Apparently, when it comes to driving your website up the Google rankings, only 25% of SEO is actually within your control, so says Dave Morse, Internet Strategist. This includes the use of keywords, the text on your page, title headers, your product/service and overall web content. It’s a small percentage – but it’s vital that you get this finely honed and correct for the other 75% to work.
The other 75% is largely beyond your control and is determined by what other people are saying about you and which other websites are linking to you.
A good way to help boost your website’s visibility yourself is to partake in relevant discussion groups. Become an industry expert in your field to get the word out about your business and help other people out too. By visiting discussion groups and forums relevant to your industry, many of which you can add your web address to, you can start to spin your own free SEO web. When the search engines crawl these sites they spot the links and this helps boost your site up the rankings. Not all links will help increase your search engine positions in this way, but if your comments and links are of value to the community, you’ll still gain real, interested visitors to your site and not just searchbots.
However, make sure that you do it well. Don’t get a reputation for spamming (Google will penalise, or even blacklist you, for underhanded tactics), don’t hijack other people’s posts to promote your own product or service, ensure your tone is helpful and pleasant and make sure your read the entire message thread before you put in your two penneth!
Emerald Frog Marketing can help boost your SEO to encourage more people to visit your site. Contact us to find out more!
SEO is a minefield and as much as us new business want great SEO right now, I am beginning to learn that it really is something that just has to be built up over time (unless you want to pay lots of money for it).
Great advice like this is always helpful! Keep up the good work!
P.S Great to see another frog logo
Nice article. You see the problem with doing it yourself is that you are not paying attention to your business. I think a business owner should know how to do SEO but if you want to have a successful business you need to focus on it, and leave the SEO stuff to us.
Agreed!
Great post. @Little Lilypad has it right – it DOES take time to build up authority with Google (and others). Rule of thumb: minimum of 6 months, but typically 12-18 months. It’s dangerous to expect anything quicker than this, so don’t be seduced by anyone claiming to “guarantee” Page 1 results in 90 days (or similar nonsense). Optimize your pages (e.g. unique TITLE tags are super important, no all-Flash sites, no fancy Javascript menus) and then, as you mentioned, get out there and evangelize your business. One idea: Blog about your expertise regularly – Google loves fresh content AND others are likely to begin linking to you (hence, the 75%). And be sure your blog is within your own domain (e.g. blog.company.com), not through Google’s Blogger or WordPress (e.g. company.wordpress.com) – you need the juice, they don’t! Good luck!