Does the idea of online marketing scare  you? have you thought of engaging a pro? Well, we’ve got excellent news for you. It’s actually not complicated to perform search engine optimization (SEO) on your own – a good chunk of cash can be saved, and the same results can be achieved as the search engine pros do. Probably better results can be attained from contracting experienced professionals, but you should at least try some of these diy actions first. Once you’ve start doing some of this type of optimization  it will be easier to decide if a pro is worth his money.

Fundamental  SEO is very easy and simple – all is needed  is the willingness to go through the sometimes very boring  work. Once you are aware of the tricks of the trade it is not that complex  though it does take a lot of effort. The most important factor of a website is going to be the quality of its content.  Here are a few considerations of when you are doing SEO on your own:  

1. You will start by finding a domain, which should reflect what your site is about. Keep it brief, as long as it is somehow connected to your site. Being more specific can help.  You could prefer to name the page after one of your services or products, for example. Another method is to get a sub domain of a popular domain. This will in general help you get indexed faster though it will not appear quite as professional to your visitors. There is a trade off here, sub domains are faster to setup (and generally cheaper), but domain names are easier to remember, and, long term, better for your indexing. 

2. The next thing you should look at is your page’s title (i.e. the Title tag), which is vital in letting search engines see what the content is about, and is the first tag looked at by search engines to establish  your relevance. You should put the most important keywords in your title tags – there is no  need to care  about singular or plural forms as the search engines account for these changes in most cases. Whatever you do, do not name your home page ‘Home’ – the title should be a mini-description of the page. 

3. The two primary meta tags are not as critical as they used to be, but the description tag is still used by several search engines to display information about your website to users and help them determine whether they’ve found what they are looking for. Not all search engines bother with this, though most will put some importance on it (even if it is minuscule).

For very short descriptions the alt tag can be used. Alt tags let you describe an image or graphic file – they’re the pop-up descriptions that appear when you hover your mouse over a graphic, or when the graphic can’t be downloaded for whatever reason. 

Text within comment tags is never displayed on the page – it is used by developers and graphic artists to remind them of what that part of the page is for. Some programmers used to put scores of keywords in the comment tags, so that they would be discovered by search engines but not users, but search engines have now stopped paying attention to any text that isn’t seen by the user. Remember this when trying to post invisible text (i.e. white text on a white background). This kind of conduct can get you banished from a search engine.

4. Having keyword density in all of your content is good, but keep in mind that each search engine has its own requirements when it comes to how many times that a keyword or phrase should be in the content for the page to be relevant. Somewhere between 5 and 8 percent is a roughly optimal level – but this isn’t always possible, and you shouldn’t force it. Don’t overdo it, or the search engines might mark you down. 

5. Many search engines estimate web page importance on the number and quality of incoming links from other sites. You should link to some related sites, but not too many.  Don’t exaggerate inbound links either, and keep them connected to your site’s content. It’s also good to get sites to use your keywords as the text of these links.

If you follow the advice above, you can do it yourself and do well. SEO, if done correctly, can keep you on top of the SERPs for as long as you want to be.