Improve your Google ranking
About the Author
Having designed his first website at the age of 13, Andy has been with StorMan since 2006 and is now our Marketing & Web Services Manager. Andy also runs our client graphic & website design department, known as StorMan Business Services.
Whether your question's about web design, colour codes, Google or HTML tags, Andy's your man! You can get in touch with Andy via our Contact page.
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Over the holiday period in late 2009, we began launching the redesigns of some of our websites - in particular, storman.com, storman.com.au and our marinasoftware.info website. Our main homepages feature a central "slider" element that allows visitors to walk their way through a predesigned sales process. While the user can step through at their leisure, Google sees this as a single web page packed full of relevant content, which is helpful to our Google ranking (just search for "Self Storage Management Software" or "Marina Management Software" in Google and, at the time of writing, we're either first or second in the results).
One of the best ways to boost your Google ranking also happens to be one of the trickiest: getting other sites link to you. In a way, it's tricky for a good reason... it's hard to do, but it ensures genuine results from Google's point of view. To further toughen this process, it's not just any old website that can link to you - the more relevant, the better. For example, if you own a coffee shop and your brother's car-mechanic business links to your website, it's not going to do much good in Google's eyes. In fact, it may even have a negative effect (although Google doesn't release their indexing and ranking formula - for good reason - so I guess we'll never really know).
However, if a bunch of people write good reviews on their blogs and provide inbound links to your site, it will then rank better in searches for "coffee shops" in a certain area. Each industry is different, too - coffee shops tend to go un-researched. If you're driving around town and you feel like a coffee, you'll probably stop at the first cafe you see and buy one. Self Storage is a little different. People tend to research it first and, according to the current SSAA Almanac, many are using the internet to do so.
So how can you stand out? We go back to our golden rule: getting others to link to you. And remember - it has to be relevant, as per the coffee shop example. Get your suppliers to link to you, get your customers to link to you (offer a discount for storage if you have to - a relevant link is worth so much more if you think about it) but make sure it's relevant. Ask your customer to include a link somewhere on their site or in their blog along the lines of "We store at XYZ Self Storage in Sydney". This provides relevancy, because the link-text contains both the business type (self storage) and the location (Sydney)... that's +2 points right there!
So if we now use all of this new knowledge and come back to the original point of this article, which was informing you of our new-look websites, we come to a perfect example of what I'm talking about... linking to you. If you've ever visited our Testimonials page, you'll know that we provide links back to your website in return for giving us a shout-out. In fact, each of our Facility of the Month articles (such as this one, in our recent eNews) contains a link back to your website.
The same goes on our Testimonials page. By helping us out, you're actually helping yourself out as well. So if you're interested in having us write a feature article about your facility, please let us know - it won't cost you a cent! If you'd like to learn more about boosting your Google ranking or using these type of elements on your website, please contact Andy at our StorMan Business Services division. In the meantime, feel free to check out our new-look websites and let us know what you think, or ask your webmaster to add a link to us on your own site.
Regards,
Andy (Marketing & Branding Manager, StorMan Australia)
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