Search Engine Optimization Explained - Free SEO

A lot of companies in the SEM (search engine marketing) business want you to believe that getting a website to the top of the search results requires two things:

1) Their industry "expertise" (in many cases, this is simply not the case as they hire inexperienced college graduates or cheap foreign labor with bad English language skills to do the work).

2) And, a lot of your money (some SEO companies charge up to $100,000.00 a month - an absolutely obscene amount of money, even when taking into account some of the larger corporate brand sites that have thousands of indexable pages of content).

This article's main purpose is to demonstrate two things, the first, that you yourself can do search engine optimization.  You do not need to hire a professional to do it for you, or an agency.  I have provided several guidelines you will need to follow; but SEO is not neuroscience, and anyone with good English language skills, and the willingness to learn and work with simple editing programs such as Microsoft Expression Web or Adobe Dreamweaver, can easily and effectively optimize a website so that it dominates the search results.

The second part of this article explains how much, in fact, you should pay for SEO.  In some cases, taking into account the time value of money, it may be efficacious for your business to outsource search engine optimisation to an internet marketing firm.  However, I am providing several resources for the reader so they can make an informed decision and not get ripped off, as many of the companies out there are hoping to bank on your ignorance of this subject.  Now, without further ado, let's get started so you can get to work and get more customers to your website, get top rankings and crush the competition with an effective online sales strategy.

                                                                What Is Effective SEO?

To begin with, every business owner should keep in mind that what they think their customers may be searching for, may not really be what they are typing into Google.  In order to discover what people are thinking, you'll need to do some basic research.  The good news, that research is quick, easy and free with a tool Google developed called "Google's Keyword Tool".

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Type in several different words related to your business, services and products.  Google will provide you with extensive lists of keywords, along with the corresponding traffic trends (at the top, there is a small selection box, which will allow you to expand the data Google has for each keyword, giving you valuable data on monthly search trends, which may give you a possible indication of how much traffic to expect each month of a year).  You can also see how competitive each keyword is (this relates to a thing called "PPC Advertising", where business pay the search engines to place ads in the search results).  Go through these lists and add the keywords that have high search volumes and which have commercial value to your business.  After you're done, save the keyword list as either a csv file for excel or, if you do not believe you will be using pay per click advertising, save that file as a text file.

Alright, so you now have a keyword list.  You know what people are searching for.  Now, you need to ask: What keywords had the highest search volumes? What keywords would most likely lead to interest in my business or products? Take those two questions into account, and pick several keywords.  These will be the theme of the main index page of your site.  If you're undecided as to what keywords to use, don't worry, you can also create additional pages of web content, or even a blog or knol, and utilize these keywords in them.

Once you've decided on a few relevant keywords, you'll need to do three things with them.  1) Include them in the main title of your page, as well as in the meta description and meta keyword tags (you can find this option on your web editing program by clicking File, and scrolling down to Properties. Open that, and you'll see several boxes.  Type the information in and you're good to go).  2) Include these keywords within the first paragraph of your page, make sure you utilize your most relevant keyword as the first word of text, and also the first word in the page's title. (this is very important as the search engines tend to give more weight to the intitial content of a page, though this is not always the case).  3) You'll also need to pick a new website url: It helps to include keywords in the URL, as well as hypens between the keywords.  For example, http://www.document-scanning-shredding.com, includes three keywords, document, scanning and shredding.  Whatever relevant keywords you choose for your business, use them in the URL.  4) Include something called "geo-modifiers" with the keywords.  Geo modifiers are geographical terms that will help you rank for local searches.  For example, if you are a business in Chicago that services the entire metro area of the city, you would want to include neighborhoods into your content such as "keyword in Lincoln Park", "keyword in Oak Brook", "keyword servicing Naperville, Schaumburg, Gold Coast, Old Town, Streeterville, the Loop and Downtown Chicago..." - the more geo modifiers you can add, the better, as this will maximize your reach for more local, and specific, searches.  One thing to keep in mind is if you have to limit the number of neighborhoods you will list, to choose those that have the highest per capita income, and those that have the highest population densities.  Wikipedia offers several articles on the per captia and population densities of several large cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Phoenix, Seattle, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Miami and more.  If you are a nationwide service provider, they also have a list of the most affluent, and populated cities in the U.S., which are an invaluable source of both quality and volume traffic.  Cities with wealthy residents often have more cash to spend on your services, and don't turn into bad leads or sales, and cities with a high population will have more people searching.

Now, repeat these steps for each page on your site.  Make sure each page links to every other page, as this is very important for search engine relevancy and also to make sure your visitors can easily navigate to the rest of your site.  Each page will become its own entry point via the search engines, so you want to make sure they can learn more about your company, services, features, pricing, et cetera (one brief sidenote is that it is also important to include as much information as possible about your pricing and features as there is a lot of competition out there, and don't expect someone to just call when they arrive at your site, when it's easier for them to click back and visit a competitor's site that answers their questions on-page).  There is no point in getting traffic to your site if they don't convert into one of your website's goals (lead, sign up, sale, call). 

Also, for the immediate future, do not utilize Flash sites, only use HTML.  It is true that Adobe is working with Google to provide a technology for search engines to index Flash, but when that technology will become available, and whether it will be as effective as HTML in terms of relevancy, is still a matter of debate.  It's best to stick with HTML for now, not only because it's search engine friendly, but also because it loads faster and tends to be more user friendly.  This will definitely change in the future, but how long until that change takes place, a few years to a decade, is anyone's guess.

Once you have the content on your site, you are going to want to create a Google Analytics account.  This software allows you to place a code on each page of your site and will give you valuable data on your website traffic, where people come from, what they searched, how long they stayed, what pages they exited, and also something called the "bounce rate" - which gives you an indication of how effective each landing page of your site is, and whether a visitor is attracted or repelled by what they intitially experience.

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Now, after you've uploaded that small snippet of java code before the </body> tag of each page, you're ready to upload the site. 

Get a free upload program such as FileZilla, and upload the HTML pages and an image folder onto your website.  If you have any problems with the site, such as pictures not showing, loading or with an X - then chances are, the folder on your server is not configured correctly.  Click on the image that's not displaying and look at its location.  You have two choices, go back to the web editor program and redefine the images location to the proper folder (e.g., images/missingphoto.jpeg) or, create a new folder, or subfolders, onto the server and upload the photo onto there.  Whenever photos don't show up on a webpage, it normally means the photo isn't linked properly to the right directory, or the directory doesn't exist (and the photo is in the wrong place).  To amend this, simply find out where the photo should go, and create that path.  Then, reload your webpage and the site should load up perfectly.

After the site is up, the hard work begins.  This is where SEO becomes a bit more complicated and time consuming. 

You need to get your site submitted to the search engines, and you need to get word of your site out there so people link up to it and provide you with something called "link popularity", which is one of the criteria Google and other search engines use when determine a website's relevancy, or what Google calls a website's PageRank.  To start with getting your website submitted to a search engine, the first thing you'll need to do create links of a high quality site that is in a related industry.  This is very important: do not have sites link up to you which have nothing to do with your business, and also do not have sites that are only links (link farms), link to you.  Google is on to these practices and will penalize your site for trying to cheat them. 

You can also manually submit your site to the search engines, but avoid companies that promise to do this for you for a fee.  In addition, avoid Yahoo at all costs.  Yahoo is one of the biggest scams and poorly run companies on the market.  They ask you to pay money to get indexed, when you can easily be indexed for free.  However, the main reason I dislike Yahoo is because of their pay per click advertising.  I cannot even begin to tell you how much money has been siphoned away because of their poor quality partner sites that are havens for click fraudsters and webmasters trying to make a few extra bucks by clicking on the ads on their sites.  Business Week recently ran an excellent article on this subject of Yahoo and click fraud.  If you plan on utilizing PPC advertising, stick to Google and MSN, both great sources of high quality traffic.  If you have money to spend, you can still get good traffic from Yahoo, but you will wind up paying much more for it due to the bad clicks you'll receive in addition to the one or two good ones.  Yahoo is like a bag of worms with only one or two of the worms serving as real bait for real customers.  The rest are just garbage.  Tough words, I know, but someone needs to say something so that they'll change for the better.

However, Yahoo and search submit services aside, simply getting a few quality links is normally enough to get Google's attention, and if you get a link from a related industry site, and you followed all the steps mentioned above, you can expect to start seeing traffic to your site within 7-14 days.  One of my clients was already receiving ten hits a day from the search engines one week after his site was launched.

If you'd like to increase your link popularity, there are two proven methods.  One is searching Google for site's related to your business and that have the term "Add URL" or "Add Site".  For example, type into Google "internet marketing" and "add url", and it will give you a list of sites that offer something called "reciprocal linking".  Avoid reciprocal links if you can.  The search engines give more weight to one-way links, so the best thing you can do is try to find a number of high quality, high PageRank websites, and develop a relationship with the webmaster.  Send them an email, and say how great their site is.  If they reply back, ask them more questions.  After a few exchanges, tell them about your site and ask if they might be able to throw a link on the home page of the site (not on the link page), and provide them with a link code that includes something called "anchor text".

Achor text is the wording you see on a link.  For example, if you see a link that says "Click Here!", and the words "Click Here!" are the anchor text.  Anchor text is very critical to effective SEO.  One way to improve your site's relevancy for the search engines is to create links that have anchor text with the keywords you are trying to optimize your site for.  For example, during the 2004 U.S. presidential election, many people exploited this by placing links to George W. Bush's biography with the anchor text "incompetent".  When someone searched the term "incompetent" in 2004/2005, George Bush's biography was the first website to show up in the search results, even though the term incompetent was nowhere to be found on the page.  So, if you are trying to promote a small business, such as a lawyer, doctor, consultant, et cetera - you could use as achor text "lawyer in chicago" - and the more links you have on quality sites, the better your chances for ranking number one in the search results.

The second way to get links, and this method is much quicker and faster, is to place at the bottom of your site the term "Add URL" or "Add Site" and place an email address.  People still using outdated SEO techniques of reciprocal linking, will search and find your site, place a link to your business in the hopes that you'll return the favor, and at the end of the day, you'll have received a free link without having to do anything.  The only problem with this method is you have no control over who is linking to you; but not that you would anyway.  You might just get a few great inbound links by doing this; and save yourself a lot of time and effort in your linkbuilding efforts.

There are several internet marketing firms out there, such as Majan International, that promise hundreds of thousands of links.  All I can say is that anything that promises you this many links, is probably not something that will actually benefit your business, but may actually harm it by getting banned by the search engines for trying to cheat their system.  The same goes for many of the automated link exchange programs, such as freerelevantlinks.com.  Also, do not use any site that asks you to pay for a link, even if the site or directory has a pagerank, you're just wasting your money.  Google hates sites that make people pay for links because they view them as a way to cheat the system.  In the end, the best way to get links is to go about it manually.  There are several automation programs such as Zeus Internet Marketing Robot, and this is not a bad program, as long as you use it with care.

Finally, no SEO is complete without web analytics.  Remember that Google Analytics account I asked you to set up earlier, well now you'll be able to use it and collect some really great data and see how your site is performing.  You can use this data to see if your site is meeting your expectations.  Are you getting a lot of relevant traffic, but not a lot of customers?  This may mean you need to make your site more user friendly, or provide additional pages and features such as LiveChat (a great way to boost the conversion rate on warm leads).  Did you know that simply changing the background color can also affect the conversion rate?  It's true, most people find sites with light backgrounds and orange text more trust-worthy than sites with dark backgrounds and heavy colors.  Or, perhaps analytics is telling you that you're simply not getting the traffic you want, then it's back to the drawing board.  You need to make sure the copy you write is effectively optimized for keywords and also for people.

There's a few more tricks you can utilize when doing SEO, and I have included a brief list below.  But, if after reading this article SEO does seem too much for you; and you'd much rather concentrate on your own business operations and development, then you'll need to consider outsourcing your SEM/SEO to an agency that can do the job, and do it well.  There are several big firms out there such as iProspect, Leapfrog, Reprise Media that charge premium prices for what they will tell you are premium service.  I don't buy that.  SEO is easy and something you can do yourself, and if anyone that asks you for more than one thousand a month for search engine optimization is trying to rip you off.  Then, there are much smaller firms, with more competitive pricing, but without the financial stability and brand ability of the larger companies, these companies will normally do a much better job, but the cost of SEO will still be between three and ten thousand dollars a month.  After those companies, are a new breed of companies called CPA companies, or cost per acquisition companies, such as Inadco and Singer Direct.  These firms brand themselves off as the latest trend in internet marketing and market themselves as "pay per acquisitions" instead of "pay per click", but don't buy into this bull.  They are no different than the click companies that came before (who are now dying out like the dinosaurs due to a failed business model).  The only difference is they've replaced the marketing language of click with acquisition, but not the business model the click companies used.  A business model that failed because it didn't guarantee results.  You'll still pay hundreds of dollars per acquisition with the CPA model, and does that really change anything?  In my mind, no.  It does not solve the problem of finding a cost-effective solution of bringing in new leads and sales off the Internet.  In my opinion, it is absolutely ludicrous that these CPA companies are continuing the trend of the click companies when new solutions have been developed to address the problem that plagued advertisers under the pay per click system, the problem of cost.  For example, one such solution is a different, new and more innovative type of CPA model, called the CPR model (Cost Per Result).  For example, instead of "specifying" an amount for an acquisition, one company Hot! Search Marketing only charges ten dollars for every acquisition generated and offers free SEO, PPC, and Web Analytics services.  The model they developed is based on paying only ten dollars for each result, and is priced under a system that makes internet marketing risk-free and affordable to businesses, rather an expensive brand marketing write off. 

If you're going to outsource your SEO or SEM, and you'd like my advice, I would say to make sure it's a company that operates under a CPR (cost per result) basis.  These companies make internet marketing reasonable and worthwhile, and other companies under different pricing models should only be used if the benefits they provide exceed their costs, but if you don't have a guarantee of their benefits, what's the point in using them?  I really cannot think of any reasons why; especially for the prices they charge!  The CPR model that companies like Hot! Search Marketing use are the most logical, but even then, there's no need to go to them if you have the time to do SEO yourself.  However, if you're going to use PPC advertising, be careful when outsourcing.  You should be very careful when doing PPC yourself as beginners can pay up to five times as much per click as an expert that can manage your AdWords account.  If you're planning on using PPC, or already do, feel free to email me for suggestions on how to optimize your PPC campaigns for improved performance.  As a final item, I've provided a list below that provides several things you'll need to take into consideration when optimizing a website.  Get to work with all of these tips and start getting traffic to your site!

• Using keywords in the header tags:  The header tags are the < h1 >, and < h2 > tags in the HTML copy.  Search engines tend to give more relevance to keywords in the headers.
• If your site isn't getting ranked, the easiest way to find out what Google likes is to search your most relevant keywords.  See what websites come up in the first page.  Look at their content, their backlinks (there are several programs online that will bring up a competitor's backlinks), as well as their title tags, alt-image tags, and keyword densities.  Copy that formulae and apply it to your site, but don't copy their content!
• Writing great content with keywords included.  Don't exceed a ratio of 7% of one keyword in relation to the rest of the text, otherwise the search engines might find it suspicious.  Great keyword rich content isn't just great for the search engines, it's also great for potential customers.  Don't copy and paste from other sites (this will get you penalized by Google) and don't just write for the search engines.  Write for both your customer and for the search engine; this is the only way to succeed at SEO.  It's not just about getting traffic, it's about getting customers.
• Using alt-image tags: When incorporating images, provide an accurate alt-image tag and description of the image with relevant keywords added in for good seo.
• Using keyword phrases, geo modified keywords, et cetera.
• The bigger the site, the better.  Just make sure each page is linked to every other page for user friendly web navigation.
• Create an XML sitemap - this site offers a service that creates a sitemap for free.  Upload it onto your site and create a link to it at the bottom of the page.  Although it might not help your ranking, a sitemap will help ensure spiders crawl all the pages you want them to when they visit your site.
• Don't rush - bad SEO is always hurried.  Good SEO takes time.  Hire an agency that works under the CPR system if you don't have the time to invest in SEO.  Don't buy into companies that require more than 1k a month for SEO unless they're optimizing more than one website for you.  Don't hire any SEO agency that doesn't guarantee its services.
• Trial and error; don't expect SEO to be a one-time job.  You'll need to look at the data from Google Analytics and realize you will make mistakes and you won't be able to rank for every keyword you want to, but with diligence, you can maximize your site's reach and grab a huge chunk of traffic (and there's a lot out there) and reach thousands of new customers via Google, Ask, Yahoo, MSN, Cuil and other search engines.  Just keep trying, and keep optimizing if you're not getting the results you want.  Remember, with SEO, patience is the greatest virtue.  Don't think it's impossible to get ranked number one.  Just keep up the hard work, optimize and one day, you'll be up there with the best.