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5 SEO Must Haves

February 16th, 2012 by Austin Stewart No Comments

Rainman’s Senior Web Developer, Austin Stewart, gives us 5 must haves for good SEO on your small business site. Implementing Austin’s top 5 list on your own site will help your site’s search engine ranking and help your company Get Found on Google!

1. Label images

  • Search engines aren’t smart enough to read images. Search engines only read the filename unless given something different.
  • Use the alt attribute whenever you can on <img> tags to describe them as text. For example, Logo.png will then be read as Rainman Web Development Logo.
  • Rename the image file to something obvious if at all possible. For example, Logo.png can be renamed to rainman-logo.png

2. Sitemap and Submission to Search Engines

  • Site submission and sitemaps are optional things to help search engines see your site faster. They will automatically crawl your site every few months but this way helps move things along, especially after a big change like a new website.
  • Visit a sitemap generator such as http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and submit your website’s domain and let the search engines crawl each page of your new website. It will then generate a sitemap file that you will upload to your site’s FTP
  • Site submission happens through a search engine’s webmaster tools. The main search engines that you should submit to are Google and Bing (Yahoo uses Bing’s search engine). Use site submission if you have a brand new site and domain, you are replacing an outdated site with a current site, or you make major changes to the structure and/or copy of the site.

3. Separate Meta Keywords and Description for each page

  • Meta keywords and descriptions run in the background of every site page and help focus search results.
  • Keywords should be limited to 10 words or less for each page
  • Descriptions should be short and less than 160 characters

4. Use of headline structure

  • heading structure is simple and seen on every website. The tags number by size h1-h6, h1 being the largest.
  • Structure should always follow: H1: title of page, H2: sub-category of page, and H3: sub-sub-category of each page, etc

5. Use Descriptive Links

Making use of Austin’s top 5 SEO must haves will not only increase your site’s search engine rankings, but help your site bring in more business on the web. Still not sure about SEO? Give us a call at 830.331.9995 or email us at sales@rainman.com and we’ll help you along the SEO journey. Maximizing sites for SEO is one of our Rainman’s top priorities.
-Austin Stewart, Developer at Rainman.com and Amanda Koone, Director of Operations at Rainman.com

Hits versus visits- What’s the difference?

November 2nd, 2011 by Austin Stewart No Comments

Some of you may have received emails or phone calls from companies promising to get your website 50,000 hits a month. Is this true? Yes, but not in the way you think.

“Hits” is a word that can easily be interpreted many different ways by many different people. Ask anyone on the street, and the answer will be the same: Hits are equal to one person visiting the site. This is completely wrong, and a very sneaky tactic used by marketing companies to inflate sales numbers.

In order to follow along better, I will break down the three types of visits to a company’s website:

- Hit: This is equal to one hit on the web site’s server for a request. Each individual element on a page will be counted as a hit. Example: You have four pictures on a web page. This will be a total of four hits.

- Visits: The total number of page visits. One person viewing multiple pages of one web site will count each page visited. This is also known as Pageviews.

- Unique visits: One user viewing the site multiple times will only count once. This is the best number to get an idea of how many different people have viewed your site.

So let’s put this knowledge to a simplified real-world example: You have a two-page site with 10 images on each page (images count as anything from photos to buttons). 80 unique visitors viewed both pages in a month’s time, but 40 of those viewed the site a second time. This is how the numbers will break down:

- Unique Visits: 80

- Visits/pageviews: 240

- Hits: 2,400

As you can see from the above example, the hit number can be blown out of proportion even with a small site. Just 80 unique visits caused over 2,000 hits to this site, making it look much larger than it actually is. Any site that is image-heavy and has at least 10 pages of content can easily hit the 50,000 mark.

Make sure to keep this in mind the next time a salesperson tries pulling a little trick on you. Show them that you are more well-informed than they give you credit for!

-Austin Stewart, Designer and Developer, Rainman.com

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