DIY SEO Website Audit Tools:Freebies!
Okay, you’ve got a new client, or you have your own new website build underway, and you’re thinking “hmm…I wonder if this SEO stuff that I’m doing is best practices strategy and tactics…” and you’ve not yet found a way to determine that? You want to know if your website is going to perform well, SEO wise in Google et al….you want to check the “health” of that site….and you don’t know how?
If that describes where you “are” in your own DIY SEO strategy, then I’ve got two links for you….links for totally free “health checks” for your website or a clients…but a disclaimer is necessary up front, eh!
Canadian Citations — Mid-Year Updates!
After the half-year mark around July 1st or so, our thoughts turned back to Canadian citations…and we were a bit surprised to learn that our own working master Canadian citation list has changed somewhat so we thought we’d update that list right here!
First, let us begin with the best of all original lists for Canadian citations, from David Mihm the well-known and respected LOCAL SEO expert, which can still be found here….
DIY Canadian SEO-Chapter 4
I guess that most of us know how to read and no, this is my lead to the whole world of <H1> & SEO rankings, regardless of how dumb that sounds…after all, you’re reading this, eh?
What that means for us SEO practitioners, is that if you read, then you should surely understand both the usage and importance of using an <H1> tag, and simply put, it’s used as a header for a few following paragraphs and it explains what’s to follow as succinctly and as honestly as is possible.
To Dot-CA or not to Dot-CA?
Many Canadian businesses are faced with a conundrum: do they set up their website on a .ca domain or on a .com domain. There are pros and cons for each, and some of those are related to SEO, to the rankings that the website can achieve in the search engines.
The first question a business should answer is whether a website is targeting just a Canadian audience or whether it is targeting a world audience (including Canada, but also the USA, Europe, Asia, etc.). This post will address only those businesses targeting primarily a Canadian audience.
I will say only that if your business is targeting a world audience, and you do choose to use a .ca domain, we have seen no evidence that it will hurt your rankings in New York or London. However, .ca does say “Canadian” and it is reasonable to expect change at any time – that Google and Bing might one day wake up and decide not serve up a .ca listing in results outside of Canada, or at least to reduce their rankings.
Getting the SEO Basics Right!
While most of you reading this are probably more advanced SEO’s, there are a lot of people out there with no clue about SEO. For these people, helping them with the basics make a huge difference. I found a site for an Ontario hockey team that looks like getting the basics right would make a big difference.
Since the Reign didn’t put any keywords in the meta tags, I am forced to guess at what they might want to show up for. I am guessing Ontario hockey (90,500 global searches) and hockey in Ontario (9,900 global searches) could be good terms for them.
Currently, for both terms, the Reign ranks on the third page (personalization turned off/logged out) of Google.com – but doesn’t even show up in a Google.ca search (from California) for Ontario hockey, and shows up in position 151 for hockey in Ontario. All of this to say the basics can probably go a long way for the Reign’s website.
Home Pages Must RULE!
When it comes to the DIY (do it yourselfer) for SEO here in Canada, like many others globally, your ‘actions’ speak louder than your ‘code!’ Least in my mind they do and to move along in this series, today I want to talk about overall structure of the content on your website home page to begin with. What’s that? Well no matter whether you call it index.html or default.php, home.htm, default.asp or whatever the case may be, the page I’m going to be talking about today is the page that ALL website visitors “land on” when they type (or click a link on Google if you’re an SEO campaigner, eh!) in your domain name.
Home pages MUST rule. That is, if you think about it, you get one chance and once chance only to impress the website visitor enough that they want to “stick” on your website long enough to learn enough to get them to contact you or buy something. You get one chance. And that one chance comes from your home page, where they first “meet” your site and your abilities, eh! Read more
DIY Canadian SEO – Google LOCAL Maps!
If you’ve ever wondered what the criteria might be, to see if you need to take advantage and use the Google LOCAL Maps SEO to gain new clients or customers, then here’s a rationale that you can follow to see what’s involved.
To rank well in the Google MAPS area, or the LOCAL search engine comprises a set of tasks that must be accomplished in order to both be listed, and then ranked. But before you bother, here’s what you should know to see if this is the best way to gain that new traffic….but let me ask first, do you want new business? And if so, then this simple DIY blog post will help, eh!
Are you a LOCAL business, would be the first question?
That is, think for a moment as to where your own clients/customers come from. Do they live within say 50 miles of your offices? Or do they work within that 30-50 mile radius? Do you sell products or services that are consumed by those same clients/customers within that 30-50 mile limiation? If the answer to any of these is “yes,” then you run a LOCALLY oriented business.
DIY Canadian SEO – Chapter 3
Okay, let’s see if we can finish off the whole <META> tags area with this third chapter on DIY Canadian SEO, shall we?
Once you’ve read Chapter 2 here, and understand that I do NOT like using (under any circumstances) the <META> keyword tags for a whole variety of reasons, you should then learn that I do like using the <META> description tag for all clients…but what’s the difference, you ask?
Simple, really. The <META> keyword tag, as I explained is a simple — they give information about an HTML page to the browser but are usually not seen by the user who visits the site. They have been severely limited in usage over the past 5 years or so due to the fact that they were so easy to manipulate to try to force higher rankings for websites that Google has simply said that their algo no longer uses them to rank a website at all. Yahoo still uses them but ever ever so slightly to count towards a site’s rankings that it just doesn’t matter. And BING, well, they say that using same does count…maybe not much and maybe not a lot….but on their site they do offer up some <META> keyword advice, all of which I discount and do not believe. In my world, the <META> keyword is dead for any real SEO rankings use, and that’s that.
DIY Canadian SEO….Chapter 2
The Whole <META> keyword tag Schmozzle…explained!
To carry on with our DIY Canadian SEO series I thought that today I’d give you the straight goods on the whole <META> keyword tag issue that seems to have been on many forums in the past few months…and what’s spot-on and what’s not!
First, what is a <META> keyword tag? Wiki offers this definition which works for me and should for you too! In one form, meta elements can specify HTTP headers which should be sent before the actual content when the HTML page is served from Web server to the client. For example: <meta name=”keywords” content=”wikipedia,encyclopedia”/> In this example, the meta element identifies itself as containing the ‘keywords’ relevant to the document, Wikipedia and encyclopedia….do you follow me here?
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DIY Canadian SEO…Chapter 1
In the next few months, I’m going to be putting forth a series of Do It Yourself SEO chapters for one and all to enable any website owner to learn what we feel are the best tactics to use, in gaining search engine rankings that climb. This series of chapters will be somewhat detailed so that not only can I explain the “how-to’s” of Canadian SEO, but also the “whys” of same. So here’ s the first chapter, on the creation and development of the <TITLE> tags and why that is so so important.
Okay, first look at your own title tag, which of course is up top in the browser’s blue bar. See that string of data up there that comes before the brand name of the browser itself? Well, that’s the title tag. For example, here’s what I see when I go to one of our websites at www.kkti.com — <title>Hamilton web developer — Hamilton Search Engine Optimization– KKT INTERACTIVE</title>.
We're in the Globe!
We're in the current Canadian Dealer News Magazine!
