Learning the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t difficult, it’s time consuming. SEO consultants can offer a variety of services but in the end, web site owners will appreciate the optimization services they’re getting much more if they educated themselves on the fundamentals.
The nature of marketing web sites has continually evolved from a focus on optimizing text to include an array of digital assset optimization such as images, audio, video and content delivery formats like RSS and mobile. Regardless, there continues to be a significant value in basic SEO.
In many cases, small businesses or small web sites especially, there’s a lot the site owner or webmaster/developer can do to improve the search engine friendliness of the site, i.e. fundamental content optimization, before pursuing outside help. However, those that do end up outsourcing on-page optimization and link building often do so because of a lack of resources or the desire to leverage expert experience to avoid big mistakes that can end up costing more to fix than a SEO consultant in the first place.
For those individuals and organizations considering their own basic SEO, here are a few items for review:
- Define clear and measurable goals for the site and take benchmark measurements
- Keyword research – generate a glossary of keyword phrases that addresses both prospect needs and the content you’re publishing. Here is a list of the best keyword research tools as voted on by our readers
- Content creation plan – Think of it as an editorial calendar for your web site. You must PLAN on creating keyword sensitive content on an ongoing basis that adds to the user experience
- Keyword mapping – Using a spreadsheet, map keywords to the page or category. Focus is important, 1-2 phrases per page
- Keyword phrase order – Does the keyword order in the page match order in the query? Anticipate queries and match the word order: “luxury hotels Chicago” vs “Chicago luxury hotels”
- Keywords and the buying cycle. Consider the content and where it fits within the buying cycle: Research, Consideration, Evaluation, Purchase
- Keyword prominence (how early in the page content or title/meta description tag) – Guide: most important phrases high and to left
- Write to inform and convert as your priority, not to rank. Title tags and meta description tags should be written with keywords in mind, but the focus must be on motivating the reader to click through or to perform some other desired action
- Keyword in alt text of images, particularly of images that link to another web page. Keywords should be relevant to the page being linked to
- Filenames containing keywords are useful, but do not change your entire site URL structure if you’ve already published another URL syntax
- Use hyphens in file names, not underscores
- HTML site maps listing links to all pages or top level categories on the site are still a good idea
- Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo Site Explorer accounts can provide useful crawling and link information/resources
- For bloated pages, try to place JavaScript and CSS data in an external file to speed page load and to move content up in the document
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