7 February 2009
Hi Ben,

Because SEO is still such a mystery, it can be confusing and difficult to find a trustworthy and reliable source, as I'm sure you know.

One thing you can do free of charge is to ensure that your web site contains quality content. Of course quality content is a little subjective, so here are a couple of tips.

1. When deciding what content should go on a given page of your website, consider how you would like people to find your page with regard to the content that you are considering, then come up with a list of keywords and key phrases that you believe people would use to search your site.

2. After you have a good list, pare it down to something manageable, and develop your content around those keywords and phrases... making sure to include the keywords and phrases in the content.

3. Decide what the title of your page should be. By title, I mean the title displayed at the top of your browser. You can use up to 100 characters, Google will display 64 characters while Yahoo is a little more than that. Make the title human readable, but once again, use a couple keywords in the title.

4. Write a description for your page, again using the keywords and phrases.

5. Then for keywords, simply take the list you have created in step one and make a comma separated list, (with no spaces before or after each comma).

When you are all done, you should have quality content that should work for searchability, have your web developer add the title you created in step 3 to the title section of your page, the description in the appropriate meta tag and the keywords in the appropriate meta tag. If you can do this yourself, please take advantage.

For other information, one site that I have found that is helpful is, "Web Marketing Now" at http://www.webmarketingnow.com. The site is a wealth of information that is not geared toward selling you services, rather it is a site dedicated to education.

A couple of suggestions that may help make a difference in monitoring your results would be:

Have your developer make available to you some kind of program such as Urchin. Urchin reads your log files and displays the results in an easy to read format that allow people to view what keywords your site is being found by, the page views your site is receiving, what pages people enter and leave your site and much more.

Additionally, you can check out Google Webmaster Tools. You will need to sign up for a Google account, but the information is helpful is displaying similar information regarding your web site as well as alerting you to possible problems that may keep your site from being spidered correctly by search engines. You can also add a site map to your Google account that will help in indexing the pages of your site. If you do not have a robots.txt file, the Google account will help you create one of those as well.

Above all, while many companies will tell you that using the same keywords as the number one sites on searches is best, be cautious with this approach, after all, if all web sites were dedicated to selling apples, and they all used the same keywords, how then would things be found? Try to be creative... ask some friends or co-workers how they would search for your web site.

That should get you started, I hope that all helps a bit. Good luck in you efforts.

Best regards,
Mark Cloyd
Mark Cloyd Designs
http://www.markcloyd.com

8 February 2009
Hello Ben,

In addition to the advice from the previous designer, which I fully agree with, I would also suggest that you promote your website on relevant directories. Many such directories offer free listings and a link to your website. Some may request a reciprocal link and you can decide whether you feel this would be appropriate. I would also suggest you open a Google account and register your services/website on Google maps. It is free and easy to do.

The Google account will provide you with details of how often your website has been accessed from Google maps so you can monitor the results.

Your website Cpanel stats will also provide you with details of visitors to your website that have found you from an external link on another website.

Hope this helps..

Shona

8 February 2009
Hello Ben,

There are literally hundreds of thousands of websites provding the same SEO service, it's almost impossible to find the right company to make your site a success.

There are so many things that you can do yourself to both increase your ranking in the search engines and also track your progress and success.

1) The first thing you need to have is a website Statistics page. These are an invaluable tool, and your host should offer one free of charge, if not, then you're obviously not with a very good host! Statistics pages can give you the amount of unique visitors to your site on a month-by-month basis, better webstats programmes even give day-by-day, and even hour-by-hour. Some of the better programmes have a fantastic tool which allows you to track what keywords visitors have used to find your website, and also what websites visitors have come from to your site. Check out www.jigsawcounselling.co.uk/stats for our best webstats programme that we use for all our clients.

2) Think of important keywords that are relevant to your company, find about 15-20 of these. Then, think of a short paragraph which includes as many of these keywords as possible and put them all down. Once you've done this - you'll then have the basis of your META element - basically what the search engines use to pick up your website.

3) Getting a sitemap can be invaluable, Google have a great sitemapping system which produces whats called an XML sitemap, noticed by all the search engines to further promote your website

I hope this has been of some help Ben, if you need any further advice please don't hesitate to contact me.

Cheers
Steve

10 February 2009
A specific website that will walk you through the Meta Tag building steps is http://www.scrubtheweb.com/abs/builder.html

You don

16 February 2009
I find this site to have a lot of good informtion for SEO stuff.

http://www.webmarketingnow.com

10 March 2009
Hi Ben,

You should check out these resources and blogs. They are a great way to learn and keep up on SEO and they will get you started.

1. www.seomoz.org
2. www.searchengineland.com
3. www.highrankings.com


Cheers,

James Svoboda
President / Director of Search Marketing
Realicity Internet Marketing
http://www.realicity.com

18 April 2009
Hi.

I'd recommend you find a good SEO company, find out what they have done for their clients and seek referrals and reviews as there's no substitute to hand coded SEO.

26 May 2009
I agree with the above advice, but would like to add that you can get some useful information from a piece of software (FREE) call WebCEO available from: http://www.webceo.com

We often recommend it to our customers as it is (in some ways) non-technical and offers features such as automatically updating tags into your page's HTML for you.

The software will analyse your site, compared to keywords that specify,but will also compare your website against your competitors and will show you your current position in major search engines for given keywords, as well as guiding your through submitting your website to various search engines and directories.

The software even offers you tools to participant in link exchange programmes, which can aid your website's position in search engines through the number of links to your website (i.e. your website's popularity).

Finally, and the main reason I recommend this software to my customers, is there is training available to use the software at relatively low cost allowing you to make full use out of the software, and better understand how you can optimise your website for different search engines.

I hope this helps,

Kurt Farrar
Small Business IT Consultant
MyDigitalMedia

28 May 2009
SEOmoz is a fantastic resource for not only learning about SEO but also finding some great tools to help and monitor your SEO.

Check it out at http://www.seomoz.org

The main thing to remember is to have patience - getting good results in Google can take time!

Good luck.

11 June 2009
I don't want to kill you with a mountain of might as well be Japanese lingo so here's some good links for your journey:

- http://www.seomoz.org/

- http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

- http://www.google.com/analytics/

Good Luck!

Thanks, Bryan

22 July 2009
Hi Ben,

Don't forget to check out SEO Book.(http://www.seobook.com/). Some of the tools and advice available here for free are invaluable.

Hope you find it useful

14 March 2010
One of the best resource I have found for SEO over the years is SEOmoz.org...

They have created a full list of all the SEO ranking factors and have listed them in the order of importance - http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#ranking-factors

I hope this helps,

Michael

16 June 2010
People have mentioned Search Engine Land and SEOMoz, and you won't go far wrong with them.

However, hiring a professional SEO or team of search engine consultants can always give you the edge. It's a full time job keeping up with developments on the search engines, so you might not have time to do the best possible job yourself!

Andrew Nattan
FirstFound
http://www.firstfound.co.uk