SolveYourProblem
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Series
Search Engine Optimization:
Want To Do It Yourself?
Does the whole idea of Internet marketing
intimidate you? Are you thinking of hiring a professional?
Well, we’ve got great news for you. It’s really not
difficult to do search engine optimization (SEO) yourself – you can
save hundreds of dollars, and get the same results as the
professionals do. You will probably get better results from
highly qualified professionals, but you should definitely
perform these do-it-yourself actions first. Once you’ve done
some of this kind of work it will be easier to determine
if a professional is worth his/her salt.
Basic SEO is very simple and easy – all
it takes is the willingness to put in the work. Once you know the ropes,
it’s not that difficult though it can be time consuming.
The content of your website the focus of what SEO is all
about. Here are the top points to think about when you’re
doing it yourself.
1. You will start by registering
a domain name, which should
reflect what your site about. Keep it short, as long as it’s
somehow related to your site. Being more specific can help.
You could choose to name the page after one of your products
or services, for example. Another method is to get a sub
domain of a popular domain. This will generally help you
get indexed more quickly though it will not appear quite
as professional to your visitors. There is a trade of here,
sub domains are quicker (and generally cheaper), but domain
names are more memorable, and, in the long run, better for
your indexing.
2. The next thing you should look at is your
page’s title (i.e. the HTML title tag), which is critical in letting search
engines see what the page is about, and is the first item
looked at by search engines to determine your relevance.
You should put your most important keywords in your title
tags – you don’t need to worry about singular or plural forms
as search engines account for these changes in most cases.
Whatever you do, don't call your home page ‘Home’ – make
the title a mini-description of the page.
3. The two
primary meta tags aren’t as important as they
used to be, but the description tag is still used by some
search engines to display information about your website
to users and help them decide whether they’ve found what
they are looking for. Not all search engines bother with
this, though most will put some bearing on it (even if it
is minuscule).
For very short descriptions the alt tag can be used. Alt
tags let you describe an image or graphic file – they’re
the pop-up descriptions that appear when you hover your mouse
over a graphic, or when the graphic can’t be downloaded for
whatever reason.
Text within comment tags is never displayed on the page
– it is used by coders and designers to remind them of what
that part of the page is for. Some coders used to put lots
of keywords in the comment tags, so that they would be seen
by search engines but not users, but search engines have
now stopped paying attention to any text that isn’t seen
by the user. Keep this in mind when trying to post invisible
text (i.e. white text on a white background). This kind of
behavior can get you banned from a search engine.
4. Having keyword
density in all of your content is good,
but keep in mind that each search engine has its own requirements
when it comes to how many times that a keyword or phrase
should be in the content for the page to be relevant. Somewhere
between 5 and 8 percent is a roughly optimal level – but
this isn’t always possible, and you shouldn’t force it. Don’t
overdo it, or the search engines might mark you down.
5. Many search engines judge web page importance on the
number and quality of incoming links from other
sites. You
should link to some related sites, but not too many. Don’t
overdo incoming links either, and keep them related your
site’s content. It’s also good to get sites to use your keywords
as the text of these links.
If you follow the advice above, you can do it yourself and
do fine. SEO, if done right, can keep you on top for as long
as you want to be.
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