SEO Blog

If you have a website – and you want it to be as productive as possible for you, try to get into the habit of doing some SEO whenever you get the opportunity, little & often is fine.

Lets say it’s a weekday evening, it’s cold outside so you can’t be bothered going & mowing the lawn, going for a run – or whatever else you may prefer to do – instead of flicking through the TV complaining about the rubbish that’s on, just spend an hour or so on your SEO, doing this will pay dividends, so it’s time very, very well invested.

Also – if you tend to spend time in the day cold calling potential clients or sending out direct mail or email – consider spending this time on your SEO instead, in the longterm time put into optimising your website are likely to be far more productive than cold calling, or any other forms of direct marketing.

“But, I hire an SEO consultant to take care of my SEO already!”

That’s great – ask your consultant to recommend what activities you could work on to increase results whenever you get chance. Just because you’re hiring an SEO specialist or company, doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to also do anything yourself – if you can put in some time whenever you get chance, this will help to improve results.

Some easy SEO activities you can do – whether or not you also hire an SEO consultant:

Write new website content. Go through your keywords list & write about something which covers an important search term & related terms.

By the way, if you don’t have a keywords list, ask your SEO consultant to give you a list, or if you don’t use a consultant, then do your own in depth SEO research or hire a specialist to do this for you. If you don’t know what search terms you should be focusing on, you’re shooting blindfolded.

Write articles. Again, consult your keywords list, choose search terms to focus on & write whatever springs to mind. Submit to articles directories – or email them to your consultant so that s/he can submit them for you.

Submit to free directories. The best directories to look for are specialist web directories within your own niche / industry. This is because some directory submissions you’ll do, will be pointless from an SEO perspective – and it’s difficult to know which directories this is the case with – but if they’re industry specific directories, then the chances are that even if there is no direct SEO benefit (because they’re NoFollow links, or the directory isn’t trusted by google, see my paid backlinks article for more info) then your time won’t have been wasted as there is likely to be some direct traffic via the directory to your site, as it’s specific to your industry.

Participate in forums. Look for forums which are specifically relating to your industry. Put links to your site in the signature file of your forum memberships, so that the link is posted whenever you engage in discussions – and make sure that you have links to your site in your forum profile. Again – some forums NoFollow links in the sig & profile, but even if this is the case your time won’t be wasted, you’ll get some direct traffic as long as the forum is on target for your niche.  (You can check which forums are using Nofollow – install the SEO for Firefox plugin, go into options & turn on highlighting of nofollow links, then view the sig links & profile links, if they’re highlighted as nofollow, then you can skip that forum if you prefer.)

Participate in blogs. As with forums, Look for blogs which are specifically targeted towards your niche / industry. Make valuable & thoughtful replies to blog posts, which the webmaster is not likely to ditch as spam. Don’t just say “nice post” – actually write something which the webmaster & other readers will find interesting & will compel them to visit your website. When you put your name, try to get an important keyword into the name field – as this is usually the link anchor text. So, when I comment in blogs for example, I’d use something like “SEO Kev” or “Kev the SEO Consultant” rather than just “Kev”. You can just put a search term as the name, for example I could use “SEO Specialist” but sometimes webmasters will ditch comments as spam if it’s too obvious that they’re just after the SEO benefit – so it’s safer to at least include your name.  In most cases, blog comments won’t have much SEO impact, as the majority of blogs NoFollow the link in comments – but it will still have benefit, if they’re targeted blogs, they’re bound to become sources of highly targeted traffic to your website.  Not all blogs Nofollow the links in comments by the way, personally I do it case by case – if someone replies to my blog post & it’s a good useful reply, and the link is to a website in the same or similar industry, and it’s a decent website with good content / features, then I will leave the link as is, and I will not NoFollow it.  Any links which look like a scam, or spammy in any way, I just delete the entire comment.

There are bits of software you can get which will search for blogs which don’t use nofollow – Comment Kahuna is one of them. They can be useful, but they won’t normally find you a great deal of blogs in your niche which don’t use NoFollow – so I would personally recommend that you just do this for direct traffic from the blogs – and any SEO benefit from blogs which aren’t using NoFollow, is a bonus.

Social Networking. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin. I won’t go in depth into using social networking for SEO here as it’s quite a complex subject – but for now, just use any opportunity you can to expose your website via social networking. Often there will be no direct SEO benefit – but there will be indirect benefits. For example, links in tweets are NoFollow – but when tweets get re-tweeted, they end up on various other websites, and many of these don’t use NoFollow.

Ebay. Do you sell on Ebay? If so – it’s against their terms to advertise your site directly in auctions (this is a grey area, there are some cases where they do allow it, but it’s a thin line) however you are allowed to put links to your site in your about me page, and you’re allowed to put links to your about me page in auctions……. Again – be careful, they don’t allow you to promote products directly from the about me page, but you can put a link into your site.

With all of the above, when it comes to links – make sure that the anchor text (the text used in the link) is an important search term, for example don’t use www.mywebsite.co.uk as the link, obviously the link will go to your website, but use a search term as the link text, and don’t use the same anchor text every single time or it looks spammy – mix it up a bit, have a few important search terms that you use as anchor text.

So there you go, when it’s cold outside, or chucking it down, or snowing – or if there are huge clouds of ash from a volcano which means all planes are grounded (Yeah right, as if THAT would ever happen!! ) or if there’s nothing on the box, of if you just have half an hour free – in other words, if you were going to waste your time in some way doing something which will not be in any way beneficial – then do some SEO, it WILL be beneficial.