You may have already built or had your website built.  It’s beautiful, it’s clean, it portrays the vision of your company  and its goals…You probably have spent thousands of dollars getting it developed and visible. (Just in case you don’t have that fancy new website, our next post is for you!)

BUT…..

• Nobody is coming
• There aren’t enough visitors
• The phones aren’t ringing
• The planes aren’t flying
• It’s just not producing like you had hoped it would.

Now you are frustrated and for lack of words, pissed off that you spent so much money on your new website.  Don’t fret yet, there are most likely simple solutions to your problems…

In today’s post, we’ll address some first steps and reasons why it isn’t working like you had planned.  We will be posting tips every week on steps to take next and what to do after you finish those listed below.

First off, congratulations! You have taken the first step at improving your online presence, which as studies prove time and time again, is essential to your success!  This isn’t said as sarcasm at all.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an absolute must-have to drive that traffic to your beautiful new page.  I’m sure everyone has heard the term “Build it and they will come”, that couldn’t be further from the truth here.  You can build it all day long and until you implement a traffic generating strategy, they won’t come.  We want you to be careful with this term though, as there are many outdated strategies that are still being used that will actually hurt you worse than doing nothing at all.

We have worked on countless client accounts that have been Google slapped and it takes a lot of effort, time and money to have that removed.  Just so we are clear, manual spam actions invoked by Google for black-hat link building and old out-dated tricks, will make your site disappear from the web!  Now you have a $10,000 website that doesn’t show up at all in searches.

Here we lay out the first five steps to improving your SEO for Aviation companies.  If you are looking for something a little more in depth, 10 essential steps can be found here as well.

Build Inbound Links

This is referred to as “off-page SEO” and is the most important factor to increasing your ranking results.  Essentially, you are working to get other quality, I’ll say it again, QUALITY, sites to link to you.  This is called “link juice”.  The more you have, the more important your site must be and thus the higher you will rank.

On Page SEO

We find it very common that businesses do little on-page SEO or do too much (keyword stuffing).  While it’s important to include your keywords as many times as necessary, don’t go overboard.  Pick a primary keyword for a page and focus on that keyword and content relevant to that word.  Too many keywords and the search engines have no idea what the page is about, resulting in lost ranking.

Title Tag & Meta Tags

These don’t have quite the level of importance that once was placed on them, but they are still very important.  After the recent search engine algorithm changes, more weight is actually given to the content of the page and not so much what is here.  These are like a table of contents for search engines.  You don’t need a web designer to do these for you as most content management systems allow for easily adding and changing them through a simple text editor.  For example, WordPress, edit the page you want to change them on and look towards the bottom.  An example of why they are relevant is because this is your calling card when search results are displayed.

XML Sitemaps

With these we are just “helping” search engines by telling them what to expect on our site and the structure of it.  It’s like a subway map that shows the structure of your website and where the pages are.  To improve SEO for your aviation website quicker, we suggest submitting your sitemap through your Google and Bing Webmaster tools accounts.  If you update your website regularly, update your sitemap as well.  We like to suggest at least once a month.

301 Redirects

USE THEM.  Have you ever been to a website and seen the old 404 Error page?  This means the page is no longer there.  Don’t make this mistake.  If you delete a page or move it, create a 301 redirect telling search engines it has moved and taking users to the new page.  These permanent 301 redirects retain the SEO status that your old page had.  Without it, all your hard work put into improving the visibility of that page has to be started over.

These are just first steps to helping improve the SEO for your aviation company.