A few years back me and a colleague of mine were going back and forth holding the number one position in the local market for Portland web design and Portland SEO, and it was amazing to watch our efforts change from day to day. Most of what was true back then still applies except you have a lot more fish in the pond now which means local searches are not as easy to dominate as they use to be. But one thing that is more true now than ever before is customers are doing more local searches.

So if you have a local business, let’s say Search Engine Marketing is what you are doing then you should not be promoting your business name Killelea Consulting as your main key word phrase .. you should be targeting Portland SEM: Portland Search Engine Marketing. If you change your strategy to simply do nothing more than this … you will benefit greatly. Think as your potential customers think. Targeting your local market works! Now it doesn’t end there.. you will need to find a page in your site that you are gonna target for these key words as well. Normally your index page will be the focus of your main key word phrase.

Once you have determined which page you are going to promote with your top keyword phrase, you can get to work. Use your keyword phrase term Portland SEM : Portland Search Engine Marketing as your title tag, write a unique description for the page and this description should contain Portland SEM again. Your description might read like this:

Title: Portland SEM : Portland Search Engine Marketing
Description: Killelea Consulting offers Search Engine Marketing (SEM) in Portland and surrounding areas. Providing Search Engine Marketing Solutions for small and medium sized businesses. Call 503-997-6935 today.
URL: http://www.portlandsem.com/

Many want to know how important is it that the url contain keywords? The answer is simple, it helps! But it wont win you top placement by itself. Ideally you have to put some fore-thought into buying your domain and ideally have http://www.portlandsem.com/ if not, and you can afford it, see who owns it and offer to buy it, as long as it’s not a Marketing company I bet you can get it for the right price. Additionally I have read if you register your domain for multiple years that helps in your page rank as well. If you are not in a position to go out and buy a specific domain you can still develop your site smart by using seo tattics when building additional pages. For example you own the domain www.marykillelea.com and you have a services page… if this was my site I’d build that page to read like this <http://www.marykillelea.com/sem-services.html  .

Next you need to go thru your home page content and sprinkle in your keyword terms, Portland SEM or Portland Search Engine Marketing. It’s a bit tricky because you don’t want to stuff your page with these keywords but you want the keyword density to be at about 2-5%. Here is a Keyword density tool to use when you get to that point. Also make sure that you place your keyword terms “Portland SEM” in a H1 tag at the top of the page.

You are almost done. It’s now time to go thru and make sure your alt tags for all of your images and links are tagged with Keyword terms. The terms you have within your site are important and they should not be overlooked as they are fabulous opportunities to use them as links for your site. For example on your home page you talk about Portland SEM Services that would be linked to http://www.portlandsem.com/

As you can see there are many things you can do to each of your various pages in your website to optimize them for the search engines. And you can see it’s not just one thing.. there are many factors to optimizing your site and then there’s even more SEO tattics to take to gain additional success, those tips will come later.

p.s. by the way as of this post 6/10/08 on Google Working Web Solutions is listed in the #1 position for the key word phrase SEO Portland, and #3 for Portland SEO and I’ve lost positioning on Web Design Portland so I need to re-focus my efforts there. I’ve just been busy with helping my clients have success I’ve dropped a bit off the map. So that is an important thing to remember yes you must take care of your clients but don’t forget about your own SEO. :-) 

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