Why need to doing SEO by yourself ?? Get success in blogging or make money with blog can not be reached without good ranking in Google. Google Pagerank or Search Engines Result Rank (SERP). That’s why people always said if you want to success in online business, do the SEO. There are a lot of bloggers in internet, but not all of them know SEO well. They engage the expert in SEO person or company. But, if you really want to have success in online business, do the SEO by yourself. At least in one of your site, with purpose you know all SEO part well. After you know all of SEO parts, just go on if you want to hire some SEO expert or company. With good knowledge of SEO, you can check and recheck their work.
So, what things that you must in SEO do by yourself in SEO ??
Keyword Research
You must decide what keyword for your product or services. Please act like your customer and think what keyword will they type and will drive them to your sites / blogs ??? A keyword can be one word, two or more words. More spesific keyword usually preferred.
Write down as many as keywords you can think of. Discuss with your team or partners. Do not forget to think the alternative words. Consider geographical phrases if they are important to your customer (e.g. “web design Bandung”). Also, get some ideas from your competitors’ websites. Try to make a list of 20-30 keyword phrases.
Then filter those keyword. Choose best two keyword phrases that you think would be searched for most people. But please remember about high competition keyword. Higher competition mean harder to get top rankings in that keywords. These 2 keywords can be update in the future, depend on the condition. No need to waster your effort to compete with something that you can beat. Use Google Webmaster tools to see which keywords that bring more traffic in your sites.
Web Content
Web content mean all the words / texts, images and video on your website. Because content is king in the world of search engines, your keyword phrases need to be placed strategically on your webpage to convince Google that your content is highly relevant to those keywords.
Some tips about keywords placement :
- Place your keywords in headings, at the beginning of the heading is preferred. You at least need to put your keyword with H1, H2 and H3 tags. These tags is most important tags in SEO.
- Include keywords in the first and in the last sentence of your content.
- Bold or italicise keyword
- Put your keyword in link, internal link or external link.
- Put your keyword in your title ( in HTML title tag ).
- Put your keyword as alt text for your images.
Links
Search engines consider each link as vote of popularity for your sites. It will improve your rankings. For internal links, you must design a good navigation or linking for each page. Avoid too much internal links to one page. External links is important. But for the latest update of Google, the most important is quality of the links. Not the quantity. External links that come into your sites should be relevant with your keywords. 1 quality backlink is more usefull than 100 backlinks without any relevant for your keyword.
Monitoring
Monitor your rankings in Google every months ( week )by typing your keywords phrase into Google search box, and recording your ranking. Note it. Also try to see stats from hosting, like AWStats. You also can use Google analytics for monitoring.
Do all SEO part above repeatly. If your chosen keyword not bring good result, change it. Do all over again, start from keyword research until monitoring. If your rankings climb up, just improve your content or links. By do it all things by yourself, you will find that SEO is interesting.