Establishing a footprint on Google and the other major search engines is a time consuming process and can take years to start getting good results. Organic rankings are crowded with businesses from every sector vying for coveted top spots. If you break the process up, and start doing a little ever day, you will start to see progress. Many of my clients simply do not even want to try and most do not know how to get started. This paper will walk you through the basic steps you need to build a foundation on which your SEO efforts can grow. The sooner you get moving on this, the better and developing a sound SEO foundation now will translate into great benefits for the future. None of this is meant as an exhaustive discussion of how to rise up on the Internet search engines. There are companies that do this exclusively, and techniques that are much more involved. The point here is to build a sound foundation that is manageable for busy small business owners and developers.
There are two factors that go into search engine optimization, on page and off page. On page factors deal with how your coded is structured, keyword choices and placement, while off page is all about building your network and techniques to drive in bound links, the gold standard for Google and the others. We will first look at on page optimization and then look at techniques that address building an off page network.
The first thing to do is find the keyword phrases that will preform for your business. The best place to start here is to write down a list of keyword phrases you would search if you were looking for a business like yours. Suppose you sell ceramic tile, you might search ceramic tile, ceramic tile repair, kitchen tile, ceramic kitchen tile, etc. Navigate to Google's keyword tool. Plug your keyword phrases in here, and sort by average search volume. You will see general terms like 'ceramic tile' get thousands of hits per month, in this case 550,000. The trick here is to choose your fights wisely. Choose phrases that you can realistically go for, and ones that match your business or specialty. For example 'outdoor ceramic tile' only gets 1900. If outdoor ceramic tile represents a significant part of your business, this would be a great search phrase to go after. You should do this for all the pages hat you plan to optimize for, and you can go for different phrases for each page.
There are specific places that these keyword should be placed in your HTML documents, You should write unique short descriptive titles for each of your pages that include your keyword phrases, place them in on tag, one tag and they should appear once or twice in your body content. Search engines look at more than just these keywords, and it is a good idea to have a good amount of well formatted content.
Your pages should be written with clean simple code. You should validate your HTML and CSS pages wth the W3 validators. You also need to submit your site to these sites: Yahoo Directory, DMOZ, Zoominfo and AbouUs.
External factors are all about you developing a network and driving inbound traffic and links. The more pages link to your site the better your Google rank will be, the better quality the in bound links, the better. Quality refers to the popularity of the site linking to yours, so check their Google ranking, The Google toolbar is a good tool to easily check page rank. Here are some steps you can take to start driving inbound links.
Keep a blog. The blog is the most important tool for generating in bound traffic. If you have the cycles to start becoming a voice in your industry, and people start coming to your site for information, tips or resources, you already have inbound traffic. Google reward dynamic content, and if your site suddenly has volumes of quality content, they will take notice. As far as what to blog about, that is probably best for other resources, but suffice to say that web 2.0 is all about giving. You need to give people a reason to come to your site, and nobody is really concerned about how your attendance at a trade show was a great success. When you have enough blog posts to be proud of, give the link to all your contacts, print it on your business card, promote it on your website. If you own a business, you probably have enough experience to be valuable to people in the marketplace. Make sure to submit your blog to technorati.
Participate in other people's blogs. Many blogs allow you to place a link back to your site, and many blogs are high traffic sites which translates into a quality link. Participate on forums, this too is a place to put your link. If you are helpful, become a trusted member, you will see some direct traffic and people looking for your services will already know and trust you if you help them with an issue. I shoot for 5 inbound links per day.
Contact sites directly and ask if they would be interested in putting a link to your site on their website in exchange for the same favor. This is not difficult to do, and it allows you to control the referring sites and make sure that you are getting a link that has value.
There are many other tools and tricks for getting your site on to Google, but if you do these simple things, you will have built a solid foundation on which you can grow. The trick is to participate, and to do so consistently, allowing time to work in your favor. There are many more tips that can be found on my marketing blog here http://www.focusid.com.
by: Greg Bowen
There are two factors that go into search engine optimization, on page and off page. On page factors deal with how your coded is structured, keyword choices and placement, while off page is all about building your network and techniques to drive in bound links, the gold standard for Google and the others. We will first look at on page optimization and then look at techniques that address building an off page network.
The first thing to do is find the keyword phrases that will preform for your business. The best place to start here is to write down a list of keyword phrases you would search if you were looking for a business like yours. Suppose you sell ceramic tile, you might search ceramic tile, ceramic tile repair, kitchen tile, ceramic kitchen tile, etc. Navigate to Google's keyword tool. Plug your keyword phrases in here, and sort by average search volume. You will see general terms like 'ceramic tile' get thousands of hits per month, in this case 550,000. The trick here is to choose your fights wisely. Choose phrases that you can realistically go for, and ones that match your business or specialty. For example 'outdoor ceramic tile' only gets 1900. If outdoor ceramic tile represents a significant part of your business, this would be a great search phrase to go after. You should do this for all the pages hat you plan to optimize for, and you can go for different phrases for each page.
There are specific places that these keyword should be placed in your HTML documents, You should write unique short descriptive titles for each of your pages that include your keyword phrases, place them in on tag, one tag and they should appear once or twice in your body content. Search engines look at more than just these keywords, and it is a good idea to have a good amount of well formatted content.
Your pages should be written with clean simple code. You should validate your HTML and CSS pages wth the W3 validators. You also need to submit your site to these sites: Yahoo Directory, DMOZ, Zoominfo and AbouUs.
External factors are all about you developing a network and driving inbound traffic and links. The more pages link to your site the better your Google rank will be, the better quality the in bound links, the better. Quality refers to the popularity of the site linking to yours, so check their Google ranking, The Google toolbar is a good tool to easily check page rank. Here are some steps you can take to start driving inbound links.
Keep a blog. The blog is the most important tool for generating in bound traffic. If you have the cycles to start becoming a voice in your industry, and people start coming to your site for information, tips or resources, you already have inbound traffic. Google reward dynamic content, and if your site suddenly has volumes of quality content, they will take notice. As far as what to blog about, that is probably best for other resources, but suffice to say that web 2.0 is all about giving. You need to give people a reason to come to your site, and nobody is really concerned about how your attendance at a trade show was a great success. When you have enough blog posts to be proud of, give the link to all your contacts, print it on your business card, promote it on your website. If you own a business, you probably have enough experience to be valuable to people in the marketplace. Make sure to submit your blog to technorati.
Participate in other people's blogs. Many blogs allow you to place a link back to your site, and many blogs are high traffic sites which translates into a quality link. Participate on forums, this too is a place to put your link. If you are helpful, become a trusted member, you will see some direct traffic and people looking for your services will already know and trust you if you help them with an issue. I shoot for 5 inbound links per day.
Contact sites directly and ask if they would be interested in putting a link to your site on their website in exchange for the same favor. This is not difficult to do, and it allows you to control the referring sites and make sure that you are getting a link that has value.
There are many other tools and tricks for getting your site on to Google, but if you do these simple things, you will have built a solid foundation on which you can grow. The trick is to participate, and to do so consistently, allowing time to work in your favor. There are many more tips that can be found on my marketing blog here http://www.focusid.com.
by: Greg Bowen
