Simple Search Engine Optimization: Getting the Basics Right

I recently did some search engine optimization consulting for a local business, Indresano Landscaping, who was not using Drupal or any other Agaric services, and it was a nice opportunity to review the basics of SEO -- and to realize just how much Drupal does for us.

• Better title text.
• Name of business (ideally with keyword or keywords in it, for instance Indresano and Landscape) in h1 (page title), h2 text
• Other people linking to the site.
• Register on Google Places for the towns one does business in. Google Places made it very easy to add Natick, Wellesley, etc.
• Location markup - see http://searchengineland.com/how-to-use-rich-snippets-structured-markup-for-high-powered-seo-99081 for a way to mark up your address so it shows in search engines and also http://www.seo.com/blog/secrets-local-search-marketing-webinar-summary/
• More pages with content about targeted words/phrases
• Video (similar to location, Google and other search engines break out videos and show them with more prominence than content that might otherwise rank higher.
• Post landscaping related things (or the subject related to your business) to the site. Do you read things about the business that interest you? Write about that!

Before, Indresano Landscaping had Home Page as the first page's title instead of anything involving landscape or landscaping. The menu items had no keywords, and neither did the page paths. I corrected these as well as the overall page title (the one in the title tag in the head). Virgil Indresano is not about to start blogging so there was no impetus to move to a proper blog platform like WordPress or a CMS like Drupal. Instead we corrected the above problems with the default hosted web site template.

One significant failure: It is hosted with a GoDaddy site that provides 5 pages, and renaming the pages did not provide redirects-- a big SEO no-no. In the long run the renaming will likely pay off but 301 redirects should have been possible to eliminate any danger of the short term hit.