Doing SEO on Your Own: Where Do You Begin?

When you are trying to gain online success, you quickly realise that search engines can be your best friend. Instead of having to pay through the nose for sponsored advertisements through a paid Google campaign or other online advertising program, if you can master search engine optimization, you can get free traffic to come to your website and that traffic can be converted to customers.

But don’t I need to hire a search engine marketing firm for that?

You could but actually, you don’t have to. You can learn a lot about SEO and do things on your own that increase your search engine indexings which will, by nature, increase the incoming traffic your site gets. If you do it well, you’ll get customers to your site who will buy from you. Instead of investing a lot of money, you can instead invest some time and effort to learn how to get organic site traffic.

There are a lot of different components to search engine optimization but let’s look at a few of the basic ones that can help anyone get started:

Relevant Keywords

Words are the foundation for the search engines. If you want to sell something, you want people to find your site when they search for that word. There are a lot of search engines that run with differing algorithms but the commonality between search engines is that they look at the words on your page in some way or fashion.

Choose good keywords and you can attract people. How competitive your niche is and how many people are searching for those keywords is something important to consider but there are a lot of free tools available that can help you figure out which keyword phrases are profitable and relate to your niche. The goal is to get to near the top of the first page of results. Most people don’t visit past page two when searching for something on Google, MSN, or Yahoo.

On Page SEO

Things that exist directly on your page impact the search engine rankings you’ll get. If you have good content with plenty of keywords and you utilize all the required fields well with the right inputs, this can definitely help you. Your title tag, H1 tag, meta description, and other SEO tags need to be populated properly in order to make your site seem relevant to the search engines as well as to the people browsing the SERPs (search engine results pages)

Off Page SEO

Things that exist away from your site but that point to it can help you as well. Article marketing, blog commenting, forum posting, and social media links pointing to your site can help the search engines see your site as more relevant to your topic. Do use tags here as well that offer a combo of relevancy, enticing headlines, and high value words.

Learning is Power

There are a lot of things you can do on a regular basis to increase your website’s rankings and profitability. Learning is definitely powerful online! Whether you choose to do your own promotion, content writing, and social media or choose to get someone to help you do it, learning as much as you can about how engines like Google work to bring relevant results is definitely worth learning. Lucky for you there are a lot of available tools that you can use to help you!