Have you ever looked up your rankings on Google and been discouraged at the low volume of visitors?

Have you asked yourself “Is my website doing me any good?”

The secret is…even if you are a nonTechy, you can figure it out with two quick checks if your site has a chance of being ranked on Google, Yahoo, Bing or MSN.

There are dozens of factors which you can look at to determine whether or not a site is SEO friendly. We are going to focus on two.

Google ranks web pages, not the website as a whole. Every individual page is a traffic generator in Google for its own specific keywords. Needless to say, each page has the potential to add significantly to your site’s ranking.

3 Quick Checks

You can know within seconds if your site is SEO friendly:

1) Keywords in the Page Titles

Does your site have a page title that Google can find?

The page titles should be keywords, not company names, names of pages, or descriptions like ‘home’. This is precious space that Google highly values. Make sure you utilize it by stuffing it with valuable keywords which Google will index and draw relevant traffic in with.

Notice this site has used their precious space to put their own name. This is precious space that would be much better used for keywords.

The keywords in this page title are targeted towards the customer. The customer is likely to type these into Google. Since this site’s page is labeled with keywords, it has a much better chance of making it higher on Google.

2) URL with keywords

Does your site have URLs including relevant keywords? If you look at the links of your URL name, you may see something that looks like a can of alphabet soup. If so, this is another sign that your site is not SEO friendly.

• Choose an SEO friendly URL which is easy to remember (try to avoid =, %, &, and ? symbols)
  
• When possible, each page should have the main keyword for that page in the URLs

Not SEO Friendly: http://www.nothing.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2&Itemid=3

You can see above that there is an incomprehensible and hard to remember sequence of characters in the URL. This means nothing to the customer or to Google.

SEO Friendly http://www.paragonlandscaping.com/design_process.php

In this example you can see ’solutions’ is the keyword used. This will help tremendously if someone searches for Bandy Green Solutions.

3) Geographic Keywords

Are you located in a geographically dispersed region or do you do business locally?

If you are located locally, focusing in on your target cities is a brilliant strategy for

How many times on my home page is the city name listed? Have I listed names of cities that I want to work in?

If I search for the surrounding areas do I come up?

Take a look at the different pages on Paragon Landscaping for a great example of locally focused content. Their two main geographic markets are Fort Wayne and Indianapolis.

Location Specific Keywords

Notice the geographic regions of Indianapolis and Fort Wayne highlighted on this page. Through putting these locations in Indiana, Paragon is effectively reaching their target market and at the time of writing this blog were Number 1 on Google under the keyword “Fort Wayne Landscaping”.

Does your site include page titles or multiple keywords of your target locations?

How’s your Site?

If you’ve looked at your site and see that you don’t have proper page titles, URLs or customer centric content— don’t worry. IT Hands has different packages of SEO for every budget. Before doing SEO on a site, we determine the goals and needs of each customer. Call us for a free consultation on how we can take your SEO to the next level.

Not sure what SEO is? For a basic rundown on SEO and how it can benefit you, see our previous blog Straightforward SEO.