has content that is relevant to the green industry. Gopher Forums contains content that is also relevant to the green industry. Both sites are very different from each other, however they share a lot of the same content. Thus, making the link relevant and telling the search engines that it is worth the ranking. Did that make sense? I hope so because at the moment Google uses inbound links as a major factor for their ranking system. I am sure that the future of SEO will change dramaticly. But, what I have gone over here will still be concidered the most important practices you can do for your site. What is the point on having a website that nobody can find? That was a rhetorical question. So where is SEO going? Well it may be hard to say, but more localized searches will be coming down the pipeline. Have you ever used your cell phone to do a web search? A lot of people are and, you will need to modify your SEO with your zip / postal codes, city and state. That way when a mobile device completes a search it will pull up local websites, basically within that mobile devices local calling area. Sounds cool eh? Well that is just around the corner. Web CEO Free SEO Tools

[Steve]

Lawn care business tips

Great post Richard. What would you say would be the most common mistake an lco makes with their site as far as search engine optimization?

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The vast majority of LCO's and their websites lack specific content...heck just any old content. I remember talking with an LCO owner and I asked him to write an editorial for his site. When he sent it to me it contained two sentences for the home page and 5 bulleted services...thats it? He told me he mows lawns and picks weeds, what more could he say? I had a chuckle.

Here are some great content ideas to add.

1. Add your area and zip to every title page, and included it in the footer of each page.
2. Your contact info should be on the footer of each page.
3. Add a newsletter to your site to educate your clients.
4. Have a pest and disease bulletin..what is affecting your area.
5. A short blurb about yourself and how the company started.
6. What services you offer and not just a bullet note, but describe your services.

Those are just some ideas I am sure you all can come up with some good ones. Also always try to make sure to update your old content with fresh content. Now I don't mean remove the old stuff, but perhaps archive it...it will still generate hits.

[Steve]

Originally Posted by [b

Quote[/b] ]1. Add your area and zip to every title page, and included it in the footer of each page.
2. Your contact info should be on the footer of each page.

I bet these two ideas alone could drastically effect the outcome of searches and they would be so easy to fix!