As a small business owner myself that runs www.salesandmarketingforums.co.uk I have found that SEO is a massive minefield. The jargon and secrets that surround the industry are now everywhere. There are so many different versions of what to do and not what to do that I did not know where to start. So putting it simply 6 months ago I set out on a mission to learn SEO using all the different sources I had available to me. Mainly spending my time on the net reading up and putting the stuff I had learnt in front of a number of supposed experts I learnt in a very short period the basics and now I would like to put them into plain English for you to benefit from. Have you been asking yourself where do I begin? What is correct?What do I have to do?How long will it take? Since I started my journey I have achieved a number of first positions in Google and will continue my efforts to make the www.salesandmarketingforums.co.uk site sit pretty in all the key major search engines. So lets begin, the first thing that you need to do is some keyword research to find out what sort of traffic you can expect from the terms you are optimising for - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal this is what I have used as it is a great tool. Now let me also say here that if you have a new site or a site that has no onsite SEO done to it, it is not worth trying to get a primary keyword to rank for e.g. marketing. Instead you need to look at things like direct marketing London or advice on marketing surrey these are a lot easier to rank for but you need to make sure that they get traffic. Also when typing this into a search engine you need to check the amount of total results as this is the amount of competition you will be up against. That should cover keyword research in its simplest terms you need to find keywords that will help you gain targeted traffic to your business service/product so that the traffic converts to enquiries. There are a number of experts that also believe that the site content will help towards the amount of conversions that you will receive and I am pleased to say that since we upgraded our site we have seen a 40% increase in the amount of new registered users so this is very true. High traffic volumes is good but only if it becomes a converted lead or sale for your business. Then we need to look at your onsite search engine optimisation and this includes Meta Site Description Headers Meta Keywords Alt Tags Meta Tag Content There is a Meta Tag Analyzer here that may well help http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html You can also find out a little more about how META tags work and what they are here http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2167931 Sometimes playing with these yourself can result in damage so it is best to get someone to do it that knows what they are doing but a great tool to check your meta content is here http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html this should give you an idea of what you can do to make things better for your meta content and is something that I have used to moderate success. Your page content is also very important it needs to relay all of the information in the above to the user of your site in a very friendly way (something I am working on). A spider BOT will crawl through your site from top to bottom and also bottom to top. Sometime having something like the areas that you cover and services you provide can also benefit your efforts of SEO. Your page needs to contain your keywords but not too many times I would say twice is ok otherwise the search engines can class it as spam like and result in reduced rankings. A great tool is Google Webmaster tools http://www.google.com/webmasters/ this is a great resource for uploading your site map to get it indexed more often by the search engines and you can create a complete sitemap here http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp completely free of charge. This is relatively easy and will give you again another stamp in the pad. Theres also a number of free tools here http://www.seomoz.org/toolbox that again are relatively easy to use. All of the above is for onsite promotion (as it is referred to in the industry) there is also off site SEO and this mainly consists of links coming to your site. To start with there are a number of directories that have a good page rank (Googles quality view of your site as I understand it) here http://www.bloggingmix.com/2008/02/20/submit-your-blog-free-directory-no-reciprocal-link-needed/. This is a good place to start with directory submissions. You will also need to submit your site to all of the main search engines here http://www.submitexpress.com/submit.html from all of this your email may be harvested and you could gain a lot of spam so it may be a good idea to get yourself a Gmail, Yahoo or hotmail account for this exercise. Once you have done all of them it may be a good idea to join social networking sites like www.facebook.com, www.myspace.com and even forums like www.salesandmarketingforums.co.uk to share in a wealth of information covering all other angles of running your business. Link building is then the ongoing concern, the ideal links are the ones that will benefit you so for example if you are targeting marketing advice London you need to type marketing advice in to the search engine and email the webmaster enquiring whether they will link to you to benefit their users with your product/service. You will need a good angle and it is a good idea to make sure that you link to the page you would like your link to be placed. Press releases from people like www.10yetis.co.uk can also be a great benefit to your SEO results along with submitting articles and comments to blogs that are related to your service/products as they will be read by your target audience. All in SEO is a very long and time consuming thing to do but if you get it right you can reap the rewards. I have written this to benefit the business community and the advice given here is based on my own experiences. If you are looking to target primary one word keywords you are probably best speaking to a number of SEO experts as I have not got this far yet. I hope this helps and if you would like to follow my ongoing efforts please register at www.salesandmarketingforums.co.uk where I will be showing all of my latest posts on the blog facility. Offering a completely free resource to small businesses with Podcasts, Articles, Blogs and the most active sales and marketing focused forum we will be able to help you with anything and everything to do with your sales and marketing. SEE YOU THERE, Dave Paget founder of UKSMF Ltd
Anyone found this useful yet? You may also find this useful to http://mrdefinite.com/submit-website-url/ Dave
Reading is great when you're first learning SEO, but I've found that nothing supplants doing when you're trying to learn what works to get you ranked.
Thank you for sharing with us! I also use Google Keyword Tool to dig keywords. Then put them into title, meta description, meta keywords and sprinkle them in page content!
Its very useful for SEO beginners. Thanks for posting. Can you please provide any .pdf or .doc format.
It was meant to be for beginners. Feel free to cut and paste the article anywhere as long as it keeps the author information. I can supply it on PDF if you want it just PM me a request Regards Dave