There is much debate on the topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), as the 14 million websites across the globe each compete for first position within their respective fields. As in any market, however, there are tips and tricks to help you get better placement, if not position number 1. In this section we will go over a few of the basics, tell you a few hints about optimization for the trucking industry, and then tell you about an option that can increase your target traffic exponentially.

Trucking Website SEO Basics:

SEO is a term used to describe a process of improving the volume of traffic to a web site from search engines, usually in "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. The term "organic" simply means that your traffic derives from a viewer clicking on a link from search results - as opposed to a viewer clicking on an advertisement. When you do a search on Google or Yahoo, you will see bold/colored results at the top and on the right hand side of the search results. These are not results at all, but are advertisements that businesses must pay for each time someone clicks on it.

Different search engines use different algorithms for finding corresponding websites to display when you do an internet search. These algorithms change quite often. Let's take a quick look at the differences in what Yahoo displays versus Google, and you will start to get a better understanding of this.

Do a search on Google and the exact same search on Yahoo. There should be at least one search result that is the same on both search engines. Click on the link to this search result, and you should see that the first sentence, or first few sentences of the website are also the same information that is displayed in the Yahoo results. The information displayed on Google, however, should contain the "description" of that website/web page. If this makes any sense at all to you, it should tell you 2 things: 1) the first sentence(s) of your web page should contain "keywords" that a visitor would use to find your site, and 2) your "description" (meta) should contain these same keywords. On both Yahoo and Google, these "keywords" are also found in the Title of the search results. Hence, the title of your web page, combined with the description and first few sentences of the web page will make for much stronger results for your chosen keywords.

Note, Google has the most stringent rules when it comes to your page title and description. You should know that Google allows only 85 characters for the page title, and only 135 characters in the description. Do not go over this amount, as your site may be rejected by Google when you submit your site.

Speaking of site submission, you should manually submit your website to Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Do not use a search engine submission service for these three. In addition, after you submit your site, you should submit a "sitemap" to all three as well. I do not mean a sitemap like you find on a simple web page. The sitemap I am referring to is would be in xml format or something similar. You can find many online sitemap generators for free by doing a simple Google search. By submitting a sitemap, you are telling the search engines all of the pages in your website, and you are also telling them how often your site gets updated!

Three Tips for Optimizing Websites Exclusively for the Trucking Industry

1) Ok - here is where our advice on "knowing your target market" really comes into play. As much as we hate to say this, truckers tend not to be the best spellers in the world. Our advice: misspell locations, keywords, and even your company name. Of course you do not want your company name misspelled on your website, right? There are ways around this which, unfortunately, we are not able to state online. You can, however, add misspellings into your "meta keywords" - the limited number of keywords you tell the search engines. You can also place misspelling on top of graphics that would make them just a little difficult to see, and you can place them in long alt tags that would rarely be seen.

2) Also, your list of keywords should include the domain name and even the "www" in front of the domain name - of your competitors? People in this particular industry, for some reason, type in the website name of a company into the search bar instead of in the Address bar. Hence, if the"www.competitorsdomain.com" is one of your keywords, it is quite possible your site will be ranked higher than your competitor's actual website. Isn't that crazy?

3) You should optimize every single page of your website. You should almost treat each page as though it were your home page. Search engines limit the number of keywords you can have on a web page, and there is no way that you can fit every single one of your keywords and keyphrases into your home page! Therefore, breaking up your information into as many pages as possible will allow you to add all of your keywords. The catch here is that each page must be relevant to the keywords you have listed on each page. Make sense? You should make the Title, Description, and first few sentences (if not the majority) as closely related as possible. In addition, many people think that just repeating the keywords over, and over, and over will make your page more relevant to the search engines. This is not true. The formula you should use is repeating your trucking keywords between 4% and 8% of the time on each page. The more content you have, the more you can repeat these trucking words and trucking phrases. (notice how we tried to slightly add the word "trucking" into our content? Guess it wasn't that sly).

The information above should definitely get you started. Our suggestion is to read up on SEO until you have a solid understanding. You will soon note that there is no full-proof method, but there are many theories, and a few tricks.

Goodies

You have been reading what appears to be a 10 page website, right? Hmmm... what if we told you that you have actually been reading a one hundred page site? or even 400, or a 1,000 page site? You would probably tell us we are crazy. There is a method, which quite frankly is frowned upon by some webmasters, which allows you to tell search engines that there are hundreds, if not thousands of web pages in your website. It also allows you to state all of your keywords on these pages, and it can state how many times these keywords are repeated!

Let's just say that Trucking Web Design has these capabilities. Let us also say that the "big" trucking companies are doing this.

In the dog-eat-dog trucking world, especially recruiting, you need a full arsenal of tools to be competitive. If you elect to have a 5 page website and truly expect to be competitive against sites that have high page rank simply because those sites have been in business for many years, you are sadly mistaken. It takes weeks and even months, while constantly tweaking your site, to get to page one of the search results.

If you truly want all of the tools available, you should at least consider this option. For now, we'll just call this option "stuffing". Call or contact us today to learn more, and even see a demonstration of what we are are talking about. We can create these "stuffed" pages for you, for as little as $1.50 - $2.00 per page.