Step by step guide to an affordable search engine optimization strategy.
The best approach to an affordable search engine optimization strategy is to do it yourself. Believe us, this is much easier said than done. If you're on a budget, the thousands of dollars you can save in consulting fees and services will be worth the effort for your initial strategy. As the site progresses up the search engine charts, you'll need to either hire and expert, or outsource to a consultant. The goal is to make it affordable over a period of time.
If you're going to be successful at this you'll need to follow every step!
Here are the steps you'll take
1. Make sure your site is clean (no broken links) hosted by a reputable company, or by yourself with a static IP address, and fast.
2.Optimize your keywords
3. Submit to the search engines and directories
4.Work on your page rank
5. Add more quality content
Two distinct situations determine the path you should take.
If you already have an existing web site, your search engine optimization strategy will be different than for some starting a new web site. This is simply because you don't wish to hurt any page on your site that is already ranking well for certain keywords. A new site offers much more flexibility because you can make changes quickly, and you're not going to be overly concerned about page rank.
What is page rank and how does it effect my web site and search engine optimization?
Page Rank is a metric search engines use to determine the importance of your site. This prevents you from throwing up a web site heavily laden with keywords that are either irrelevant to what you're actually trying to accomplish, or pertinent but not quality. Page rank is mostly determined by the number of sites linking back to yours. There are other factors but links to you are the most important. For effective search engine optimization of competitive sites and keywords, page rank is just as important, if not more so, than keywords.
This is a critical point so let me explain. If there are 50 web sites all selling the same product, all with decent web sites, and all with an equal number of keywords, who gets the coveted first page rankings? The search engines strive to give the first page to the most important sites. Page rank determines that importance.
OK, One last thing before we get started. If you have an existing web site, pick one page at a time and work on it slowly. Before making any changes, visit all of the major search engines and see where you rank now for the 2 or 3 keyword phrases you're targeting. If you're already at or near the top, don't change anything. Move on to the next page.
Step 1. Make sure your site is clean
A clean site starts with clean hosting. Affordable search engine optimization does not mean free or even cheap. If you're going to host the site yourself, have a static IP address. A dynamic IP address and a DNS redirector will give the search engine robots trouble. If you don't have the technical expertise use a company like godaddy or doteasy to host the site.
Now that you're properly hosted make sure the site itself is clean. This comprises two primary components. Make sure you have no broken links, and make sure the site loads quickly. This means no unnecessary graphics. You should also test the site to make sure it scales well at different resolutions and with different browsers. This doesn't help with affordable search engine optimization, but it will ensure the visitors you drive to your site will have a pleasant experience.
Step 2. Optimize your keywords and keyword phrases.
Keep your keywords for each page to a minimum of two or three. When you've decided on your keywords do a search with a keyword tool (you can search the web, there are several that are all pretty good) and find out how many searches are done for each phrase. I usually start with overture.com, resource center and then work out from there. Once you've selected the keywords you need to optimize them. This is done by putting the primary keyword in the title of your site. For example, the primary keyword phrase for this page is affordable search engine optimization. You also want to include the primary and the one or two secondary phrases in your description, and in your meta-tags for keywords. The last and most important step is to use these exact phrases in the content of your page. At least four or five times, and dispersed in related content. You just can't type the word over and over on your page. You'll be penalized and your search engine ranking will actually fall
.
Step 3. Submit your site to the search engines.
Critical note! Do not use search engine submission software to submit the site. Googles terms of service clearly state that this is a violation. Most quality search engines will see this as spamming the site and penalize you for it. These products are good for working on your page, they are not good for actually doing the submitting. You'll find that the path to affordable search engine optimization, and even professional search engine optimization, offers no short cuts.
For MSN and Google you only need to submit the index page of your site. The robots that visit your site will handle the rest. Once you've completed the submissions you won't have to start checking for a week or two. In that time you can go on to steps 4 and 5. If after two months you're site is not indexed by a particular search engine, it's safe to re-submit.
Yahoo is a different animal. You have to pay to be included in the directory. The cost is $299 per year.
After your site is submitted and excepted by the directory it can take several months for your entire site to index. After the first year the site will already be indexed so you're just paying to keep it in the directory.
Step 4. Work on increasing your page rank.
Remember page rank is that critical metric that boosts you over the top of your competitors, when everything else is equal. To increase your page rank you need to get other sites linking back to you.
There are several ways to do this, some of them will help drastically, others will hurt. Link exchange programs were the old way of increasing page rank. Some of them still offer value, but it's limited. You want the links back to your site to be quality, not just a page with a thousand links to people trying to increase page rank. Your best two options are writing articles that get published, and requesting links from vendors and other business partners. Getting published is not difficult. There are hundreds of web sites that do nothing but publish just about any article submitted to them. They do this and then allow these articles to be pulled and placed on others sites to increase or buttress their content. The key is to write as well as you can, and create the link back to your site inside on an href html block. The link should incorporate the keywords. In other words the text will say, "Expert lawn care" but the link when clicked takes you to fredslawncare.com.
Ezinearticles.com and amazines.com are two of the biggest article directories and a great place to start submitting your work. Just like search submission software there are companies that make article submission software and provide the service. Be wary of these as more often than not you'll be better served submitting manually.
Step5. Add more quality content to your site.
Steps 4 and 5 can work together. As you're writing content for your site you can submit all or part of the page to the article directories to increase your page rank.
When adding content to your site don't go overboard. If you've written a really great piece that doesn't add to your site, use it to submit to gain page rank. If you just add page after page to your site you'll end up with something that's difficult for visitors to use, frustrating them and costing you sales. This is one of the primary reasons you'll need to consider a consultant once your site starts making you money. But even here you have to be careful. Many search consultants will focus entirely on increasing your ranking in the search engines and sacrifice the quality of your site in the process. When this happens the end result is lots of traffic from people who won't buy from you.
Summary:
Affordable search engine optimization is not cheap. The affordability comes in to play because you're doing the work yourself, so you need to make sure your valuable time is being spent wisely. The goal should be to build enough sales to outsource, or hire someone internally to fulfill the role. The do it yourself model is only practical for small business and only as a starting point. The site maintenance should grow in direct relation to the profits of the business.
Latest updates!
More emphases is being placed on anchor text. This is the text that is used to define a link. Instead of Click here, consider, Click here for more info on affordable search engine optimization. Incorporate your keywords in to the link in a natural way to help users and the search engines understand what your site, and the pages are really about.
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