When I initially took on the website contract for Rhonda Sherwood (her website is at www.rhondasherwood.com), she asked me if it was possible that her website would be returned at the top if somebody searched for “financial planning for women in Vancouver” and other related keyphrases. Her focus was mostly female clients, and of course, the phrase “financial planning” is important, not to mention the geographic distinction of Vancouver, BC.

And here are the results, as I checked and verified on Google just now :

financial planners for women vancouver bc
financial planning women vancouver bc
rrsp gic non redeemable federal lia
financial education for women vancouver
women financial planning vancouver
women financial planner vancouver

All of these search phrases return her website on #1 on Google!!!

Of course, the fact is that there is not too much competition in Vancouver for that niche yet in the web world, so it was a bit easier than the usual. Paul Masoumi’s site (www.paulmasoumi.com) was much tougher, and is still battling.

More steps to take to get her site’s ranking even higher are these :

• I will get her to sign up on financial advice forums, blogs etc. in order to seed links all over those websites. External links from high-pageranked sites can do wonderous for SEO.
• Down the road, if the competition for that niche gets tougher on Google, I will get her to add a blog and update it regularly.

Here are some useful tips when you try to focus SEO on certain keyphrases/keywords :

• Save the important phrases into PHP variables, and recycle them through the site. Embed them as alt texts to images. Use it in the meta tags. Use it for links, even. In Rhonda’s case, “financial planning & advice for women” was saved as $maintag in the PHP code, and was used throughout. This way, if you ever want to optimize that important phrase to improve the SEO, you can easily change it with a snap!
• Make sidebar links. Menu links are restricted in terms of its anchor text (anchor text is the text between <a>TEXT</a>). Make sidebars that allow for longer anchor text, and use the keyphrases there as well.
• Use text links at the top menu bar if you can help it. If you get a good source code for an effective CSS based drop-down menu, you don’t need to use images. You can pull off the great looks with better search results.
• Make the title of each page different. Also, if geographical location is important, include that in the title.
  Here is a sample code :<?
  $pageid = 2;
  $pagetitle = “This section’s title”;
  ?>

  <title>Site Name - <?echo $pagetitle?>, City, Province</title>
  
  It’s better to have the $pagetitle BEFORE The Site Name, but this is up to you on how your client wants the title to look like.

• Start each page’s contents with the title, IN TEXT. Also, using subtitles/brief descriptions on each page effectively places the relevant keywords near the top of each page, giving it more value!
• Linking to PDF documents that have a lot of data and content can help. Google can search within a PDF document to pick up the words!

So there it is, a very brief overview of my SEO techniques I used for Rhonda’s site.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 16th, 2007 at 12:30 am and is filed under Web Development, Marketing and Media, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.