Optimize It
While your Web site address (also called a URL) should be on every marketing piece you put out, a large percentage of the people who visit your site will arrive there via a search engine. But with so many home improvement companies out there (a search on “Washington, D.C., remodeling,” using the Google search engine, returned nearly 6 million Web pages), getting your site to the top of the list is key to maximizing its utility.
The art of doing this is called search engine optimization (SEO), and to understand its methodology, it is important to know a little bit about how search engines work. To greatly oversimplify things, they use programs called “Web crawlers” or “spiders” that browse the Internet, gathering information on the content of certain pages. When someone queries a search engine, they get a list of Web sites that match their search words, sorted by relevance via a complex and secret algorithm.
Be forewarned: There are SEO techniques that are generally considered unethical and will get your site temporarily or permanently banned from some search engines if you are caught using them. Examples of this include hiding text (by using the same color for the font and background) so that it’s invisible to site visitors but is picked up by automated Web crawlers; and using keywords in meta tags, page headers, and descriptions (more on these in a minute) that are unrelated to the site’s content.
However, there are plenty of legitimate tricks you can use to increase your site’s ranking on search engine indices. Since Web crawlers latch onto page titles, headers, and meta tags (short descriptions of a page’s content), make sure the language you use is not only relevant, but is consistent with what terms consumers would search for. Homeowners are more familiar with the word “remodeling” than they are with the phrase “design/build,” so you’re better off, in this instance, using the more general term. In addition, consultant Nora DePalma says “people tend to search for ‘remodeler’ or ‘contractor’ in their town or city,” so it’s a good idea to include your location in page titles, descriptions, and meta tags.
However, diversifying your keywords will help catch Web surfers who use different or more narrow search terms. “Ideally, every page on your site would have a different description,” DePalma says, while conceding that “it is difficult to write with all of this in mind.”
Beyond that, the more quality information on a broad range of subjects that you can provide on your site, the better. DePalma suggests product information and trade show reviews as two “extra” sections of your site that will bring you more traffic. Don’t create content just for the sake of creating it, however. Pages with little useful information will, at a minimum, reflect poorly on your company, and may even result in your site being blocked by the search engines.
Another advantage to content-rich sites is that they are more likely to be linked to from other sites, a component of most search engines’ ranking algorithms. Participation in Web rings — groups of sites that are linked to one another and have related content — is an accepted method of increasing your link total. Just make sure the Web rings in which you participate are populated with legitimate sites.
Consultant David Alpert says that the deck is somewhat stacked against remodelers when it comes to search results. “There are many contractor referral businesses that spend a lot of money getting themselves ranked high,” he says. “It’s hard to get on top of them. It’s worth doing to a certain extent, but it’s not cost-effective for most remodelers beyond a particular point.” In other words, spending the money for an SEO professional probably isn’t worth it, unless you’re an extremely large company with a national presence.
However, Alpert does say that a program called Google AdWords is often worth the expense. It’s a pay-per-click service that allows you to purchase advertising on Google. You get to choose which search terms will trigger your ads, so you can limit your appearance to certain geographic areas. It’s not SEO in the strict definition of the term because your site doesn’t appear at the top of the results list — your ad is in the right-hand margin of the search-results page —but it should help drive traffic your way.Yahoo, another popular search engine, has a similar program.