I will try to keep this simple (remember I said try!!)

Checkout my website: www.inspiredpetservices.com

If I want people to find my site typing "pet sitting northern virginia" or "pet sitting fairfax", do I need to change the Page Title or Description for better results?

I have not submitted a sitemap to google or yahoo yet.

Thanks,
Curt

I can't say I am an expert in this area but I can share my experiences. There is no particular need to change the Page Title but you can use the appropriate expression in your site description. There are also many different theories regarding the key words nowadays. If you want people to find your site typing a certain sentence, do check how many competitors you have using the same sentence. If there are many businesses in your area offering the same kind of services it can get crowded then. The whole SEO part of building a website is rather time consuming.

I can only concur completely with what Roma says, and, like her, I’m definitely no expert.

I first started out with (and still maintain) a site mostly for family and friends. I have never worried about submitting a site map for the site, and there are no meta tags. Yet, judging by the stats from my server, and from people who have contacted me from the site, my site has been found by specific phrasing of a search.

I think that search engines these days actually scan your pages for text. This puts a whole new meaning in what to supply a search engine.

For instance, you can’t surmise that someone will enter “pet sitting northern Virginia” and expect your site to appear in the list unless those exact words appear in the text of your page. Not the title or name, but in the actual text.

I could be way off beam here, but that’s the way I understand it at the moment.

Terry

Just one addition to what's said above. If you have a descriptive domain name (in relation to your services) it's worth while (in my experience) to have it included in the key words and the description meta tag. Most of my clients that have descriptive domain names got actually listed whithin a week after the site was launched and the sitemap was provided to google.

First off will people type in the exact keyword phrase "pet sitting northern virginia" or "pet sitting fairfax"
There maybe a better keyword phrase to implement into your website. You can check for the best most searched for keywords using GoogleKeywordTool
Be sure to use the best keywords even if they do not appear to be totaly relevent. i.e. "pet services" has had 4,090,000 searches for August so is popular. This will drive traffic to your website with visitors who have pets.

Now you have your top keywords use these in your:

1. Page title
2. Page description (repeat 2-3 times in your description)
3. Page keywords
4. In the content of your page. Try to repeat the keywords at least 5 times each in the first paragraph of your page. Try not to use the keywords more than 5 times or google may think this is spam!

Once you have done all that upload your new optimised page to your web host. Now it's time to fine tune your page for search engines by using MetaTagAnalyzer You need to get all your results for Title, description and keywords on 100% or as near as. This will tell search engines your page is search engine friendly so your content will probably me more relevant.

In addition to all that you could do with some inbound links to your page from other websites using the exact same keywords or phrase on your page.
So a link like pet sitting northern virginia would be quite useful.

Try and use a site map and submit it to google.

There is alot more information that may be helpful here

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Adaptor,

Thanks everyone for all of the information and suggestions. There are a lot of pet sitting and dog walking companies in my area. Unfortunately, the services that are offered are industry standard.

How people search for a pet sitter or dog walker in my area is hard to understand. The "overall" area I live in is referred to as "Northern Virginia". It is also referred to as each separate area "Fairfax", "Springfield", "Burke", etc.

So, if someone was doing a search for a dog walker in my area, I am not sure how they would search. Let me know how you would search for dog walking in my area, then see if my website, description, and keywords are ok.

www.inspiredpetservices.com

Thanks for the help.

Curt