Getting Started With SEO (part 1)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of preparing your website to be reviewed, and indexed, by search engines and it seems to be all the buzz these days. Is SEO important and can you do SEO yourself?

The simple answer to both these questions is "yes!"

The real question should be, I guess: Can you SEO well if you do it yourself? And the answer to that one is a little more complex. If you were to look at my commercial web services site you would find that a basic six-month SEO package starts at $4800.00. So, if SEO is so easy that anyone can do it, why can I charge such significant fees for the service? Well, good effective SEO isn't easy. It's involved, picky, time consuming and it requires significant attention to detail over a long period of time. Effective SEO takes a minimum of six months and, in reality, it is a never ending story.

Let's take a look at a non-commercial example site. Fairhope, Alabama, is a small, but very active, community on Mobile Bay near the
Gulf coast of Alabama. They are known for their art and music. One of our clients owns a small website that features photographs and
photographers from the town. You can find the site here:

http://www.beautifulfairhope.com

The site itself is nothing spectacular, but the photos are nice. And that's what it's all about: the photos. About two years ago the site was getting an average of, oh, perhaps one visitor a day or less. It was a little discouraging for the site owner. That's where SEO, and my company, comes in.

We examined the site and applied a few basic techniques. For keywords we considered, among others, Fairhope (obviously) and every
combination of the words picture, photo and photographer, both singular and plural. So now, after about two years of working on it, if
you do a Google search for combinations of Fairhope pictures, Fairhope photos, Fairhope photographs, Fairhope photographers, etc., you should find the site turns up on page one every time, and most often in the number one spot. That's not too shabby considering there are between 25,000 and 200,000 returns for each combination of the desired keywords. Photo sites on the Internet are quite prolific.

Being found in more generic searches for Fairhope AL or Fairhope Alabama, would be good too, but likely to be more difficult since the terms are less specific and will find many more pages/websites. But our efforts paid off. Both of these terms return first or second page placement as well, despite 700,000+ and 250,000+ returns respectively.

And the important part is the site is being found. It now receives dozens of visits daily.

There are a lot of things required to make this happen and the basics can be done by anyone. For best results you will need to be able to edit the raw HTML code of your page (open-source shopping cart sites like OSCommerce are more difficult) and you will need to have a few other basic things in place. I will cover a number of the things you can do about SEO on your own website in my next few articles.