The "ABC's" of SEO

A former colleague asked me recently about SEO and could he do it himself.  My answer to him was, "Yes."  With a little information anyone can manage their SEO campaign and not have to pay tons of money hiring someone. So I figured I'd share with you what I shared with my friend.  I hope it helps you too!

The most important think you need to do is go through and define all your key phrase (sometimes called keyword) searches. Start with you homepage. Look at it carefully and write down the words and phrases that best define your site or what you want people to search for to find you.

Example: If you are selling toys, you would want key phrases to be: “buy toys” not “sell toys”. You will want to get in the mind of your target and think about what they would be typing in when they search for you.

Try to form two or three word phrases, since competition for one-word key is fierce, and it is virtually impossible to get a top position for them. Once you have got your list of possible key phrases you will need to check to see how these are ranked currently in search engines.

Go to Google’s home page and type-in each of your key phrases in the search box. Enter your key phrases within quotation marks and see how many results each individual phrase produces.

Make a note of those with a relatively small number of results, because those will be ones you will want to use. Remember to stick with the key phrase that best describes the content of your page, is popular and generates a small number of search results.

Once you have chosen the key phrases for you homepage, do the same for the other pages on your website.

Once you have completed these steps with all your pages, you will need to go back and optimize your pages heavily with them. This involves placing them in the title, headings and body of each page. Of course you may have to rewrite some of your content, but it is totally worth it to get your site up on Google searches.

Depending on how your site is built, you should be able to add your key phrases/words and metatags yourself for each individual page. Usually this is found in the html code at the top of each page. Some other sites have built in a feature for the words to be typed into a special section, specifically designed to accommodate SEO.

Some other considerations to keep in mind:

1. Remember to use text strategically with key phrases / words.
2. Search engines don’t really like flash or javascript, so the less you use the better.
3. Always have a sitemap on your site.
4. Don’t try to cram everything into one page; it will confuse search engines and dilute the content of your page. Always create specific focused pages.

One of the last things that will help your site is to get other (reputable) sites to link to yours, write articles in your field of expertise that can be posted on other sites, which will link back to your site.

You can create a free Google Analytics account, which will show you where your traffic is coming from, what words are searched, etc. This will help you decided if you need to update your key phrases. You can also advertise with your Google account and pay-per-clicks.

Firefox also offers a free SEO tool you can download, I’ve never tried this, but hear good things about the functionality.