As a local search optimization professional, I’m steadily reviewing other sites and using Google all day long — on most days. What I’ve come to find through my website reviews, more so than not is that most websites aren’t optimized for on site strategies. Before you leave this page, due to you already knowing all there is to know about on site SEO – give me a moment of your precious time.
Many of the sites I’ve recently reviewed are those of my competitors — SEO Companies. To my surprise, most of these SEO Companies had a very poor on site SEO score.
Whoa — Why is This?
It’s simple — most people, including SEO’s like to presume that Link Building is number one. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are more than enough websites out there that teach things that are far from the truth. It’s not because these website authors are trying to lead you in the wrong direction, it’s solely due to the fact that they too was taught the wrong way. They paid a little bit too much attention to those who called themselves professionals, when in reality they are still a baby in this business.
I tend to not judge others. Those who fell into the trap of the blind leading the blind. These guys simply need to be taught how to do things more correctly.
One of the biggest misconceptions in the SEO community is:
Title tags: Google measures it in character limits. This is not true. Google measures title tags by pixels.
In order for you to make sure your title tags are SEO optimized correctly, you need to export your title tag data into an Excel doc. You then must change the font you’re using, to Arial. Make sure to use font size 12. This is exactly what Google uses.
Set the Excel column width to 520 pixels — that’s Google’s cut off limit. Anything more than the standard 520 pixels is going too be too long and anything under 350 pixels is going to be too short. Follow the directions I’ve provided you 100%
My Recommended guideline for perfectly optimized title tags:
Roughly 50 to 65 characters in length.
Use unique titles on every page.
Use the title tag keyword twice (once at the start, followed by separator, and then once again in a call to action).
If relevant, include a geo-qualifier (such as Kentucky or Morehead, Ky).
Image Optimization Tips:
One of the biggest mistakes I see, is how webmasters (webdummies) use numbers and other crap to identify an image. I’m not talking about the image ALT text, I’m referring to the “name” of the image. This plays an important role in your overall optimization score.
Image names should be description in nature. They should accurately explain to a search crawler what the image is about. If your image is used as a link, the ALT tag functions in place of the anchor text. A linked image should follow this structure:
By ensuring that all images are properly named and tagged, you will not only increase the SEO value of those images, but you will increase the likelihood of receiving referral traffic from image search results.
Local Search Optimization isn’t just about Link Acquisition. Above I’ve provided a couple of awesome tips you can be using, to help you do much better in search. I will be providing a more in depth article, including more advanced tutorials, in our upcoming blog posts. Stay tuned!
