If your business covers a few locations then why wouldn’t you have location pages to try and pick up search traffic for that area?

For example, if you ran a window cleaning company with divisions in Cardiff, Swansea and Abergavenny, then you would benefit from decent location pages to get the correct traffic in the correct area. People searching for Window Cleaning Cardiff are not expecting to pick up a company in Swansea because of the area difference, so this makes perfect reasoning why you should direct the visitor into the best and most relevant area for them.

But, many people just chuck three pages up with little text, a good title tag and just simply hope for the best and this is definitely not the way to make location pages that are actually going to work in the search engines.

There are three things that we think you can do when it comes to making sure your location pages not only work for your visitors but also work in the search engines and these are based around:

Unique, Quality Content – Like all Google successes, you need to make sure that your location pages have strong, unique and quality content, because this is the only way to really make sure that your location pages are considered good and strong enough to actually rank on their own merit. Try to make sure your location pages actually talk about the specific location and you can achieve this by offering a short write up of the area, various attractions etc and then mix in information about your services.

Only The Truth – Only a fool will try to fool Google and we mean that seriously! Only put location pages up for the areas that you do actually cover else you will soon be seen to be telling porky pies and this could well affect your overall ranking if you do get penalised. Only make location pages for the places you will actually work in and offer your services to, which can include local towns and cities but try to make sure there is a search demand for them first.

Different Contact Details – This is probably the hardest box to tick, but if you can show unique office addresses or contact numbers for each location then this will stand you in a good position when it comes to making these pages work for you.

It is important to remember that the search engines will welcome information about the areas that you cover as it can help them to deliver a much more relevant search. But, if you start to try and fool the engines to cover locations that you do not really offer a service in, then at some stage you will be found out and you could suffer because of it.

A big ranking factor for Google and the other major search engines is often age and how long the website has been live. Obviously, because your website is new, you are going to have to ignore this factor for the mean time, but in the long run having a regularly updated website is only going to do you massive favours.

Many people assume that once your website goes live, your work has ended but as we mentioned in the opening paragraph, the hard work has only just begun.

One of the first things you need to do is get your site into the search engines, something that is called indexing. A few years ago you would have been waiting months to get your site into Google, but luckily it is much easier these days and all you need to do is let Google know that your site is now live and is ready for them to send their spiders to your site.

The first three things you need to do are:

• Update Your Robots.txt File
• Add A Google Webmasters Account And Sitemap
• Release A Press Release

By updating your Robots.txt file you will be basically allowing the spiders access onto your website, because when your website is being developed it is quite possible that your developers blocked access to stop the spider getting early access to the site before its finished.

You then need to register a Google Webmasters (and indeed a Yahoo and Bing) account to let the engine know that not only is your site live, but that you are actually really serious about making it work. Run a sitemap.xml and then submit this in your webmasters account, which can help the engine work out a decent order of spidering and then hopefully indexing your site.

The final thing that we think you need to do just after launch is release a press release to a paid press release provider online. We recommend you do this because press releases are often published instantly and therefore you can get a link into the search engines so that they can follow it back to your site quickly.

Once you have done these three things then you should then start considering all the other things you need to do, which mainly focus around link building and online marketing. But, the three things we mention are the first few things that you need to do to help get into the search engines and start getting the early doors traffic for your website.

When you first launch your website and it gets indexed into the search engines, you then have to wait around three months to really start seeing the impact of this. Any new site normally gets a few weeks of “grace” from Google and the other search engines whilst they try to work out where your site should be in the search results, which can lead to a false sense of security when you see your website in the top ten after week because this probably won’t last when you have been indexed correctly.

When you begin your SEO campaign, it can be easy to expect over night results, but the reality is that the work you do today might not benefit you for you for a few weeks or months, which is why it is vital to look at your optimisation as an ongoing concern and not just have a dabble for a few months and then give up because you do not feel that you are getting the correct returns or the instant results you had hoped for.

SEO is not instant and as we have said it takes time to really start showing through in terms of traffic and sales, but once you have embarked on a good campaign your work will remain rewarded as long as you do not do anything “naughty” in the eyes of the major search engines. SEO is a long term reward, because all of the work that you put in at any time will continue to benefit you for the life of your website, but you have to keep plugging away and doing as much as you can every month.

When you think that your SEO campaign will be made up of:

• One Way Link Building
• High Page Rank Link Building
• Directory Link Building
• Article Submission
• Press Release Submission
• Social Bookmarking

You will soon understand that all of these things take time to not only influence your search engine ranking placements, but to also start increasing relevant traffic.

If you get your link text right when building your links and your content spot on, you can start optimising your campaign to make sure you are getting the right traffic, because anyone can increase their websites traffic, it’s getting the correct, relevant and most rewarding traffic that takes the time.

Instant traffic is often the least rewarding kind of traffic, whereas the visitors that you try to target through your SEO campaign are normally the visitors that you really want, but this really does take time to achieve.

The URL is the www part of your web address, your link to your website or your pages. A good URL should be relevant, concise and have a couple of keywords in there if possible and should explain what the customer is going to see on that page.

For example, if you were selling washing powder, then your URL should reflect this and have some mention of washing powder. Getting a couple of keywords in your URL is one of the most important onsite optimisation factors that you should really try to achieve and it is much easier to do this at the start of your websites life rather than half way through it.

If we take two theoretical examples you can then start to see the importance of making sure your URL is the best it possibly can be.

Let’s look at Two online shops both sell washing machines; one has a strongly optimised website and the other has over looked the importance of making sure the URL is structured correctly. They are both exactly the same, selling the same products and using the same ecommerce platform, but the importance of the URL really becomes noticeable when you compare the two.

Shop A has a Zanussi Washing Machine model A1002 for sale and they have their URL optimised and structured correctly so it looks like – www.shopa.co.uk/washingmachines/zanussi-washing-machine-A1002.

Shop B has the same product but has not taken care of the URL structure and will therefore have something like – www.shopb.co.uk/cat1/cat2/12838474jdyeynmamki28yndn.

If you compare the two URL’s from a search engines point of view you can quickly see how important it is to make sure you get this right from the start. A search engine will have no idea about Shop B in terms of what the page is selling, mainly because it has no mention of washing machines or even readable keywords, which means that the search engine will struggle to index this page correctly if we are just considering the URL.

Shop A not only tells the search engine that they are selling washing machines but go one step further and actually states the washing machine make and model, which should pick up specific searches as well as more general ones. If Shop A gets the rest of its SEO correct, then this shop will be ranking for not only washing machines but also specific model searches as well, which really is the best of both worlds.

Not only will this make a big difference for your natural rankings, but it can help with achieving a better keyword score if you are using Google Adwords for your pay per click campaign, because the URL is one of the scoring factors.

We are not saying that by having “good” URLs that you will rank top in Google, but this is one box you simply have to tick when considering the overall onsite optimisation and your ongoing SEO campaign. As we have said, so many sites over look this when they first go live and to then go and change it can be a nightmare, so it really is something that you do need to get right from the start if you want the most impact.