Increasing your search engine visibility and ranking is usually not as difficult as people think it is or make it out to be. Especially if you are a local business, it really comes down to some simple, easy to follow tips, many of which can be done in just a few minutes. Follow the guidelines presented here and you are sure to give your website’s houston seo consultant a big boost!

Minute 1: Find Keywords

You are the expert on your business and your field. You know what you are good at, and what your customers are looking for. Off the top of your head, write down 10 or 20 things that customers are looking for when they need your help. Try to keep these as general as possible, like “dog sitting” or “wedding flowers”. Look over your list and pick the one phrase you think people are searching for the most. Add your city and state to the end of that word, like this: “Carpet Cleaning Lincoln, Nebraska”. That is the phrase we will optimize our page for.

Minute 2: Add a page title containing your keyword

This is pretty simple. If we are dealing with your home page here, you really, really want to make sure the page title includes your key phrase. The closer your phrase is to the start of your title, the better. Ideally your title will be Keyphrase. Business name, like this: “Carpet Cleaning Lincoln, Nebraska – Bob’s Carpet Cleaning”.

Minute 3: Add meta description containing your keyword

Meta description is what search engines use to display a snippet of your page. With most blogging and e-commerce packages, this is generated for you but can be overridden. You have about 160 characters to say what you need to say. Think of this as a mini sales pitch. If you include keywords or phrases here, they will be displayed as bold text in search results for those terms.

Minute 4: Add a heading containing your keyword

Search engines consider headings to be the topic of your page. In HTML, they look like this:

This page is awesome!

The numbers determine size and importance, so h1 is most important while h6 is a sub-sub-sub-sub-subtopic. There should only be one H1 on your page and it should closely match the page title you created earlier.

Minute 5: Add content containing your keyword

After all, what is a heading without content? Spam, according to the search engines. To get the best ranking, you need to have good, quality content on the topic decided upon to display to visitors and to search engines. In my experience, many business owners have trouble coming up with content for their site. In reality, it’s not that hard! You are the expert and people want to read what you have to say. Think of it like writing articles for a newsletter you’re sending out to your customers – tell them something interesting that is useful, and slip in a note about how you …

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Did you hire a web design company to create a slick, eye-popping site for your business? Did you have a professional copywriter spin some compelling copy for you to convert those browsers into buyers? If so, good for you, you’re on the right track. However, we have some bad news for you. If you aren’t doing something to drive traffic to your site, then you’re just wasting your time and money. Luckily, SEO services firms exist to fulfill that third vital step, search engine optimization and marketing.

But how do you go about finding an SEO services firm you can rely on? Let’s face it-there are plenty of people out there who have one goal in mind. To squeeze every dollar out of you that they possibly can. But you want someone who is truly interested in delivering results and helping grow your business. Now believe it or not, the good guys aren’t hard to find. Just look for:

A free website evaluation – The first thing you should always check for is a free website evaluation. The company should take a look at your site, figure out what’s right and what’s wrong with it, and offer you a free report. They will then give you recommendations on what course of action makes the most sense for your individual situation. You shouldn’t pay a dime until you actually sign a contract with them.

Up-front pricing – It’s pretty common to visit an SEO firm’s site, click on their deals, and find no prices. Why? They want you to pick up the phone, call them, and get hooked. The SEO company you can truly trust will keep things transparent by listing their prices on their web page.

A breakdown of services – SEO services tend to carry a bit of mystique about them. Meaning, we know they work, but often when we hire people for them, we don’t really know exactly what they’re doing. The right SEO services firm will take the mystery out of the entire process by offering a complete breakdown of their services on their website.

Someone who refuses to guarantee a #1 ranking – Sure it might seem like you want this guarantee, but trust us… you don’t. And here’s why–no one can truly guarantee the top ranking. Especially not within a certain period of time. If they try to tell you something different then they’re a liar. Sure they should be able to guarantee that your rankings will improve, but number one? Nope.

An understanding of offsite and onsite SEO – There’s a lot that goes into developing an effective SEO strategy. With that in mind, make sure the SEO services firm you choose performs both onsite and offsite services. Why? Well, think of it like battle strategy.  First of all, you need to make sure your home base is secured. Or in SEO terms, your website needs to be set up with the tools to increase the chances that it gets crawled by Google and …

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