dcmeagle

Dom a follow up question. My home page is made up of 3 documents: header, footer, index. I just edit them in notepad using html, upload them and I guess they are joined together as one source page...? One of the h1 tags is in the header doc Accredited Home Inspection Specialist, Inc. and the other is in the index doc Providing Home Inspections and Radon Testing to Belleville, O'Fallon, Collinsville, Edwardsville and surrounding Metro East Communities Should I still remove the first h1 tag ( Accredited Home Inspection Specialist, Inc.) since when I view the source online all my pages have 2 h1. If so should I replace (h1) with something different so it does not loose the formating? Lastely can you take another look at my key words. I'm not sure about comma (,) placement between city names, and if I have to much, or is there such a thing as to much? Thanks Agian. Hi Mark, You don't want to have more than 5-7 phrases (separated by commas) for your keywords. Go with phrases like "Belleville Home Inspector" Go ahead and use H2 for your company name (so remove the h1 from those files). It's not unusual for sites to pull from separate files and combine into one page. If it messed up the formatting then you need to look at the css file controlling your site and copy whatever is set for your H1 to your H2 tags.

Hey Mark, Sorry it took so long to get back to you. It's been a crazy few days. I can see you've made a lot of the changes suggested. Your page title looks great. Your description tag needs to be updated, make it something like your page title as this is what shows on Google and is important for matching searches. Right now you have: which doesn't help you since no one's looking for you by company name. Good usage of city names on your home page. Your keywords could be updated. Make them more like 'Belleville Home Inspetor', 'Home Inspections in ...'. List about 5 phrases I see you're using alt tags for your images which is excellent (most guys miss that opportunity). Right now on your home page you have two tags. You actually only use one. Then you use , etc. It's best to actually get key phrases into your h1 tag as google considers it important to your sites relevancy. I'd remove the h1 tags around your company name and leave it on your description of areas you service. I see you have a decent number of incoming links to your site which is good. The more the merrier. Other than that you're looking good! You might want to add a few additional pages of content. If you have any more questions, let me know! Dominic

Just do it all at once. You're going to end up with the same ranking either way at the end.

Yes, often times when you make any sort of change you'll go down for a few days then go up higher than before. I've never really found a good explanation for that but it's pretty common. Download a program like WebCEO (get the free version) which will make it easier for you to track your rankings across all the search engines for the top 5 terms your aiming for.

Testimonials are always an excellent idea from the standpoint of hooking your client. It can help with your SEO as well if you include the city that the client is from. I would take the NAHI and ASHI inspector phrases out of your keywords, they are rarely ever going to be used. The average home buyer has no idea about associations so they aren't going to search for it. It would be much more powerful to use some city or county names there instead. Your header looks better, you have keywords up there now and it's not invisible text. I'd definitely work on renaming your page url's still. Your page title also needs updating (one of the top ranking reasons). You're getting there!

Haha

Hey Steven, Nice to see you too Yes I'm trying to cut down to 20 hours. That 23.5 hour schedule wasn't working out for me. Lol.

We actually opened up our web hosting service recently to the public. All inspectors get 3 months free to try it out (no strings attached). It was built from the ground up for inspectors after a bunch of guys complained about the same thing as you. You can read more about it here: Home Inspector Website Hosting I'm actually filling out the link to be added to TIJ right now as well. Regarding the title tag. It should contain nothing but text. It basically should look exactly like this: Performing Home Inspections in city 1, city 2, city 3, city 4 and surrounding areas It should also be inbetween the tags on your website. Let me know if I can help you with anything else!

The problem might be all the extra junk that companies like Dell, HP, etc, add to your computer to make their residuals. I wiped my XP laptop clean and installed Vista fresh without any add-ons and it's actually faster. Part of this could be because it's running in 64 bit mode and XP was only 32 bit mode. Go into your control panel, click add/remove programs and remove all the stuff your not using. You can also turn off the Aero theme as that takes up quite a few resources. I wrote an article on speeding up your computer, you can read it here . Mainly it covers moving to a lighter virus scan program, and using MSCONFIG to control what programs start up when your computer does. Chances are you have a ton of programs that are starting up (quicktime, real player, etc). Or you can just wipe it clean and install Ubuntu [:-slaphap

Glad to help. If you have any more questions as you go along, let me know. I know some of you guys don't like this site, but they gave me a great opportunity to film a show on Search Engine Optimization for inspectors which I couldn't get elsewhere. There's no reason why you guys shouldn't check it out and benefit as well. Hopefully you can handle staring at my mug for 10+ minutes, hahaha. Check it out http://www.nachi.tv/episode24

Hi John, Nice site overall. You have a good amount of content, which is helpful. There are definitely a few big things you can do to change your site around. The fact you have the word home inspection in your domain name is VERY good. 1. Your site tag control what is shown on the very top of your site. This is one of the top 5 items that control what controls what keywords your site comes up for. Right now you only have your company name there. You actually want to remove your company name as no one is searching Google for your company name, and instead replacing it with something like "Performing Home Inspections in Arundel, Baltimore, Baltimore City, Calvert and surrounding areas." Don't list more than 5 or 6 cities. What happens is Google looks at the percentage of the phrase being searched for i.e. ("Baltimore Home Inspection") in your title tag. The more things you list, the lower the percentage. If your site system allows it, you can actually list a few different cities on each page, just make sure your main ones are up front. 2. Make your URL's include keywords and use hyphens, Google does not count an _ as a word separator (due to programming logic). Instead of www arundelhomeinspection.com/Rates.html use www arundelhomeinspection.com/Home-Inspection-Rates.html . By doing that you're letting the search engines know your site has to do with search engines. 3. Your description text is way too long and doesn't target in on what people are searching for. Make is more like the title I pointed out in #1. It needs to contain what people are searching for. 4. Same thing with your keywords. You shouldn't have more than 7 or so keyword phrases, you have a lot more than that. They should be things like "baltimore home inspections", "arundel home inspections". I actually did SEO on a site for a guy near you. http://www.richnspect.com , you can check out his site and look over what I did. Another guy actually made the site so I only had limited control over what I could change (for example the home page should really have more text instead of being an image). Go to Google now and search for "Arundel Home Inspections" and a few other phrases. Write down your rankings and check them once a week. Make all the suggestions above and keep an eye out for what I mention to the other guys.

What Randy said. On the left side it says Website Optimization Tips. You'll see I help out guys no matter whether they use our software or not as long as I have time. I actually helped a guy today from another forum get his radon machine working. Never worked with one before but had it fixed in about 5 minutes. I was a computer/math teacher for a long time and like to help out. The information I give out in places like this helps my competitors out too, yet I give it out freely. If you have any questions on the articles feel free to ask them here.

Sure thing. I have a few things to finish up first. I'll check it out after and post back in a bit.

Randy, I see you made changed to the way your pages are named, which is excellent. I just saw this first part of your site which is VERY BAD: You have this hidden at the top of your site: "A home inspector providing home inspections in Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond, Issaquah, and all over the Eastside and Snohomish county." It's the same text color as the background color which makes it invisible. This can cause you to instantly get BANNED from Google as they consider it fraud. Make sure to remove it ASAP! The word Seattle is only on your home page once and it's the only city name mentioned. This means that it's the only thing you're going to come up for, and not that high. You want to get it on the page a few more times. Remove the hyphens (-) from your description tag (shows at the top of your site. You only want the hyphens in your page URL. Your description is much better: "Providing home inspections in Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond, Issaquah, and all over the Eastside and Snohomish county." and to actually make it effective you have to use the same words on your site itself, which you've done, nice job. You've done a good job of getting "home inspector" and "home inspection" onto your home page. Your contact information page is a giant image. Make sure to get some text onto the page. I'd remove your contact information from the image and add it manually. Make sure to list some cities on that page too. You have a decent number of links pointing to your site, but most of them are from here or AR. Make sure to keep building those. Remove your company name from your page title, no one's searching for it, so it just dilutes your ranking. Change it to something like your description: "Providing home inspections in Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond, Issaquah, and all over the Eastside and Snohomish county" would be much better. One of the other weaknesses of your site is that it doesn't have much content. Your fighting for a very large area, which means there are a lot of inspectors trying to get to the top for "seattle home inspector", you need to beef up your site so Google thinks it's more relevant. Make sure any content you add is not just plagiarized from another site as that will hurt you as well. You can rewrite stuff, that's fine. Give those changes a month, check your rankings now and then and see how it goes. You should definitely move up. You can post your rankings here now for comparison. Dominic Maricic

Hey Randy, Sure thing. Give me a few minutes to look it over. Dominic

Hi Guys, As many of you already know, I help out on several of the other forums with any website or computer related questions guys have. I've also written quite a few articles directly for home inspectors on how to improve your website rankings. If you have any questions or want a quick review of your site, feel free to ask here and I'll write up a few things I see you can do to improve your rankings. I get a few emails a day from people asking if I'll perform SEO on their site. Just to let you know, I don't do this any more as I'm working about 20 hours a day and have way to much going on to perform the service. I'm happy to provide assistance here on the forum as it takes a lot less time to send you in the right direction than to do the work it takes. Quite a few of the guys here have already implemented tips I've talked about on other forums (I recognize quite a few of you) and have gotten themselves to the top of Google. Dominic

I bought an EEE PC last month as a few of our users had bought one and I needed to make adjustments so they could use it (the resoultion height is around 480 pixels). The keyboard is definitely an issue for anyone with large hands. My hands started to cramp up after using it for about 30 minutes. It would be perfect if it had a touch screen though. My fiance on the other hand loves it and now uses it more than her normal laptop. It's extremely light and quick to startup. Runs Open Office and Firefox natively. They do have a Linux and Windows version but if you get the Windows version you get a smaller hard drive. Asus announced they have a new version coming out in the next few days which a much bigger hard drive. The drives are solid state which is awesome as it means there are no moving parts. The new version moves the side speakers so that they have make the screen larger but the chasis the same. Although the screen isn't touch screen there are a few guys online who've posted how to remove the current screen and solder a touch screen onto it for $60 which I might do. There was a touch screen model in Hong Kong but they don't know if they will release one here. Also, regarding XP. They just released Service Pack 3 which is supposed to be a big deal. 95% of it is composed of updates MS has released since the last updates that most everyone already has on their computer. The other 5% are a few features they added into Vista but don't account for much. It's definitely not a critical update. Dominic

Our software, Home Inspector Pro runs natively on a Mac. The templates and inspection reports are also interchangeable with users of the windows software. You can download a trial on our site and see if you like it. Click live chat or give me a call if you have any questions. On a side note, Mac has finally allowed a 3rd party to create a Mac based tablet. The device even has built in GPS. You can check it out here: http://www.axiotron.com/ . They have so many orders though that they are back ordered a month. If anyone gets their hands on one, let me know, I'd like to know how well it works!

I haven't tried Vista ultimate yet, let me know how it goes. My desktop is running Vista Business which at least gets me the Aero Glass effects. Right now it's a quad core with 2 gigs of ram and it's not enough. As soon as I have some free time this week I'll jump on newegg and order another 2 gigs. The terabyte of storage rocks though

I haven't actually ordered it yet. I'm going to discuss it with my partner tomorrow and talk about getting it for a demo piece. I will definitely get XP, there's absolutely no way Vista is going to run effectively on only 1 gig of ram. I had to update my desktop to 4 gigs, although I'm not going to have 20 windows open on that little thing like I have on my desktop right now

That's awesome. Thanks, now my fiance is going to be pissed when she gets our credit card bill

Wow! You've definitely been busy but it sounds like your have fun now. Playing golf, reading and doing some part time consulting sounds great to me. Thanks for the advice. I definitely like working in a small group. You have a lot more control and freedom then you do working for a large corporation.

Awesome! Yes, definitely older than me, but not you're not too old I graduated with a Bachelors in Computer Science in 2001. I taught a few years of Java at a high school and ran their network. I started writing inspection software in early 2004 when a franchise here in southern California came and asked me to develop a custom program for them. After finishing up what they wanted I started making it more applicable to all inspectors in the U.S. and other countries (we have inspectors using our program in 5 countries now). There's now 4 of us working on it (2 programmers) now. I'd like to think we're on the right track and have some unique features but we definitely have some things to work on. Our 'to-do' list is several pages long! How did you end up doing home inspections?

We recommend to inspectors using our software that they follow the method Gary mentioned. Create a folder for each year, with a folder for each month inside of it. Within that we recommend saving the file itself with the address name and last name of the client i.e. "/2007/September/1234 My Street, My Town - Maricic.pdf". That way you can easily do a search later by either and find what you need. While it might not be the perfect method, it works pretty well.