Avoiding the bad apples of SEO
We hope you are here because you want your website to do well on the search engines for a long time and not just for a day or two. The search engines continue to challenge even seasoned SEO professionals, but by no means is search engine optimization an "elite" skill only a handful of people in the world can master. Although a lot of Internet marketers are pushing some new secret formulas for gaming the search engines, the fact is there are none if you want to ensure your site's long term success. In every market we can find snake oil sales men who are peddling the next miracle cure to your problems, and the Internet marketing world is no exception.
Just take a look at this typical claim below.
The sales pitch is always the same. They say you are missing a key ingredient in your web promotion campaign and only they know what it is. Or they flaunt in front of you affiliate checks or Clickbank earnings reports to convince you they know the next big SEO secret that helped them earn a pile of money. Did you ever notice, there is also a sense of urgency in these offers. If you don't buy their e-book or spam generator gizmo today you are going to miss the boat.
SEO is not a secret, but a discipline that can be learned by anyone with patience and practice. Yes, that includes even you.
How can I master SEO?
- Dedicate sufficient time to learn the fundamentals of SEO and search engine guidelines. If you don't have the budget to hire a SEO to do the work for you, you will need to have a fair amount of time on your hands to understand the most basic SEO techniques. This manual could take only a few hours to read, but we guarantee it will take a few weeks to really sink in even after a few re-reads.
- Master keyword research techniques. Imagine if you were the owner of a retail store on a busy street, and your store didn't have a sign. You would probably get a lot of people who come into your store just out of curiosity, but would they find what they are looking for? Most likely not. It's the same with the search engines and keywords. If you optimize your site for the wrong keywords, you will get a lot of lookers and no buyers.
- Understand web design and HTML at a very basic level and learn a WYSIWYG HTML editor such as Dreamweaver. If you can't make changes to your web pages and upload them, there is no chance of improving its relevance through keyword optimization. You don't need to have complete control over the website, as you may work with a template based CMS (Content Management System), but you need to be able to make modifications to the Title tags, META description and the body content. If you have a web designer who makes the changes for you, that's perfectly fine as well.
- Learn to write and inject keywords into web content and HTML elements. You don't need to be an expert writer to create well optimized keyword rich content. As long as you understand you potential visitors' needs and wants, writing search engine optimized web copy can be learned by anyone. The important thing to remember is to always write for your web audience first, and then tweak your copy to incorporate your target keywords.
- Dedicate enough time to grow their website content by a few pages a week. Most small business websites stop expanding their web content after 45 pages, which also include some not so relevant pages like privacy policies, contact us page, etc. Websites with more relevant informational pages do better on the search engines. So commit to writing at least one new page per week on a topic that answers some common questions your visitors may have. Begin with "how to tips, "top 10 lists, and "did you know articles" to start your creative juices flowing.
- Grasp the concepts of links and execute a link building plan. If you were a hiring manager for a large company, would you hire someone without checking their references? The references provide some tangible way to validate the candidate's skills. Links are the equivalent to references on the web. The search engines use links as validation of another website's value and quality on a specific search topic. The more "citations" the search engines find from reputable websites linking to another site, the higher they rank them. It's important to develop a sharp "eye" for valuable links from the beginning that can push your site past your competitors.
- Remain patient even in the face of sudden ranking drops and continue to learn more about SEO each day. Overreacting to ranking changes and undoing all the previous work is the single most reason new webmasters fail at SEO. If your site is only a few months old, you need to give yourself and your site at least a year to attain reasonable ranking. As long as you follow the safe optimization and "white hat SEO" link building techniques we describe in the following chapters, any ranking fluctuation will be only temporary and there is no reason to change course. Educate yourself daily by subscribing to SEO blog feeds, read SEO forum posts and expert articles.
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