10e20 Blog

Last week I took a look at a site for USA Today’s Jeff Graham and gave my feedback on some of the things that they should be concentrating to help raise their rankings for Google. The site (yourheartfeltsolutions.com) is owned by Yaffa Balsam and is for her small family therapy practice in California:

USA TODAY asked Chris Winfield, president of website consultant 10e20, to look at Balsam’s site, yourheartfeltsolutions.com, identify its weaknesses and offer tips on how to improve her rankings. His recommendations are instrumental for anyone with a website, as they are pretty universal.

You can read the full article here or in the Money section of the print edition.

It looks like Yaffa has already implemented some of my suggestions (I had a few more that couldn’t be printed due to size constraints). But I see that she hasn’t quite grasped writing effective title tags so perhaps I can help her with an example here. For her homepage - she currently has: Your Heartfelt Solutions Yaffa Balsam . That’s fine and all - if you just want someone to find your for her business name or her own name but you want to be more descriptive with some keywords that she should be targeting. For example: Family therapy specialist in Orange & Los Angeles County - Yaffa Balsam MFT.

With regards to links - I suggested that there are lots of opportunities for Yaffa to get links pretty easily. By doing a few searches for her name and company, I saw a lot of good websites that she was mentioned on but with no link back to her — simply ask them if would be willing to include a link to you. Write out a list of all the organizations that you are involved with and contact each of them asking for a link to your website — then do the same with colleagues and partners. Contribute articles to websites within your industry asking simply for a link back to your website. Again - these are just basic ideas but a great way for a small website to get started. Also get mentioned in a paper like USA Today and links will surely follow (that one’s already done)

Local search is another essential element for a business like Yaffa’s. Her business mainly comes from people within her geographic location. Identify those areas and work the city/county/state names and corresponding zip codes into your website naturally. Also get listed in the local search engines (click on any of the links below to do that):

• Google Local
• AskCity
• Yahoo! Local
• MSN Local (then click Help)

The list could go on and on but by following these steps and implementing them - Yaffa will be off to a great start in a niche that she could soon be dominating.

Check out the full article over at USA Today. Also if you are looking for another podcast to add to your listening schedule - Jeff’s “Talking Tech” is highly recommended.