SEO Tips for Beginners: Issue 1
Author:
Hannah 
FAQ's
For those of you starting out, and want a couple of SEO tips to get you started, I will outline the basics you need to get to grips with, or if you are paying someone to carry out your SEO, it might be important for you to understand the resource that goes into your internet marketing.
I may stand alone in saying this (I’m hoping not) but more times than I care to mention, I have “discovered” a new interest, a temporary flash of inspiration and gone and brought every book I can on the subject. I will possibly read one, I will flick through a couple, get bored and throw myself in at the deep end and learn by my mistakes, filling in the gaps as I go along. When embarking in the world of SEO I may as well have been sitting in a room with people speaking French, I was lucky in that I have a few pretty good very patient translators around me. So here are my tips for SEO Newbies, they are not black and white, I’m not going to hand it to you on a plate more leave the sauce pan on the hob, and let you help yourself:
1.Don’t fall at the first hurdle, pick a web designer who can build your site to be search engine friendly and understands organic SEO, java script and flash will make your site pretty but spiders crawl text.
2.In an ideal world pick your keywords and search phrases before work on the site starts, use these appropriately in the copy, text links, domain and respectfully in ALT tags (make sure they still serve their purpose).
3.Don’t put all your eggs in one basket with one hugely competitive keyword, focus on some smaller long tail keywords at the same time and watch the traffic and conversions increase.
4.Make sure you have keyword rich title tags and descriptions on each page of your site, if you have space (there is a limit to the number of characters you can have) include your company name at the end.
5.If you are optimising regionally, you need to make sure you include the areas you cover within your copy.
6.Content, if you have done any back ground reading you will know unique, well-written keyword rich content is imperative (but not go over board, if it looks unnatural you will be penalized). Make sure you check it in copyscape to ensure you have no duplicate content.
7.Updating your site frequently with fresh useful content can improve your rankings, I would strongly advise adding a newsfeed such as wordpress to make this quick and easy. Adding new pages takes much more time and effort, if you can aim to blog 3 times a week.
8.Links I see as a reference to back up your theory (your site is relevant for the keywords you want to appear for), others describe them as votes, imagine them as you wish, but learn about them and use them correctly, the more you know the less work you will have to do. It is true that if you compress sand hard enough you will eventually get stone, but save your self the time and effort by using less but better quality links to support you keywords.
9.Make sure you link your keywords throughout your site to the page you are optimising them on, describe the link with related words using anchor text.
10.Last but not least, don’t be afraid to link to other related sites. It wont do you any harm.
I think those ten points are a good start for this week. If you want to succeed in your search engine optimisation there are 4 main aspects at this stage you need to plan for, and they all work hand in hand I will explain how. Your aims are reputation (Google views your site as authoritative and informative) Your objectives are popularity (getting visitors to your site). Your method is content and links. Makes it sound easy eh?
