DIY SEO
If you are web savvy enough to have built your own website,
you can almost certainly improve your website rankings and attract
more internet customers with your own basic DIY Search Engine
Optimisation campaign. While some advanced SEO techniques may
be more time or trouble than you can manage while still leaving
time for the actual running of your business, there is still
a good deal of fundamental optimisation you can put in place
for yourself.
The first part of any basic SEO project is to know what you're
aiming at. While professional SEOs may have any number of tools
at hand to help with ultra-precise key word targeting, there
is a simpler way to get started: Ask friends and relatives what
they would type into a search engine if they were looking for
your products or services. You may be surprised what words non-experts
come up with when they're online looking for something you think
is obviously referred to by another term!
Your web hosting company should also offer a website statistics
package that will allow you to see referral information from
the search engines. If you're unsure about this, or don't know
how to access your statistics data, contact your webhost and
ask! Finding out what phrases people are actually using to find
your site can not only suggest new phrases to target (álà
the 'interview' technique mentioned above), but can also point
out "missing" keyphrases that indicate words you may
wish to add to your website text to bring in more visitors.
When you know what key words and phrases are most apt to bring
customers to your site, you can start what is arguably the most
important part of basic search engine optmisation, writing keyword-targeted
text. Try to choose one primary word or phrase to target for
each page of your site, and sprinkle that phrase throughout your
text in the most natural manner possible. If you're already somewhat
familiar with HTML, you should also know a little something about
Header tags. Making sure the header text on your site contains
your targeted words and phrases is a great help. Using <strong>
and <em> tags to bold and italicise selected keywords on
the page can also help.
Perhaps the easiest and most overhyped part of basic SEO is
META tags. Be wary of hiring any search engine optimisation firm
who tries to make it sound like your meta keywords tag is an
essential part of a well-ranked website. For the most part the
meta keywords tag is all but ignored by most major search engines
these days. It doesn't hurt to include one on your site, but
they're certainly not a magic bullet. The META Description tag,
on the other hand, is still used by some engines and directories
as the listed description for your site, so try to ensure it's
well written, and contains appropriate key words and phrases.
All of these tips will help ensure your site is more appropriately
ranked in the search engines for the most relevant words and
phrases for your target market. While advanced search engine
optimisation can certainly get far more complicated, a lot of
the "grunt work" of any SEO firm is correcting some
of these basic deficiencies in their client sites.
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