Do You Have To Pay Big Bucks For SEO?

Why do companies that do good SEO charge so much for it? Well, it's partly just because they can. There are few really good companies, and there is so much myth on the subject, that the really good companies are able to command high fees for their service. Bigger e-commerce businesses that want their websites in the top search engine results can, and are willing, to pay more to get there. This generally leaves the small business owner far down in the Search Engine Return Pages (SERPs) with, it often seems, nowhere to turn.

But that's not really true. Even the smallest business can do some things themselves and, if they shop wisely, can find affordable commercial solutions that can help. There are actually two major things that always affect your position in the search engines:

1) the work YOU do on YOUR site.

2) the work OTHERS do on THEIR sites.

If you are not continually changing, adding to, and improving, your site then others will move ahead of you as they change, add to, and improve, their sites. The result of this is, simply, you moving down in the SERPs. Even though you have done nothing to your site -- in fact, exactly because you have done nothing to your site! -- it seems you are being penalized. You are not. It's not your site that is losing ground. It is other sites that are passing you by. You need to regularly change, add to, and improve, your site if you want to keep it's position steady or moving up.

Here a complete alphabet of the things you should be looking at, and likely doing (or not doing in some case), to your site to maintain, or improve, your position in the SERPs:

1. check your page code; good coding is more important than you might think.
2. remove extraneous code (often put in by drag and drop HTML editors).
3. don't indent the lines of your code.
4. don't leave excessive blank lines.
5. use a style sheet.
6. move style sheets and scripts off your page.
7. use title and meta tags effectively.
8. do not use un-necessary meta tags.
9. use current coding in place of old, or deprecated, tags.
10. be sure your meta keywords also appear in your page text.
11. check keyword density; too much is as bad, or worse, than too little.
12. have keyword-rich text in the first sixty lines of code or so.
13. design your layout (and coding) so functional elements come after content.
14. text menus are better than graphic or "button" menus.
15. use title and alternate text (alt) attributes in image tags.
16. close all tags correctly including stand-alone tags.
17. make sure your pages have good keyword-rich, meaningful, and relevant, paragraph (prose) text.
18. use titles effectively and correctly.
19. do not use color-on-color text to hide blocks of keywords.
20. do not make long lists, or blocks, of keywords.
21. if you don't use text menus be sure you provide a text-linked site map.
22. even if you do use text links a site map is probably a good idea.
23. keep page linking to no more than three or four levels.
24. add new, or refresh old, content regularly.
25. review your keywords and change them as needed.
26. do not pad alternate text with excessive keywords.

If you attend to all of these items you will almost certainly improve your search engine results and likely move your position in a positive direction. It generally takes a few months of continued effort to make significant improvements. Don't be impatient and don't give up. If you do the work regularly over time you will see results. Most people fail because they give up -- often just before they would have succeeded!

[The Rev. Stephen B. Henry, PhD., known online as "the wiz", is a professional website designer and e-commerce consultant who has been involved in online business since 1989.]

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