5 Simple Steps to SEO Success For Dog and Cat Breeders

Dog Breeders and Cat Breeders have it made when it comes to website content! Learn how to use it to your advantage.

Let’s face it. SEO has gone to the animals – literally! Since the introduction of the formidable Google Panda and Penguin algorithm updates over the past two years, the future of the “SEO Industry” is uncertain at best. Most of the “tricks of the trade” that so many so-called search engine optimization professionals have peddled to you for more than a decade have been hit by Google’s extremely powerful “delete” button, leaving most of them scratching their heads as to what to do.

As Google has always told us, “Content is King”. Offer a quality website that provides your visitors with what they came to find, and ye shall reap the benefits. And for dog and cat breeders, offering your visitors a great experience that makes them want to call or contact you is a fairly simple matter, and one that you – or your website designer can take care of quite easily.

So, without further ado, here are my suggestions:

5 Easy Things To Do To Help Your Pet Website Gain a Higher Ranking on Google

1. Pictures ARE Worth A Thousand Words!

Don’t be lazy when it comes to pictures! As website content, those photos of your cute dogs and puppies or cats and kittens are like gold. You can turn them to platinum by:

• Taking great pictures! If your camera is old and crappy, get a new one. Nothing turns off prospective puppy or kitten buyers more than dark, foggy or blurry photos.  If you’re just not good at photography, find a local pet photographer and make a deal with them for discount prices.  A picture may be worth a thousand words, but great pictures are priceless.
• Make sure you name your pictures for what they are. If you have a nice picture of a ruddy Abyssinian kitten, name the file ruddy-abyssinian-kitten.jpg – instead of znjdwlekurh0004.jpg.
• Always crop, resize and resample your pictures when displaying them on your website.  There’s a race going on out there on the web, and the websites with the fastest loading pages tend to win. No photo on your site should ever have a file size of more than 250kb, and 50kb or less is a reasonable goal.
• Make use of “alt tags” and captions. An “alt tag” describes what your picture is about to visually impaired visitors to your site. It is also something that, as of this writing, is used by Google and other search engines to determine the content of your site. Don’t “spam” your alt tags by putting in lists of keywords, but do tell the visually impaired visitor what the picture contains.
  

  Good Example:  alt=”Photo of a ruddy Abyssinian kitten available for sale by Freda’s Abys in Oklahoma”
  Bad Example:  alt=”Abyssinian,aby,abys,abyssinians,abyssinian kitten,abyssinan kitty, Abyssinian breeder”

• Link your photos to your website. Every photo on your site should link to your website’s home page – or the page on which it is listed. Google indexes photos just as it indexes pages or other content from your website. Those indexed photos, linking back to your site, really count.
• Don’t delete pictures from your website. If you have sold a puppy or kitten, add the picture to a gallery of past litters – or better yet – create a new page just for that kitten, and encourage the buyers to send you pictures and updates about their puppy. This is a great way to get others to create content for you – as well as boost links, likes, visits and other signals that Google pays attention to.

2. Forget About Frames!

If your website uses frames to display content, then you have a problem when it comes to that content finding it’s way onto the search engines. Any information, text or pictures that appear within a “frame” on your page are invisible to the search engines, so a redesign is absolutely essential if you are using this dated technique.

3. Got an “Entrance Page”? Get Rid of It!

In days gone by, it was customary to have an elaborate flash entrance page with an “Enter” button beneath. This was the first page people would see when visiting your website. The main flaw with this type of setup is that there is virtually no content on that page for the search engines to crawl or index. The other flaw is that the first page in your website is the MOST IMPORTANT! If the most important page on your website has no content, you are in big trouble if you want your site to rank on Google.
It is far better to put your best foot forward, and create a home page that provides the visitor with a good, well-written overview (at least 500, keyword-rich words) of what you are about and what you offer, along with a few of your very best photos. This helps both the visitor – and the search engines – decide whether or not your site is worth visiting.

4. Be A Miser With Links

When you provide a link anywhere on your website, it’s really important to be choosy. Make sure that any website you link to is very relevant (ie. about the same thing) to the subject of your website. Make outgoing links open in a new window (ie add target=”_blank” to the html code for the link). This way anyone clicking on the link will visit the new site in a different browser window, while staying on your site.
Watch out for link-getting schemes such as “website awards” and pet directories that require you to link to them to place an ad. By giving them a link – you’re telling Google that they should rank for your subject matter – not your own site. Do link to websites that you really would recommend to your visitors for additional information, such as CFA, AKC, TICA, dog breed or cat breed clubs or health organizations. Links are like votes. Make sure yours count.
If you belong to a “Webring” site or other such thing, STOP IT IMMEDIATELY!. These sites are useless, and I have seen the code they provide actually “hijack” the visitors from websites.
You can add a “NOFOLLOW” command to outgoing links that tells Google and other crawlers that you do not want them to follow this link. This is a good idea for non-relevant links, or links that you are “required” to have in order to be listed on pet directories. Just add rel=”nofollow” to the html code for any link you do not want to “vote for”.

5. Jump On The Social Bandwagon

Not only are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Pinterest, YouTube and other social media sites important – they are ESSENTIAL to your SEO success. Anyone with any type of business website must-have an account on these services, which are becoming more and more popular and important to Google.
It’s FREE and relatively easy to set these up, and the more people that follow, link to you, like you or mention you on them the better. Not only that, but over time you will create a large following of people who love your dogs and puppies. When pups become available, a single Facebook post will let every single one of them know about it – instantly. It’s like the world’s best and easiest mailing list.
So stop being afraid of FACEBOOK! It’s a valuable, very useful and important new trend in online marketing. It’s user-friendly and very effective.
One thing to note:  Having a personal Facebook page is not the same thing as a page for your business. You need a personal account to set up your business page, but they are different in many ways.
These are just a few suggestions that can make a big difference to you now – and going forward. If you are somewhat saavy when it comes to your website, you should be able to take care of these things yourself. If not, I offer pet website designer and SEO/SEM services that will make your site an online resource that Google loves.