A Beginner’s Guide to SEO

Be sure that when you have your own website, and when you are dealing with professional technical aspects of your website like server configuration and hosting, that you do your own SEO modifications. This is because SEO affects the way your website works and how it looks. You cannot please everybody and you cannot please Google all at once.

Doing your own SEO modifications may mean giving up on trying to get your website onto the first page of Google. You will miss out on hundreds of thousands of visitors to your website.

The first and foremost step in doing your own SEO is to do a keyphrase search.

To do a keyword search, you will need to use the Google keyword tool. This tool is a Google supplied tool which works closely with the Google search engine.

The Google keyword tool gives you the number of monthly searches by people using the keywords you select. You can later narrow this down to the keywords that are getting people to buy or that are generating a lot of searches but that do not have a lot of competition.

Once you have narrowed down your keywords to those that have a lot of searches and a lot of competition, you can start building your website around these keywords.

You can make simple HTML changes to your website and place the keywords in a page title, meta description and meta keywords section. Also you will need to get plenty of external links to these pages using the keywords as the anchor text.

If you do not have external links to your website I would suggest using software like SEO Elite or an automatic link building service.

Write and submit articles

You can write your own original article, and you can also submit them to various article directories as well as to various article directories. These article directories generally have a much greater credibility with the search engines than non-article directories.

Also when submitting your articles, use the keywords you are trying to target as the anchor text of the links that you create.

Build off-site links

Off-site links to your website is basically links from other peoples’ websites to your website. You can do this by simply having a link to your website on other people’s website. You can also do this by writing comments or posts on other people’s blogs.

Getting links from other blogs or websites is a very easy way to build off-site links, and you can also easily build many off-site links by writing and submitting articles to various article directories. Also commenting on blogs and contributing to discussions is also a great way to get links to your website, and since virtually every blog has an Author biography section which will allow you to create links to your website, it is often considered a great way to get extra links to your website.

Google is a great way to search for websites that allow you to copy their url into the Google search bar and see who is linking to them. You can then approach them either by contacting them by email or visiting their website and submitting your own link (orm.. Mistake…or you can use their “Link to Us” form and add your website URL).

One final note: It is a good practice to regularly check your link popularity and to debate about reciprocal linking and so on.

Submit Informative Articles

Another great way to add links and help your website in the eyes of the search engines is to submit articles that are completely informative, and then let other websites put them on their website.

Each article should have it’s own redirect code inserted into it. It is generally best to insert your website URL into the article before you submit it out. Articles don’t have to be completely informative. Just make sure that they are well written and have no factual errors.

Start a Blog

Blogs are a great way to get a reputation and establish yourself as an expert in your field. A blog will help you talk about interesting news or advertisements. This is great for small business websites.

You can start a blog at any time – before you start your website, during the development of the website or right after. However, preference is to start it during the development of the website mainly because it will help you in avoiding the on page optimization keywords.

If you have a brand new website it is best to add more content in the form of a blog during the development phase. Content is certainly king and it is very important for your website to have lots of content both on the home page and inside the blog. The advantage of having a blog is that it helps you in building a relationship with your prospects and customers. You can create a blog with free services such as blogger or wordpress.com.

Once you have your blog in place and your prospects start visiting your website again, you will be getting sales letters anyway!