website marketing

doubleo7

I have an idea for a business i would like to atart up but first i need a website and i have to learn how to SEO search engine optimization, which means basically how to draw traffic etc to your website. This bit sounds so complicated to me and its the major part, anyone know where i could find an idiots guide. This is my first hurdle but i feel if i get past this then, who knows. any advice greatly appreciated.:beer:

jleonuk

Hi doubleo7, for my sins l do this for a living! Let me know how I can help?

Ewaf

Ive got a couple of blogs, one which has just started. The one which has just started is getting more visitors than my oldest blog, and I think its because I'm using a different SEO plugin. I am not sure if you can get a sort of "plugin" for a website but it works wonders. :beer:

Makes it easy to optimise your website and ad keywords etc.

rj-uk_2

I do a lot of SEO with blogs. If you have Wordpress then there are plugins that will take some of the work off your hands, just search somewhere for 'wordpress SEO plugins'. Then it's all about building those backlinks!

TheRealDeal_2

doubleo7 wrote: »

I have an idea for a business i would like to atart up but first i need a website and i have to learn how to SEO search engine optimization, which means basically how to draw traffic etc to your website. This bit sounds so complicated to me and its the major part, anyone know where i could find an idiots guide. This is my first hurdle but i feel if i get past this then, who knows. any advice greatly appreciated.:beer:

Yep what Doubleo7 said.

I don't even know what 'SEO' stands for.

I work on a site that is dead and need advice on how to increase traffic.

An idiot's guide to all this would be a great help.


Thanks in advance.

warpedchippie

TheRealDeal wrote: »

Yep what Doubleo7 said.

I don't even know what 'SEO' stands for.


An idiot's guide to all this would be a great help.


Thanks in advance.

SEO = Search Engine Optimisation.

I have a website for my building/carpentry business.

Built it myself using a free html editor (Kompozer) & various youtube tutorials & ebooks (all free).

Not done much in the way of SEO to it but............

I have found that getting my business listed for free at "Google Places" to be the best, and most cost effective way to get local customers, although using the most effective keywords is essential.,

Google lists the "places" results on page 1, near the top of the page.

If someone searched for "carpenter in Ipswich", & I had those keywords for my "google places" listing, then I would be listed along with any other "places" listing with those keywords - it works for me!

If you want a local, rather than a national/worldwide audience for your offerings/website, this is the way to go IMHO.

Steve

TheRealDeal_2

warpedchippie wrote: »

SEO = Search Engine Optimisation.

I have a website for my building/carpentry business.

Built it myself using a free html editor (Kompozer) & various youtube tutorials & ebooks (all free).

Not done much in the way of SEO to it but............

I have found that getting my business listed for free at "Google Places" to be the best, and most cost effective way to get local customers, although using the most effective keywords is essential.,

Google lists the "places" results on page 1, near the top of the page.

If someone searched for "carpenter in Ipswich", & I had those keywords for my "google places" listing, then I would be listed along with any other "places" listing with those keywords - it works for me!

If you want a local, rather than a national/worldwide audience for your offerings/website, this is the way to go IMHO.

Steve

Ok thanks for that.

I'm not selling anything or making a business though, I'm just part of a team on a site which is dead and would like it to be more successful by increasing traffic.

hamcaster

The basic principle of SEO is a 3-step process:

Step 1 - keyword research:
Decide what "terms" your site should rank highly in Google for. Basically, you need to pick a few terms which are related to your site, and optimise your site for them. For example, if you have a movie site, you could pick "movie trailers", "movie news" and "movie reviews". Search for "google keyword tool" - it will give you suggestions on search terms, showing how many people search per month etc.

Step 2 - Onsite SEO:
Onsite SEO is taking the keywords which you picked in step 1, and showing Google that they are what your site is all about. There are a number of steps in this process, some of which are: adding the keyword(s) to the title of your pages, adding the keyword(s) to the meta description/meta keywords, using the keywords regularly throughout your site (in h1 or h2 tags wherever possible, otherwise try to use bold), have each keyword linking to another page within your site (for example, everytime the text "movie trailers" appears, the text would link to your movie trailer section). Also, adding "alt" text to images, preferably containing your keyword, can help as well. The URL is very important - if possible, try to have your URLs as something like: https://www.movietrailers.com/movietrailers/movietrailer-moviename.html - this also helps Google establish what is on your site.

Another important point for onsite SEO is to steer clear of having text within images - try to have plain text instead. Have your scripts in a separate file on your server, and do not use Flash! Google can't read Flash sites, so they are SEO suicide.

Step 3 - Offsite SEO:
Now you need to prove to Google how popular your page is, which is defined by Page Rank, or PR. You may have seen sites boasting that they're "PR5" for example. To build your PR, and improve your ranking, you must build links from other sites. Each time a site links to yours, Google sees it as a vote for your site. However, links from high PR pages count for more than links from low PR pages. Some sites have their links set to "nofollow", which means they don't count as much as "dofollow" links (some argue that nofollow don't count at all, but many SEO experts insist they do). You can build links by commenting on related blog posts, buy links (not recommended by most SEO experts) and exchange links. Also, the word or phrase which is hyperlinked to go to your site is important, try to have it as one of your keywords if possible. "Click here" is virtually useless.

Building links/traffic through social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg and so on will also be beneficial.

Hopefully some of this helps, I've read a lot of SEO books/articles and this is a bit of a condensed version. Let me know if you have any questions about any of it.

woohoo_postingid

Get yourself down to your local library and have a look - you may need to order books in but it's a great start. There are some really good basic SEO books out there

rao_2

(EDIT: Whilst digging up these links from my bookmarks/memory I found this on one of them, seems like a nice prettified beginners guide you can try:
http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization )

A few handy SEO info / tutorial discussion forums I know of:

http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/
(and its archives which has a lot of older but equally useful info: http://www.warriorforum.com/forum/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=33 )

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=12

http://www.webmasterworld.com/home.htm
(has a few different sections for SEO)

http://forums.seochat.com/

I don't know the products these sites sell (never tried them) but their free blog posts or free tutorials have been handy in the past:

http://www.seomoz.org/
http://www.seobook.com
http://searchenginewatch.com

Tip: Try not to get information overload with all of it, be sure to act as well as learn! Even starting with small yet very effective things can be a boost.

TheRealDeal_2

Thanks for all the info guys. :beer: