More and more inflatable rental companies are forgoing yellow page ads entirely and relying on their website to do their advertising for them – more effectively and less expensively!

But to be effective, customers must first be able to find your website. The best way to help them is not online advertising, but instead just tweaking your site so that it ranks highly on pertinent search engine results.

Here are three simple Dos and Don’ts of search engine optimization. The biggest and most significant things that will impact your search results:


The 3 Dos

Use Your Title Effectively
The title of your page is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization (though only if those same keywords appear in the body text of your page). Don’t just title your page “Acme Inflatable Inc.” Most customers won’t be searching by your company name, they’ll be searching for bounce houses, rentals, and your location. A better title would be, “Acme Inflatable Bounce Houses and Moonwalk Rentals in Minnesota.”

Use Your Keywords High in the Body
As mentioned above, your title is only significant if the same keywords appear early on in the body of your page. And those keywords (no more than 3-5 of them) should appear at least three times in the body of your page and at least once in the first paragraph. Don’t forget to mention the states and major cities in your delivery area in your first paragraph.

Get Linkbacks
Next to your title/body text, linkbacks are the most important part of search engine optimization, and was the major innovation that put Google on the map. Basically the more web sites that link to yours, the more important search engines assume your site must be. However, this is only true if the sites linking to you include similar keywords (so a car dealership linking to your site wouldn’t help in a search on “inflatable rentals”).

A good place to start in accumulating linkbacks is with the major inflatable directories, which will link to your site for free. Best of all, not only will you be getting a link, but probably even customers! The major free bouncer rental directories are:

-    www.nationalmoonwalkdirectory.com
-    www.bouncerdirectory.com - the largest inflatable rental directory
-    www.partypop.com -- be warned that while they will list you for free, you must agree to receive spam emails from them as well as sales calls asking you to advertise periodically. May be more trouble than it’s worth.

The 3 Don’ts

Don’t Worry About Meta Tags
The web savvy like to talk about meta tags a lot, but here’s a little secret: they don’t matter. All of the search engines that you care about now completely ignore the keywords meta tag. Only Yahoo pays any attention to the description meta tag, and even then it gives it very little weight. After years of misuse and abuse the search engines have gotten wise and no longer pay attention to meta tags, so now you don’t need to either!

Don’t Stuff Your Title Tag
Upon learning of the importance of the Title tag, some web designers go a little crazy. They like to put up titles like “Inflatable bounce house moonwalk bouncer jumper Pleasantville inflatable Yourville inflatable rental inflatable bounce.”

Now here’s the thing: a title like this won’t help, and could hurt you as search engines these days recognize keyword stuffing (too many repetitions of the same keyword in the title). It might also get your site entirely banned by Google.

This kind of title is against the Google webmaster guidelines, and can get your site blacklisted. While a Google employee may never see your site – a competitor could see it and report it with Google’s easy reporting form. In fact, if your competitors are doing this, you can report them at: www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

Don’t Ever Use Invisible Text
You might be doing this without knowing it! Your site can get banned from Google for using invisible text or invisible links. This is accomplished by making your text the same color as the background or through specific code like this: <div style='visibility:hidden'>

You probably don’t do this on purpose, but here’s something to watch out for: if you have animated images of your inflatable that you got from the manufacturer, look closely at the code that they gave you. It’s fine if it includes small text or a link, but it’s potentially disastrous if it includes invisible text. (Nothing provided by Cutting Edge Creations will ever include invisible text or invisible links). If you get reported for this your site could be forever banned by Google to never come up on any search result.

Next Week…
One of the advantages of the internet for consumers is that they can browse the website of a company they’re interested in before ever calling. The downside is that they may not like what they see.

Now that you customers can find your site, make sure they give you their business! Stay tuned next week for Turn Website Hits into Sales!