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10 Steps To Kick Start Your SEO Campaign

By John King

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 26Aug2010 Word count: 660 Viewed: 260 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Search engine optimisation or SEO is still for many a black art. A technique so secret that it would be easier to turn base metal into gold. Well, there's no disputing the fact that it's possible to dig really deep and get extremely involved in the whole process, but great gains can be had by following these 10 simple rules:

1. Research the keywords you intend to use for your site - don't just pull a stack out of thin air. There are many free tools around for this purpose, none better than Google's own keyword tool.

2. Stitch the keywords naturally into your page copy without spamming. Most importantly you are providing a 'good read' for your site visitors, but you are also trying to clearly let the search engine spiders know what your site is about.

3. Write compelling page copy. The better your page copy reads the more likely you are to have people stick around or maybe even dare I say... revisit.

4. Ensure that your website is built with nice compliant code. You want those search engine spiders to sail through your website collecting all that valuable information about your business without hitting nasty brick walls. Don't clutter your site's page with tons of inline Javascript and CSS, instead link to external files.

5. Got some images on your page? If so you'll want to make sure that every image has an 'alt tag'. This tag is the facility to describe an image to a screen reader for the visually impaired. An important tag for obvious reasons and also it keeps the search engines happier.

6. Make sure you use your title tag. If you're not sure where this can be found it sits in the head section of the code and the resulting title can be seen by site visitors at the top of their browser. Make sure you have a different title on every page and make it descriptive and contain a couple of important keywords. Don't spam this tag as it's a very important part of the SEO process and you want it to count. Keep your page titles to under 70 characters and make sure you keep your important keywords in the first 55 characters.

7. Make sure you include the meta description tag. This tag is again found in the head section of the code and is the section of copy that is placed with your website's url in the search engine's results. This is your call to action so use a different description relevant to every page. For this Google typically truncates your meta description in the SERPs (search engine results pages) to approximately 150-155 characters.

8. Try to add content to your site by using a news section or a small blog. All the optimised content that you add to your site will be new content waiting to be included into the SERPs. All this creates new avenues to your website.

9. Get some links to your site! The search engines like to see other websites linking to yours as it's seen as a vote of confidence. Write a few articles about a product or service and upload these to the big online article sites like Ezinearticles.com. They allow you to include a link or two in the resource section. Don't also forget to submit your site to some directories. The best ones like Yahoo can be expensive but are great for the important link juice. Some will be cheaper and some will be free. Beware of trashy looking free directories that are never maintained, though there are some very good new free ones out there that are going places: see link below.

10. Get social! Get yourself a Twitter account and start tweeting. Get some followers and every 15 or so tweets you can promote your business with links to important pages etc. Beware that if you do this every other tweet your followers will soon lose faith and unfollow you.

There you go, nothing like the secret of alchemy!

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