subject: 10 Simple Steps To Kick Start Your Seo Campaign [print this page] Search engine optimisation or SEO is still for many a black art. A technique so secret that it would be easier to turn base metal into gold. Well, there's no disputing the fact that it's possible to dig really deep and get extremely involved in the whole process, but great gains can be had by following these 10 simple rules:
1. Research the keywords you intend to use for your site - don't just pull a stack out of thin air. There are many free tools around for this purpose, none better than Google's own keyword tool.
2. Stitch the keywords naturally into your page copy without spamming. Most importantly you will be delivering a 'good read' for your site's visitors, but you're also trying to clearly let the search engine spiders know what your site is all about.
3. Write interesting page copy. The more impressively your page copy reads the more likely you will be to have people stick around or maybe even dare I say... revisit.
4. Ensure that your website is built with nice compliant code. You want those search engine spiders to sail through your website collecting all that valuable information about your business without hitting nasty brick walls. Don't clutter your site's page with tons of inline Javascript and CSS, instead link to external files.
5. Do you have some images on your page? If that's the case you'll want to be sure that every image has an 'alt tag'. This tag is the facility to describe an image to a screen reader for the visually impaired. An important tag for obvious reasons and also it keeps the search engines happy.
6. Ensure you use your title tag. If you're uncertain where this may be found it sits in the head section of the page code and the resulting title can be seen by site visitors at the top of their browser. Ensure you have a different title on every page and make it descriptive including a couple of important keywords. Don't spam this tag as it's an extremely important area of the SEO process and you want it to count. Keep your page titles to below 70 characters and ensure that you keep your really important keywords in the first 55 characters.
7. Make sure that you include the meta description tag. This tag is again located in the head section of the code and is the crucial area of copy that is placed with your website's url in the search engine's results. This text is your call to action so use a completely different description relevant to every page. For this Google typically truncates your meta description in the SERPs (search engine results page) to roughly 150-155 characters.
8. Try to add content to your site by using a news section or a small blog. All the optimised content that you add to your site will be new content waiting to be included into the SERPs. All this creates new avenues to your website.
9. Get some links to your site! The search engines really love to see other websites linking to yours as it's considered a vote of confidence. Write a handful of articles about a product or service and then upload these to some of the big online article sites like Ezinearticles.com. They will allow you to incorporate a link or two in the resource section. Don't also forget to submit your site to some online directories. The best ones like Yahoo can be pretty expensive but are excellent for the important link juice. Some will be cheaper and some will be free. Beware of cheap looking free directories that are never maintained, though there are some really good new free ones out there that seem to be going places: see the link below.
10. Get social! Get yourself a Twitter account and start tweeting. Get some followers and every 15 or so tweets you can promote your business with links to important pages etc. Beware that if you do this every other tweet your followers will soon lose faith and unfollow you.
So there you go, nothing like the secret of alchemy!
