Most large companies have their own website. Their (IT) organization has or hires employees like, a web developer (back end), web designer (front end), graphic designer (look & feel), Webmaster, site manager, content managers, text-editors, marketing managers, web hosting providers and site promoters, or they hire professional web design- and SEO companies. In any way, such companies have better (financial) opportunities to create and promote a website then most individuals or small business companies have. This means that you need to have a lot of different skills to reach the ultimate goal; ‘get a prominent position/ranking in the major Search Engines (SE’s)’. Search engines including Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Sounds hopeless? No, it isn’t, because if I can do it, you can do it too. I also started once with a personal website and got interested in organic SEO. So I started reading, subscribed to some good SEO newsletters, visit specific SEO forums and read some books about SEO, design, marketing and writing and one of the most important things, I visit and analyze the websites of my competitors. The only problem is (for me it is a challenge) that the development in the ‘SEO-world’ never stops, you have to keep yourself up with the developments of the major search engines and directories and stay up-to-date by reading prominent articles and regular visit SEO forums. I do that by subscribing to some interesting RSS feeds, which I read with my (free) Google RSS reader.

Just remember that all information you need to learn about SEO is free on the web. You only need to know where to find it. And you need some talent to distinguish all this information from what is true and what is not (or what is something in between).

Simple rules to follow are:

Make a good plan what you want to do with your website

Know exactly who your audience (customer) is

Learn about your direct competitors (just have a critical look at their websites and learn from the good things (their success) and avoid the bad things.

Make ‘your’ website unique, comparing to your competitors. Do something different that others don’t do to attract visitors. Distinguish yourself from your competitors.

Build a simple sitemap to help the search engines . On this page you show (only normal text, no graphics etc.) a complete overview of all your pages, sub pages or topics. A sitemap is easy to access for robots to find and index all your website pages.

Do not use too many graphics, graphics can’t be seen by robots, but if you do, then always use the alt-tag with keyword rich text, to describe the specific graphic. Keep the alt-text ‘natural’ otherwise it will include to much spam for the SE’s.

Use an easy-to-access navigation bar at the top or left top of all your pages, but also at the bottom of all your pages. Make it for the visitor easy to navigate through your website. If a visitor gets lost after page 2, it will immediately leave your site!

Just remember, don’t overdo it. It’s not easy to find the balance between copy written for search engines and copy written for customers. In many cases, this balance will be too difficult to achieve without professional help. Don’t worry, though. If you’ve already performed your keyword analysis, a professional website copywriter should be able to work your primary keyword phrases into your copy at no extra charge.

When in doubt, call the professionals at DTG. They will show you the various ways to get your website in the top listings of most search engines and show you how to keep your website in the rankings.

Blog Archive

Read more in our 12/02/09 Blog entry: SEO and the Basics
Read more in our 06/25/09 Blog entry: SEO and the Basics