“SEO”, or search engine optimization has a few very common stigmas. It’s either “too technical, and I wouldn’t know where to begin”, or “there’s too many snake oil salespeople and I don’t know who to believe”, or “I need a consultant and they are too expensive for me right now”. We’re here to tell you that SEO is not as hard as you think, and you can do a lot of it yourself. All you need to do is follow a few simple guidelines:
1. Make sure you have the basic technical requirements in place. Ooooh…”technical” – you just scared me. Don’t worry, our SiteJuice product will be able to tell if your site has the basic technical requirements met, and if we find an error, we tell you exactly how to fix it. If you are using WordPress, there are some plugins you will want to use, such as the All in One SEO Pack, the Google XML Sitemap and Redirection plugins. Those will allow you to set your SEO tags properly, submit your sitemap to the major search engines, and permanently redirect pages so you don’t have those pesky “404″ errors anymore.
2. Choose your keywords carefully and be methodical. Many websites make the mistake of either a) targeting too many keywords; or b) targeting really competitive keywords. You want to choose keywords that are not so competitive to begin with, and work your way up to more competitive terms over time. For instance, you don’t want to target your homepage for “internet marketing” just yet if you have a brand new website. That term gets searched over 1 million times per month, and has thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of websites competing against you. If there were five pizza shops on the same street, would you open another pizza shop, or a mexican restaurant? Keyword targeting is kind of similar. Once you have a short list of 5-10 keyword, write as much as you can about them, and monitor your rankings. Once you appear on the first page for all of them, you can pick 5-10 new words, or try to move those initial words higher. Read this article on Keyword Research Tools.
3. Consistently write good content. This is tough for a lot of people. I just set up my mom with a brand spankin’ new website, and asked her to blog weekly about her business, which is easily something she can talk to you for hours about. She was reluctant because she “didn’t know how to write well enough”, or “didn’t have time”, etc. Don’t worry about any of that – just start writing and see if you can get some new traffic to your site. It is almost certain that over time you will find a comfortable writing style and frequency. Our blog generates nearly 50% of our traffic, so it’s a great way to get found by searches, and people will link to you if it’s good stuff. Remember to write about the keywords you chose in #2.
4. Build links with the right anchor text. Once you have #1, #2 and #3 going, you want to think about how you can build links (a.k.a. “inbound links” or “backlinks”) to your website. Google is looking for a diverse group of inbound links coming from trusted sites that have been around for a while. This is why it’s not a good idea to purchase links from random companies or anything like that, since those can easily be flagged as spam and will end up hurting your rankings. Getting links from sites or directories that contain the keyword you would like to rank for can boost your rankings significantly, depending on the value of those sites. Read this article on The Power of Anchor Text in SEO to get a better idea of how to do this.
5. Have patience and give it time. There is no silver bullet in SEO, and if anyone is “guaranteeing” anything, they are either lying or picking really easy stuff to rank well for. Give yourself a year of building good content and linking, and you will see results. Expensive SEO consultants are a good idea once you have mastered all of the above, or you simply don’t have the time to manage it all anymore.
And that’s about it! This is going to be just fine for 98% of the site owners out there who are competing for visibility in the search engines.
