Website basics you should have before you employ an SEO

Often people can be doing really quite well in search engine rankings before they ever talk to an SEO. Some people never talk to an SEO because their natural instinct to put together an honest and informative website that people will want to visit has just come naturally to them. It's great to meet people who have sites like that as they are well on their way to top rankings naturally.

For everyone else who comes to me, I have to help them try and attain the same from their websites that those naturally gifted sites attain seemingly without effort.

So what simple steps should you take to make the most of your website before you consider spending thousands on an SEO campaign.

1. Own your own domain. Book it for as long as you can afford, and stick to one domain.

2. Create as much information about your product or service as possible.

3. Brainstorm more information about your product. What could you use it for that is off-the-cuff or different from how it was originally envisaged?

4. Write articles, or just a few paragraphs every day about something related to your subject, product or service.

5. Learn how to link phrases on the pages you've written to related pages elsewhere in your site.

6. Emphasise important bits in bold, italics or by making them bigger.

7. Write some more articles!

8. Get in a position where you can easily publish all this info to your website on a daily basis, by learning dreamweaver, or by having your developer implement a blog, or a CMS for you.

It's all about content. It's the single most important thing you can do for your website. Content, content, content. If it's done right, you and I will never speak until your site is already doing well in the search engine results.

28-Sep-2005