DIY SEO - Learn to do your own search engine optimization

Everywhere are you look in the internet, every knowledgeable webmaster will say that one of the best way to get traffic is by having a good website content and a well designed website with proper search engine optimization. This will greatly help to get free traffic from search engine such as Google, Yahoo and etc. To have good content is basically to know well what your website topic, plus to write the material and deliver your information properly to the readers.

However, when it comes to Search Engine Optimization Methods, it is totally a different ball game. Even if you know your website content very well, it does not mean you could make the website to be as friendly as possible to the search engine crawlers or spiders which will index your site and determine your search engine ranking. That is why you need to at least know the basic knowledge of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) when you are creating a website. Many SEO company website that claim they could do the task for you will sometimes just do the basic and charge you lots of money. If you are big corporate company, well that is fine. But if you are a small company or individual webmaster, it is better to do it yourself and learn the basic. It is not complicated as what many SEO websites claim to be, as long as you are willing to learn.

I have listed down here 6 important SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION steps that anyone could use while writing their website. The best time to do your SEO is when you are designing or writing your website. But if you have created yours, just edit the pages accordingly. The six steps are:

1. If you are not using standard website and instead using the following Frames, Dynamic URL, Flash, Image Navigation and JavaScript Navigations, then you need to worry about the search engine spider/crawler being unable to index your site. If you are using the above, then there are few ways to enable the crawler to index the site properly. I have listed them in my website as explaining each steps for each above case will be lengthy and will be out of the scope of this article.

2. Choosing correct keywords - what are the words that best descript your site topic or any particular page within your website. What are the keywords that you want people to type in a search engine such as Google, and they will find your site. These are the words that you need to use as frequent as possible in content of your site. However, since keywords have enormous competition especially when your website topic is famous, then try use Specific Keyword Phrases and not just Keywords. You will have a better chance to be ranked well for specific phrases and the resulted traffic will be more highly targeted plus much more higher quality. The keywords need to be used as much as possible in you page content, but don't over do it. Example of a selling collectable baseball card website keyword as below.

Too Board Keywords: selling baseball cards
Specific Phrase: collectable American baseball card

Find you competitor's website, look at their website and see what are the keywords that they are using. This will give you an idea how to use and phrase your keywords better.

3. Title Tag is another important aspect that your need to consider when you are performing your SEO. Always place your most important keyword or key phrase in your title tag. The code for title tag in HTML is and it should be placed in your page's HTML code between the and tags. Title tag is actually the phase that appears top left corner of any website when you view a site.

4. Your Website Content could be the most important part that your need to pay attention while doing SEO. All your important keywords and phrases need to be incorporated within your content as much as you can. However, do not over do it until your page tends to make no sense. In early days of SEO, many people tend to concentrate on title tag, meta tag description and meta tag keywords to get highly ranked in search engine results. However, today's search engines are more smarter where it will look into the content itself to evaluate a website rather than totally depending on only title tag, meta tag description and meta tag keywords.



5. Meta Tags were originally created to help search engines find out important information about the description of the page itself. Well as time past and due to stiff competition, people start to abuse this tag by spamming the search engine with keywords stuffed in meta tag. Then, search engine designers have to make the search engine much more smarter and make it look at broader spectrum before ranking a page. Many people believes that excellent meta tag is all to it t achieve good listing in search engine. This is incorrect. The search engine will look for a combination of all the aspects to determine a listing plus ranking. To certain extent, some search engine may sometimes just ignore meta tag.
Description Meta:

Keywords Meta:


These tags should be placed in your page HTML code between the and tags.

6. Below are some of the things you should not be doing if you are trying to do SEO and get your site better ranked by search engine. Doing the below steps will cause you to be black listed by search engine.
List keywords should not be anywhere except in your keywords meta tag. By "list" we mean something like - keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3, keyword 4, etc. There are very few legitimate reasons that a list of keywords would actually appear on a web page or within the page's HTML code and the search engines know this. You may have a legitimate reason for doing this we would recommend avoiding it so that you do not risk being penalized by the search engines. The search engine will not listen to your reasons.

Use the same color text on your page as the page's background color. Search engines can detect this and view it as spam.
Use multiple instances of the same tag. For example, using more than one title tag. Search engines can detect this and view it as spam.
Submit identical pages. Do not duplicate a page of your site, give the copies different file names, and submit each one.
Submit the same page to any engine more than once within 24hrs.
Use any keywords in your keywords meta tag that do not directly relate to the content of your page

With these simple steps, you could perform your own SEO without spending a dime. Paying a SEO company to perform SEO for you will definitely cost a webmaster. Furthermore, a good website is a dynamic site which changes from time to time. Therefore, paying a SEO company to help you to do your SEO will only solve your problem temporarily. This is because once your website grows and things change, you need to update your website and update your SEO. This means if you hire a SEO company, guess what, you need to pay them again to perform SEO on your website.

Rahman Alwi is the author of a website called http://www.toliveonline.com . The website teaches readers different online business models, how to create your website, performing your own search engine optimization, build your website traffics and etc. These information are crucial for every webmasters who wants to be an internet entrepreneur. The website is unique and shows how to start each online business models from creating the idea to actually having a workable website. FREE ONLINE BUSINESS INFORMATION FOR YOU !!