Have you ever wanted to drop thousands of dollars to have an SEO go through your site? Of course you have, but chances are as a small business you don't have the funding, or aren't comfortable with the risk of hiring a pro. So the question I'm often asked is, can I do it myself? The answer is yes, good SEOs are not born, they're made, and you can do some simple and free things without hiring anyone or spending hours studying search engine algorithms. Here are some free SEO tips you use on your website tonight. 1. Build a sitemap. I can't stress this one enough. Build a sitemap, and search engines will follow. Even if it's just a list of links on a page named sitemap.html, it's good enough. Going out and building one according to sitemaps protocol and submitting them is even better. 2. Make your title and description enticing. While meta tags aren't the powerful SEO tool they used to be, search engines still use them to build a description in your listing. Make it something enticing that people will want to click. Don't load it up with keywords, because it wont help anyway. Just make a quick message that gets them to click. Do the same with your title tag. That way when you get high rankings, people click them! 3. Make your title tags and metatags unique for each page. Make sure the description tag and title tag is unique for every page, and describes the content of the site. (Don't load it up with keywords). This will get more click throughs from your results, and more listings because search engines favor unique pages. 4. Get a good link from an established page. Getting pages spidered is tough. But submitting them to search engines can take weeks. Submit as you usually would, but try to get a good link from an established site. This will get you crawled much faster. 5. Give up on keyword stuffing. In 2002, keyword stuffing worked great. In 2008, it's all about natural language. Google and other search engines are actively penalizing for keyword stuffing, so don't get caught in that trap. While you want to include keywords, don't overdo it. Read it aloud to yourself and ask "does this sound natural?". If not, consider rewriting your text. 6. Avoid duplicates. Are you linking back to your page with index.html in the url? This creates duplicates, as does having multiple pages with the same content. If you have a subdomain thats in a folder, use robots.txt to keep it from being spidered. Any duplicate content will end up hurting you in the long run. 7. Use alt tags and description tags. Use image alt tags and href description tags to your advantage. Don't overdo it, but make sure and include something in there that will indicate what the picture or link is about. As long as it's done right, it will help you, but stuffing it with keywords will hurt. Find a happy balance. 8. Avoid Javascript or flash navigation. While this stuff looks great, it's not helpful for search engines. Make sure and include a backup text navigation in case flash or javascript is turned off. This helps the spiders find other pages on your site. 9. Get as much text as you can on your site. Text is the fuel that feeds search engines. The more text, the better. Don't stuff it with keywords, but don't keep a few sentences on every page. Build as much text as you can, and keep it unique and tasteful. And last, but certainly not least: 10. Focus on your content. As they always say, content is king. Focus on getting unique, useful content on your page. This is where most of your efforts should be placed. Update frequently, and don't delete pages later. The more unique and relevant content your site contains, the better you'll do, so don't skip it! Give as much information as you possibly can, and make it interesting and fun. These tips should help you get started on the path to better search engine traffic! Jeremy Morgan is a SEO and Internet marketer who runs a SEO blog and helps out business owners with his SEO forums. Check out the site!
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