mar 2 p5

Article of the week; 7 Steps to do-it-yourself SEO; by Carl Cristie

There is a lot of information and different opinions out there about getting top rankings and lots of traffic for your site. The basic steps are simple and can be put in place by anyone, follow these pointers and you will be well on your way;

1. Your domain name matters, if you can call your site roof-restoration.com.au instead of HurstvilleConstruction.com.au this can help. Why? well it is keyword rich and may connect better with the user/buyer. That being said content is king at the end of the day and lots of relevant content and links will win in the end.
2. Keyword strategy, really spend some time here use tools like Wordtracker.com, Overture and Google to come up with a comprehensive list, include synonyms and related keywords. All good campaigns live and die right here. You might think the main key is ‘buy notebook’ when everyone might be typing ‘buy laptop’ as an example. (they might both be popular). With people spending time online researching before purchasing getting a broad range of keys relating to your product or service will pay off.
3. Have meaningful url's. You see a lot of url's out there for example Vignette url's like
http://www.optus.com.au/portal/site/WOCA/menuitem.5c9196e855037e213d7e0157c00345a0/?vgnextoid=2f0ab5831cf2cf00VgnVCM1000006801540aRCRD&vgnextfmt=default, this is Optus’s Mobile page, would be much better if it just read like this http://www.optus.com.au/mobile right? Get your webmasters/developers to use meaningful url's or do what is called a mod_rewrite or isapi_rewrite to force CMS (content management systems) and databases to output something that makes sense.
4. Content is King; lots of relevant content will pay off, 200+ words a page is a good guide. Distribute your keyword strategy throughout the site in a natural manner, use keywords in your H1 and H2 tags also.
5. Title Tag; Make sure each page has unique and meaningful Title tag., this tag tells the search engine what the page is about, where possible use your main keywords in the title tag without stuffing or over doing it. Classic mistake is calling the homepage ‘Index’ this page title should contain your top 2 or 3 keywords.
6. Meta data description, following on from point 5 is write unique descriptions for each page. Some search engines sometimes use the description within the SERP’s (search engine results page) followed by the link to the site. Keywords well, they have fallen out of favour due to excessive spamming. Lets just say only put the keywords in that relate to the content of the page your are on, and don’t put in your competitors business name either! The ALT tag is worth using to reinforce your keys, though the best policy is to try take a natural human approach to usage.
7. Link Popularity Campaign; get lots of good quality incoming links pointing to your site. Some Search engines give a site an ‘importance’ ranking (page rank) based on the links pointed to a particular site.
In these links use the keywords relevant to your site don’t use <a href=”www.roof-restoration.com.au”>click here </a> instead use <a href=”www.roof-restoration.com.au”> Roof repairs & restoration Sydney</a>