Doing Your Own SEO

SEO: THE DO-IT-YOURSELF WAY

If you have a website you obviously want people to see it. You want visitors to pour in and help make your business rewarding. You want customers help you to slowly expand your little business to a larger and more popular one and you would do just about anything to see that happen…pay hefty sums for advertising, compose hundreds and hundreds of articles for ezines, get top notch SEO services to put you up on popular search engines….only you probably don’t have the kind of time or money to do any of those. Relax that needn’t end your dreams of making your site popular, you can still get the sort of mileage either of those options would provide you without pumping in the sort of money or time they would demand.

Welcome the D.I.Y method of SEO into your business and watch how it makes your ambitions work out for you.

Now, we have all grown to realize the benefits SEO can provide to our online business, but we have also realized, at various junctures, exactly what it costs us to earn that sort of benefit. Most SEO services charge you any where around a neat $4000 for optimizing only a few pages of your site and ranking just two or three of your site’s key words/phrases. The present rate for internal SEO work ranges between $40-$60/hour. External work can cost anywhere over $100/hour. If you own a small business or are a solopreneur then you know paying so much will shake up your entire bank balance.

Even if you are a part of a larger establishment you should probably know that if all the SEO responsibilities of the company’s site is taken over by an individual employee or a group of employees, then it will allow a lot of the company’s revenues to be saved, a boon for a company which fails to make the expected amount of profits by a narrow margin.

SEO companies are withholding a big secret from you. What they aren’t telling you is that earning good ranks at a search engine is really quite a simple job. And once you earn it you can settle there comfortably because all you will need then is a little maintenance and tweaking to help you stay there.

So you can put your site up on a search engine and also get a good ranking without anybody else’s help. Get yourself one of those easily available (and affordable) SEO guides, or land yourself a membership or software package on one of those sites online and learn the tricks which the swanky SEO company’s keep flashing in front of your face.

That is not to suggest that learning them will be a cake walk! Well wake up and smell the coffee….of course they won’t. But if you have a basic understanding of technical matters and a little wit to spare then you can have your website on its way up on the search engine result pages in less than two weeks.

But here is a little thing you must know if you intend to make SEO work for you all by yourself. Most of us who begin on SEO the D.I.Y way learn the tricks and techniques real well but then goof up when it comes to implementing them. That’s because most of us don’t have a plan of action. Now, when you are fighting a war (and believe me competition on the internet is a sort of war in itself) you have to have a plan of action and you have to see it through. Same goes for your SEO plan.

As search engine’s will be made more and more advanced with the coming years, marketing through them will only grow bigger and bigger. In the mean time all you have to know is whether you are willing to sacrifice good money on SEO services which gives you little or no benefit and yet charge sky high rates or whether you, as an enterprising individual, are ready to take the challenge of SEO’ing on your own capable shoulders and thereby determine your own fate for yourself, without the financial loss. The choice is yours.

How To Select An Affordable SEO Company Or Firm

SEO COMPANIES: HOW TO SELECT AN AFFORDABLE ONE

Search Engine Optimization has helped millions of people to get more people to visit their websites and thereby increased their earnings manifolds. If you want to make use of SEO methods for your website you can either put it to use by yourself, or you can take professional help. The first step towards implementing SEO on your website would be to augment your site’s search engine ranking. This in itself is an intricate process and requires time and effort, if you are willing to invest a good amount of both on a regular basis then by all means do it yourself.  But if you are wary about executing SEO methods on your own and think you do not possess the required expertise or do not have the sort of time it requires don’t fret, a number of affordable SEO company’s are eager to be of service, all you have to do is get in touch with them.

If you have a website which is already up and running, but is not providing you with the sort of money you expected it to an SEO implementation would be a good move for you. Your present lack of funds might keep your from investing the kind of money topnotch SEO services require you to, but there are other ways of making it work for you. A number of companies and individuals offer SEO services for a modest price, but you need to scan through your options before deciding the one which will work for you. Don’t jump the gun and hire the first company/individual you find, you may live to regret such a rash decision. Instead, take some time to conduct your own background checks and research, spend time comparing possible options and only then decide which SEO service will be right for you.

If you are searching for someone else to implement SEO for you then chances are that you don’t really know how it works. Make sure you tutor yourself to know at least the basics of the service before trying to hire somebody, else you will end up being taken on a ride. The internet is a place where quality service people and crooks are packed together so close that it becomes difficult to distinguish one from the other, so while most SEO company’s are legal we would be foolish to deny that there are a lot of people out there waiting to swindle you. The more ignorant you are about the work you need done the easier you are to swindle.

After you have decided on a few options and running a back check on them remember to ask for feedback. If the company you are dealing with has a creditable work background it will not hesitate to provide you with references to check up on. Every professional company should provide you with the sort of background information which you as a potential customer might want, without having to be asked for it. But in case they don’t even then make sure you don’t forget to demand it.  Once you get the feedback run your own search through search engine’s to see whether their work has made the claimed difference to the former user’s links.

Although you are making use of a service which asks for a modest amount in the form of fee do not allow yourself to accept anything besides quality service. Remember the reason you are paying as much or as little as you are for the service is because the service costs that much, therefore there is no reason why you should let someone use the low costs as an excuse for poor quality.

Affordable SEO services are easily available and a wise and effective idea for website owners who wish to step up their profits. However a little effort needs to be invested to make even the most brilliant of ideas work, so don’t slacken up about the research and back check part. Once you are truly satisfied with a company put your SEO responsibilities in their hands and watch your website earn you a fortune.

Google Cache

THE GOOGLE CACHE AND WHY YOU SHOULD AVOID IT

Sites usually make superhuman efforts to get all possible pages into Google to increase their page rank. In so far as Google cache is considered, this tactic can and does sometimes return to haunt websites, especially those sites that sell products.

Google Cache – What is it?

Google makes a copy of every web page it can get its little spider robot on. And it stores the copies of these pages in a cache. The cache is nothing but a copy of each and every previous web page for the concerned link. When you are searching on Google for something, each result that the search returns has a "cached" button at the end of the link. Click the "cached" link and you will see a previous copy of the page. Often, what you see is an older version of the page.

In case you are an online seller of products, would you seriously want Google to keep copying previous pages and making them available? Look at it by putting on another pair of lens - do you really want customers to see the old prices of the products you are selling? Many sites change prices or information during the year by way of reflecting their selling cycles, among other things. If your current prices of July are at their top point, would you want your customers to click on the cache link and see your lower prices from April? Probably not.

Don't Get Cached!

It is really simple to keep Google and other search engines from taking copies of your pages. All it needs is some careful meta tagging, and nothing more nor difficult.

All search engine robots that rely on meta tags must stop taking copies of your site. Of late, YahooSlurp was seen behaving somewhat strangely, so please ensure you keep a tab on it when it crawls into your site.

To get already-been-copied pages, all you need do is get in touch with the search engine in question. They normally delete all copies, though they aren't particularly quick.

Adding pages to MSN, Yahoo and Google, and any other major search engine should be an important goal for all websites. However, before you storm down that path, do remember to ensure you realize the consequences of outdated webpages appearing via the cache.

SEO Tips

TIPS ON SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Launching a website and maintaining it isn’t a big deal. You can learn and keep updating yourself about various aspects of a website through the vast resources present in the internet any time. So practically, in no time and with minimum efforts, you end up having a great website with good content and eye-catching graphics. But what do you do next? How do you ensure that people visit your site?

You cannot assume that every single web-user around the world will know how great your site is just as much as you do. The cyberspace is infested with numerous websites, many similar to yours as well. And each claims to offer something unique. There is a website for every thing you can think of. Name any type of business and you have a website to its name for sure. When such is the competition, how do you plan to make your mark and outshine the rest?

The key question — how do you bring the internet traffic to your website?

Web-users know it all too well that whatever they need to find, they will get it in the search engines. The latter is one highly user-friendly internet tool that bridges the gap between the users’ search for a particular thing and the website that offers just that. To find what you want, you just need to think of words or phrases that relates to your need. Say for example you are doing a research on the Halloween festival. Then you just need to type in keywords like “Halloween origins”, “Halloween customs” or “Halloween celebrations” et al. The clever search engine immediately lays out an exhaustive list of websites on Halloween right before you.
But it is known to all that the websites which feature at the top of the search engine result page, get the highest number of clicks and visitors. There is enormous competition to reach the top positions in the search engines, so that visitors get to see your website displayed first as the best among many others. Getting the top ranks is, however, not easy. You are to know a lot about search engine optimization in order to get there.

Here comes the most vital question now — what is search engine optimization? If you are told that search engine optimization is easy and simple, it may sound a little baleful. Nevertheless, it is somewhat true. Following the few following tips will surely help you with your search engine optimization. These tips, if used, will not only help you achieve a high listing in the search engines for your site, but will also ensure more internet traffic to it:

Simple, easy to spell keywords

Internet being a fast-paced medium, its users are impatient and do not stick to one thing for long. They hardly bother to look at the bottom or next page of a search engine results page. They also do not use well-thought-out keywords, at least never in their first search. So you need to keep the keywords of your site as simple and easy as possible. And even if your use commonly misspelled keywords, you should balance it well with all probable spellings of the same word to maximize traffic flow into your site. Complex and long keywords or words having unusual spellings do not get typed often in the search engines. Hence, it is always a good bet to stick to short, simple and easy-to-spell keywords on your site.

Lots of links

The more the links on your site, the better. Search engines appreciate and recognize links. So give as many links as possible in your site—both internal links that link the various web-pages within your site and external links that link to other websites.

Lots of content

Content plays a vital role when it comes to ranking high in search engines. A good lot of keyword-rich content is always conducive to high listing. The search engines rank websites based on their content proportion. So you should keep lots of content in your site and maximize chances of keyword inclusion in that. Remember, however, keywords alone do not count. Content is just as much essential, precisely because search engines do not give a high rank to websites which are rich in keywords and scarce on content. So incorporate sufficient content and even if it is not of the best kind, search engines would excuse that.

What Is SEO And Why Is It Important

WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND WHY IS IT NECESSARY?

When you search for a certain something on a search engine it opens up a number of pages containing possible answers for your search. These ‘answers’ are your search results and the pages which contain these are the SERP or Search Engine Result Pages. Now, consider the many times that you have probably used a search engine, and the many results which each of these searches have raked up. If you think about it closely you will probably discover that out of all those million SERP’s that you have opened up through your searches each time you have probably visited at the very most the first 3 pages of results, the rest you have ignored like they didn’t even exist.

As the owner of a website being thus ignored by visitors and sidelined by search engines has probably kept you up nights wondering exactly how you might better the position of your site. Well the answer is simple; through SEO.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization refers to a process by means of which a website earns high ranking amongst the search results, gets a coveted place on the SERP and thereby pulls in a large chunk of ‘unique’ visitors.

Who needs SEO?

Websites can broadly be classified into 4 different types:

• Personal sites
• Corporate Sites
• Sites providing information
• E-commerce sites

As is obvious the first two types of websites can hold their own without using SEO. That is because they are target group is in itself a niche and it doesn’t want or need audiences beyond that niche. However, that cannot be said for the last two types of websites. If you build a site primarily to circulate information or for commercial use then you would definitely need unique visitors, these may be found only by means of good ranking on SERP’s and therefore by means of SEO.

Watch your content, get the right visitors. If you want to lure the right visitors into your website then simply use the right words. Although search engines do not read they do scan the site’s text. The more relevant your content is the higher your chances of a better ranking.

Another important consideration, while on the topic of content, is keywords. Your keywords are words or phrases which summarize or represent the main topic or subject of your site, when a search engine scans the body of your website’s text it picks up these repeating words and match them with the words being searched if they match then you get a high ranking.

When selecting your keywords make sure you choose words which are most likely to be used by users searching for a site like yours or subjects covered by your site. After you have selected them sprinkle them abundantly within the text of your site. However be careful that you don’t unnecessarily stuff them at inappropriate junctures cause that might attract criticism or even a penalty. Your keyword density per page can be anywhere between 5-15%, depending on of course how skillfully you might choose to repeat them. Make sure that you use your key words/phrases freely in the first two paragraphs of the text. Also, remember to include them in the concluding line of your text. But most importantly use them in your anchor text, certain Search Engine’s like Google put a lot of importance on the anchor text of your inbound links.

Judge for yourself

Here are the reasons we think optimization is a must, you decide for yourself.

• More than 80% of net-users find websites by means of search engines.
• 90% of these users do not bother to check beyond the first 30 results.
• 75% of those using search engines intend to buy a product or service.
• “Professional SEO is twice as effective as all other internet marketing methods and 8 times more effective than banner advertisements.”