SEO on a Shoestring Budget - Marketing & SEO Discussion List

SOHO SEO: Search Engine Optimization On A Shoestring

Yes, IT can be done. Thousands and thousands and thousands of web entrepreneurs have done IT and so can you.

IT? Improving your search-engine page rank and return position without taking out a second mortgage on your home or pawning your car to raise money for an SEO guru.

To understand how you can do basic SEO yourself while still having time to properly manage your "real" business and the other elements involved in growing and maintaining your website, it's sometimes easiest to consider search engine requirements as a series of modules.

1. Building The Foundation

The foundation of your site includes all the things you need to consider and act on before you upload your first test page to your host - even before you sign up with a host. Craft a bulletproof foundation and you've won half the SE battle.

Select your host carefully. Inadvertently signing up with a host the search engines consider flaky - one which welcomes operators of spammy or fraudulent sites - can have a severe negative impact on your page rank, cause your site to be tossed into an search engine sandbox or even result in your site's not being indexed. The not-so-technical term for this phenomenon is "guilt by association" and while it might not be fair, it's a powerful factor in both offline and online relationships.

Most hosting services have a posted ethics, standards or guidelines policy. Read it and apply some commonsense. If they don't allow the types of operators you wouldn't want to invite for dinner, they're fine. If they do open their doors to people you'd find undesirable, there's a reasonable chance the major search engines might find them undesirable as well.

Other important things to think about before you build your first page are the page's title and keywords. Many people base these essential items on what they think are important about their business. You may get better results, search-engine wise, if you pretend you know very little about your business and try to think of "search terms" you would enter in Google if you wanted to learn more the product or service your business is in.

2. Considering Your Copy

In many ways, words are the most important things on your website. Words describe what your business is about. What you sell. What services you provide. What you know that might be useful to potential customers.

Words provide information. And they provide that information to search-engine ranking programs as well as potential customers. These days, web crawlers such as Googlebot analyze the words on your site and use the results of that analysis as a major factor in deciding how "good" your site is and how high to rank it.

The key elements the major search engines look for are relevancy (are the words on topic?), originality (are they unique to your site or duplicates of canned copy also found on other sites?), and freshness (do you add or revise the copy on your site regularly?).

Though there isn't space in this brief overview to cover the intricacies of Search Engine Optimized Copy, you can get really comprehensive information about it at copywriting services such as GetWebContent.com and Brian Clark's excellent Copyblogger.

3. Preparing A Linking Strategy

The Web is all about links. Without links there is nothing. Without links no one would ever have to worry about search engine optimization because search engines would not be able to link people to websites. If you want to talk about "by association" factor, you only have to look at the relationship between linking and search engine optimization. Good link "associates" will earn you search engine bonus points. Bad ones can lead to severe penalties. You can learn all you need to know about that relationship just by reading the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Here's Google's first comment under the "When Your Site Is Ready" heading:

"Have other relevant sites link to yours."

And here's what Google says under "Quality Guidelines - Basic Principles":

"Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links."

Not sure of the difference between "other relevant sites" and "link schemes?" Avoid software or services that force you to link in high volume to other sites without your editorial discretion. Make linking decisions based on what benefits your end users. Ask yourself, "Does this site I am about to link help my end user learn more about the product or business I offer on my site?"

Search-engine optimization for small business. If it sounds more complicated than it actually is, it's because there's an entire industry of "experts" and "gurus" expending massive amounts of energy to try and convince you that you can't do it yourself, that building a search-engine friendly site is somehow more complex than building a customer-friendly site.

But it's really not, at least not for the average SOHO site. To steal yet another quote from Google "make pages for users, not for search engines" and you'll do just fine.

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