Hi Guys,

Here is a very important tip to get good search engine positioning. I've mentioned it in passing before but am going to talk about it fully here.

Search engines need a way to know that YOUR site is relevant to what a potention client is searching for, which most often is 'your city name home inspector'. You have to do your part to let the search engines know why you're relevant.

One of the best ways to do this is to include your keywords inside your website address. If you can get it into your main domain name it's the best, but even setting page names works great. If you have not setup your website yet then this is something very important to consider!

Part of the reason I named our software Home Inspector Pro is because http://www.HomeInspectorPro.com has two of the keywords that inspectors will search for when looking for a software program. This has really helped my rankings. You will notice that Bob Elliot comes up first for 'Chicago Property Inspector' in large part because his domain name is http://www.chicagopropertyinspection.com.

Now, for the rest of you that already have your website setup, you need to focus on your page names. You want your url's to actually have keywords in them. Look at this threads url, it does not help search engine rankings at all because the search engines will have no way to gather this is a SEO page from the url. It will get it from the content, but the more ways you optimize your site, the better your rankings. Look at

Code:

 http://www.homeinspectorpro.com/software-tutorials/home-inspector-pro/ 

and notice that I have software-tutorials in the name as well as home inspector. Now when someone searches for home software tutorials on google I come up first! I have 3 or the 4 words in the address.

Look for 'home inspector software features' in MSN and you will see the first page is http://www.homeinspectorpro.com/features.html . Note that home inspector and features, 3 of the 4 keywords are all in the url. If you swap inspector for inspection I still come up first as I use the word inspection on the site.

So, what do you need to do? Let's take Bob Elliots site for example again. http://www.chicagopropertyinspection.com/ . Since he's in chicago we can assume one of the top keyword searches will be 'chicago home inspector'

1 His 'About Our Business Page' has an address of

Code:

 http://www.chicagopropertyinspection.com/id1.html 

, id1.html is no good! Change it to:

Code:

http://www.chicagopropertyinspection.com/chicago-home-inspection-business.html 

Now we have 3 keywords in the url!

2. His See My Clear Home Inspection page which is his sample report is at
, again, no help. Change it to:

Code:

 http://www.chicagopropertyinspection.com/inspection-sample-report.html 

Now we have chicago in the first part of the name and sample report in the rest. If someone searches for a 'chicago home inspection sample report' he has relevance. Even if someone searches for 'chicago proprty inspection' then he has lots of relevance because 3 of the 3 words are in the url.

One thing to note. Don't make a page name InspectionSampleReport.html as search engines have a harder time splitting up the words (it's better than nothing though). It's much better to make it Inspection-Sample-Report.html. Note that I'm using hyphens '-' instead of underscores '_'. Word on the street is that search engines like hyphens better. Don't use hyphens in your main domain name though as it's just plain ugly and you still need to consider your site's attractiveness.

If you have any questions about this, let me know. Try not to stretch things when renaming your sites pages, but get as many words in there as you can. If you're targeting multiple cities, then maybe make a short page on that city with some stats like crime rates, good schools, etc and use the name in the address.