DIY Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation on a Shoestring

Optimising your website for the search engines (in order to get a good ranking for specific search words) needn't be expensive for business owners.

Many small or micro businesses simply don't have the resources to pay for their own marketing department or search engine experts and find they need to conduct their own optimisation, at least at startup stage anyway.

Search engine optimisation is very simple despite it appearing otherwise, and is a task any business owner can complete for themselves and achieve results; all it requires is dedication and time.

Firstly decide what search words people will be keying into a search engine to find you. A free trial at www.wordtracker.com can provide you with this information.

It may not be the best idea to pick the most popular words, because whilst you will have many search engine users keying in these keywords or phrases - you also will have plenty of competitors, making it harder for you to reach the surface of the search engines.

You may want to aim at the second or third most popular terms, or try and be very specific with your keywords, and make a niche for yourself. You can use a tool such as Wordtracker.com to find out what keywords people are searching under. They offer a free trial, and in my experience you can use it more than once ;-)

Search Engine Optimisation Work Tasks
These will unfortunately need to be completed on a weekly/monthly basis, as search engine optimisation is an ongoing process.

No sooner have you reached the top of the search engines you could easily slip down them again as your competitors double their efforts to pull ahead of you; this forces you to continue your optimisation work for the long term to stay ahead of the game.

1. Link Building

You need to build a good number (as many as possible) of incoming links to your site; this is a key factor in ranking - the number of links you have to your site - the top ranked sites have thousands of links to them. . There are several ways of building links to your website, which I have described below.

Link swapping
Create a links page for your site and build reciprocal (swapped) links with other companies in the same or similar line of business.

When you ask for links from other people you should ask that they use a link title that contains your keywords (but makes sense still), and then link this text to your website address.

The best links are from similar companies who have a good search engine ranking themselves, and whose link will feature any of your keywords. Pay attention to the Google Page Rank of the page your link will sit on, a low PR (0 for instance) is pretty useless for you, whereas a rank like PR3 or PR4 is valuable.

Bear in mind that website owners will only give you a link on their PR4 page, if you can offer them a return link on a page of your website that is also PR4. It is only fair that they will want to trade like for like. This means that until you build up a decent page rank, you may be forced to accept your link going onto pages with PR0 and PR1 for now until you can offer better in return.

If you install the Google Toolbar, you will be able to view the Google Page Rank of every single page you visit.

Inbound Only Links By Writing Articles
You can build in-bound only links by writing industry expert articles and submitting them to article directories or resources. These always allow a 'author bio' within which you can place your url.

Inbound Only Links On Directories
Another good way to gain inbound only links is to submit your site to some of the many high quality free business directories on the Internet. Some of these will want a link in return, but many will not. Never pay to feature in a business directory - this is not an effective way of marketing your business for the majority of industries, no matter what the sales person may try to tell you.

Inbound Only Links On Social Bookmarking *
You can gain links via social bookmarking. Do a bit of research to find out what social bookmarking is and then utilse the excellent free tool at www.socialmarker.com.

Inbound Only Links On Social Media *
Social media is very popular and a way to distrubute inbound links to your website. Use websites such as Twitter and Facebook (create a Facebook business page of course) and use Twitter to 'tweet' links to your website, and Facebook to post links to your website content on your Facebook wall (business page only, not personal wall).

This of course only works if you have new content added to your website on a regular basis (ie, like a blog, which I strongly recommend as being beneficial for your business)

Of course your Twitter followers for instance won't appreciate you blogging your homepage link to the same old content on a weekly basis - that's just one way to loose followers fast. The links you post have to be to something new and fresh each time you do it.

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2. Content Is King
Build good quality content on your website, the content should be useful and keyword rich without being excessively keyword repetitive - some search engines view excessive keyword littering as spam and actually can count this against you and perhaps even ban you from their search engine.

It is said that keyword density of about 1-5% per page is a good benchmark to aim for (so about 1-5% of the page words can contain your repeating keyword/s)

Others methods that can cause you to be banned are to litter keywords on your site and then hide them so that they are not visible. Frequently update and add to your content, as refreshing content also improves your importance in the opinion of the search engines.

Having a blog on your website is a very good way of regularly adding keyword rich content and serves the dual purpose of helping you connect with your customer base and evidence expertise in your field.

It is said that good content will naturally drive in-bound links to your site as other websites will want to link to your useful content. Also, of course if you have regularly updated content such as that on a blog, you have new content to post to social media and bookmarking sites so that you build your inbound links up in that way also.

3. Site Composition
Ensure that even if your site is flash based, or entirely image based, that there are also text only links to navigate the entire site with, this will enable the indexing robots (from the search engines) to find your pages and your keyword rich content.

It's important that your site content is not buried in flash files, or isn't in image format; the search engine robots would be unable to read it in this case.

Search engine robots cannot navigate image based links, only .html links and thus if you have image based navigation, the robots won't be able to read beyond your homepage.

Create alt tags on images to name them, if relevant use keywords in the image names.

Make sure the right keywords are used on your meta tags, page descriptions and page titles, do not use a string of keywords for your page titles or descriptions, some search engines don't like this and view it as spam/cheating. Each page should have titles, descriptions, and keywords relevant to the information on that specific page.

Use keywords in your page headers.

4. Submission
You can use www.submitexpress.com to submit your website to multiple search engines for free at once. You only need to do this on the day it first goes live.

Submit your site to www.dmoz.org - Google rates this highly and a listing will greatly boost your ranking.

5. Patience
Expect it to take time (up to three months even) to achieve a decent ranking from all of your efforts. Have patience and keep it up every single month without fail. As soon as you stop search engine optimisation work (and your competitors do not) they will stride ahead of you for your keywords once more.

It can take even longer to get a good ranking if you are targeting highly competive keywords, after all one does not build thousands of inbound links over night and if you did somehow manage that Google would know you had used automated software and you could face being banned from their search engine. Not the result you wanted.

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