Search engine tips
For your NetKennel Website

You have a new kennel website and now you need to people to be able to find it. You can advertise in magazines, give out business cards, buy keywords and banner ads, but these methods all cost money. Search engines offer a free method for people to find your website 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. However, there are no guarantees when it comes to search engines … if you’ll be listed, under what terms your website will be listed or what rank your website will be in the search results. You need to keep your search engine expectations realistic, there are over 2 billion websites on the internet today, that’s a lot of competition. All those websites want to be ranked #1. When optimizing your kennel website for these search engines, try not to target keywords that are too board. Realistically, you’re probably not going to make it to #1 for Labrador Retrievers or German Shorthaired Pointers, but you might make it to #1 for Labrador Retrievers in Missouri. Optimizing your website take some experimenting, but here are a few tips to help stack the deck in your favor.
Keywords
Understanding the basics of how search engines work can help you improve your kennel website’s placement and generate more traffic to your site. Search engines like Google and Bing are super complex, but at their core, they work by collecting the words on each page of your kennel website to figure out what search terms or keywords your site should be listed under. In their simplest form, they just pull the text off the pages of your website. They collect these words by using automated programs that crawl your site to harvest words. Knowing that these search engines are collecting all the words on your site, it’s a good idea with come up with a list of keywords that you prefer to be found under. If you wanted to be listed under DOG TRAINER, you need to make sure that DOG TRAINER is mentioned on your site at least a few times. If you want to be listed under ENGLISH POINTERS, it’s a good idea to make sure that ENGLISH POINTER is included on your pages somewhere. Not only do the search engines collect all the words on your website, but they also count the number of times each word appears on each page. They assume words that show up more than others are probably more important than words that only show up once or twice. If they crawl your site and find ENGLISH POINTER mentioned 10 or so times, then ENGLISH POINTER must be a major topic of your site and it should probably be included in the search engine under that term. It’s a good idea to stack your website with the list of keywords you created, including those keywords multiply times throughout your website. Be careful not to overuse your keywords on a single page, including DOG TRAINER 50 times on one page could be more harmful than good. Even the placement of keywords on a page, in a paragraph, and even in a sentence has bearing on how important a search engines deems a keyword is to your site. More important keywords should be mentioned towards the top of your pages and paragraphs, but also included throughout the page.
An example homepage paragraph might be: “Hello, welcome to our website, I’m Mr. Breeder and I’ve been raising dogs for the past forty years here in the south Georgia area. You won’t be disappointed with one of our dogs. We hope you find our website useful and easy to navigate. “
In the above example, you’re on Mr. Breeder website and he runs “Breeders Kennel” and he raises English Pointers in Savannah Georgia. The above paragraph doesn’t really say anything about English Pointers, the Kennel Name and only vaguely mentions where Mr. Breeder is located. Some of Mr. Breeders primary keyword phrases should be ENGLISH POINTERS and ENGLISH POINTERS IN GEORGIA. Maybe a better opening paragraph would be something like this:
“Welcome to Breeders Kennels, we have raised English Pointers for over 40 years. We are located in Savannah Georgia, just west of Wormsloe plantation. We selected the English Pointer breed because of their excellent scenting ability and high drive. We raise classy bird dogs that won’t disappoint in the field. Our dogs excel on southern Bobwhite Quail but can hold their own on northern Pheasant. Our English Pointers are easy to train with tons of natural ability. Our pointer lines include lots of National Champions like Elhew Snakefoot and Dunn’s Fearless Bud. We try to focus on breeding the Elhew heritage.”
Homepage
The most important page on your website is the home page, it’s going to pull more weight than any other page on your site. I always encourage kennels to come up with at least two paragraphs that describes their kennel to put on the homepage. Ideally, the more paragraphs the better, but I would aim for at least 600 – 1000 words. You need to include things like where you’re located, what type of dogs your breeding, any famous dog found in your pedigrees and any services your kennel offers. Remember to work in your list of keywords, multiply times if possible. If you’re a DOG TRAINER, make sure your paragraphs include DOG TRAINER and well as derivative terms, like PET TRAINER, RETRIEVER TRAINER and TRAINING PROGRAM.
Page Titles
Page titles, heading and even bold text can signal a search engine that the words contained within should pull more weight than other words on the page. Search engines see page titles and headings as short concise terms that describes what’s on a page. If you’re a dog trainer, I would hope that you included DOG TRAINER multiply time in the paragraph on your homepage, but I would also hope that you created a dedicate DOG TRAINER page. That page needs to include a few more paragraphs describing your training methods, training grounds and facilities, while also incorporating more of your keywords. If you’re breeding dogs, it’s going to be a good idea to create a BREEDING PROGRAM page, that describes your breeding program and facilities.
Photo Captions
Modern AI can scan a photo and tell you what’s in that photo, but most search engines aren’t going to `see` your photos to determine what it is. Since search engines collect the words on a page, you need to include some text describing the photo in the form of a caption. You have the ability when adding a photo to include a picture title and caption, doing so can pay dividends down the road as it’s another opportunity to include your keywords.
Targets
You want to create opportunities for people to find you and the more target pages you have the better the chances are of being found in a search engine. Besides the Homepage, I encourage kennels to include the Reference Dog section, where they can name drop famous dogs in their breeding program or pedigrees. Including these famous dogs, gives you a change to be found be somebody searching for those bloodlines. I also recommend listing puppies for sale individually, instead of listing them once as a group. If you have a litter with dozens of puppies, creating a litter announcement when they are born is a no brainer, but when the puppies get eight to twelve weeks old, you should be listing each one of them separately. That might sound like a lot of work, but once you create one dog on your NetKennel website, you have the ability to clone it to create the others. Giving each of these puppy’s different names, titles and descriptions increases your chances of being found by someone using a search engine. The more information you can include, just creates more text and more opportunities to be listed under different keywords.
Backlinks
Backlinks are other websites on the internet that link to your kennel website. Search engines consider pages with a lot of good quality backlinks to be more popular than pages that don’t have any backlinks. One way to improve your ranking in the search engines, is to have other websites link to your page. This is where services like Kennel Accounts and Banner Ads on Gundog Central helps your kennel in more ways in than one. Gundog Central Kennels Accounts are included free with your NetKennel website, giving you at least one good quality link back to your site, but it’s a good idea to get listed on other sites as well.
Domain name
The domain name that you select for your Kennel website can have a big influence on your ranking as well. It’s a good idea to include your most important keywords in your domain name. Let’s say your name is Mr. Breeder and your kennel name is Breeders Kennel, you raise English Pointers in Savannah Georgia. While BREEDERSKENNEL.COM is a good domain name, BREEDERSENGLISHPOINTERS.COM, BREEDERSBIRDDOGS.COM OR GEORGIAENGLISHPOINTERS.COM might net you better search engine results.
Age
Your domain name age has a lot of do with your rankings. Older established websites, that have been around for a long time, generally rank higher. Keeping your website on and active can help improve your rankings.
Speed
The speed of your website can help boost your rankings. Loading down pages with lots of photos and graphics can slow down the page, especially for people on mobile devices. Try to limit the number of pictures in slideshows or gallery pages, to keep the site fast and responsive.
Keep tabs on your search engine rankings and don’t be afraid to make changes to site. If you see a change that negatively affected your rankings, you can always change it back. If you are optimizing your site, give the search engines time to update their listings before trying to make additional changes. It can sometimes take 4 – 8 weeks before you start to see results from your changes.