Basic SEO Recommendations for the DIY Marketer


Regularly, we're asked for some basic SEO recommendations for individuals’ websites. Below are some simple suggestions we generally make to these fine folks to help them get a bit of a foundation for their site.

There’s no magic here, it’s essentially public knowledge at this point. So if you’re not in the position to hire a professional SEO, be willing to invest the hours necessary to properly implement these techniques. While these items alone certainly cannot ensure top rankings in an increasingly competitive market, it can help you gain credibility in search engines and provide a good launch pad from which to carry out more aggressive marketing in the future.

  1. Target your keywords.  Get specific.  If you're selling Ford trucks, you'll probably be more effective much faster, and produce more ROI, if you target "Ford F-150 Trucks Cincinnati Ohio" than just "Trucks For Sale".  It's generally much easier, especially for the layman, to rank on more specific terms because there's less competition.  Just make sure that somebody is actually searching for the term! Use WordTracker or Aaron Wall’s tools, for example, to determine approximate searches on the phrase, then bounce that off of Google’s number of pages indexed for the term. The narrower the ratio, the more opportunity to rank.

  2. It's very important to ensure that the main visible body of the page, as well as some internal links, contain the actual phrase that you're targeting.  It's not enough just to have it in the <meta> and <title> tags.  The exact phrase needs to exist a couple times on the page itself.  Also, be sure to optimize your pages each individually, with individual keywords.  Some overlap is ok and to be expected, but the more specific you can get with each page, the more milage you'll get out of them.

  3. Content Content Content.   Be sure there's plenty of descriptive, visible text content on your site.  Develop some articles or other descriptive text areas around your market keywords, then optimize those pages for those keywords and resubmit to engines.  A worthwhile page should have an article of at least 400 words.  If the article is more than 800 or so words, you can consider splitting it across multiple pages to spread content and expand the overall page count of  your site.

  4. Page titles.  The content found in the <title> tag should be very descriptive, without getting too longish.  Google particularly seems to weigh this tag heavily.

  5. META tags.  These aren't as important as they used to be, but they need to be there for sure.  Use <meta keywords> with key phrases, separated by commas.  Use <meta description> with an actual complete sentence that describes the page.  It may look something like <meta name="keywords" content="baby announcements, baby girl announcements, custom baby announcements">

  6. Comment tags.  Add a comment tag (between <!--  (comment --> tags)  just after the <body> tag of your pages.  Keep the comment pertinent to the page content.  Use sentences.  Don't just fill it with keywords.

  7. Image ALT tags.  Each image can have an ALT tag, which contains text to describe the image in imageless browsers, etc.  Use them to capitalize on pertinent keywords, but keep them real-world descriptions as much as possible.

  8. Descriptive internal links.  As mentioned earlier, it's good to have your key phrases exactly contained within links to pages with content pertinent to the phrase.  For instance, you can link to a product page for new Ford F-150 trucks, rather than using a generic click here link.  Internal links like this often appear in the footer and, more importantly, the body of the page.

  9. Page File Names.  A page filename and path that contains the keywords is better than one that doesn't.  For example, a site path like /ford/trucks/Ford_F150_crew_cab.html is better than /F150.html.

If you have some level of acumen with the technical aspects of your website, you should be able to carry out each of these items fairly easily. If you’re not sure what some of the terms are referring to below, we encourage you to Google it, or run it by Wikipedia.

If you’re still having trouble, then you have a choice: Do I spend time learning this stuff and neglecting my business purpose, or do I bite the bullet and hire a pro?

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