Weekly Website Wednesday - Week #2
Hello World
Welcome to my second Weekly Website Wednesday post … or was it my Weekly Wednesday Website post? Either way, this is my attempt to share tips for past, present, and future kennels interested in improving their website and its ranking. I’m setting a goal for myself of 52 total posts; that’s only 50 more weeks! I have a handful of ideas for a future post, but definitely not 50.
Let’s talk about the single most important thing you’ll need for your website … that’s a good kennel introduction. If you want to have a successfully, high-ranking kennel website, you need to write an introduction to go on the homepage of your site. It’s essential that you come up with a few paragraphs that explain where you’re located, what services you offer, and what kind of breeds you deal with … it also doesn’t hurt to name-drop a few famous dogs that show up in your pedigrees. Chances are most people will never read it, but you’re not writing for people to read … you’re writing it for the search engines to read.
I’m not going to get into the nuances of search engine optimization here, but search engines work by analyzing the words found on your website. Think of each word on your home page as another way for somebody to find your kennel. The more words you have and the more descriptive your introduction, the easier it’ll be for people to find you. Try to think about what people might search for to find your kennel, then use those words in your introduction.
Try to type 600 to 800 words; to give you an idea of what that might look like, this post is just under 600 words, so aim for something similar in size. If you can’t get there, try to throw in some of your accomplishments or a heartfelt story about how you got started. Maybe your family has been raising dogs for generations, maybe you picked up a stray dog and fell in love with the breed, or maybe you went on a memorable hunting trip with someone who owned a nice hunting dog.
Not a writer? You don’t have to be. Today, you can just jolt down some ideas and ask an AI chatbot like Chat-GPT or Perplexity to re-write it for you. If you have an iPhone with Apple Intelligence, it has writing tools baked into it now. Just long press on your typed text, go to writing tools, and ask your phone to rewrite it for you.
Most of your website traffic is going to come from search engines. Search engines don’t care about what your website looks like; they care about what it says. Do yourself a favor and take the time to write an introduction. One or two sentences isn’t going to cut it. Your website will be useless to you if nobody can find it.
Your homepage is the single most important page on your entire website, and it’ll pull more weight and traffic from the search engines than any other page you create, so give it some love. You want your introduction to be stacked with words related to your business, making it easier for people to find you.
