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SEO Tips For Your Window Cleaning Web Site
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In other words, optimizing your web site so that it ranks better in the major search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing when someone performs a search for your product, service or subject matter. Whether you are building your web site yourself or having someone else build it for you, you should at least have a basic understanding of SEO practice to determine why your site ranks well or doesn't rank well. Because let's face it, if they can't find you, then you virtually don't exist.
Now there are a lot of complex ways of achieving a better ranking on search engines that include link building, signatures on other peoples sites, keyword spamming, URL re-directs and several questionable tricks known as Black Hat SEO. You can learn about all of these techniques and more by doing your own search but for this article I am going to concentrate on the 'On Page SEO' techniques. In the world of search engine technology content is king! What's actually on your web page will serve you better for SEO in the long run. The truth is, Google and all the other big search engines pride themselves on delivering relevant content. So we are going to look at the top 7 'on page' SEO practices.
Top 7 On Page SEO Tips
#1 Web Page Name
When you view a web page in your browser, you will notice at the top of the browser window that there is the name of the page you are viewing. If you look at the top of your browser window now you will notice that the name of this page is 'SEO Tips For The Window Cleaning Web Site.' Surprisingly there are many web sites out there that leave this blank or it says 'Untitled' or they are given vague names like 'Home, Links, gallery, Prices, etc'
Make sure your web pages have names that are descriptive and contain your best keywords. If you don't know what your keywords are then now is the time to start writing a list. As an example, I will list keywords relevant to this site. Keywords include window cleaning, window washing, tips, tutorials, techniques, tools, videos, training, DVD, etc If you are designing a web site for your window cleaning business it's not only important to use keywords like 'window cleaning' but you should also use the name(s) of the city, town communities that you service so that it is more relevant to the people searching in your area. ie: 'Toronto Window Cleaning' is more relevant than just 'Window Cleaning.'
Lastly, don't forget that proper page naming must be done throughout your entire site to help your rankings.
#2 HTML Header Tags - most importantly H1 tags
H1 html tags are basically title tags that surround the title/name of your web page. Think of it like the heading of a newspaper article or magazine story. The title instantly tells the viewer the subject matter of the story or in our case, our product or service. Again it is important to incorporate your main keywords here. H1 tags are read by search engine robots as they crawl the web and helps them to catogorize web content. Your H1 tag tells Google "Here is my web page, it is about my window cleaning service in Buffalo NY." Now guess what happens when people in Buffalo search for "Buffalo Window Cleaning." Relevant sites are pulled up and listed in order of strength based on several factors including your H1 tags. See below for the H1 tag on the page you're reading now.
#3 Using Combinations Of Keywords Throughout Your Site Text.
You should have several keywords in mind for the service you provide as well as the areas where you service. Your city name(s), communities, etc even postal/zip codes can be benefit you in search results. Quite often when I'm working on one of my web sites I will right a line of text describing what I do or the benefits of my products or services then I'll take a step back and think about how I can say the same thing but in a more SEO friendly way. For instance, a company may simply put "servicing your community since 2001." Nothing wrong with that but for better SEO response you might want to change it to "providing window cleaning service in the Denver area since 2001." Just be careful not to get too repetetive or your site will read like it was written by a 5th grader. Just casually slip in your keywords here and there. Also try variations. On one page use "window cleaning" and on another try "window washing."
#4 Descriptive Text Links
When I first started building web sites I bought a CD collection of cool web buttons, bullets, and other graphics to use in web pages. Now it may be eye catching to use a graphic button for your visitors to click on to the various links within your site but unfortunately they do very little in the way of SEO. Take a look at the 3 links below and guess which one has stronger SEO value.
The download button graphic may be more eye catching but text has stronger SEO power. And so it stands to reason that the more descriptive the text is in your links, the better the SEO juice. Now I'm not saying get rid of all your graphics but you should certainly look at where using text will serve you better. And remember, this is especially true for any link pointing back to your home page. In fact, make sure you link back to your domain.com url and not to the index.html file. More text links pointing toward your domain, the better.
#5 Using 'ALT' Tags In With Your Images
Okay so I just told you about the SEO downfall of using images/graphics instead of text in your web pages so should you avoid using images alltogether? Of course not, especially if you know how to give them some SEO power. You do this by using the old 'ALT' tag along with your images. The 'ALT' tag was popular in the early days of the internet when most people were on dial up internet service. Because they had slow connections, many people, especially educational institutions would set their browsers to not display images. What would then happen is when they got to the section of the page where there would normally be an image, it would display a descriptive text in its place as an alternative. Take a look at the image below. Google, Bing and Yahoo don't quite know what to make of this image but I have placed an 'ALT' tag within the 'IMAGE' tag that reads "Learn Window Cleaning Skills".
Now let's look at the html code behind this image.
See the 'ALT' attribute at work? One last thing about images helping your SEO, I could actually improve its SEO juice by naming the image file something like 'learn_window_cleaning.jpg' but I think you get the idea.
#6 HTML META Tags
Now I know a lot of web developers don't put a lot of stock into META as they don't have much power like they did in the early days of the world wide web. But they can still be handy. The 'description' meta tag is most important but it doesn't hurt to use the 'keyword' tag. You may be wondering why I'm not making a big fuss over the 'keyword' meta tag. Keywords are critical right?Well the truth is, too many web developers would spam up their list of keywords here so the bigger search engines started to ignore this tag in favour of actually web page content. Anyway, look below to see my meta tags at work for the site you're on now. There are a couple of other meta tags there as well but you can do your own research on these and other meta tag attributes.
#7 Fresh & Refreshed Content
All the search engines (the ones that matter anyway) send out robots or spiders to crawl the web and index pages and check to see what content is new and what appears to be a dead or orphaned site. Google, Bing and Yahoo pride themselves on their search technology so you can imagine if you performed a search for the latest computer equipment and on the first page of results there's a review for the first generation iMac. That would be pretty sad. So how does this affect you and your window cleaning web site?
Many people take up blogging as a way to add new content to their site. Some install twitter widgets or connect their Facebook page to their business page. I suggest you pick a method that is easy for you to stick with. Also adding a 'what's new' page could be good. Have you added a new add on service to your business? Well do a launch page for it. Expanded your service area? It's time to tell the world, all the while letting the search engine robots know that there are things happening on your site. Sometimes you can just go in and tweak some text on a page or change up an image or two (don't forget to tweak the image 'alt' tag as well).
By the way, just the fact that I've written this article and added it to my site will contribute to improving my site SEO. Not only is it fresh content but it also adds a new subject matter and group of keywords that will help bring people to this site. So thank you for reading and I hope this information will help with your own SEO.
All images, and text on this page are © 2009 & 2010
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