A Dummies Guide to SEO

Before I begin I want to make it clear that you do not need an SEO ‘expert’ on a monthly payment plan to get your website ranked. If you just apply the tips in this post you will be using the same ethical techniques that SEO professionals use but with better results in my opinion.

However! There is a major difference in effort in firstly ranking then sustaining that rank. Sustaining your rankings within Google takes lots of time and is at the mercy of the Google “gods”. Getting a good placement first time is a good start as your business focus might enable your ranking to hold. Don’t deal with any business that states that they can hold your rank constantly – it cannot be done. No business controls what Google does and Google often makes changes to their searching system.

When do you need a SEO professional?

Most business owners with minimal research can perform all the basic SEO tasks that the SEO professionals do at a premium cost. But just like a car if you want it fine-tuned to get the maximum performance out of it you go to a mechanic that specializes in performance. For some businesses that extra boost in SEO ‘performance’ can make the difference between placed number 5 in search results to number 1 which could mean $1000’s to their business.

However before you engage a SEO professional to fine-tune your website you first need something to be fine-tuned and its my guess that most of you won’t be in that position.

So lets start with the basic tasks of SEO that you should be doing yourself (or your staff) and save possibly $1000’s of dollars paying someone else to do it.

The image above shows our current ranking in Google for the search term ‘Business Blogs’. We are now number 3 in the US beating the likes of CNN, Harvard Business Review and Business Week. We are a small business but we can beat the big boys not through ‘black hat’ SEO or employing thousands of IT sweat shops to spam our URL in forums and other sites or spending 8 hours a day writing blog posts.

All we do is use the tips below which I want to share with you.

The domain name must contain keywords

Look at our domain name – ‘BusinessBlogsHub.com’ – look at our keywords ‘Business Blogs’. Simple.

Have relevant content to your keywords

If you are an interior designer have some articles on your site such as ‘simple tips to spruce up a room’, ‘the basics of color design’ etc.. That way people can share your articles with their own friends online. This is the start of having a ‘social presence’ that Google now takes into consideration for rankings.

Important! Make sure the title of your article reflects a common search term your prospects would use. For example ‘How to protect your Intellectual Property: 4 easy ways to protect your Intellectual Property’ – this article has one of our highest hit rates. Guess what the main search term is that brings people to our site?

I must emphasize how important it is to have good quality content on your site demonstrating your skill – Google loves it and your visitors will rank you higher than your competitors because of it.

Link Build – But Wisely

When another website has a link to your web site that is called a ‘backlink’.

Backlinks are good for SEO only if the website that contains the link to your site is considered by Google to be of high quality and if its relevant to your business sector.

Dodgy SEO ‘experts’ don’t worry about the quality bit because its far harder to get your website link on high quality sites so they just go for the crap link directories that are not even indexed by Google.

What is quick way of getting quality backlinks?
Create press releases and submit them to quality press release distribution sites such as PRWeb.com, OnlinePRNews.com and others – get the best distribution package that you can afford. These services should not only distribute your content to websites but also social networks as well.

Optimize your website for SEO a little

Don’t go overboard here. Google has stated years ago that it does not consider ‘meta-tags’ or excessive keyword-to-anchor ratios anymore as this strategy has been abused too much. BusinessBlogsHub.com only uses the absolute basics for site optimization as it is mostly ignored now and a waste of time.

Don’t try and fool Google

Some SEO ‘experts’ will tell you that they know how Google ranks web sites, some will tell you they have an ‘inside man’ in Google, some will guarantee that they will get you on the front page of Google. If any business mentions any of those statements do not use them. Each statement is total BS and they are either dodgy or more naive than you after reading this post.

The most important tip

I cannot emphasize enough that if you provide great content that your visitors get benefit from they will share it with their own networks. This means you have free link building, third party endorsement AND its a natural progression of how content is shared among humans which Google understands. Google does know when you are being dodgy.

There are of course many other tasks you can do to improve your SEO but for now this is enough for most small businesses and to be honest this is all we use for basic SEO that got us to number 3 search rank.

If you have any comments, thoughts please comment below.