Do It Yourself SEO, Where Do I Begin?
Sure Do It Yourself SEO can seem very daunting at first sight, but once you put together a plan of SEO action steps for yourself it can be much easier than you think. One thing I tell most of my clients is that SEO is not rocket science. There are clear rules and reasons why websites get ranked well in the search engines. Below are some of the more basic ones for all you newbie SEOs’ out there:
1. Internal Navigation
Sure the search engines are getting better at learning to crawl complex websites, but you need to make it as easy as possible. Avoiding JavaScript, Image Maps and session IDs are just a few of the pitfalls many newbie’s miss. Create your navigation in CSS or standard text. One way to see if your navigation is easily crawlable is to check the Google cache and click on the link “Click here for the cached text only.” If you can see your links in hyperlinked form you are probably ok. This is probably the most universal issue I see as a problem for newbie SEO’s and even some of the largest online companies. Get this fixed, do nothing else and you could see large improvements in rankings and conversions.
2. Why Are You The Best?
Maybe the 2nd most important item in marketing your website online is setting yourself apart. If you’re just another website that offers DVDs (or whatever) online for the same price as BMG, Best Buy, etc., what makes your website better? The internet is a network of interesting content, products and services. You must make your content, products and services stand out above the rest. How you do that is another story altogether.
3. Links
OK in a perfect world you could make a great website with awesome content and it would rank fine. Our world is hardly perfect and the search engines are not even close. The search engines will more than likely always use some sort of linking weight in their algorithm, so after you build this great website, let the world know. Contribute in blogs, forums, and message boards related to your website. Write articles. Contribute To The Internet. Become an authority on what your website deals in and before you know it you will be getting those one-way links without even asking for them. This is truly the link you want. Remember there are no short term link building strategies that work long term.
4. Content
a) OK obviously you can’t just have a website made up of images and one sentence on each page. Text is the meat that those search engines love to cook and grub on. The more relevant text you can write on each page the better it is for the search engines and the better it is for your end users. One thing to remember here is not to squeeze too many subjects onto one page. Break pages out as much as possible. Check out this example:
http://orchidsbyohlman.com/Care.htm
What a great page full of great content, but much different content. The search engines rarely associate many keyword combinations to one page. So break it down for them. Each of the caring tips for the orchids should be broken down into its own page and expanded on even more.
b) A second point to consider when writing content is natural language queries, personalization and local search. These will be the future of the search engine algorithm, so consider them when writing.