Step-By-Step simple SEO technique that you could adopt

SEO techniques are a must for every individual entrepreneur who is looking to get business through their website. For some companies, SEO can give you rapid results if that particular industry has not got much competition but great demand. For others, it is really going to be a tough time to reach and hit the top spots. And to achieve this, a lot of effort needs to be given on keyword research as that is the starting point towards achieving success on long term. 

Here are simple steps that need to be adopted:

Step1:

Keyword selection - As I told before keyword selection is the first thing you will have to do in any SEO campaign. It depends on the business which keywords to select. To find various keywords from a single keyword of your choice you could use google keyword for adwords tool. It also shows you an approximate number of keywords searched by users in a particular region or globally. This could help you in determining the exact keyword of your choice. A recent article I read stated that, broader keywords had customer conversion more than shorter keywords. For example: If your keyword in particular is for selling a camera in your e-com site, Camera would be a narrow keyword but the number of people searching camera could be more. But this could be customers with vague idea of what they want to buy or might be just researching on various cameras. Suppose your keyword is Sony x123 cybershot camera, and then if a person is landing into your website by searching for that particular keyword, then there are more chances that he/she is going to be customers because they have already researched and have choose to search a model directly. So choosing a keyword could be tricky and good analysis of the market you are in could bring you good results. This is one reason why many SEO companies have SEO analysts, who study the clients’ market requirement and suggest them keywords and work towards those keywords. Also make sure the keywords are relevant to your website or you might get banned by search engines.

Step2:

Know your competitors- By knowing your competitors strategy, it would be easier for you plan to reach that place. Analyze how your competitor has placed keywords, their strategies and back links that generate traffic to their site. By doing so, you would be able to get an idea as to how and where to start your SEO.

Note: Back links from good PR website can quickly help in improving your ranks. At the same time back links from your website to a search engine banned website can affect your rankings.

Step3:

Start On-page Optimization:

On-page optimization involves making changes within the website to make it more “search engine friendly”.

Content Optimization – Content can be a good factor in making your website rank high. One way is to embed the researched keywords on texts found throughout the website, focusing mainly on the headers (those with the big bold letters). It is said that keywords used should be take about 7% of the total number of words in content. Let’s say you have 400 words in a single page, so 7% of that 400 (which are 28) should be keywords. Note: Make sure that the content is still readable after placing those keywords. Remember that the users are still your prime target, not the search engine spiders. If I were to do content optimization, I would play it safe at say 4 percent because too many keywords could as well make the search engine feel as spam website.

Site Map – Site maps are an important part of websites optimized for search engine. This way, search engine spiders (or robots) could easily crawl through the whole website by use of site map. Making it easier for spiders to crawl through the website is one way to make a website “search engine friendly”.

Meta Tags - Meta tags are comprised of the Title, Description, and Keywords of the website. Other than the content of websites, Meta tags are also the perfect place for keywords. The only difference is that these things are like a “Free Buffet” sign for search engine spiders, it’s the one responsible for attracting search engine spiders to crawl your website. But remember that it still depends on the structure of the Meta tags.

Alt Tags - Alt tags are those found in HTML image codes. Let’s say your keyword is “buy camera”, your image tag should now look like this: <img src=”images.png” alt=“buy camera”> .Just like the Meta tags, alt tags are also an appropriate place to put several important keywords. Note: Make sure that only one (1) keyword should be placed on every alt tags found all over the website to avoid keyword spamming (which is part of black hat SEO)

Title Tags – Like Meta tags and alt tags, title tags are also an appropriate place to put some keywords in. By adding a keyword, let’s take for example “Sony Camera”, in the title tag, the HTML hyperlink tag should look like this: <a rel=”nofollow” onclick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/outgoing/article_exit_link’);” rel=”external nofollow” target=”_blank” href=”default.aspx” title=“Sony camera Online”> Note: Alt tags are not seen by visitors, only the search engine spiders so it wouldn’t hurt to just leave it with the keyword. But title tags are seen by visitors, so make sure that the title tag is still readable after embedding a keyword or two.

Step 4:

Start Off-Page SEO 

Unlike the on-page, off-page optimization involves SEO strategies outside of the website. This part of SEO is divided into two categories, backlinks and public relation strategies. Backlinks are links all over the world wide web that points back to your website. It has long been considered that the many backlinks you have, the more popular you’ll get. Another theory added is the weight or importance of the website where the link is coming from. Tools used to determine the popularity of a website is through Google’s PageRank and Alexa traffic tool. Here are some of the strategies used by SEO specialists to get backlinks.

Link Exchange - One of the earliest forms of backlinking involves exchanging links with other relevant websites.

Article Marketing - This type of off-page SEO can be considered both for backlinks and public relations. An article commonly generates an average of 3 links (depending on the kind of article directory it was submitted). It’s also considered as public relations because these articles commonly promote the business they’re trying to market.

Blog and Forum Commenting – Forums and blogs are also a popular trend to generate backlinks by using their signatures as links linking back to your website.

Blogging - Other than commenting on other blogs, creating your own blog and embedding links is another popular way for generating backlinks.

PR or public relation strategies of off-page SEO involve generating traffic not only through search engines but also with other types of media. This type of off-page SEO mainly works by marketing their service through word of mouth. The strategy involves the use of:

• Social Media - Social media such as Friendster, FaceBook, Twitter, Linkedin and MySpace are the perfect place to start a buzz that could benefit the website through the marketing strategy they call “word of mouth”. Adding a link could also help in getting more backlinks. Please note that you need to be active on such sites, to gain user confidence in-order to benefit. It has become easier these days to be active by linking all your social media accounts through twitterfeed , RSS feed etc.

• Social Bookmarking – By using the articles in bookmarking sites such as Technorati or Digg, people could easily learn about your services through your article. This is also another way for the articles to gain more importance in the web, thus increasing the chance for your websites to be visited through your articles.

Other forms of off-page SEO are submitting your website to search engine directories. Make sure to submit your URL for free to Google, Yahoo!, Alexa, www.altavista.com, www.alltheweb.com, www.excite.com, www.lycos.com, www.webcrawler.com, www.Jayde.com, www.whatuseek.com, and more. DMOZ and Yahoo Directory listings are tremendously valuable. There are a lot more free and paid search engines and directories to submit.

Last but not the least, advertising in channels/ newspapers etc is also good off page optimization technique and can draw huge amount of visitors to your website. The more the visitors, the better you rank.

So thinking to start an SEO campaign?? Contact us at i-proconsulting.com for a no obligation consultation or email us at info@i-proconsulting.com and we will contact you shortly.