Search Engine Optimization for the DIY Vermont Webmaster

Why are some Vermont sites on the first page of Google, Yahoo, MSN or other search engine search results and what can I do to get my site on the first page?

This is the most common question we receive from "do it yourself" Vermont website owners and the answer is search engine optimization. What is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization is part of search engine marketing and deals with increasing the number of visitors to your website from natural search engine listings / search results (non paid listings). Basically, search engine optimization is marketing to machine/search engine algorithms to increase your sites relevance and hopefully/ultimately web traffic. We say hopefully because optimization is not necessarily a guarantee of more visitors/traffic but in most cases you will see improvement.

What can I do myself to improve my Vermont sites ranking in the search engines?

There are a lot of things you can do to improve your sites ranking in the search engines but we will stick to the most important and common methods here.

• Create unique, relevant titles (<title> </title>) for all of your pages that include your keywords/phrases.

• Edit your current web pages and replace vague wording with keywords or phrases relevant to the subject of the page.

• Be sure to always use original, unique, quality content on each page.

• Use descriptive, relevant meta tags for every page on your site that include your keywords and or phrases but don't over-do it.

• Be sure that all pages on your site are accessible from the homepage via hyperlinks or by creating a sitemap.

• Get high quality, relevant sites to link to your site. This can be a bit tricky but as long as you offer unique, valuable content people will find and link to your pages. If you have a non informational site such as an online store it can be hard to build natural inbound links but it's not impossible. Create static, optimized "product information" pages which other sites would want to link to. Another good way to get inbound links is to write informational articles about your industry and submit them to the many free article submission services. Try to stay away from link exchanges if you can help it as most are bad news.

We know a lot of this can be a bit hard to understand but with a little practice and a lot of research you will find a method that works well for your site. If you don't feel comfortable optimizing your Vermont site or if you would rather leave the work to professionals simply visit our free quote page and leave the hard part to us.