Cincinnati is a great city. The “Queen City” as those of us residents like to call it. One of the important things about running a business in Cincinnati is ensuring your company website appears toward the top of the search engines for whatever your potential customers are typing into Google (or Yahoo or Bing).
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of bad information out there regarding SEO so I thought I’d share some information I learned at a recent conference from the guys at SEO Cincinnati.
Two ‘Flavors’ of SEO
I should mention for those unaware, SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization,” and according to John Crenshaw, the owner of a local Cincinnati web design and SEO company, SEO involves “any tasks designed to improve your rankings in the search engines. One of the things he mentioned to me was that there are two primary types of SEO:
- On-Site SEO – This includes anything you do on the site itself. Some items he mentioned were meta tags (title, keywords, description), the content of the pages themselves, SEO-friendly URL structure, etc.
- Off-Site SEO – This includes anything you do off-site. Some items he mentioned were link building and PR (public relations)
Mr. Crenshaw informed me that, while on-site SEO forms an important foundation for ranking a website, in most cases it’s the off-site work that actually gets you ranked. So he said his company spends 80 – 90% of a project on off-site SEO.
This is an important point to make as I always thought SEO simply involved all the on-site stuff and, once you had that down, you’d eventually rank pretty well. According to Mr. Crenshaw, that’s incorrect. He says for all but the lowest-competition industries, on-site SEO will not get you ranked by itself.
The On-Site Stuff
So, I mentioned that the on-site stuff is important, but it only forms the foundation of a good SEO campaign. Still, I’ll talk about it a bit here. When you look at the top of your browser window on this site you’ll see the words, “My Conversation with a Local SEO | All Greek Books.” Those are the words in the title meta tag on this particular blog post. Behind every website, there’s code that tells your web browser how to display a page, and the title meta tag is one line of that code that tells your browser what to display in the tab or window you have open. It also happens to be one of the most important on-site elements that search engines take into account when determining your rank. If the keyword you’re trying to rank for appears in the title meta tag, you’ll be much more likely to rank for that term than if it doesn’t.
One of the other on-site items John spoke about was the page content itself. He mentioned that if you’re trying to rank a page for a particular keyword, that keyword should appear at least once on the page itself. This helps the search engines determine what your page is about and if they think it’s more “on-topic” in relation to the keyword you’re trying to rank for, you’ll rank higher for that keyword. This also means that you shouldn’t try to rank a page for a particular keyword if that page doesn’t actually have anything to do with that keyword.
Off-Site Tips
As I mentioned before, Mr. Crenshaw explained to me that this is the most important part of SEO. All the on-site stuff in the world won’t help you if you don’t do off-site link building.
John mentioned link building is a touchy subject as there are two major forms of link building…black hat and white hat. Black hat involves building links using some automated strategy as fast as you possibly can. He said those links are usually low quality and don’t help rankings much, but people try to pump out as many of them as possible in an effort to let quantity compensate for quality.
The other type of link building, white hat link building, involves reaching out to website owners and encouraging them to write about you or write about a great piece of content you have on your own site. This is exactly what John did when we spoke at a recent networking event. After explaining all of this in detail, he said I should write about our conversation on my blog and that he’d be happy to help clarify any questions I had. And here I am writing about John and his company. This is white-hat link building and, according to John, can be extremely powerful but does require that you network and think “outside the box” in order to find linking opportunities.
Some other tips he had for off-site link building were:
- Contact a local news agency and pitch them a story involving your business. Many of them have websites where they’ll post the article with a link to your website.
- Attend networking events and speak with bloggers and website owners. Provide valuable information and they may write about it (like I’m doing here).
- Reach out to bloggers you may not be able to meet in person and spend time building a relationship. Comment on their blog, start a conversation, and eventually they may link to you.
- Write great content on your own site. This is a big one, but John told me that it’s not enough by itself. You should write great content and then promote it to bloggers and website owners. Let people know about it, because they can’t always find it by themselves, and encourage them to link to it if they find it useful.
- Create a cool tool. This is another big one. John says unique and useful tools naturally generate links because people find them so useful and/or interesting that they decide to share them on their own websites or blogs.
Hopefully this article cleared up a few things regarding getting your website ranked in the search engines. I want to thank John Crenshaw for his tips, advice, and general willingness to clarify any questions I had on this fairly complicated topic. If you’re looking for an SEO or web design company in the Cincinnati area, definitely get in touch with John at Razorlight Media.
