Eric Edelstein

SO YOU WANT TO DO SEO YOURSELF?

If you’re looking to get your website into the Search Engines, here’s a few tips.

1. The only 4 Search Engines that you really want to get into are Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves. The other major “portals” and search engines, use one of the big 4 to power them. And other Search Engines that aren’t powered by one of the Big 4 aren’t worth putting time into when you first get started. Taking this further, Google currently dominates traffic, meaning a large percentage of all searches get made on Google.

2. If you want to get FREE VISITORS from the Search Engines, the best way is to build your site NATURALLY - that means don’t try write an abnormal amount of content from day 1, don’t try get hundreds of sites to link to you from day 1, otherwise the search engines get suspicious.

3. There are 2 areas you need to focus on to getting your website ranked on the search engines so that you get lots of new visitors for FREE from the Search Engines.

a. On page factors - the title, the meta tags, the H1 and H2 tags, the content you write (length, type of words, bold, italics, frequency of words showing), the format of the page, the file structure, the keywords in the URL’s and a LOT of other factors.

b. Off page factors - links from other sites to your website. Important factors include how significant the other website is in the eyes of the search engine, the words around your hyper link, and the specific hyperlink words used.

Keep in mind each of the Search Engines have an algorithm, consisting of up to a few hundred variables - SEO experts constantly try to reverse engineer these algo’s to try work out what is important, but if you are trying to do SEO yourself, focus on building value to your visitor rather than manipulating the search engine (if your visitor will want more content, give it to them, if it makes sense to link to an external site on the subject do so, and if other websites would add value to THEIR visitors by linking to your site, then you have found a suitable potential incoming link)

4. The SEO iceberg effect - this is the biggest error when trying to get into the search engines. Instead of trying to focus your site on 5 or 10 SINGLE OR DOUBLE PHRASE keywords, which you’ll probably never actually appear on, rather choose 2 or 3 THREE or FOUR word phrases that describe the topic of your page, and use these phrases a few times through your article.

If you are trying to get into the Search Engines with a single word phrase, you’re:

a. competing against EVERY one in your industry (and other industry’s who are going for that single word phrase) and..

b. that particular keyword probably isn’t that targetted as it’s so general

So if you did happen to get into the Top 3 on one of the Major 4 engines for a single keyword phrase, you probably will get tons of traffic (targetted & untargetted) but it most likely WON’T HAPPEN.

RATHER focus on a number of phrases, and hopefully you’ll get into the Search Engines for one or more of those phrases, OR because you are using phrases, you might get into the engines for similar phrases using a combination of the words you CHOSE.

This is the ICEBERG EFFECT. Focus on the 10% above the ground using longer phrases, and good content in 300 to 500 word articles per page, and you’ll find that you start getting 90% of your traffic on words you never optimised for.