Search Engine
Optimization
A 5 Step SEO To-Do
List
 If you are thinking of setting up a website
or are have just done so, how will you promote it? Here’s a quick
run through of a few steps you must take to make your website’s
presence felt on the web.
SEO Step 1
You
have to submit the website to directories. This is an important and
vital step where SEO is concerned and the links that lead to your
site are helped along by listings in directories. So you could look
at DMOZ or Yahoo Directory and when you are listed here, it tends
to weigh heavily in your favor when it comes to search engine
results. You just have to be patient though because nothing happens
in a day with most of the directories – you’ll have to wait a while
to get ‘credit’ to be listed on these online directories.
SEO Step 2
Submit articles to article directories. You could write about your
business or the industry you are in. This is a great way to promote
your product or service without it being blatantly hard-sell. The
great thing about articles is that they somehow seem more
informative than selling so a reader’s guard is down most of the
time. These articles will have to be submitted free to article
directories and e-zines. People who want to pick up these articles
and put them on their websites will have to include your byline as
well. So your name and link to your website travels far and wide by
sheer virtue of you having submitted a free article. Of course, it
goes without saying that the more articles you submit, the more
links you’ll get to your site. In your byline, you could have yours
or your company name and a short description. This should be
followed by a link to your site.
SEO Step 3
A bit of PR helps. So you could write a piece about your product,
service or site in one of the local newspapers or magazines. You
could weave a story around it. However, don’t bite off more than
you can chew. If you do a big story in the major newspapers or
magazines, you might just be inundated with calls and emails or
even visits and it would be pointless if most of them were
irrelevant to your business.
SEO Step
4
Support your site with a blog. It is
incredible how a blog can talk a reader through something. Somehow,
it seems a lot more human than a website. So it would be a good
idea to start a blog about the company or industry that is featured
in your website. What you could do is to start it as a subdomain of
your website. This is how it would be: subdomain.domain.com so your
blog would appear as: blog.yourdomain.com. A blog really is a great
idea because you can build a lot of unique content within it.
What’s more, it sort of makes the company to be viewed in a more
human light. You can let the customers peek into this warm, softer
side of the business through a blog. You could also host your blog
in so many places online and quite a number of them are free. Two
that are very popular are wordpress.com and blogger.com. Too lazy
or too busy to start your own blog? Then go to popular blogs and
write comments there, making sure that you get a link back to your
site. Do these backlinks work? Well, if the blog is very popular,
they do!
SEO Step 5
Promote, promote, promote….that’s what you need to do for your
site. Tell everyone you can about it – let the whole world know –
online and offline. Don’t be shy but shout it out loud from the
rooftops. If you get traffic to your site that is what you need.
Who knows? You might suddenly create such a huge interest in your
site that your company gets onto the business map.
What you need to do for basic SEO is to sit down and think about
it with a common sense approach. Isn’t that how you would promote
your business if it were offline? Well, an online business
is pretty much the same. You need to get exposure – and positive
exposure. So ideally if you could do your promos both offline and
online, you should have a good thing going!
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