Key SEO Elements Of Your Home Page

NumberOneOnTheList SEO Tips Video

Presentation 16 July 2013

TRANSCRIPT

So, at any rate you’ve got the orange handout, right? I have these ready for a presentation that I did about ten days, two weeks ago, for a group of visiting Russian businessmen who spoke no English, and I did the whole presentation through an interpreter. I thought I had these guys interest and all that, I finished my part. The next person up was Master Chi, a ninth degree black belt, who had studied for four years with the Dalai Lama. He stopped a clock with his mind, he did all this unbelievable stuff. I’m sure those guys went out of there not necessarily remembering a word I said, but that’s okay. Fortunately I didn’t have to follow him, that would have been worse.

Alright, so; everybody’s website is in a state of flux, everybody’s website is a work in progress, right? None of this stuff is laid out in stone. So whether you’re thinking about, down the road, updating your website, revising it, doing something different, creating a website, so many elements you want to do. An easy mistake to make is to name your homepage, “Home”, because that says absolutely nothing about you or your business, and that’s one of the first things Google looks at to see, “What is this?”, “What is this webpage?” When looking at it. “What is this thing?” If it says “Home”, that provides them with absolutely nothing.

So your homepage should have a title like, what you do, and if you’re geo-specific, where you do it. You know, if you’re not selling to the entire planet then, you know, like if you’re a steakhouse in Midtown, then it would be “Steakhouse Midtown”, you get 70 characters to mess with. It’s half a Tweet. Okay? That’s how I remember it. You want to make that clear because, believe it or not, Google actually is not working against you, they’re not waiting for you to buy a whole bunch of Adwords before they produce your website in search results. They want you to come up in search results when people are looking for your product to service, that’s a desirable outcome for them. So, the thing to do is to make if very, very clear to Google just who you are and what you do.

Okay? All right, so, that should be up at the top someplace. If it’s on the website and you have your choice of what your web address is going to be, use that same approach, what you do and where you do it, all right? So, if you’re a dentist in Englewood, EnglewoodDentist.com is a great URL. If that’s already taken, there’s TheEnglewoodDentist.com. If that’s already taken, there’s EnglewoodNJDentist.com. So there’s variations on that. Even if the first thing you think of is already took, you can play with it a little bit and find a URL that’s an exact match.

Some of you might have heard that Google has a penalty if you try to do an exact match. The penalty is only if there’s no content. See, if you’re trying to fool Google into thinking that you’re an Englewood dentist and your page is just some cookie-cutter page that’s full of recycled junk that appears everywhere else on the internet, that’s not going to fool them, that will get you penalized. But, if you really are an Englewood dentist and you’re EnglewoodDentist.com, that’s a good thing.

All right, next, headlines. The Googlebot can tell the difference between a headline and regular text. It can tell the difference between a sub headline and regular text and it knows that something that’s a headline is more important than the rest of the text. It’s important to realize that the Google bot is not just reading everything and photocopying it, it’s evaluating this stuff. When Google indexes a website they take into consideration what you say is important while they’re figuring out what searches you should come up on. So your headline is key, again with this Englewood dentist, the headline on this page could be Top Dentist in Englewood, Family Dentistry in Englewood, Cosmetic Dentistry in Englewood, All Purpose Dentistry in Englewood, something along those lines. Again, keeping with that, what you do and where you do it, right.

Now the subheads, that’s in H2 on this sheet, okay, that’s the subhead line. That would be all the different things that you do. If you do, dental implants, if you do root canals, if you do braces, those would be your subheads and each of those should be a link that goes to a specific page about that product or service. Okay? Are we good so far? So this is hierarchically listing who you are, what you do, and the different sub-headlines of what you do, the different flavors of what you do, as it were, right? This is not just about dentistry, this would apply to any occupation.

All right. So, now we’re at the important stuff. Top right portion of your page, or someplace else if there’s a more aesthetic place to put this, you need a compelling call to action. So what’s a call to action? Well, for people that are looking for you, what you do is compelling. You know? I actually heard a comment, “Well, what’s compelling, I’m a CPA, you know, what’s compelling?” Being a CPA is compelling if people are searching for CPA services, so a profit and loss statement, all this stuff is important. So, a compelling call to action is when you offer to exchange your expertise in order to get an email address. So, all right, using the CPA example, if you could offer a document that tells you “How To Keep More Of Your Money And Give Less To The IRS And Stay Out Of Jail”. All right, so you’re offering that in exchange for email addresses.

One of the main things you want to do on your website is to collect identities. The reason you want to collect identities, is unless you’re selling a commodity, in which case it’s all about price, unless you’re doing a lot of return business, repeat business, people are not going to just buy from you having stumbled across your site. They’re not going to look at your site and go, “Oh, yeah, I should invest our life savings with this guy!” It’s just not going to happen.

You want to get their identities, you want to give them some of your expertise, you’re giving them familiarity with you, you’re helping them. Okay? It helps them sleep good at night, you know, you’re helping people, you’re being a nice guy, they think well of you. When it actually comes time to spend a few bucks, they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that guy with the pdf about how to keep more of my money and stay out of jail, this is great, yeah, let me talk to him” See, so you want to do that, it’s a value transaction. You’re giving them something, they’re giving you an email address, okay?

How to find out what’s compelling, there’s different things you can do, which we should probably talk about one on one, it gets slightly technically. You can do A B testing, so you can try one version, then another version, and see which one is more popular. Alright, but the point is that you want to collect email addresses by giving people your expertise.

Alright, now that we’re down in the middle here, okay, we get to video and images. This is key, people will click away from your website unless there’s some really good reason to stay there and they have to be able to spot it in five seconds. Okay? Some people say three but popular wisdom is five seconds. So how do you hook somebody in five seconds?

One thing you don’t want to do is have a video that automatically rolls as soon as somebody comes to your page. That’s uniformly found to be annoying, don’t do it. What you do want to do is have a video available so that if somebody decides to, they can click on it and they can look at a short video. Not the video of this presentation, this isn’t going to appear on my home page tomorrow. I have a very nice 30 second video by this Romanian girl, that’s going to appear, not this. Okay? So, a video that says what you do is awesome, customer testimonial is good, it’s all good, all right?

So, where do you get this video? Do you do it yourself? Well, that’s a decision, you know. One way you can do it, is you could see David Title, okay, he’d be happy to help you with that. You can do a nice pro shoot. If you want to have David interview you for an hour, you can cut that up into 90 second, 2 minute, short videos and dole them out over the course of a year. So, the price of that one session would actually be divided by, I don’t know, 20, maybe 15, you know, however many of these short videos you get.

Now this is not intended, to be like a web design thing. You want a beautiful web design, something that communicates your brand, you want to see Brian. Brian is going to put that together in such an aesthetically pleasing way, and put your brand across, right? Brian totally understands the marketing importance of people recognizing what it is you do instantly by looking at an image. He’ll get you a good logo, he’ll get you an app for your Smartphone. You know, or for your Customers’ Smartphones, actually. So that, you know, your website, kind of is the linchpin for your marketing campaign, alright. So Brian can do that for you.

Another guy that can help you out is Michael Meyer, with a photo that says what it is you do. Remember you’ve got five seconds, so the last thing on earth you want to do it present a full page of text. What you want to do it present an image or a short video that says what it is you do. You don’t want to get to arty about it, right, you don’t want to be the guy, he’s wearing sunglasses, his Hawaiian shirt is open to the waist, he’s walking down the beach, the sun is rising on his right, the moon is setting on his left, underneath him it says “Eternity”. Okay, that might work for cologne, but not really, I mean, I don’t understand this stuff but I guess people who sell cologne do. But, the point is you want an image that says what it is you do, you know, and an expert like Michael can help you with that. Okay, or David can help you shoot a video like that, right. If you want Calvin Klein fragrances that’s another whole issue, we don’t have anybody doing that here.

Alright. There’s more, there’s more to this and fortunately there’s a link at the bottom of the page and I emailed everybody that link also, so you can go check it out if you’re interested. Again, this is not the full design. These are just some elements to consider. These aren’t even necessarily in the right sequence, except everything from video on up, you want to have above the fold. That stuff you want to appear when someone first hits your page, they want that to be visible. You know, this is in order to hook somebody right?

Okay, so, let’s do a one on one, let’s take a look at your website, see what we can do to get you some more traffic, all right? There’s other BNI guys that you can work with, assist on this. Its fine if it’s a collaborative project, you know? More input on this, and more, more allowing experts to be experts in their own particular areas and choosing that expertise. That’s kind of like, you know, you’ve got your cabinet working with you on putting your public face out there, okay? So that’s the approach I highly recommend, I like to work other people, I like to work with smart people, you know, so, that’s a fun way to approach this.

All right, thank you very much, Tom Jacoby, NumberOneOnTheList.com.

Let’s discuss.

Take care, be well, have fun,

Tom Jacoby
Number One On The List
A New York Internet Marketing Solutions Corporation
Get found, Get business

phone: 917-338-9586
9 AM – 5 PM Eastern Standard Mon – Fri
voicemail on weekends and holidays
fax: 917-210-0142

NumberOneOnTheList.com

Number One On The List on Facebook
Number One On The List on Google Plus
Number One On The List on YouTube
Number One On The List on Alignable

Member of the New Hyde Park Chamber Of Commerce