Do It Yourself SEO
Can You Do-It-Yourself?
Is it possible to get top rankings for your website without the help of an experienced Seo Service company?
Can an automated software program or service really automate the process of generating a continuous stream of sales for your business?
Unfortunately, this magic Seo Software would need to research your market niche, identify and develop the keyword hierarchy for your online market, dissect your competitive landscape, write unique relevant content, structure your website perfectly to meet your online market objectives and integrate all of this together in an effective way, you’ll probably be asking for your money back.
You’ll run into a similar situation with online offers for number one Google ranking for a very small investment on your part in time and money. The problem with these offers is that it isn’t necessarily false advertising, but more that the keyword they’ll get you ranked for will have almost no traffic and, in essence, be useless to your business. If you demand that the keyword they rank for is one of the more competitive, you’ll find them pulling their offer immediately.
Can You Get SEO Help That’s Affordable And Works?
The short answer is yes… you can find pieces of useful information, online courses, etc. that will provide techniques and methods… But, knowing which to apply in what order, which are the most effective for your time and effort, and which may be actually outdated and are no longer effective can waste a huge amount of your time and money. You may even hurt your ranking if done incorrectly.
That being said, there are things you can do to make some incremental improvements that can be made with some minimal copy, meta tag and content modifications. Of course, you must be willing and have the time to implement any of these do-it-yourself efforts.
HOWEVER, there are tools and analysis reports available to you that can give you a towering leap for the do-it-yourselfer. Some plain English comparisons of your page vs. the top 10 ranking pages in a particular engine for a particular keyword phrase will define dozens of parameters to begin your do – it -yourself optimization.
How many links do you need, are there better keywords you should choose, and then what do you do with all this information once you have it? Comparisons and analysis of your site and your competitors are usually presented in an easy to understand format and reveal patterns and collected intelligence that can help you re-write and revise your content and page layout and begin your SEO efforts a lap ahead of everyone else.
Set Realistic Goals
You must remember, legitimate, professional Search Engine Optimizers are immersed in their field and are educated with experience. The time, knowledge, talent and effort that you get with a pro is worth every penny.
A professional SEO’s approach involves research of your market, competition and many times a significant renovation of your existing site from code to content. The in-depth detail and deep analysis, content development, link and page structure requires a significant amount of time, experience, and a lot of hand work.
In other words, if you want to feel better and improve your self image, you don’t have to pay a doctor to tell you that eating healthy, taking a vitamin and regular exercise will make a marked improvement in your well being.
If you want the large scale, lasting and radical change a facelift can give you, you must pay a plastic surgeon for his education, experience and talent.
Don’t forget to use some common sense when looking at your market. If you think you’re going to rank for a highly competitive keyword that has several well known companies at the top without the aid of a professional, you’ll probably end up disheartened.
Keep in mind that gaining page one ranking for competitive keywords in a saturated market is a huge task. You need to be prepared for a major effort even for a Professional Seo Services firm with the knowledge and resources to tackle the challenge. Even so, your strategy should be to identify some second tier competitive keywords in your niche market that can drive serious traffic to your site.
Even Some Basic Tactics Can Get Your Started On The Right Track
For less competitive situations, even small changes can have an impact. Here are a few that you should consider when getting started:
Title Tags: Search engines first check out the title of the website to determine what the site is about. This title tag is in the code of the page and not visible on the page, but is visible in the top of the web browser in the tab.
Typically you want this title tag to identify the product or service using proven keywords that are searched often for your business. You can add your company name if you know that it will add to the relevancy to what the searcher is looking for. You may also just want to begin to brand your company’s name as an add-on to the keyword topic.
Say someone is searching for a foot doctor. Most likely they are going to type in “foot doctor” or “podiatrist” followed by the city where they are located, not a doctor’s name or medical facility. When this phrase shows up in the browser tab, they know they’re in the right place. If they already knew the name of the doctor or facility, they wouldn’t need to search on podiatrist since they already know who they’re looking for.
Your main website and browser ranking goal is to attract people to your website who don’t know that you exist!
Important: Use this same keyword phrase in your Header in the content of the page itself. These are called h1 parameters in the code on the page.
In addition, use this same phrase in the first sentence on the page to increase the search engines understanding of the relevant importance of this keyword phrase to describing what this page is all about.
On-Page Content
First, the content of the page must be quality content and not just keyword stuffed garbage. Google is now able to distinguish crap from quality based on its review of all content it has indexed in your market. It knows what other words are typically associated with the keyword phrase you are targeting and will be looking for those relevant semantically related keywords on the page and throughout your site.
Your keyword research should identify other relevant phrases to your target keywords and use those in a natural way within the content of the page.
Important: Don’t write specifically for search engines. Write content that will be interesting and relevant to the reader taking into account your SEO criteria.
In addition, keep your content in bite size pieces unlike how copy is written for off-line published information. Use bold subheads and bullets to break up copy and create white space.
Your Keyword Research for SEO
Keyword Universe: At a minimum, you can use Google’s Keyword Tool to begin your research. What you’re looking for is to identify the “keyword universe” for your niche market. You’ll find that there are different high level (based on searches) categories within your main subject. Each of these will have it’s own hierarchy, and so on in a corporate type pyramid structure.
Note: this can be very time consuming and requires experience to determine how to structure it and understand which keywords to avoid, which to target and for what purpose.
On-Page: In conjunction with industry keyword research, you’ll want to evaluate your existing website (if you have one) to determine how well you are situated with respect to this keyword universe to take advantage of the online market you’re targeting. This primarily will entail implementing on-page optimization techniques throughout your site.
Competition: Next, you’ll need to evaluate the top competitors and determine why it is that they are ranked so highly in the search engines and identify what you should do to exceed their efforts and outrank them. This includes evaluating their keywords, content, meta tags, site structure, internal linking, and especially inbound links.
Off-Page Inbound Links
Making up the majority of the contribution to your ranking strategy, once you have the rest of your work accomplished is the quality and number of inbound links to your site.
Ranking is based primarily on who and how many links you have coming into your web pages. Not just the home page, but pages throughout your site. Google considers links to your site a vote of the quality and importance of the content on your site and, thereby, contributes to the popularity and authority of your website.
Important: It’s not just the number of links that count, but the quality of those links. In evaluating sites, you find sites ranking higher than others even though the number of inbound links is much smaller. This is partially due to the quality of those links.
PageRank
Very briefly, PageRank (PR) is a measure of quality given by Google to a web page (not website). There are many factors that contribute to this. A number is assigned between 0 and 10. Getting back links from websites’ pages that are have a rank of 5 or above can be very valuable to boosting your site rank. Even sites with lower PR can positively contribute to improving your search engine rankings.
Links: to find links to the top websites in your niche, conduct a Google search on your target keyword phrase and then take the top ten sites and plug their web address into Yahoo! Links function to review the external sites linking to them.
In Yahoo search field type link:www.competitordomain.com (replacing “competitordomain” with the site you’re reviewing. Review the external sites linking to them for potential sites to get links to your site.
Important: Download use Firefox browser with an SEOQuake plugin to display the PR of each of those sites and so identify those that will have the most benefit to your back linking efforts.
Most Important: Take Action
Start now and begin to take action. Every bit of effort can begin to have an effect on your ranking.
Even so, know that it will take time for any effort to work its way through the search engines and begin to take effect. It can take months for your efforts to become apparent and see results. That’s why quality, long lasting, SEO is an incremental process that’s worth the effort in the long-run.
After conducting your research, lay out a plan and begin to execute. Over time you’ll be surprised at the results that can be achieved even with small incremental changes and efforts.
If you have a business to run, then budget for some professional SEO to get your site situated correctly and get you started. As you see positive results and an increase in customers from this research and fact based activities, you may find that it’s a good return on investment to employ a professional SEO company.
Whatever choice you make… Do something!
To Your Success!!
Author Steve Josephs is owner of Intellidon Marketing LLC, a Search Engine Marketing and SEO Services firm specializing in attracting new customers for local businesses through Online Marketing Strategies. See: Wikipedia on Search Engine Optimization.
