Our company, Saco Media LLC, designs and manages websites for Florida attorneys in addition to producing voiceover and providing network and IT support. Somehow all that fits together pretty well and provides a nice package of services for our major clients.
One of our biggest challenges has been to better position our clients’ websites on Google search results. For Florida attorneys, this has been particularly difficult given recent Bar guidelines which significantly restrict their web content. Nevertheless, we’ve managed to consistently get clients on page one of Google search results for specific searches. Considering the number of Florida attorneys out there, that’s a tricky endeavor.
These experiences have helped us develop a better understanding of what works. Here are some organic ways to improve your voiceover website’s search standings. These are tips which you can implement today without spending a fortune for search engine optimization:
Treat the entire website as a collection of specific landing pages. This allows you to market a specific service or highlight a unique selling proposition (USP) on specific pages. From the outset, this also compels you to utilize other best practices for search engine optimization.
- Target a specific audience
- Keep page content shorter, optimally under 3 paragraphs unless it is an article.
- Keep pages focused, on topic, specific, on point. Grandma’s spicy pumpkin soup recipe can be shared on Facebook.
- Use rich keywords for the page content. If you sell pink widgets cheaper than anyone else then cheap, pink, and widget would be good keywords to weave into your text, your title and your meta tags, more on that below.
Optimize each page of your website for specific keyword searches and page content. You’re wasting virtual real estate if every page just generally describes you as an English male voice actor. Use one page to promote your uncanny ability to sound like Morgan Freeman; another page might promote your extensive experience narrating military training videos, and another page might showcase your live voiceover work at industrial trade shows. Your meta tags for each page should then match the page content.
- Textual Content. You can optimize your page content, the actual text a site visitor can read, by using specific formatting.
- Use header tags like <h2> or <h3> for your page titles
- Bold keywords like voiceover and IVR.
- Use bullet points or numbered lists
- Non-Textual Content. You can optimize non-textual content, like images or audio files, by using alt tags or link title attributes on non-textual content like audio files or images.
Use unique title tags specific to the content, target audience, USP for each page. The title tag is the meta tag which displays a page title or short description at the top of the browser window for most browsers or as part of the browser tab. The title tag is HTML code nested within the <head> tags of your page code and might look something like this:
<title>Voiceover Web Site Search Engine Optimization Tips</title>
Don’t give up on other meta tags, keyword tags, and content description. Although some web developers speculate that meta tags are losing importance, search results repeatedly show that Google and other major search engines continue to give significant weight to meta tags as long as they are supported by related page content. Your keyword and content meta tags should be tailored to the specific page content.
Bottom line: focus is the key to effective search engine optimization. Everything about a specific web page should be focused: the page itself, the page content (what your site visitor can immediately see) and the metadata (the extra information in the background code for your page). Even if you’re a jack of all trades, you can develop web pages for each thing you’re good at. Then, drink two or three espressos and you’ll be well on your way.
Update: Also, don’t forget about other opportunities for SEO. Voiceover artists tend to ignore the ID3 tags available in their voice demo Mp3 files. These tags travel with the audio file download and don’t just help producers identify you, they also provide an SEO bump. Read: How to Add Album Art and ID3 Tags to Voiceover Demos to add tags and branding to your demos.
Hi!
Thanks for sharing the info, thought you might find this link interesting regarding Google and Keywords in the meta tags : )
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
Google has been discouraged by spammers who bloat the keyword tag with fluff that doesn’t make it into page content. Unfortunately, some web developers throw out the baby with the bath water and stop using ANY meta data, including effective title tags and meta name=”description” that support the keywords woven into the text on the web page.