[Here's one of my more recent posts from Contractor Talk, the best construction forum in the history of time.]

I’ve been doing a ton of free website critiques lately. (In fact, I have a few piled up that I need to finish right now.)

Here’s the cool part:

So far every local market I’ve researched has major opportunity. Big cities, small towns…every one I’ve looked at. These local markets, for a construction business, are all very attainable. A little work and you really can get to the top of Google and start getting traffic.

Quick start do-it-yourself list:

1. Find keywords that get real traffic using Google Keyword Tool. (Hint: find your core keywords to optimize your main website. Then find all the other “lower-traffic” keywords and optimize a page for each set. You want a big “online footprint” to get all the residual traffic from long tail keywords.)

2. Check your competition by “Googling” your new-found keywords. (Advanced web guys can use fancy software to find holes on page one.)

3. Put the best, most attainable, most relevant, targeted keywords in your page title. Hint: If the words won’t bring you visitors who are already actively looking for your specific service, they’re no good.

4. Build your new-found keywords into your URL. (If you have a URL that is more than a year old according to Google’s info, then KEEP IT. Add keywords using subdomains or “/directories” added to your current URL. Reason: domain age has SEO clout.)

5. Post fresh content about once a week. Don’t “keyword load” in a spammy way, but do sprinkle your keywords in naturally. 200 words is plenty, per new post. If you can talk about your industry for 5 minutes, you can add fresh content. It’s not difficult.

6. Link out to relevant sites. And link internally to your a hub on your own page (tastefully.)

7. Get inbound links. Be ethical. How? Simple: If you have to ask “should I or shouldn’t I,” don’t do it. Use common sense.

8. Make a video, and distribute it online with a link back to your site in the description.

9. Stay up all night fretting about it for 6 months in a row.

10. You are done. Go have a beer.

PS. If your spouse keeps asking what the heck you’re doing on that stupid computer…you know you’re on the right track.

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