When you are working on a low budget and doing the web site yourself, here are some local seo tips that can help you bring your site up near the top of Google and Yahoo. One of the first things I do is to pick out a site name that has at least one of the keyword search terms your customers would use to find you. As I discussed earlier, I use Market Samurai, for all my seo needs. I also use it to help pick out my domain name for the web site I am designing. Today we are going to be finding out what would work best for our fictional fence company located in Miami.
The first thing I would do is to find some keywords that will bring people to my site. Since this site is going to be for a local Miami fence company, the search term Miami Fence Company is going to be the one of the top choices for a domain name. miamifencecompany.com is already taken, but miamifencecompany.net is still available. What I am looking for is a domain that has the words fence and the city Miami in this case in it. You might also try miamifences.com, and fencesmiami.com. Those are both taken so my next choices are miamifences,org which is available and fencesmiami.net. What I am trying to do here is to take two of the most popular search terms for fence companies which is the local city and fences, hence miamifences, or fencesmiami. With the choices that I have the best choice is always a domain that ends in .com then .net if com is not available. Digging a little deeper I find premiermiamifences.com is available. That’s It! We’ve found our domain name. The reason I chose this domain name is because it includes common search term miami fences and it also includes the word premier which can be used in your description and title meta tag.
By using great search phrases and words (premier+miami+fences) that people would use to find you in your domain name, title and description, google will understand those words are important to your site. Thus when people search on those words, google will take the fact you use them in all three (title, description, and domain name) into account when deciding who to put at or near the top for searches on those words. Hopefully this means they will look closely at your site as one of the top results. Google does not stop there in deciding who ranks at the top, but that does play an important part in it. Back links, age of domain, and many other factors also are important.
One thing I get all the time is that the local company I am working with already has a domain, or they only want a domain that has the company name in it. I can certainly understand that, especially if you are an established company with years of being in business. In those cases, I recommend you might consider two web sites. One with your company name as the domain and one to be used strictly as an advertising site. Branding, is as important many times as keyword search terms are. If your company has already spent thousands of dollars advertising, and the company name is well known in the local area, you may not need to add the second site. But just remember you may very well be the established leader in your local market. But Google does not know that and so you will still need to optimize your site using the other steps I have outlined. And you can still use those keyword search phrases in your web site title and description. The bottom line is understanding the search engines and how they decide who best relates to the search term the user has typed in. If you have a small local business and want to get your company’s web site at least on the first page, and if you follow this simple process in picking out a domain name, you will have a jump on the competition.
