Businesses Can Do Their Own SEO and and Social Media Marketing By Israel Rothman
As someone who sells SEO related Social Media Optimization and Marketing as a service you would think that it is not in my best interest to tell people they can do SEO and Social Media Marketing on their own: But it’s true. Just as changing the car’s oil, fixing clogged pipes, or painting a house are all relatively easy, most business owners can build, market and improve their website on their own. All it takes is an abundance of knowledge and time.
Knowledge can be found easily enough for free (search Google), and time, well, any excuse not to make another cold call, eh? Fortunately, SEO can be automated completely, and Social media Marketing is an ongoing advertising and marketing project, so you can simply use all your spare time to accomplish what needs to be done. (I do)
If you want to optimize your site yourself then you need to simplify. A lot of what you’ll learn about SEO and link building and social media marketing can be complicated: especially when you start reading about .htaccess, robots.txt, 301 redirects, anchor text links, and so on. This is all good and important to consider information and everything alse you do will be wasted if you do not get it right, but you don’t have to start there if you know that those things are already done well.
If you’re doing it yourself then start with the things that you can do yourself. Don’t get caught up in all the complicated issues that go beyond your knowledge or ability to implement. The more difficult technical tasks may still be necessary down the road so that you you do not limit your traffic, exposure, and income, but for now, do what you can with what you have: two dollars may as well be $2,0000,000 if you do not have it, right?
Here are some things that you can often do easily enough on your own:
1) Customize all your tags. If your site is big this may take some time. If it is dynamically generated from a database with a CMS (Content Management System) then you may want to have your programmers implement a templates and plugins that pulls in and inserts keywords and tags relevant to the page. If you website is on an outdated platform there may not be anything you can do to optimize your website and you may need to replace it.
2) Customize your content. This can be especially important if you sell products. Don’t settle for stock descriptions, and take the time needed to write something different for each of the 20 products you have that are simply different versions of the same thing. This customized content is essential to achieve organic search rankings and get traffic from search engines and social media sites.
3) Get text based content on all of your pages that the robots index, and tell them how important the pages are, excluding navigational pages with no real content value. If you practice outdated SEO methods like key word stuffing you will be penalized and nobody will see the offending pages or your website anyway. This is all easily accomplished either with a Google site map, or proper entries on the pages and/or the access and robots.txt files
4) Link, link, link. Add links throughout your content to other pages and products of your site. Link back and forth between pages, add links to related products, link to your blog and from your blog with properly optimized text links that are relevent to the pages or files linked to, and contain the key words you wish to found with..
5) Blog. Write content that your visitors will love, reprint with proper text links back to you, subscribe to in an RSS feed or opt-in email, and appreciate enough to want to do business with you.. Don’t just use your blog to pimp your products or services. Write helpful tips and tutorials or provide insight that your readers can use.
It’s only when we over-think SEO and Social Media Marketing that it becomes more complex than it needs to be. I recently read a blog conversation at Activerain.com in which the author, a young woman and mother, who was in the market for a real estate website said:
“just break it down for me Barney style”
The resulting conversation and arguments and comments was so full of miss-information and conflicting viewpoints, that it was anything but simple.
There certainly are aspects of SEO and Social Media Marketing and link-building and web design that require a technical mind and someone savvy enough to implement it. But there are plenty of areas that can be done in just an hour or two per a day. Do what you can or pay someone who has the machinery to do it. Some of the things I would write about you in my columns which appear on search engines organic search results for whatever key words I want them to come up for within minutes of posting would be imodest if you said them, and your success in business depends on the excellence of your website and marketing efforts online more and more every day, but if you really want to you can learn it all, and do it all yourself, in which case, you do not need us, or anyone like us, since this article, and every one anybody like me has ever written, is already on the search engines, and you can find them!
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