Seo Diy

[lesliedocherty]

Following on from the post the other day where a guy got onto page 1 for retractable gate or something, i would like to do a bit myself.

I have been quoted £8,000 from just search to get 5 keywords to page 1 on google within 3-12 months, spray paint, nixon watches, zoo york clothing, emu ugg boots, carhartt clothing.

If i go down the DIY route what steps help, i have just been given a great document by Scott @ SCD marketing which has been helpful.

Here is a list of the things i know about

High Quality links.
Articles written and submitted to Article sites.
Blog Posts on do follow blogs.
Social networking on social networking sites.
Doing a video and posting on youtube.
Doing a podcast.

I want to compile a list of all the things i can do and see where it gets me before i pay a company.

Answers please

[dave_n]

leslie...has anyone done an assessment of your site design/architecture from an seo perspective yet?

[KidsBeeHappy]

On site stuff. Tags, descriptions, keywords, alt tags (make sure each of your alt tags includes at least one keyword) then you need to rewrite your content. i say this not having seen your content, but i would advise re-writing it anyway. write it again and again and again. Research your keywords and when you are rewriting make sure that you include these, in ways that make sense to both people & spiders. Read every sentence again and again to think of ways of rewording it that get your keywords in in the best possible way.

Same for the blog entries, i find the easiest way is the write your article as you feel it flow, and then ruthlessly edit it, at least twice. It is very easy to write whole articles that don't actually include your keywords, mainly because they seem obvious to you.

People will say to watch your keyword density, but in my experience if your article reads properly to a person, then it's not going to be keyword spamming. content which is keyword spamming tends to read really badly.

And yes you can do it yourself. I would advise it. Don't expect immediate results. If you do it yourself you understand it, and you know what to do and change ongoing. I always think that SEO is an ongoing permanent task, partic if you are in competitive keyword markets.

[fisicx]

This should be your priority:

1. Unique page titles (sell the sizzle)
2. Unique description meta tags (selling the sausage)
2. Unique H1 on every page.
3. Unique descriptive copy - aim for 200 words for each product.

Don't bother with the articles, good for traffic but pants for SEO. Same with blogs unless you are going to post yourself but that will just look like self promo and will be ignored. Blog comments won't do you any good either.

Social networking and youtube vids again good for traffic but no good for SEO.

High quality links are good but these have to be earned and must be 100% relevant to the target page. Ideally you want a reccomendation from a fashion site withg associated write up about how cool the site is.

[cycloneuk]

I would'nt pay 8k to be ranked for those keywords, i never pay for seo anyway, i do it all myself and have managed to rank for a number of huge traffic keywords over the years with all clean seo.

Dont' worry about keyword density, follow the advice above about unique well written tags & just provide good content that includes your chosen keywords and submit to relevant directories to get started. If you build a nice clean website, then people will link back to you eventually.

Usually takes around 3-6 months to rank for keywords using Google UK from my own expierence. You can exchange links with other relevant sites but that is up to you, personally with my current site i am not exchanging links at all, i am finding that a number of sites have started to link to me and that as boosted me for a number of keywords.

[KidsBeeHappy]

Don't bother with the articles, good for traffic but pants for SEO.


How do you seperate traffic & SEO? I would have thought that the two were instrinsicly (prob spelt wrong!) linked. How do you get the traffic without the SEO, isn't SEO all about getting traffic?

(p.s. do you have the SC proposal for me?)

[lesliedocherty]

Hi,

lime, no not looked at that yet.

and yes cyclone, i dont want to pay £8k, i reckon with some effort i can make some good inroads

[fisicx]

How do you seperate traffic & SEO? I would have thought that the two were instrinsicly (prob spelt wrong!) linked. How do you get the traffic without the SEO, isn't SEO all about getting traffic?

(p.s. do you have the SC proposal for me?)

SEO is all about making your site more SE friendly. Essentially this boils down to the stuff you do to the site itself and link building.

If you publish a youtube video of a cat falling off a chair you might get some people visiting your site to see if there is anything else interesting to look at but it won't actually do anything for your ranking.

I get stumbled occasionally and for a day or two get loads of traffic. No SEO advantage though.

Doing SEO will improve ranking and get you more traffic. Promotion thorugh other media sources will just get you traffic without necessarily improving your ranking.

Hope this makes sense.

[david rushton]

A good choice of domain name can help SEO. So rather than having achme.com try something with keywords in the domain name, emuuggboots.co.uk (might not be available but you get the idea).

Also have you domain name and hosting based around where you are trying to sell, so if you are selling in the UK make sure the website is hosted in the UK with a .co.uk domain name.

[tagnum]

Boxby: How do you seperate traffic & SEO?

Probably better questions to ask are:
1. How to get relevant traffic?
2. Which keywords work best for your business?

[lesliedocherty]

Linkbaiting, what is this ??

A guy was offering to build a game or something for linkbaiting, it got good reviews from some purchasers, but ive no idea what it is

[dave_n]

Linkbait is essentially a piece of content placed on a web page - whether it's an article, blog post, picture, or any other section of cyberspace - that is designed for the specific intention of gathering links from as many different sources as possible.
With the rise of the blogosphere, meritocracy and social bookmarking sites, all it takes is one interesting page on a site, someone to notice the page, and a few people to share the link - and before you know it, you've accrued a large number of links across a wide variety of sites.

[lesliedocherty]

ah,

ok, that makes sense

[dave_n]

leslie...i think you have to start at the beginning and then once the basics are in place AND WORKING, then start looking at other areas such as inbound links, blogs etc etc


the first, and possibly most important thing to do is make sure your site content, layout and code is fully optimised for the search engine(s).

A quick glance over your code tells me this is not the case

[edmondscommerce]

setting up a wordpress blog and posting keyword rich stories linking back to the pages you want to promote can work wonders and is very easy...

the trick is to consistently post new stories which can get tricky

[lesliedocherty]

we have a seperate blogspot blog, but going to do a wordpress blog integrated to the site at store.com/blog and then phase customers over, we get 200 visitors a day to the blogspot blog

www.fatbuddhastore.blogspot.com

[fourblankwalls]

They saw you coming mate. I have dealt with them in the past and in my experience you would be mad to take them on. You could have a full time SEO expert working for you for 4 months for that full time.

They quoted us 2k for 5 keywords that were very very difficult single word keywords. They also agreed to split this over 12 monthly payments and a get out clause after 3 months.

One thing you need to know about SEO companies.

They always charge a huge amount
They never garuantee anything
They make their money from deposits
They don't have to do anything legally and can just keep your deposit. Imaging 1000 deposits of a few hundred quid each week for doing nothing.
Usually they link farm your http out to useless websites
They can use black hat techniques that can get you banned from google.
If they go under - which they do often - you lose all your money. They generally start up again under a different name.

Having said all that - just search are number one and will get you what they said but they will do only that and once you stop using them, i suspect your website will slip down again.

If your website is quite well developed i reckon i could get you on page 1 within a few months if you need any help. Give me a shout if you do. Perhaps you have some skills we can use in return?

[sirearl]

The quickest way to get high rankins is to put a hallway page on a power site.

Earl

[lesliedocherty]

anyone know any good premium wordpress themes or sites to find them

[dave_n]

hi leslie
I hate to bang on about this, and I am trying to help, but a core problem will be with your site. It isn't SEO friendly at all and the layout has shifted to the left which won't look good to potential customers.

I really would urge you to look at that before you embark on blogs, inbounds, linkbaiting, youtubing etc etc

[lesliedocherty]

Hi,

its changing on friday, you can see it just now at http://new.fatbuddhastore.com .

Dave is this version still not search engine friendly ??

also, whats not search engine friendly about the current one

[dave_n]

much better...see you got rid of the tables!

[fisicx]

You need to work on your page titles, headers, product descriptions and navigation structure.

There are literally hundreds of things you could do to the site to make it not just SE freindly but also user friendly.

much better...see you got rid of the tables!

Are you sure? I can see 5 on the homepage.

[lesliedocherty]

Hi,

a few of the hundreds of things would help, tables, what do you mean ?

[dave_n]

Hi,

a few of the hundreds of things would help, tables, what do you mean ?


tables aren't seo friendly but your new site appears to use css only which is better.

does your developer know you want a site optimised for search engines?

[lesliedocherty]

Hi,

i dont think seo is his strongest point, do you have some ideas

[dave_n]

Hi,

i dont think seo is his strongest point, do you have some ideas

a few!!!!

Also....you have a great brand name and logo but it's not being used well in the site design and user experience. The color scheme of the site isn't even the same as the logo, some of the menu's have odd spaces in them and the overall user experience could be wonderful...but isn't.

your site is screaming for a make-over as it could, and should, be fantastic....and from a designers point of view it's sad when a site could be great but simply falls well short of its potential