If you’re a small business with a website, but no SEO plan, you’re missing an excellent opportunity to promote your products or services. Plus, SEO is not very expensive – with a moderate amount of time and money, you can start getting traffic from the major search engines.
Assuming you’re ready to start optimizing your website for top rankings on Google, Google UK, Yahoo UK, Yahoo, MSN, etc, there are three basic steps you should follow in your SEO plan.
Step 1 – Choose your keywords.
You first need to choose the keywords that you want to rank well for. I’d suggest that you start with 3-5 main keywords.
Keep in mind that bigger, more completive keywords are much harder to rank well on. You want to choose keywords that quite a few people search for, but that the competition is low to moderate on. You can check the search volume and competition for a keyword with overture. Use Overture’s keyword suggestion tool to check the monthly search volume, and the bid prices tool to check on the competition. (Generally, the higher the top bids for a keyword are, the more competitive the keyword is.)
Step 2 – Optimize your site.
The easiest way to optimize the pages on your site is to use a free tool like WebCEO. This tool will check and analyze your pages according to the search engine algorithms, to ensure that you have the correct keyword density, etc, for your selected keywords. WebCEO comes with plenty of documentation, so I won’t include instructions in this article.
Step 3 – Build links to your site.
Building inbound links to your site is actually the most important part of SEO. There are many ways to build links to your site. A few of the best methods are link exchanges, directory submissions, and article submissions. One could write an entire book (in fact, many have been written), on building links, so I won’t go further into the details in this article.
If you are SEOing for a particular country, like the UK, be sure that you either have your site hosted in that country and / or your domain uses that country’s extension.
The principles in this article should give you a good start in getting the knowledge you need to SEO your site for top search engine rankings. Have fun!