Can you do your own SEO?
You are probably wondering why a person, one who makes his living on web design and search engine optimization would write an article on how to do what he does. Well, I learned everything you’ll read here from my own online research. I figure if you can find this information in other articles, blogs, newsletters, etc., then I’m not going to share anything that you can’t already find out there. BUT, I may present the information in such a way that it will hit home with you and you will benefit from it.
So the answer to my question, Can you do your own SEO? There are things you can do that will get you a lot closer than you may be right now, but all of it takes time, effort, and a lot of thought and research. So the question you need to ask yourself is not “Can you…”, but “Do you really WANT too?”
The following will run you through the basics; things you can do to help get a head start, you just need to decide if you want to spend the time to do it. And if you do, then you need to do it correctly; cause if you don’t you can hurt yourself more than help.
We will start by covering what to do with meta tags and then move on from there.
Meta Tags
Meta tags are those mysterious things that you always hear about but never see. These tags hide up in the
• Keywords – The keywords meta tag is the area where you put, guess what… that’s right, keywords. Keywords can be individual words or phrases. Think about how you search; do you use a single word, a phrase or description to search? Most people use a combination of words to search, so keep that in mind when selecting your keywords (or phrases). There is some debate as to whether you separate your keywords or phrases with commas or not, I do it with commas. Search engines use the keywords tag to help decipher where to list your site. All the keywords mean nothing without relevance to them throughout not only the rest of the tags, but also in you site content.
• Description – The description tag is where you spell out what your product or service is. While keywords help define where you want to be listed, the description is used to do just that; describe your product or service to the searchers. You tend to see this information under the link in the search engines. Now while you COULD put anything you want here, it is best to refer back to some of your keywords or phrases. This help create… you guessed it – relevance.
• Page Title – Now while this is not technically a ‘Meta’ tag, it falls into the category so I will cover it here. The Title tag is what you see in the top bar of the browser window. It is also what makes up the link you see above the description content on the search engine pages. Once again, relevance is important so consider the use of keywords or phrases in the title tag.
More Tags
There are two more tags that can help with the relevance association to your keywords or phrases that you should consider.
• ALT Tags – This is the abbreviation for ‘alternate tag’. You have probably seen these when a picture doesn’t load on a page. For the most part, the alt tag is used for the visually impaired so they can know what is represented graphically on a web page. But used correctly, you can add more keywords or phrases to these to help increase relevancy within the body of the page. This relevancy weighs heavy on the search engines and increases your rankings.
• Link (Title) Tags – Link ‘Title’ tags are a relatively new thing in the SEO game used to increase not only relevance to the page the link is on, but also to the page the link is pointed too. You can put almost anything into a title tag for a link (text or graphic), but make sure it relates well to the content on the page the link goes too as well as the page it is on.
Content
Content is King. Everyone who is anyone in the web circle will tell you that the more content is better. Well I say it is not the amount of content that is king, but the quality of the content you have on any given page that is king. So how can your content increase your chance of a high rank in the search engines?
• Keyword Repetition – Now I am not saying to have each and every sentence start with a keyword. It would be pretty hard to understand the point of the content if it was written solely for the purpose of getting high rankings. I mean come on, what good is a high rank if the people hitting your site don’t understand the content. That is one of the biggest challenges of SEO, balancing readability for your viewers and relevancy for the search engines. People actually go to school just to learn how to write for the Internet.
• Content Positioning – Remember, the search engines are tools, software. They don’t view a web page the same way you do. A search engine spiders a site looking for specific bits of code. It will hit the meta tags and page title tag first. They are always at the top of the page within the code. Then the search engines move down the code looking for content that shows relevance to the keywords in your meta tags. The more JavaScript code you have for graphic mouse-over links and newsletter sign-up scripts, the further down on the page your relevant content goes; and the further down it is, the less relevant it becomes. By using external script pages and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) you can bring the page content practically to the top of the page as the search engines see it.
• H1 Tags – Search engines rank H1 tagged text as more relevant than text at a default setting. In the eyes of a search engine, H1 is reserved for headlines. And before CSS, it was just that. If you add an < H1 > tag to a line of copy without using CSS to control its settings, the text would be an average of 3 times the size of regular text and would have a rather large line break. But now with the help of style sheets, you can place H1 tags anywhere in the content and while it will look like a headline to the search engines, your viewers won’t be able to tell it from the regular text in the browser.
• Bold Text – Bold text on the other hand can not be hidden with CSS. The tag used to signify bold text needs to be in the content to be ranked as bold text. So while it helps with relevance when using bold text on keywords and phrases, you have to be careful not to fill your page with bold text.
Links
There are two main things that help organic rankings in search engines – relevancy and popularity. You can do everything listed above and not get anywhere fast. The true test of relevancy is how relevant your content is to others. And how can the search engines tell that? Well by the amount of links that lead to your site from other sites that show similar relevancy to your keywords. That my friends… is why they call it the World Wide WEB… The bigger the web of sites linking to you, the more popular your content is, thus the more relevant your content becomes in relation to the keywords or phrases you use.
Now there are few things we didn’t cover; like page naming convention, URL, site maps and text based links vs graphic links. But you can only so much in one article.
So let’s recap… Your success in search engine marketing, when it comes to organic results (the links you don’t pay for), is directly related to relevancy of your page content, description and page title to keywords or phrases you select and how popular that content is to others. Now this information will give you ammunition. You will be a little more educated when you sit down to talk to those that offer to do this for you. You can understand that this can’t be done overnight and that those who say they can get you top rankings in a week are full of crap. (Unless they cheat and then you risk getting black listed from the search engines.)
Did I lie? Can you really do your own SEO? Sure you can. But then again, how valuable is your time? Is it worth you spending triple the time it would take someone like me to do your SEO in order to do it yourself? If so, then yes you can do your own SEO work. But I’m guessing you would rather dedicate that time to making money or spending those evenings with family.
Best of luck. And think of us when your ready to step into the world of SEO.
