Insert free content the easy way (less effective)

: Search Engine Optimization For Home Inspectors

NOTE: IF YOU ARE USING OUR WEBSITE HOSTING SERVICE THEN USE THE NEWS AGGREGATOR TO ACHIEVE WHATS BELOW IN A FEW SIMPLE STEPS. DO NOT FOLLOW WHAT'S BELOW.

This is a GREAT TIP. Make sure to read it all, and ask any questions you may have. This is an easier way than method

Having new content on your website is important for search engine rankings. Search engines are more likely to crawl your website and crawl it more often if you change your site often. Being a home inspection website though, how is that possible? You put up a few pages on your site describing you, your business and what you do, and that's about it. What is there to change?

For our example we're going to use the city where I live, Rancho Cucamonga, California (yes it's a real place). If I was an inspector I'd want http://www.HomeInspectorPro.com to give me high rankings for people looking for 'rancho cucamonga home inspector' and cities around me. To do this I need 'Rancho Cucamonga' to appear in my site multiple times. I also need the nearby cities.

The trick is called RSS, which now stands for Really Simple Sindication. I'm going to show you how to add news stories about your local cities to your website, and have them AUTOMATICALLY UPDATE THEMSELVES, WOHOO!!

So, I'll create an imaginary new page, rancho-cucamamonga.html and set the design to look like the rest of my site. At the top I'd write a few things about Rancho Cucamonga, maybe the population, my favorite restaurant, whatever. Then under that we're going to add news stories about rancho cucamonga!

You can get RSS feeds from multiple sites like Google News and Yahoo News. I'll use Google News for this email.

There are two ways to do this, the easy was is listed now, I'll post the more complicated way tomorrow after I do a few things to make it easier. It won't help your ratings as much but it MUCH simpler. The easy way relies more on the paragraph you type ABOVE these news feeds for the SEO and the feeds just make the page look more relevant.

Steps for the easy way:

1. Go to http://news.google.com/ Type into the search box the name of your city: "Rancho Cucamonga" you might want to use "Rancho Cucamonga" California if your city is a popular name (yes, I'm talking about those of you who live in Springfield). Note I put the city name in quotes because it's two words and I want them to appear together.

2. Click Search News

3. A page will appear with stories about Rancho Cucamonga. Scroll down until you see the word RSS on the left hand side.

4. Right click on the word RSS and click on "Copy Link Location" in Firefox or "Copy Shortcut" in Internet Explorer.

5. Now go to http://www.rss-info.com/en_rssinclude-simple.html

6. Right click on the empty line next to RSS URL and select paste. My url looks like this: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=%22rancho+cucamonga%22+califor nia&ie=UTF-8&output=rss

7. Now the other options are up to you. You can change the width, color and more.

8. Click create html.

9. Copy the code in the box and paste it on your site where you want the stories to appear.

You can see an example for what I did here: http://www.homeinspectorpro.com/rss.html

Try it out and let me know how it goes. I will be posting the second method tomorrow and explain the difference. If you feel you are a total beginner to web design and you're using a site like grassfrog, you must use the method above. The main difference is the code above is pure javascript so search engines really don't see the text from the news stories (but your users will), so make sure the paragraph above it includes your city name a few times. The alternate method will actually include the text for search engines to see.