Ok here is the story a friend of mine had a site built for his business. A Beauty salon in Huntington WV. I have looked over the site, and like the design. But we want the designer to add some more elements to help him rank better in Google, and other Search engines. I believe the site needs some more keywords. I wanted to get some opinions of the DP users before I took my findings to the designer. Thanks Oh! the site in question http://www.professionalhairdesign.net
Do some brainstorm with keywords. I prefer wordtracker, to explore your niche keywords as well as if you want to get rank better in Google. Link building is the best option to rank better in Google for example post a comment in blogs with signature links, forum posting, press release , article submission, etc.
The first think I would do is take off the http: //grafitz.com/ logo. This would stop the PR bleed. If you have to keep it, put the NoFollow attribute in the link. Then do that for all of the external links you have. Second, since you will be local search, add a text address and phone number. The images are nice but won't help you. Add a 301 redirect from your index.htm url to the default domain name.
Do some link building with the terms that you think people will use to find beauty salons, hair cuts, etc. Also always use Huntington WV and the surrounding cities in the anchor text. If you have those terms in your page title, description, a h1 tag, and in the text then you get some links with variations of the text you'll rank pretty easily for your local areas.
Page Rank can be increase only by putting good links to your site. All others things don't affect the PR value. But to reach the search top page of one word.. we will need more than a high PR.
Thanks for the help everyone. Yes I am going to make the suggestion to my friend that his web designer either move the grafix logo, or add a no follow. And add some keywords that will help him rank better for local search.
I would add a matching WP blog, which is so much better for SEO and also looks better to potential clients. Gives chaces for more keywords. Kill the self ads on the sidebar. They can toss a post a week - simple stuff and subtle sales as well - pics of celebs with a new cut, locks for love charity stuff, some text about the products they use, new products out of their line, nutrition tips for healthy hair and all that....