This article is for:
* Small to medium sized businesses (1-300 employees)
* Professional services like Tree trimming, financial advisors, Dentists, and hundreds more.
* For ecommerce websites, the methods discussed do apply but ecommerce requires extra help which will be covered in a different article.
Methods discussed here you can certainly do yourself and make Google magic happen and you don't have to pay a pricey conventional search engine optimization company or freelancer to do them except for some notable exceptions.
But, hold on a minute there a minute Sparky...
I don't want to give you the impression that you can head south for the Winter once you do as many of these suggestions as you can. No, no, but I am saying do it yourself to learn what the process is like and help your garden grow. It is satisfying and fun when you get results. You will get results.
To get the best return on your website investment hire a search engine marketing professional and do the list below and ask him if you get stuck, find out if he's doing the same things, if not -- Why not? As you become more knowledgeable in the ways of SEO, your professional service provider will come to respect you and will be more attentive to your needs because he thinks you know enough about his methods. It's an excellent way to get respect and better performance from your conventional pricey search engine optimization professional or your affordable search engine marketing professional.
Listen, I have a few clients that can talk intelligently about DMOZ, or FaceBook, or Twitter, and deep linking. I am always impressed and feel like comfortable talking about my methods to a client who doesn't glaze over in the eyeballs when the discussion turns to deep Backlinking. I purposely keep my conversation in basic English so as not to put prospects and clients to sleep talking about top level domains and the importance of having 65 characters in your title tag which is the most important
tag in a website's header.
So, here's what you can do.
I am assuming the following:
o You know how to use a Google search bar
o You have a browser, like Firefox or IE8. I recommend Firefox because you can search for any word on an entire Google search results page. The browser even highlights the word found within the all 100 listings.
o You know how to set whatever browser you use to search for 100, not 10 listings.
o You need the Google toolbar. You can get if free on Google. Be sure to get the PageRank option too.
There are certain talents that I suppose you can learn, like you could learn to play piano, you could learn to do creative keyword research, but do you have that much time to spend away from your business?
You will l need a search engine optimization expert to do certain things. Don't reinvent the wheel. For example:
o Don't do your own keyword research. The Google model and new Caffeine architecture requires a formidable professional keyword research talent because your keyword research is the #1 cornerstone of your website's success. Don't try this at home.
o Same with your
tag is ignored by Google these days.
o You will run across what seem to be amazing SEO deals on the Internet like "Get your website listed on FaceBook and all the social media sites -- or get your website automatically listed on 500 internet directories, or 1000 backlinks for $50.00. These are all scams, mostly run by overseas web-pirates.
o As a small business, if you are paying more than $1000.00 for a one year SEO service, revisit the situation. You need to look harder, compare prices, services, credibility, and trustworthiness.
Here is what you can do to strengthen your website, and how to do it.
1. List your website business by category on DMOZ - is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. You have to have a listing. Period. Finding the right category for what you do can be frustrating. Stick with it. You have to be listed. Period, again.
2. Don't pay money to be submitted to a million search engines. Once you're indexed on Google, the rest fall into place.
3. You can get indexed on Google by opening a free Twitter account and Tweet yourself. Sounds painful, but being tweeted is interesting. If you know someone with a Twitter account, have them Tweet. You. What do they Tweet, just the URL of your website. An URL is spelled with the http and: and // but a domain is just the domain name.
4. How do you know if your indexed on Google or not? Easy, put the following in the Google search bar. (Not your browser's address bar, only the Google search bar will work. Exactly enter site (colon)yourdomain com if Google reports: Your search - yourdomain com did not match any documents, then you can't be found on Google even though you appear when you put your domain in the address bar. Confusing, nope, just read very carefully what was just written. It is critical that you are indexed on Google, or you are invisible to the world and beyond.
5. Start building backlinks. Find blogs that are related to what your website is about. Make a comment on the blog and be sure to include your URL, not your domain name. When your comment is published by the blog owner, your website gets 3 Gold Stars from Google. Try to do one or two a day. This experience is great promotion for your site and you get to see other designs, read some well optimized text, see what graphics are useful and which are stupid. You will see blogs that are practically nothing but advertising, OK to comment but pretty worthless as contributing good content to the internet. Many of these blogs are just ad money scams.
6. Become familiar with your competition. This is the most important way to promote your site. Do what the top 5 indexed sites are doing. Figure it out do the same. That's the key to this whole approach, beat the competition.The trick is to find a balance of how much time you can put into the promotion process and the time needed to run your business and maybe do stuff you used to do before you get hooked on this. Some people get addicted to promoting their own website. Balance, and do what your competition does, that's all there is.
My next article could include more starter methods, maybe not because if you get into the points listed above you will find out more ways to promote your own site. The trick is to find a balance of how much time you can put into the promotion process and the time needed to run your business and maybe do stuff you used to do before you get hooked on this. Some people get addicted to promoting their own website. Balance, and do what your competition does, that's all there is.
