4 SEO Tips For Your Home Construction Website

We here at Halstead Media are obsessed with understanding how today's SEO works. We say today because SEO techniques change almost everyday; it's a constant flow of change. And with Google's 200+ ranking factors (source: Google) in their algorithm to rank web pages, we keep busy with our obsession of SEO learning. 

Equally as obsessed, are home remodeling and landscaping business owners in getting more revenue, more leads, and more traffic. There is nothing that drives that more than first page (top of page) ranking in search results for keywords relevant to your services. If you're looking for ways to boost your rankings, we have a million ideas, but here are a few to get you started. For full disclosure, the best and most important SEO technique is content, content, and content, but that doesn't belong on this list because it's foundational to the website. Read more here: What You Need to Know About Content and SEO.

1. Linking.

Links leading to a page on your website help search engines to verify credibility and authenticity of your pages and site. Not all links are equal, the better the site that's linking to your site, the better it is for your site. This also help local businesses (like the majority of our clients) - when local companies link with each other, it further establishes the service areas for Google and other search engines. Like with all SEO efforts, going on a mission of linking isn't good: quality over quantity!

Even though you do not have full power to control the inbound links to your site, there are some simple steps you can take (and conveniently these items also help increase traffic to your site):

1. Write quality material in lengths that are appropriate. Shorter is not better and longer is not better. The right length is zero fluff and only what's necessary. 
2. Post your content on social media to get views of this page.
3. Provide others links on your site so that they can exchange the favor. 
4. Ask to write content for other sites. 
5. Get you home remodeling and landscaping work published in digital magazines. 

2. Get social.

Setting the record straight: the number of followers on your social media account does not impact your website's rankings - on Google search engines (Bing actually does value social media engagement). It used to matter, but Google has gone on record to say that's not true anymore. There is a significant benefit however to having terrific social media accounts and that is: they're crawled and indexed just like your website pages are. So when someone googles home remodeling in Poughkeepsie, NY, your Facebook, Twitter, and so on, should be optimized for that (if that's important to you) so that your profile shows on Google's search results (hopefully right under your website shows up).

3. Make use of breadcrumbs.

Breadcrumbs play an important role of ensuring that your site visitors are able to retrace their steps from the homepage to the page they are currently viewing. When breadcrumbs are used well, they can add context to the innermost of your pages while at the same time reducing some of the factors that might negatively affect the SEO of your website such as the bounce rate. Apart from helping the user, breadcrumbs can improve your site by:

1. They can point keywords to search pages while at the same time help search engines to see how one page is related to the other.
2. They reinforce and help to improve the internal linking structure of your website (content hierarchy). 

4. Use keyword friendly titles.

First you need to realize that using a keyword friendly title does not mean keyword stuffing the title. This is just going to dilute the importance of keyword and you will definitely end up getting penalized for that. The keywords you decide to use at the title should be relevant to the content they precede (as search engines will also look for them in the content). Keep your titles as user friendly as possible and readable. Remember that Google will display this page title in search results so if its keyword stuffed, people won't click on it - so you'll get the rankings but zero clicks... resulting in penalty and pushed down in rankings. 

-Image Flickr Jeffrey Beall