By Gregg Hall

If the idea of Internet marketing intimidates you and you are thinking of hiring a professional, hold on!  I’ve got great news for you. It’s really that tough to do search engine optimization (SEO) yourself, save hundreds of dollars, and still get the same results the professionals do. I won’t lie to you, you will probably get better results from highly qualified professionals, but you should definitely take the time to execute these do-it-yourself actions first. Once you’ve done some of this kind of work it will be easier to decide if a professional really needed.

Basic SEO is not difficult at all – all it takes is the willingness to put in the work. Once you know the basics, it’s not that hard, though it can be time consuming. The content of your website is the main focus of what SEO is all about. Here are the top things to think about when you’re doing it yourself:

1. The first thing is the registration of your domain name, which should reflect what your site about. Keep it short; as long as it’s somehow related to your site, being more specific can definitely help. I have had sites rank in the top of the search engines just from the domain name alone with no other SEO at all!  You could choose to name the page after one of your products or services, for example. Another method is to get a sub domain of a popular domain. This will generally help you get indexed more quickly though it will not appear quite as professional to your visitors. There is a trade off here, sub domains are quicker (and generally cheaper), but domain names are more memorable, and, in the long run, better for your indexing. Also try to stick with .com and avoid multiple hyphens.

2. The next item you should examine is your page’s title (i.e. the HTML title tag), which is crucial in letting search engines see what the page is about, and is the first item looked at by search engines to determine your relevance. You should put your most important keywords in your title tags – you don’t need to worry about singular or plural forms as search engines account for these changes in most cases. Whatever you do, don't call your home page ‘Home’ – make the title a mini-description of the page. Look at the title of my page from my site, “The Internet Marketing Secrets”. If people find my site in the Search Engine results for those keywords it is going to stand out. The title of The Marketer’s Mind is “Website Optimization and Promotion”.

3. The two primary meta tags aren’t nearly as important as they used to be, but the description tag is still used by some search engines to display information about your website to users and help them decide whether they’ve found what they are looking for. Not all search engines bother with this, though most will put some bearing on it (even if it is minuscule). Again, this is crucial for people searching as well. Here’s the first line of mine,” The Internet Marketing Secrets Your Complete Internet Marketing Online Resource”. Again, it makes people want to see more.

For very short descriptions the alt tag can be used. Alt tags let you describe an image or graphic file – they’re the pop-up descriptions that appear when you hover your mouse over a graphic, or when the graphic can’t be downloaded for whatever reason. These should be peppered with keywords for your site.

Text within comment tags is never displayed on the page – it is used by coders and designers to remind them of what that part of the page is for. Some coders used to put lots of keywords in the comment tags, so that they would be seen by search engines but not users, but search engines have now stopped paying attention to any text that isn’t seen by the user. Keep this in mind when trying to post invisible text (i.e. white text on a white background). This kind of behavior can get you banned from a search engine, DON’T DO IT!

4. Having keyword density in all of your content is good, but keep in mind that each search engine has its own requirements when it comes to how many times that a keyword or phrase should be in the content for the page to be relevant. Somewhere between 5 and 8 percent is a roughly optimal level – but this isn’t always possible, and you shouldn’t force it. Don’t overdo it, or the search engines might mark you down. Additionally you should be creating your sites to be more visitor friendly by using the methods espoused in The Master Plan by Charles Heflin. Charles really has a good handle on how sites should be constructed and how the content should be written to take advantage of the new LSI technology that the Search Engines are moving to. If you don’t think LSI is important you need to check out the news where Google has bought several LSI technology companies. Another excellent report on visitor enhanced optimization can be found from Colin McDougall of The Veo Report.

5. Many search engines judge web page importance on the number and quality of incoming links from other sites. You should link to some related sites, but not too many. Also, be sire to use “no follow tags” on links to pages within your own site that aren’t “money” pages. Don’t overdo incoming links either, and keep them related your site’s content. Don’t trade links with a site about online dating if your site is about auto parts. Lastly, it’s also a good idea to get sites to use your keywords as the anchor text of these links. You should vary these and you should specify what you want them to use.

6. Use Technorati tags to get traffic from Technorati. For details on how to do this I recommend you get my free report available by subscribing to my newsletter link in the upper right hand column below my picture on the home page of The Marketer’s Mind.

If you follow the advice above, you can do it yourself and do fine. SEO, if done right, can keep you on top for as long as you want to be. The Marketer’s Mind is brand new, but The Internet Marketing Secrets is number 6 in Google right now for the term “internet marketing secrets” out of almost 3 million results. The only sites above me have been online for much longer than mine. Do you think the domain name has a lot to do with it?

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