Do-it-Yourself SEO
There are several things
you should do right away to make your site
more SEO friendly and drive more traffic
to your website. If you haven't already,
read the "Three
Ways to Get More Clicks to Your Site, Right
Now, For Free" section.
This SEO tutorial will
help you understand SEO better and empower
you to optimize your website yourself. There
are also SEO tools to help you get started.
Listing Your Site-coming
soon
Testing
Keywords
Title Tags
Keyword Difficulty
Checker Tool
Link Building
Testing
Keywords
Before you start testing
keywords you should know what are the
keywords that would most likely drive traffic
to my site and create a sale? Well, to
start with, what is your #1 money maker? If
it is "reused furniture", try typing
that in to Google. Now you can see who your
competition is! You may find that thousands
of sites pop up when you search your product--how
are you to compete with 867,093 other companies?
Well, if someone is searching for your product
or service, they might also want to go to
your place of business, so you could add "reused
furniture pittsburgh" to your search.
Now what comes up?
Using a more descriptive
keyword (see longtail approach) will narrow
down your competition, and get the people
who are more likely to BUY your product
or service to land on your site. Likewise
if you are selling a service such as printing
books, but you are a "green" company,
you can try using the word "green book
printer" and see what happens.
Now that you see who your
direct competition is, the next step is
to see what is on their site. Why did their
website come up in the search results and
not yours? Do they have descriptive keywords
on their site? Is it giving you any ideas?
Title
Tags
The first step to answer
these questions is to look at their title
tag. The title tag is created by your web
designer through HTML. It is the title that
appears at the very top (usually blue) bar
on your web browser. Incidentally, it is
also the first line that appears in search
results.
You can change the titles
within your HTML to optimize your keywords.
The titles are very important to search
engines. Every title of each of
your web pages should include keywords --
the words you think people would most likely
type in order to find your products or services.
The title tags should also be different
on each page and be tailored to what each
page is about.
Here's some homework for
you-check your title tags right now. Go
to your website, and look at the titles
of each of your pages. Are they different,
or all the same? Do they include your company
name? Are they relevant to the page your
are on? Are there any other good keywords
that would fit within the title?
Please Note: Title tags
should only be 65 characters long.
Keyword
Popularity
The next thing you'll
want to do is check to see how often your
keywords are searched for on the internet.
Unfortunately, there are not more precise
tools (unless you want to pay for them),
but there are a few free tools that you
can use to get an idea.
Try this keyword popularity
tool from Google Adwords: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
To check where your website ranks organically in Google for a given keyword, check out this handy keyword tool.
Link
Building
Once you have decided
on the keywords most likely to get people
to come to your site, search for them! See
which sites have the highest rankings. Would
they want to trade links with you? You might
be thinking, "Why would they, aren't
they my competition"? Well, not necessarily.
There might be a blogger that has a list of
resources for your specific product or service
that would be happy to list you on their site.
Or, there are lots of chat rooms out there
that discuss your products and services. Get
involved in their conversation.
And sometimes your "competition" might be happy to trade links. The more
resources on their site, the more reason
for their customers to come back and vice
versa, especially if they are not in the
same geographical area.
So how do you get the
webmaster to list you on their site? Email
them and ask. Most websites have a "contact
us" section on their site--try to get
to the webmaster. Do this for your Top 5
Keywords. Your email should always come
from the url of your domain. Don't email them
from a generic yahoo or gmail email address,
or they might not believe you are who you
say you are. There's so much spam these
days!
