DIY SEO
Nov 16th, 2007 by Tim Skipper
Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is often thought of as something of a Black Art. There are unscrupulous individuals and companies who will take your money in exchange for wild promises that you’ll soon be “ranked No.1 in Google for “Stuff”!” There are also a lot of perfectly genuine SEO services out there who don’t make such rash promises and do genuinely help you. Invariably though, these services do not come cheap.
So what can you do for yourself? DIY SEO is perfectly possible. In fact, it’s quite easy. Some simple changes can make a big difference to your visibility in search engines.
For example, on one of my businesses’ Good Time Products Adult Toys & Bondage Gear web site (warning: adult content) I made a simple change to the way pages were named in the catalogue, using the product name instead of a random stock code, which led to a 40-fold increase in the amount of traffic reaching my site from Google. Forty times!
Pay attention to your page titles. These are vitally important and often overlooked. Keep page titles under 70 characters and use your most important keywords in the page title. I bet you didn’t know all the major search algorithms place more weight on the page title than on other page content.
There are lots of really simple easy changes like this you can make to improve your search engine ranking. I’ve been reading Aaron Wall’s SEOBook of late, and I can’t recommend it high enough for learning about the tips and tricks of SEO. Check it out.
