Another successful example of my SEO
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.
I have a question about how you battle for rank as you mentioned with Paul. What does that entail and how often do you make changes?
Well with paul’s site, because it was a flash site to begin with, and also because we did not have too much focus on SEO in the beginning, there were a lot of improvements to be made..
First of all, every single link generated to a listed real estate property has keywords in the URL :
http://www.paulmasoumi.com/showproperty.php/4/Coal%20Harbour/Shaw%20Tower/2003/1077/W.%20Cordova%20Street/condo/real/estate/listing/waterfront
Out of that URL, the ONLY part that actually dictates which property is shown is the /4/ part.
may as well be showproperty.php?id=4 !!!
To use this method you need to be well versed in handling the paths etc. Also, since this kind of practice became common for SEO, using absolute paths for all file links/inclusions became common as well!
Also what I did were generating these links in blank images/text only in a hidden layer… shhhhh!!! This isn’t criminal or anything - after all, those links actually do exist in the website - it’s just that the flash icon’s don’t show it too well… they are essentially replicas of the flash links except not visible so there is no harm done.
if it does ever get blacklisted by Google, I can always toss in a “non-flash-version” link somewhere, and that can generate the links legitimately and visibly.
This is really useful information. We just threw up the downloadable PDF feature from Matt Coddingtons interview we did. The other strategies I can always do more of!
p.s. Yes, it is coming. My laptop decided to be dumb this week and I need to replace the hard drive. I’ve been doing all our website stuff from work (well, I do that anyways :-)). But I’ll send you the link when it’s up on our site. Hopefully this weekend if I get my laptop back.
PDFs are good because they are written out of tags too. Have you ever created a form using PDF, through Adobe Designer? All elements/text are still in tag formats (different mechanism from HTML though) which is why it’s readable by robots!
That’s really neat. I didn’t quite know how a site that doesn’t update itself was supposed to go anywhere in the search engines. I’m still not sure how it all works but it’s still really interesting.
SEO has always been something I’ve dabbled in, but never really focused on, and this post actually MADE ME want to do more seo work. Good work on the rhonda website. #1 is always a good place to be, even if its not for a 1,000 per day click keyword.
I’ve actually done a lot of #1 positioning for misspellings of celeb’s names, but I always did it in the wrong ways, so my sites got blacklisted for being MFA sites (made for adsense). but, in the future, I am going to try my hand at some of these techniques you mentioned.
Would also like to see more insight in seo work in updates if possible.
I have tonnes of updates if you click on “SEO” category on my sidebar. There’s lots and lots of information on wordpress SEO, especially.
It’s like I’m writing blog posts about this blog sometimes, about its progress. There are many things you can do with WP to increase SEO.
Great Post! I’ve just finished the SEO process for one of my clients and she is also very specific with her keywords and the geographical region she wants to target. I will see if I can add some of your tips to her site and see if that improves the results. If I come up with anything, I’ll make sure to let you know too. Keep up the great work!
Sharing of information and knowledge is the power of the internet, and blogs are the culmination of it so far.
i intend to continuously experiment and study up SEO and other useful design techniques and share them here.
Jeff, like your site. Thanks for the tips on SEO.
I want to point at that your #2 note up in your head… small business owner graphic is spelled smal business owner.
I vote that you create a new acronym out of SMAL to solve the problem