Three Easy Steps SEO By Owner

You have two choices to consider when trying get your site ranked higher in search engines. You can hire a SEO is an expert in the field or if you have some time, you can do it yourself.

Research your Keywords

Ask yourself what keywords you think someone might type in when searching for products you sell or services you provide. Though a keyword may be only one word it is usually a phrase made up of keywords. Phrases are more specific and will more than likely be what potential customers use when searching for products or services online.

After a quick brainstorming session write down all that you were able to come up with. Make sure to consider geographical phrases if they are important to your customers and don’t forget of alternative words that could be used (an example could be “new car Littleton”). Make sure to surf the websites of your competition to get more ideas until you can come up with a list in the neighborhood of 20 to 30.

Now you should take two keywords from your list that you feel potential customers will use most frequently. Take into consideration that popular keywords are also competitive keywords and harder to achieve higher ranking with. If your goal is to obtain a high ranking for the term “auto insurance”, the path to achieving it may be long. Try to make your keywords the ones that are most related to your business and not riddled with vagueness or extremely competitive. Make each phrase about two or three words in length like the previous example.

Now that we have your keywords we will move on to the next step.

Site Text

Your site text is made up of the wording that is on your web page. There is a phrase for search engines and it is content is king. Search engines love unique content and your keywords should be placed in key locations within the content so Google understands the relevance your site has to them. Also make sure that your copy reads well around them as it needs to make sense for your visitors who are most important.

Keywords can be placed in headings, at the top of pages, in bold or italics, used as link text other pages of your site and in your title tag.

Add additional content after you are finished tuning up your webpage. Give more detailed descriptions of the products and services you offer. Provide a frequently asked questions page and pages of articles that pertain to your products or services.

With your design you should keep in mind that search engines cannot read images nearly as well as text. Sites that are made up with excessive flash or pictures really impede how well they can read the content of your site.

Link Building

A common way of thinking about links is that every link from another site that leads to yours is a vote for the popularity of your site. Every quality link you receive can improve your search rankings.

The quality of your inbound links is more vital than the quantity. The preferred and more valuable link is from sites that are relevant to your niche and with authority (highly regarded in the niche). A quality directory with relevant categories is another example. Just a few quality links with authority can have more value for your site than hundreds of lesser quality. Think of it like you do your personal business network. Both can have a strong effect on the success or failure of your business.

Take time to consider all the other relevant websites in your niche such as organizations, industry affiliates and non-competing companies. Send them a email introducing yourself, your products and services and explain how your website could benefit their visitors. Then politely suggest that they create a link to your website from theirs.

Record the Results

Over time you should watch and record your search engine rankings by doing a Google search for your chosen keywords to see where you rank. You can also monitor where your visitors are coming from by watching your hosting reports. Do this for each significant page of your website.

Continue to add to your websites content and increase the links to your website over time. This needs to be an ongoing effort for as long as you want visitors to your website.

As you continue to record the results of your efforts you should see the traffic increase and with that your sales. Know where your visitors are coming from so you can continually monitor your marketing efforts successes. Only by measuring it do you know where and how to improve it.

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Search Engine Marketing Facts

With millions of websites available on the Internet and more being added almost daily, the only way for people to find what they need online is through the use of search engines. People rely on search engines the way early sailors relied on the stars – they’d literally be lost without them. The good news about this fact is that people’s reliance on these tools has made search engine marketing a popular and affordable way to boost traffic to your site and to increase your revenue.

A Couple of Facts

Before you start search engine marketing, you should realize why it works. First, research studies and reports form webmasters have shown that between 80 to 95% of their site’s visitors come from search engines. What usually makes the difference is whether or not the owner of the site does any additional marketing, such as direct mail, that might also attract visitors. That says even if you are doing other marketing methods you could be getting a lot more traffic if you concentrated on search engine marketing.

Second, people typically use the same main search engines for all of their efforts. The largest is Google. Nearly one-third of every single person on the Internet uses Google for their searches. That’s a lot of people. Yahoo and MSN are, of course, in second and third places with respectable percentages of their own: 29% and 27%, respectively. This information tells you that you absolutely should be doing some type of search engine marketing for your site and that you need to focus your efforts on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

What is Search Engine Marketing?

If you’re not familiar with search engine marketing, let’s start at the beginning. Basically, you’re using search engines for the purpose of driving traffic to your site which is the main idea of the engines. However, you are taking extra steps to ensure that you gain access to the largest audience of potential customers possible. For example, SEO is a huge part of search engine marketing. SEO means developing content around particular keywords which are chosen because they are likely to be ones searched for by possible leads.

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Some Common Link Building Methods For Seo

One of the primary activities in SEO that will arguably have the most impact on your sites position in the search engine rankings is link building. A web pages position in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) is largely dependent on the number and quality of other pages linking to the page. Here we present some of the more common link building techniques to increase your inbound links.

1. Directory submission: Link directories contain pages of categorized links. One method to obtain back links involves submitting your site to these link directories. Directories can be either paid, free or requiring a reciprocal link. The most well known directories include the Yahoo directory and dmoz.

2. Article Submission: Submission of articles to article directories is another common
link building technique. At the bottom of an article you submit to an article directory is an author’s bio where you can include links to your site, as can be seen at the bottom of this article. One of the positive traits of this form of link building is that you can word your author bio as you want and therefore, have choice over the anchor text of the link.

3. Social Bookmark Submission: Social bookmark sites allow you to bookmark web pages online, and when you do a link is created to the page you bookmark. Submitting pages to social bookmark sites is another common method of link building.

4. Blog Posting.: Similar to article submission, you may be able to contact owners of blogs relating to your niche and provide them with quality content for them to post on their blog. In this content you may put a link back to your site. The key here is to provide quality content so that it is worthwhile for the owner of the blog to post your content.

5. Link Exchange: Some sites participate in link exchanges, where you link to a site in exchange for a link from their site. It is important in link exchange to exchange quality links in limited numbers. There is not a lot of value in much of the mass link exchange some sites engage in that have many pages of links devoted to their link exchanges.

6. Link Bait: This involves the writing of content, of posting of pictures or other interesting posts that other webmaster will find interesting and worth linking too. If the content is of high enough quality if may be featured on sites such as digg, potentially attracting a large number of organic links.

So here we have presented a number of the more common link building techniques. There are many others and a good way to keep up with current link building trends is to become active on one of the many popular web master forums. The key is to try different methods and attempt to get a feel for which methods are more effective through monitoring your sites position in the SERPS. You may want to establish several sites and explore different link building techniques with each site, thus allowing you to observe which technique provides better performance.

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