Jefferson Graham
USA Today
LOS ANGELES — Yaffa Balsam was mystified.
Why did so many other family therapy websites pop to the top of Google search results listings, while her site was nowhere to be found?
It’s a question posed by thousands of small-business owners every day as they seek new customers online rather than through traditional Yellow Pages directories. These days, if a company website can’t be found on Google, it basically doesn’t exist.
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“I’ve had my website up for a year, and as far as I know, I haven’t found one new client from the Internet,” says Balsam, 50. “I want that to change.”
USA TODAY asked Chris Winfield, president of website consultant 10e20, to look at Balsam’s site, yourheartfeltsolutions.com, identify its weaknesses and offer tips on how to improve her rankings. His recommendations are instrumental for anyone with a website, as they are pretty universal.
Winfield has three top tips for Balsam: Her site needs to be linked to from other quality websites. She should have a clear website title. And she needs descriptive copy that includes the search terms (called keywords) that articulate how she wants to be discovered by search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, he says.
“Keywords direct the search engines to how to find you,” Winfield says. “And links are the holy grail. If a lot of sites link to you, that means you have authority and should be placed higher than others.”
Balsam’s front page was virtually devoid of text, beyond tabs for inside pages and contact information. Winfield says this is a huge no-no. Google’s spider crawls the Internet compiling website information, looking to keywords on the page for how to reference the site.
In his analysis, Winfield wrote: “Add some good, descriptive text about you and your services that gently incorporates the one- or two-keyword phrases that you are concentrating on. For example: ‘Family therapy specialist in Orange & Los Angeles County — Yaffa Balsam MFT.’ “
Keyword tools
The first step for many businesses is realizing exactly what their keywords should be. A house painter, for example, shouldn’t use “house painting” as a keyword, because it’s so broad. Instead, the painter might drill down to the more specific “interior house painting” or “exterior house painting.”
Winfield directed Balsam to a free tool Google offers for keyword tips —adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. There, USA TODAY typed in Balsam’s “Family Therapy” keyword, and found many variations, including “family therapist,” “family marriage therapy” and “family therapy counseling.”
These online keyword tools help Google’s advertising clients, who buy sponsored pay-per-click links to guarantee good placement in the search results. But they are available, free, to everyone.
Many businesses also look to pay-per-click advertising to augment their Web exposure. Paying Google or other search engines helps assure that your business will be near the top of the sponsored listings. Advertising is also a great way to figure out which keywords potential clients are using to find you, Winfield says. Both Google and rival Yahoo offer tools to show which ads were clicked.
In designing a website, Winfield says, the most important keyword for a business should be on the site’s title page (visible along the top of Internet Explorer or other web browsers). This is the first thing Google looks for when crawling the Web.
After keywords are under control, it’s time to start working on links to your site from others on the Web. Think of links as word of mouth. The more people on the Web who are “talking” about you, the more your site rises to the top.
Getting one great link from a top, heavily trafficked site (like www.engadget.com for a technology item) is worth more than 25 mentions on the many directory sites that are all over the Web, Winfield says.
Attracting links may seem daunting at first, but it’s easier than you might think. Most local chambers of commerce and trade associations have websites and will link to member websites.
Many businesses post notes on blogs and sign them with their website addresses. Or they post pictures on photo sites such as Yahoo’s Flickr, which can be tweaked with a link. Comments on popular social networking sites such as MySpace can also be signed with a name and a link. For example: my name, www.mywebsitelink.com.
Balsam’s reaction to Winfield’s suggestions: “I’m going to work on my links, and start a blog. I’m going to be busy.
“But this is exciting. I can see this is leading somewhere.”
