Building an Alpaca Web Site: Get It Right From the Start

Whether it's an alpaca website or any types of websites for livestock, laying the right foundation will get your site ready for your customers as well as the search engines.

Choosing your keyword phrases

A better-targeted and more specific keyword phrase tends to yield better-qualified prospects. If you run an alpaca farm in Ohio, targeting regional keyword phrases may be a better option. Phrases such as “Ohio alpaca farm, alpacas for sale in Ohio, Ohio huacaya alpacas” are phrases that come to mind.

If you want to see actual search phrases that searchers use to find alpaca-related terms, SEO companies can provide you with a detailed keyword study.

Having your own site is a good start

Putting a site online is easy. But that does not mean people can find your site. If your goal is gaining online exposure, you really need to plan a solid foundation for a user friendly and search engine friendly web sites. Many of our clients that have come to us for online marketing usually already have their own sites online for few months to a few years. Then they found out that the site is unseen. They are not found anywhere even under their company name. And they don’t make enough business. And this is after spending, in some cases, over $10,000 or more on new site design, programming, and other flashy looking sites. The figure is hard to swallow. Just like offline businesses that need promotion, new online businesses need exposure. And the best exposure you can get is through search engines.

Consider some of these factors if you already have an existing web site:

• Is it well copy written with your major keyword phrases naturally inserted throughout every page?
  
• Is the site structure e.g. Page URL search engine friendly? What’s a search engine friendly URL, you wonder? In layman terms, search engines are quite wary of very long URL or dynamic URL with a lot of gibberish letters (session id). They’ll index it but it’s not a guarantee that it will be comprehensive indexing. Some may just stop and leave your site. And yes, there are ways to get around this. So talk to your SEO provider about the cost and the programming involve in fixing your URL problem.
  
• Is your page meta tag optimized? Many web sites still have “Untitled” or “Welcome to My Farm” as title tag. I strongly suggest changing your title tag to support the content that you have on a page.
  
• How popular is your site? Beside well copy written content, “Link Popularity” is another major factor that will help “boost” or “lose” your presence in the search engines.
  
• Are you linking back to a good authority site e.g. Ideal Alpaca: http://www.ideal-alpaca.com or The Alpaca Library at Northwest Alpacas: http://www.alpacas.com/AlpacaLibrary/ or the AOBA: http://www.alpacainfo.com/
  
• Are other quality alpaca or livestock related web sites linking back to you? That’s considered a “vote of confidence” in the eyes of the search engines.
  
• Other ways to gain “vote of confidence” is submitting your site to major search engine directory i.e Yahoo, The Open Directory, etc. If you have not and plan to do it yourself, think about your keyword phrases and how you can fit them into your submission. Plan out a strategy. Or talk to your SEO provider. If you are interested in our services, you can find out more here >> SEO Advantage Services

Related article you might like: Elements of a Successful Alpaca Website

Copyright 2007 SEO Advantage.

About the author: Pat Reuning is Senior SEO Associate at SEO Advantage, a web design and SEO firm serving the Ideal Alpaca Community with SEO Alpaca services since 2000. Learn more about custom alpaca website design and search engine optimization today at www.seoalpaca.com.