# Need a little help with keywords meta tags.



## pinwheel (Dec 7, 2009)

We've finally found someone to build us a website. I know nothing about building a site. I was sent home to do some homework. One of the things I was told to do was come up with keywords for the search engines. Can you guys help me out?

Some of the services we offer are:

Hardwood floors. Site sand & prefinish
Custom stairs/hand rails
Custom cabinets
Refacing kitchen cabinets
General woodworking
We stain & finish doors & trim in house.

Our primary cabinet building style is more towards rustic & primative.


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## #1Painters (Jan 22, 2015)

pinwheel said:


> We've finally found someone to build us a website. I know nothing about building a site. I was sent home to do some homework. One of the things I was told to do was come up with keywords for the search engines. Can you guys help me out?
> 
> Some of the services we offer are:
> 
> ...



LOL! You are paying some one to make a website?

And they are making you find keywords?


That sounds a little backwards too me.


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## pinwheel (Dec 7, 2009)

#1Painters said:


> LOL! You are paying some one to make a website?
> 
> And they are making you find keywords?
> 
> ...



How's that? If they're not fully familiar with what our services are. I'm thinking there's plenty of guys here with experience in the trades with successful sites. Why wouldn't it make perfect sense to get input from the guys here?

So, do you actually have anything besides smartassed remarks to add to the conversation?


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## #1Painters (Jan 22, 2015)

pinwheel said:


> How's that? If they're not fully familiar with what our services are. I'm thinking there's plenty of guys here with experience in the trades with successful sites. Why wouldn't it make perfect sense to get input from the guys here?
> 
> So, do you actually have anything besides smartassed remarks to add to the conversation?




I was asking serious questions... Are you paying them to make a website?



If so then that's their job to make the keywords. I would reconsider your website developers.


You can use Google's tools to find the most searched key phrases in your country/state/province/city...


You can find what your clients search in Google and what key phrases get the most impressions and clicks.


for example I did some searching my self and found that Painters Vancouver gets the most searches in my area...


Following with Vancouver painting company, Vancouver painters, painting Vancouver, and etc...



Normally when you Google search for a service in your area... You type in the city then actual service your looking for.



So say Im looking for a laminate flooring installer for my starter home.



I will type in Google Vancouver Laminate flooring Installer.


Then the first 8 company's will show up on the first page of google maps... Then I will pick a company out of the first 8 I see...


So generally make different variations of Your city and service...

Vancouver House Painter, Professional Painting service in Vancouver, Vancouver house painting, Vancouver painting contractors, Vancouver House painters, Commercial Painting Company, Interior,

And say you have districts in your city...


Example: 

Vancouver has Surrey, Richmond, Burnaby, North Vancouver, and etc.

So include the districts you want to service as-well...


but Google's webmaster tools take most of the guess work out and you can find the exact keywords your clients look up for your service and find out what your competitors are using.


Here is the link to the Google keyword planner if your interested.

https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner


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## Texas Wax (Jan 16, 2012)

Try google's keyword planner to get familiar with validity of keys words. Google it. I'd put a link to the 'free' thang, but it goes to my account. Now you don't need to, but it may help the understanding of the what's what.

As examples:
'Rustic Custom Cabinets' is a good "specific" key word.

"General Woodworkng" not always so good.

However it may depend upon your local area's market/demand and for that matter search habits. The key word planner, I've found, to be a reasonable way to find 'understanding'.

Beyond that
Your list is good, keep going. Creating more and more specific terms will likely be helpful to your web/seo people.

Congrats on going to the interweb and welcome to the 21st century. It may suck more or suck less than the last century... I'm in the more camp when it comes to all this SEO chit.


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## Texas Wax (Jan 16, 2012)

#1Painters said:


> If so then that's their job to make the keywords. I would reconsider your website developers.


Keywords should be marketing specific to a company. How can the web developer know and find unique approaches for higher visibility. They can't read minds and nor is it thier responsibility to develope a marketing plan for a business.


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## #1Painters (Jan 22, 2015)

See in this example how I searched up Vancouver flooring installation and all the company came up on the google maps listing.



So that's what your are aiming for... Your city then service...


Then add different variations...


Flooring Service Vancouver

Hardwood flooring installation Vancouver

Vancouver flooring installation

Vancouver flooring

Flooring Vancouver


But again use Google keyword planner to find the exact keywords that get the most impressions and clicks.


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## #1Painters (Jan 22, 2015)

Texas Wax said:


> Keywords should be marketing specific to a company. How can the web developer know and find unique approaches for higher visibility. They can't read minds and nor is it thier responsibility to develope a marketing plan for a business.


...They can use the keyword planner... 


If your gonna make a website then you have too make the keywords.



Then they if they offer more advance seo optimization then that's fine. Or hire another company that solely does seo.


but in my opinion keywords are the web developers job.


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## Texas Wax (Jan 16, 2012)

#1Painters said:


> but in my opinion keywords are the web developers job.


Sure refining and choosing the best ones to implement yes. Having the owner of a company give a good starting point and ideas does not make them unworthy of being hired. 


 Nice back link from the search image, to your site. If I wanted to see your web site I would have looked in your profile. You do that on purpose?


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## #1Painters (Jan 22, 2015)

Texas Wax said:


> Sure refining and choosing the best ones to implement yes. Having the owner of a company give a good starting point and ideas does not make them unworthy of being hired.
> 
> 
> Nice back link from the search image, to your site. If I wanted to see your web site I would have looked in your profile. You do that on purpose?


I guess it comes down to opinion.


But the thing is most people paying for a website don't know much about Search Engine Optimization or even know much about computers.


So I think it my be in the professionals hands to cover the keywords.

Just a thought.


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## Philament (Dec 9, 2014)

#1Painters said:


> LOL! You are paying some one to make a website?
> And they are making you find keywords?
> That sounds a little backwards too me.


...because we know all web developers know what "shaker doors" are right? 

They are developers, specializing in code and design and you expect them to know every technical term pertaining to every specialized business they create websites for? To the contrary, I would say they are doing their due diligence and recognizing that they don't know everything a soliciting the client for technical terms. 


That being said, I would ask your developer how they plan to use theses keywords. I'm not sure how familiar you are with websites or Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but long ago there used to be a meta tag in the HTML called "keywords" (technically it's still there) and people would just list anything and everything in this tag to generate traffic. Search engines got wise to this and just started to ignore the "keyword" tag. 

No a days search engines use frequency of terms used in a page in the different sections of a page. For example the title, the headings, body text, the link text, the image descriptions, as well as how many pages link to your page. 

Although I don't have specific terms to provide you, I would suggest you focus on terms that can be peppered through out your page, from the description, to titles to links....
For example if you have "Custom inlays" , make sure to have some pictures of the custom inlays you and that they are tagged with a description with similar text "compass rose custom inlay". Besides the technical terms, don't forget location terms. Generally people search for a term appended with their location. Eg. "custom stairs buffalo". 

Now I know that's probably a lot to digest, but understanding how search engines work might help you narrow it down instead of just providing a whole list of words. Think of it like making a legal case for the "word", you want to have a lot of supporting evidence. 

Your web developer should then be qualifying your words or phrases to see what is the most effective from a statistics point of view. Using tools like google ad words, they (and you) can see if the term "carpentry" or "carpenter" is more popular and focus more on that. 

If you ask your web designer how they are going to use the "keywords" you provide them and they say they need them to put in the keywords tag .... fire them!

You can take a look at your competitors pages by right clicking on their page and selecting "view page source" or "view source" or "view code" to see how they have peppered keywords in the various hidden tags.


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## pinwheel (Dec 7, 2009)

Philament said:


> If you ask your web designer how they are going to use the "keywords" you provide them and they say they need them to put in the keywords tag .... fire them!


He didn't go into as much detail as you did about why they were important, but more or less he said similar to you, that they would be used in writing content & descriptions. Thank you for the detailed info, that was helpful.


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## Philament (Dec 9, 2014)

Hopefully the nerd speak didn't make your eyes glaze over...

It would probably be most beneficial to start by quantify the type of customer you are trying to attract with your page if you haven't already. If your target customer is very discerning, you might want to focus on period terms like "shaker" instead of "rustic"....but if you're trying to stay away from those people because they're a pain in the @ss to deal with, then do the opposite. Similarly with your products, if your target customer is focused on fast turn around, emphasize that you use UV cured finishes. Likewise with low/no VOC finishes, you could pepper that throughout the different sections of your page. 

Because we don't know your business (or at least I don't) or your target client it would be pretty difficult to provide you with specific words or phrases that would be actually of value to your company. I don't want you to take this that you asked a bad question, just that, as Texas Wax alluded to, this is part of your marketing plan which only you know. Providing some of that information might help in getting better feedback.


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## pinwheel (Dec 7, 2009)

You're actually dumbing it down pretty well for me to understand. I really appreciate the straight, simple talk. It helps a lot.

I know this is gonna sound wrong, but we're really not wanting a website that generates a lot of new traffic.

We struggle to keep up with the work generated by word of mouth of past clients & networking with other local businesses. I mainly just want a site that I can refer people to show them examples of our past work during the selling/design portion of the project. I'm scared to death the site is going to be too successful.


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## Philament (Dec 9, 2014)

I want to have your problem 

In that case, put all your keywords in the 
<meta name="kewords" content="
tag .... nobody will find you then...and do the exact opposite of what I said. LOL!

Put your phone number and location in a picture instead of text.... it will make it harder for people to reach you when searching on mobile.


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## EthanB (Sep 28, 2011)

#1Painters put some good info out there but I disagree about asking you to supply keywords.

You are the business owner, you have the marketing plan, the business plan, the experience and know your product and your customer better than anyone. Who else should start deciding which terms are important to the business. I'm not saying that they web dev should use your keywords as gospel but I ALWAYS tried to solicit a decent list from my customers before I began research and keyword analysis paid a lot of my bills for several years.


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## JBM (Mar 31, 2011)

pinwheel said:


> You're actually dumbing it down pretty well for me to understand. I really appreciate the straight, simple talk. It helps a lot.
> 
> I know this is gonna sound wrong, but we're really not wanting a website that generates a lot of new traffic.
> 
> We struggle to keep up with the work generated by word of mouth of past clients & networking with other local businesses. I mainly just want a site that I can refer people to show them examples of our past work during the selling/design portion of the project. I'm scared to death the site is going to be too successful.


I understand what you are saying but the reverse is more helpful. 

If you have a site people found on the internet and it showed them what they wanted to see, when they contact you they are already 80% sold. 

Your hoping for the reverse to happen. 

It sounds good but I think is fundamentally wrong if sales with strong margins are our goal.


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## retrogradeMT (Oct 20, 2014)

Both MOZ and hubspot have some great resources of contractors related to keywords. 

Here is a SEO page that hubspot posted earlier today. There is a xls sheet you can download that will give you a list of everything you should double check and some examples. 

You can use a tool like www.keywordspy.com that lets you view what other sites use for keywords. It probably isn't worth paying for the service, but the free tools are good.


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## pinwheel (Dec 7, 2009)

I had another visit with my web guy. After reading this thread, I came to the conclusion, the main thing I want from my site, is to make it easier for those who have already heard of us, get hold of us. And that's what I told him. I don't have time for a lot of tire kickers who are just curios, so I'm not looking for a ton of new lead generation. We stay extremely busy with 90+ % word of mouth,, referal & networking with other contractors & local businesses.

I've been pulling my hair out sorting pictures. I've not been very good at keeping them organized. 2 external hard drives, 2 laptops, one desktop, a tablet & smart phone, all with pictures. One hard drive had over 10,000 pictures. I'm about halfway through those finally.


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## pinwheel (Dec 7, 2009)

BTW, I met my web guy a couple years ago when I worked on his house because of a referal from a local realtor. We just finished another project for him last week, so not only is he a referral, he's a repeat customer who knows the quality of our work & has referred us for other jobs.


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