SEO? Try DIY First.

Recently we were referred a potential client requesting us to review his website and provide a cost estimate for attaining first page ranking for two specific keyword phrase queries in Google’s natural search results.  We thought it might be instructive to publish our email reply back, as an opportunity to introduce our general philosophy on SEO.

Hi —–,

We really appreciate ———- referring you to us, but we are not a pure play SEO firm that will give you a ‘guarantee’ about where you will end up. Be wary of a web design company that would!  However, we do know a lot about SEO and would be happy to consult with you on how to do-it-yourself or make a plan of action towards that goal.  It’s really not that hard and we advise that it’s best to learn and direct SEO strategy on your own rather than spend up to $2-3K a month for these services.  Others may disagree.

There are several different components to an effective SEO strategy.  Please allow us to explain a few concepts, and forgive us if you are already familiar with the following.  As a baseline, you need to attend to some basic structural elements throughout your website:

• Well-designed, hierarchical information architecture
• XML site map submitted to Google
• Title tags
• H1s
• Alt tags (photos and links)
• Meta-description
• Meta keywords
• Keyword density
• SEO friendly URLs

Take care of all that and you’ll doing well.  You can also do a lot with press releases:

• You can use press release distribution services to send newsworthy events out on the wire online, allowing online publishers and aggregators like Yahoo, Google, etc, to pick up your press release and publish it on their site. Just as important, you get a permanent page on this press release distribution site that links back to you.
• A word of caution:  you should hold yourself to a high standard and make sure that whatever you do is actually newsworthy. Some SEO firms believe in ‘creating news’ to be able to send out press releases all the time, but this approach seems unsavory to us.

Try to generate good inbound links:

• Target listing sites, partner companies, directory listings, blogs, etc, anyone that has a website that it would make sense to have your company mentioned with a link back to your site.
• Build quality links every month that will be there permanently linking back to your site. The more links you have and the longer they’ve been there the higher your page rank will go.

Be a blogger:

• Frame yourself as an expert within your industry
• Each blog post acts as yet another way for you to promote your agenda (more qualified traffic to your website). Many times your audience might find you through a search query that you would never predict, which is why having quality articles and posts on your site that discuss your industry using your industry language is very important.
• Open up the outgoing RSS feed on your blog post. With quality blog posts on your site you create the opportunity and possibility for others to want to display your content on their site. When others do that it creates backlinks to your site, which is what you want!

As an advanced technique, try a desirable ‘widget’ or freebie of some sort.  Be creative:

• If you offered something to your clients that they could put on their site, such as a ‘[-----] Certified Professional’ seal of some sort you could give them a reason to put something on their site that links back to a page on your site that explains that ‘seal of approval’. These are all free links from extremely relevant websites.
• What I mean by relevant is that it’s better when a website has related content to what you do. Having a link from ESPN to your site would be nice, but it wouldn’t necessarily be that powerful in the eyes of Google.

We can absolutely assist you in all these pursuits–we do these services all the time for clients– but we cannot guarantee a ranking because a) we focus on sites, not search, and b) our approach is to teach our clients to understand SEO for themselves first because it should be a long term goal.  It’s not hard to learn or implement basic SEO tactics.  All it takes is time and consistent effort.  We do understand that sometimes time can run in short supply, so If you’re interested in a referral we can recommend a very proficient SEO and PPC firm here in town that can do it all for you, but again, we believe that no outside party can do SEO work as well as you can do it for yourself.

Hope this is helpful to you, —–, please let us know if you have any questions or would like to schedule a time to talk.

Tags: google