Archive for September, 2007

Sep
5

A Simple SEO Strategy – Website Footers

Want to learn about one simple SEO strategy that takes only about five minutes to implement and will have a very positive result in search engine rankings? If this interests you then get ready to change the footer on your website.

The footer on most websites usually contains a copyright statement and occasionally links. Several websites have a two-line footer where one line is devoted to links and the second one contains the copyright. Adding a company one sentence description to your footer is an easy way to develop one SEO strategy that is simple and doesn’t take much time. Here is an example to clarify:

It generally is better when you have the text footer (non-link footer) fit within one line. Here are some key issues that this new style of the footer accomplishes:

1. Our website or company is focused on providing web design, web development, SEO or search engine optimization, email marketing, and social marketing services to our clients. Since that is a long list of services sometimes you may have to pick and choose what you can fit on one line. The above example makes sure that every page on the website contains the keyword phrases of ‘web design, development, and search engine optimization’. This helps the search engines realize that this website is related to those keywords since they appear on every web page. This strategy helps search engines know what services you provide as well as doing the same for human website visitors. If a web visitor can’t determine what the website is about they general do one of two options: either leave or look in the footer for an ‘about us’ link. Having this information in the footer ensures that if they do look at the footer they will know what the website is about without having to go to another page.

2. The above example also contains ‘Reno and Utah’ in the footer. Twelve Horses has headquarters in Reno, Nevada with another main branch in Salt Lake City, Utah. Having these terms in the footer lets search engines know what geographic area our company provides web services in. You may question why the footer contains Reno, a city, and Utah, a state. Through a keyword analysis we discovered that people in Salt Lake City generally search for ‘utah [keyword]‘ rather than ’salt lake city [keyword]‘, possibly because Salt Lake City is too long to type and “Utah” only has one major metropolitan area which is the Wasatch front. Since Nevada contains several metropolitan areas such as Reno, Las Vegas, etc. which are distant from each other users tend to search by city. Through keyword research we discovered people in Nevada are more likely to type in the major metropolitan area they are near instead of ‘Nevada [keyword]‘. As with the services we provide, this also provides web visitors the geographic area our company is based in by looking at the footer.

3. This simple and effective SEO strategy should only take 5 to 10 minutes to implement on your website and will have a very positive effective on your SEO campaign when comparing it to the investment of time that is required.
If you enjoyed this SEO strategy tip and would like us to post more please let us know and we will be happy to share our knowledge with you.

Posted in Advertising, Google, Marketing