Outdoor Power Equipment

March 2012

Proudly serving the industry for which it was named for more than 50 years, Outdoor Power Equipment provides dealers who sell and service outdoor power equipment with valuable information to succeed in a competitive market.

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FEATURE STORY By Brad Smith The title tag includes the major brands that Tuttle Motor & Hardware, Poteet, Texas, is trying to sell and covers the geographical area this dealership serves. The search engines will match up the brands to the market and give Tuttle Motor & Hardware's website more relevance for these terms. GETTING NOTICED by search engines or others. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about getting noticed, making sure that people researching the very products you sell will find your website. SEO is designed to improve Web pages ranking organically, meaning that free listings appear on a results page — ideally at the top of the first one — solely because its content was deemed editorially relevant by a search engine. The search engines use spiders to crawl R through websites and scan content. The collected data is then matched with search terms to determine your site's ranking. When a spider indexes your website, it looks for keyword-loaded HTML text, as it can be easily read and understood. Your website should be designed according to several criteria to effectively attract search engines, improve your visibility, and drive new traffic. esearch shows that 87 percent of users will not navigate beyond the first page of results when searching Google, Yahoo, Bing Creating and fostering the right content Keywords are the most applicable and commonly typed phrases when researching a specific product or topic. Your search terms should be relevant to your business and your geographical location (e.g. lawn mowers for sale, Mosinee, Wis.). The more a given keyword is repeated within the body text of your website, the greater the likelihood of a higher ranking in search results. As such, make sure that target phrases are embedded regularly throughout your website. However, be sure that you are using the keywords in a conversational manner and avoid repeating them in an unnatural way, as it could potentially deter visitors and search engines alike. Remember to include keywords in the headline, high up in the copy, and at the bottom of each page. Consider also targeting popular models and parts for your brands and business. Filters, belts, blades and spark plugs are common items which are searched for in high volume, so they're ideal targets for your SEO efforts. Last but not least, building dedicated pages for fast-moving parts for popular models also supports SEO. They help potential buyers and draw attention from the search engines. Speaking to spiders through code The use of appropriate meta tags on each page also contributes to higher rankings. This term refers to the HTML- coded information that describes the content of a page. The page title and meta descriptions are crucial to your SEO efforts, as they are often displayed in the search engine results. Generally, you want to ensure that the most meaningful terms for a given page are reflected in the page title and the description, as well as the page URL itself. A good example is a page with URL "briggsfilters.aspx", along with the phrase "Briggs Filters" appearing in the page title and meta description. Don't forget to include these terms in your meta keywords. It remains a best practice, even though the search engines do not give these much consideration lately. Also, alt tags must be used to describe what is in an image or video as the search 24 OUTDOOR POWER EQUIPMENT www.outdoorpowerequipment.com

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