Everyone that works with SEO can agree that there really aren’t many real trade secrets involved with Search Engine Optimization. Well if that is true, why are there are so many websites out there that simply do not use any of these blatantly obvious Optimization Techniques? The answer to that question is simple: People, and businesses in general, don’t know what these techniques are. These people (businesses) don’t understand how much SEO they can actually accomplish themselves. Today I will discuss Five Do-it-Yourself SEO Tipsyour business can use right now to start getting your website Ranked.
We are going to start with On-Page Optimization. According to HubSpot, On-page SEO makes up roughly 25% of the factors that Google uses to Rank webpages in its SERPS. What this means, in a nutshell, is that the portion of SEO that a business has the most control over (their website) accounts for only 25% of the work that must be done. Since we are only talking about 1/4 of the work, let’s move along quickly and get to the the meat of this post; because after we are done with On-Page SEO we still have the other 75% to finish!
Tip #1 – Name Your Page
The first step to On-Page SEO should be deciding what your Page is about. This is where you are going to build the “title” of your page. If you were asked to describe your webpage in 10 words or less, what would your answer be? Not only do you need to describe everything that can be found on this webpage, you also need to make your page sound pretty amazing at the same time; because who wants to click on a link to the dullest story ever posted to the web?
Titling a webpage is much like titling a blog post. You want to state exactly what you are going to talk about, but in a way that is so interesting that you actually gain some readers. Now this can’t always going to be the case because let’s face it some pages were meant to be dull and uninteresting: “Terms & Conditions” – that’s a page everyone wants to read, right?
The most important thing to remember about titling your webpage is this: make sure that your page Title is Unique. I repeat, make sure that your page Title is Unique. No one wants to read the same thing over and over again right? Plus – search engines like it when you describe your webpages uniquely all throughout your website.
So, performing SEO on a new page? Time to write a new “Title.”
Ok, now that we’ve decided on a Title (we’ll go ahead and use “Top 5 DIY SEO Tips” for our example) let’s throw it into our webpage. You can do this by opening up your webpage in the editor of your choice (Notepad, Dreamweaver, Visual Studio, etc…) and find the text located between the 2 Title tags (<title></title>). This is where you are able to “Name Your Page.” For the purposes of this discussion we would would use a Title that looks something like this: <title>Top 5 DIY SEO Tips</title>. On our Search Engine Optimization Blog, we let WordPress write the Title of our blog into every page of the blog so our actual Title is “Search Engine Optimization Blog » Top 5 DIY SEO Tips.”
If you have any questions about how to edit your Title tags, or if you are having problems doing so, send us an email with your issue and we’ll see if we can help you out.
Tip #2 – Describe Your Page
The second Tip for SEO that you can do yourself involves another piece of On-page SEO. This piece is the Description for your webpage. This piece looks a little different from the Title tags in the first Tip; instead of looking between two tags like <title></title>, you will need to look for the information found in one of the Meta tags. Meta tags are located in the <head></head> portion of your webpage, just like the Title tags are. The Description Meta tag might look something like this: <meta name=”description” content=”Five Do-it-Yourself SEO tips for Optimizing your Website. Search Engine Optimization you can do Yourself.” />.
As you can see in the previous paragraph we’ve inserted a short phrase that describes the type of content you should expect to find on our webpage. Using a short descriptive phrase that can be read naturally by a potential Visitor to your website is probably the best way to complete this part of search engine optimization for your website. The main reason that you want this phrase to be easily read is because the description that you give is used by Search Engines to describe your webpage in the SERPS. Combined with an exciting Unique Title, the Description can be a great call to action for potential Visitors.
Before we move on to the next Tip I want to make a quick suggestion. Even though this second Tip is all about the Description tag of your webpage, I believe you can take this information and use it as the basis for every other piece of content on the page itself. If you describe your webpage as containing 5 Do-it-YourselfSEO Tips, like we did, then you better make sure that the content matches the description. So before you move on to link-building, make certain that the page content you are going to be linking to matches its Title and Description.
Here is where we are after the first two Tips:
<title>Top 5 DIY SEO Tips</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Five Do-it-Yourself SEO Tips for Optimizing your Website. Search Engine Optimization you can do yourself.” />.
Tip #3 – Link to Your Page
The first two Tips are probably the most important pieces of On-Page optimization. Now it is time to talk about the biggest piece of Off-Page optimization: link-building. Link-building can be accomplished in many different ways, but we’re going to stick with the ones that you can do yourself. This should make sense, since this is a DIY SEO tip!
When going through the link-building process yourself without the help of an SEO firm you need to be careful when approaching potential opportunities. The first word of caution that we want to give you is to watch which directories you are thinking about using to link to your website. There are many directories out there that offer “free” listings and just ask that you complete a form with information about yourself and your company. The main problem with these “free” directories is that they do not discriminate against websites based on the amount of value these websites might or might not have. This means that you may have worked very hard at creating a good name for your company and at producing a very high quality product, but you are going to be listed right alongside all of the fly-by-night companies that laugh in the face of all your hard work.
Directories like those described in the previous paragraph will more than likely hurt your page ranking more than they will help it, so we suggest sticking to a very few directories and ones that put potential listers through the ringer in order to get listed. The directories that we would suggest you use are DMOZ.org,Yahoo!, and Business.com. DMOZ is a Free Directory, but is monitored heavily by a group of moderators who make it very difficult for the fly-by-night operation to get listed. For this reason, we definitely recommend a listing in DMOZ’s Open Directory Project. Both Yahoo! and Business.com offer their Directory submissions at a fee so choose these directories based on how much you are willing to spend (Yahoo! charges $299/yearly).
Directories are not the only way for you to build links that point to your webpages, there are many other venues that you can choose to use but make sure that you use the same caution with these venues as you would with a Free Directory. Additional opportunities for link building include: Partnerships (you link to me and I’ll link to you), Press Releases, Blogs (start your own and get added to the Blogosphere!), and otherSocial Media.
Directories, Press Releases, Blogs, and other Social Media are definitely useful when building links to your webpages. Link-building is by far the most important aspect of search engine optimization and will help you immensely when climbing ranks with your website. But remember this: if you do all of this and your website doesn’t have enough high quality content, you will begin to spin your wheels. All of the momentum in the world isn’t going to help your website rank any higher than it already is if you don’t have enough traction to continue moving forward. This is where high quality content comes in.
At the beginning of this article I stated that HubSpot describes On-page SEO as being just 25% of the work required to get Google to notice your webpage. The other 75% is Off-page SEO and consists of the link-building opportunities suggested above, but just as importantly it consists of building high quality content that visitors will not only read… but will also “link” to. By becoming a reliable, quality resource for the type of information that your target audience is looking for, you can gain more press than you could ever pay for. If your website has content that is worth coming back for and worth telling others about, then you’ve achieved the sort of traction that will drive your website and your business forward.
Tip #4 – Rate Your Page
The first three Tips have covered On-page SEO and Off-page SEO, but there is another item that needs to be discussed if you are going to be able to know whether or not you are succeeding. This is where the Tip “Rate Your Page” comes in. In order to understand whether or not your efforts in SEO are working, you need to be able to measure the results.
There are a number of websites, and a number of companies, that have been created to provide for this very necessary component of SEO. Analyzing how well your webpages are doing will let you know whether or not you are doing the right things for your website to begin ranking better. The main factor will of course be your webpage’s position in the search engine results pages for the keywords that you are targeting, but there are other factors that you can monitor as well. These include PageRank, Alexa Traffic Rank, Blog Rank, # of inbound links, and others…
By monitoring this information, you will be able to learn whether or not your SEO efforts are helping or hurting your webpages. This information will help you better understand how well you are doing and where you should make some changes to your strategies. Tip number four is a little bit easier than the rest because most of the information is out there and available to you, but it is up to you to continuously measure this information in order for you to make the right choices for optimizing your website.
Tip #5 – (Repeat)
Perhaps the hardest item on the table, Tip number five definitely hits on a subject that isn’t always talked about during a typical SEO consultation. No one in SEO wants to tell a potential client that when they’ve finally finished optimizing their website they are going to need to start over and do it all again. Who wants to hear something like that, right??
Well, it may be sad, but it is true. In order to maintain the amount of success that moving to the first page of the search engine results pages brings, you will have to go back to step one and start all over again many, many times if you want to continue to be at the top of the list. Why is this so? Well, to put it bluntly, it is because you are not the only fish in the sea, and many others are out there trying to climb just as high or higher!
I consider these Tips to be the Top 5 DIY SEO Tips because they contain the most important steps that you can take to optimizing your website that you can actually do Yourself. There are many other tips that will help you rank higher in the search engines, but these Five are the most important.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this article here at my Search Engine Optimization Blog. I want to put a lot of time and effort into each of the articles that I write so expect a little bit of time between each update, but rest assured that they will possess the same amount of quality information. For now it is time for me to get back to that other 75% of SEO! Thanks again!