Doing SEO on your own and learning SEO can be a challenging task for two major reasons:
The demanding, ever-changing landscape of search algorithm behavior is often unpredictable and nonintuitive.
There are literally thousands of details and tactics to learn, some of which may have little impact on their own, but when used in various combinations with other components can hold powerful influence over ranking. Herein lies the “art” aspect of mastering SEO.
Fortunately, many SEO training materials are available via paid subscription at SEOmoz, SEO Book, Market Motive, and the SEMPO Institute, among others. If you don’t have the budget for a subscription, you can try public blogs and resources such as the SEOmoz Blog & Guides and SearchEngineLand.com. Also consider the many resources for learning that we outlined in Chapter 11.
You can do numerous things, at a fairly low cost, to improve your site’s overall optimization, including the following:
- Use the free search engine tools
Use the free set of tools provided by the three major search engines. Create an account in Google Webmaster Central, Bing Webmaster Center, and Yahoo! Site Explorer, and verify yourself as a site owner on all three. This will provide you with access to diagnostic tools, such as robots.txt validators, and reports on backlinks, spidering activity, server errors, top search queries, anchor text, and more.
- Check out your competitors
Assess your site and those of your competitors for SEO success factors such as keyword URLs, keyword-rich title tags, H1 tags, keyword prominence, and so on. To survey yours and your competitors’ title tags across a large number of pages, use the search engines’ site operators and set (in the preferences) the number of results returned per page to 100.
- Optimize your title tags
You want each title tag across your site to be unique and focused on a relevant keyword theme. Make each title tag count, because it’s given the most weight by the search engines of all the elements on the page—and it heavily influences the searcher’s click decision from the search results.
- Optimize other critical elements
Analyze the text, HTML, inbound links, internal links, anchor text, and so on to determine your ideal configuration for success (include a dose of your own critical thinking).
- Measure, test, measure, and refine
Test your assumptions and the assertions of others—particularly SEO bloggers (not every piece of advice you find will be accurate or applicable). Measure Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and treat SEO like a series of experiments. Make iterative improvements to your URLs, title tags, H1 tags, internal linking structure, anchor text, page copy, link acquisition efforts, and so on.
What sorts of KPIs should you measure and aim to improve? At a minimum, consider checking rankings, traffic, and conversion metrics. However, you can also check other metrics, such as the number of different search terms used to find your site, the number of different landing pages where search visitors arrive, the growth of inbound links and/or the addition of any notable inbound links, and so forth.
- Make nice with IT—or bypass them
If you are in a larger organization, you must persuade your IT team to have a stake in your site’s SEO success because you rely on them to implement many of the optimizations (such as URL rewrites, 301 redirects, breadcrumb navigation, tag clouds, PageRank sculpting, etc.). IT can be your biggest ally or the thorn in your side. They need to weave SEO into every facet of what they do, and that happens only when they want to work with SEO. Start by heaping on the praise and appreciation—maybe buying them pizza!
If conflicting priorities and insufficient internal resources stymie you, you will have to institute workarounds that minimize IT involvement. Have no fear: you can still accomplish what you need to with your site, with a bit of out-of-the-box thinking and some technology.
For example, you could use proxy optimization technology (such as Netconcepts’ GravityStream) that optimizes the URLs, titles, page content, navigation, and so on via a proxy server, obviating the need for major invasive surgery on the underlying e-commerce platform. Nonetheless, start with the pizzas and go from there.
- The link bait option
Get one great idea for a tool, service, resource, or page, and bounce it off some folks in the forums (or privately through email to an SEO expert whom you trust). Hire a developer who can help you build it; use Craigslist (http://www.craigslist.org) or other online classifieds and post with a budget you can afford.
- Leverage low-cost tools
Consider using one of the following tools:
- Adobe’s Dreamweaver (http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/)
This is a de facto tool for any website/application developer. Most of the time it is used to build web pages, but it also has a very good range of reporting tools. With a few mouse clicks it is possible to:
Analyze website accessibility (WAI and other standards)
Analyze website coding practices
Find empty or missing title tags
Find empty or missing image
altattributesAnalyze link structure (orphaned files, external links, and broken links)
Store everything in nice reports anyone can view in HTML format
To make things even nicer, you can fix most of the noticed errors/warnings automatically, either directly or indirectly. And even better, you can extend the preceding list of available default tools with scripting and extensions.
- Xenu’s Link Sleuth (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html)
This is a simple link-based crawler. Web developers use Xenu to check for broken links on a regular basis, but for SEO purposes the best value comes in the form of simple internal link analysis. By ordering the Xenu Sitemap based on “links in” and “page level,” it is easy to detect possible internal linking abnormalities that interrupt PageRank flow or decrease anchor text value; and of course, you can save all this information as a report. Xenu gathers loads of information, and it is a very useful tool, even for in-depth SEO purposes.
- Microsoft Word (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/FX102855291033.aspx)
Although it may seem to be an unconventional tool for a web developer/SEO practitioner, it is undeniably one of the best copywriting and publishing tools that all users are familiar with. Microsoft Word has several built-in features that help to produce high-quality content, analyze existing content, fix and locate essential grammar errata, and above all, easily automate and synchronize all features and changes with other users and publishing tools. For more tech-savvy folks, there is always the scripting option for fine-tuning.
As with most SEO tools, the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If you use the preceding tools properly, they can be very helpful; for the untrained eye or for the wrong kind of task, they can cause pain and misery. Making proper on-page optimization decisions usually takes tens of hours. Even for a relatively small site, it is possible to cut that down to fewer than two hours with the tools and methods we just described. Of course, there is a difference in the quality of work and the documentation you’ll get with these tools compared to what you’d get with more conventionally priced SEO services.
- Limited cash options
If you’re on a tight budget, you can look into purchasing Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think ($23.10) or a Yahoo! Directory listing ($299). You can also check with SEO firms to see which ones are offering special introductory packages. Many firms offer special pricing just to get started with a client.
These are just examples of things you can do, and countless other options are also available. Whatever you do, don’t short-circuit the process of developing in-house expertise, even if you hire outside help. That in-house knowledge will be invaluable over time, and if you have hired a quality outsourcing partner they will be delighted as it will make their job easier. They may even help train you or your team.