Work From Home

Search Engine Optimization is big business. The number of companies out there providing SEO services is quite staggering, and it’s growing every day. Does that mean it’s too difficult to do all by yourself? Not at all. It’s very involved, and it will take a little time and ongoing effort, but it’s not rocket science, and you can even do everything you need to organically Rank #1 in all major search engines by yourself, all for free.

When I opened my SEO Services business in 2004 I only had experience working with my own websites before that point, and I learned VERY quickly one last, very important thing about SEO… It’s personal.

If you pay a big company to Optimize your website for you, as opposed to you learning how and doing the optimization yourself, then you’ll never be able to rank as highly. Another company cannot have the very discreet knowledge of your businesses’ keywords and market that you had to learn the hard way. You can’t just write some keywords down on a list and give it to them, either. You have to be the one continually choosing your website’s keywords and putting them in your site where you see fit. Any other method will either make your site be someone else’s work, not matching your industry, or simply ineffective. (Usually all three.)

The good news is that you taking on the role of SEOer of your own site means that you won’t have to pay a penny for SEO services at all. As my ratings suggest, it’s not a very quick way to bring in traffic, but scoring very highly for your keywords in the Google, Yahoo!, and MSN search engine ranking pages (SERPs) is an incredibly effective way of bringing in traffic. Possibly the best of all ways, because it is the highest possible quality, and if you can dominate enough keywords for your niche, the highest possible quantity as well! People who don’t understand SEO just aren’t aware that it’s all about the Keywords. Choose the right ones, and all the ones, for your niche, and then use them everywhere you can. That’s really all there is to SEO, but there are infinite variations to the process. Let’s hit the major areas by category.

Keyword Selection

Keyword Density

META Tags

Site Flow

SiteMaps

Choosing the Right keywords to target your intended audience with is more than vital, it’s the whole ball game. The best way to do this is by using a large-scale keyword generation software & services such as Wordtracker or Keyword Elite.

However, if you take the time to do it right, you can find all the same keywords yourself, albeit more slowly, by using an excellent free web-based tool offered by Digital Point Solutions, simply called the Free Keyword Suggestion Tool. It actually queries both Yahoo’s (Overture) data as well as Google’s AdWords keyword data, for each and every keyword search you run. Better yet, it let’s you drill down to be as specific as you want. The only thing this doesn’t tell you is how much people are willing to pay for each
term in PPC engines like AdWords and Y!SM. This is valuable data I suggest you use for in-depth campaigns, especially for AdSense Publishers, however at this point it’s not necessary. SEOing your website is strictly the art of choosing the MOST RELEVANT keywords to your desired audience. All else needs to be forgotten at this stage.

Build up as big a list as possible, keeping all keywords on your list relevant. I suggest using a spreadsheet like MS-Excel to store them, so you can sort them by demand as well.

The way you get lots of people to your site is by choosing the highest-demand keywords on that list and using them in your site often. After you’ve built your whole list, sort by demand, and use those with the biggest numbers the most across your website.

Technorati : keyword selection, keywords, seo

This term refers to the number of times you use your keywords throughout a page or a site. If you had a 200 word page that you’re trying to optimize for the word “peanut butter,” but only said this phrase once throughout the whole page, you’re not letting Googlebot and it’s spider pals know what you’re talking about at all…

Alternatively, if 50 of those 200 words (25%) are the keywords themselves, then you’re really going to be spamming the search engines, as Googlebot will see right through what you’re trying to do and penalize you for it. Even worse, people reading such copy would think that you’re not even a native speaker of your language, and leave the page immediately! The best course of action would be to aim between 0.5% and 5% of the content on a page. Any more would sound artificial; any less would be too vague. The trick is to never let it influence your copy’s effectiveness. This doesn’t take into account the other places you can put your keywords, such as the name of the page, the title, in HTML comment tags, as names for the photos it links to, and of course in the Meta Tags in your HTML code. They’re all wide-open for you to shove your keywords into as well, and SE Spiders like Googlebot read them too.

Technorati : Keyword Density, seo