SEO: An experiment in doing it yourself.

HostMagic.co.za

It starts here

The reason for my new business (and website) was simple - my business partner and I decided to go our separate ways after only nine months of working together. I can tell you this - I've never been married, but I now have an idea what a divorce must feel like. Even simple things like dividing up office furniture (he took my favorite chair) and stationary (I retaliated by taking all the paper) can become petty battles.

In the end though, it was all for the best. And we remained friends. (Although we don't visit each other anymore). And even though we are now each other's direct competition, we still work together sometimes. (READ: We criticize each other's work in a tongue-in-the-cheek fashion - and only to each other.)

The new website

As I am a web designer - making a new website wasn't a problem. Making an effective one in a day is though. So I made a rush job with the intention of doing it over proper as soon as I had the chance.

I really was going to do it as soon as I had the chance...

Two months later - and still no sign up from my website. I decided to investigate.

Shock shock, horror horror.

OK - So I'm not going to pay someone to do something I can do myself. A quick search on Google, and there's an online Meta Tag analyzer to see what's going on.

... total chaos in the Meta Tag department. Turns out in my rush to finish the site I neglected the most important part of ANY website (imo).

Search engines just don't like my site the way it is. At ALL. So I set aside two days, and totally redesigned my website, getting rid of the flash banner in the process since Search Engines don't take to kindly to Flash if it's the first thing they see on your homepage. (I had my banner's ++Loading++ message come up in the site description on the SERP's. I didn't find it funny at all.)

The "How To" section.

All the tools I use for my SEO endeavor are online. I have SEO software which I got a while ago - but I don't really trust it that much. (hence the lack of said software's name) Here's how I do it:

1. Analyze your current Meta Tags. I used this tool:

http://www.rankingtoday.com/seo/meta-tag-analyzer.php

Follow the suggestions on how to improve your Meta Tags in the report, otherwise the whole exercise is pointless.

2. Check for dead links on your site:

http://www.rankingtoday.com/seo/link-check.php

Links that go nowhere are bad for your site, and irritates your visitors.

3. Build quality back links to your site. THIS IS IMPORTANT.

The best way to do it is to find links from sites with the same keywords as your site: http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php

You should also build links to sites with the same theme/content as your own site. Sign up here and start building: http://www.linkpartners.com/ <--- This is a free service. Try to get links from websites with a high Page Rank.

Any site's PR can be checked here: http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

4. Create a site map. http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Upload the sitemap to your root directory, and ping the Search Engines to notify them of your new sitemap. You can get a list of ping's in this blog entry:

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/013113.html The list I used is in the 9th commend under the original post. (And they all work.)

So how are we doing?

6 weeks down the line, and I am already seeing an improvement in my traffic. My number of unique visitors for the month to date (Oct 14 2008) is already more than the total number for the previous month.

My PR went from 0 to 2 - which I don't think is bad for a 6 month old website on web design and web hosting, considering the amount of competition.

I've also had more sign ups in the last 4 weeks from my website than in the previous 5 months - all from new visitors.

I'll keep this post updated with my progress.

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