By
John Warren
Yes, SEO does work. That's the short answer! The longer answer is that YOU have to work at it to make it work!
If you think that submitting your website's URL (your website address) to Google or any of the other top search engines, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc. is going to make your site magically appear in their search results, guess what? It ain't gonna happen. And if you seriously believe that you can use one of those SEO services that will submit your website to 500 search engines for 34.95... umm, guess what? It's not only NOT gonna happen, (getting a top ranking on Google for instance), you're also going to find your site blacklisted for spamming. So save your 35 dollars and I'll give you a couple of tips towards SEO that works and all you have to do is do a little work.
Google likes link popularity - that is the more websites which have a link to yours increases your popularity and therefore (at least in theory), the quality of your site. So, start sending out your Christmas cards now! In other words, find out who your competition is, as well as other sites who are in the same business as you and fire off a polite email to the respective webmasters enquiring if they'd be interested in swapping links with you. More links to you means quality in the eyes of the infamous GoogleBot and that means a higher ranking on Google's results pages and that means more customers to your site.
Content is King. Google likes up-to-date fresh content. Update or add new information to your site on a regular basis. Like once a day if you can! Show the GoogleBot that your business is alive and well and not some Internet artifact. Write new articles about your products or services, or update existing ones. Start a blog. Open a forum. There's all kinds of neat, easy-to-do things you can do which keeps your site actual, both for the search engines and your prospective clients.
Optimize your site for the keywords that you use in your content. And I don't mean, slap a whole bunch of keywords into the keywords METATAG and hope for the best. Google doesn't even look at METATAGS anymore (except TITLE) - you'll do more harm than good using METATAGs, so lose 'em. What I mean by optimizing your keywords is using words and descriptions which properly describe your business, your products or your services within the content of your site. Good copy makes for good keywords. Don't write paragraphs and paragraphs of garbage that's just filler which says nothing useful about your products/services. Learn to write descriptive, snappy bits and bytes that reflect your goods and makes them appealing. Remember visitors want instant, accurate information about your products and have very little time or inclination to waddle through a lot of BS. So keep it short, simple and descriptive! And that's how you optimize your keywords in the process.
More tomorrow... I'm off for coffee and my daily SEO report for many of the sites I'm responsible for getting 'googledbygoogle'
Have a great day!
This article is (c) Copyright 2007 John Warren
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