Like many of you, I've been curious about SEO and some of the claims that have been made. You've seen them, "Guaranteed Results", "Top Ten on Google Organic Searches" and so on. So I decided to learn the truth.
My strategy was to read as much as I could about "SEO Best Practices", because, after all, I wasn't really interested in learning about "Worst Practices" or what is commonly known as "Black Hat Techniques". No sir, I'm a "White Hat" kinda' guy and that's what I wanted to learn. To aid in my education, I posted on blogs in places like LinkedIn, seeking the truth as others know it, and I read everything I could get my hands on. There is an amazing amount of information out there and a surprising amount of consistency in it.
Of course, all this information could be considered opinion, unless it's worth could be proven, so I determined to use my main site as a guinea pig. If I could improve my SEO page rank placement using my own site, I would have the proof I needed. I took the principles I had learned and applied them to my site (http://www.davsdesign.com) as follows:
- Use keyword rich content - everywhere! In your meta information including title tags, descriptions and keywords.
- Make sure all your page titles are unique and also use keywords.
- Make sure all your heading tags use keywords.
- Use keyword rich content on your sites including in the IMG tags
- Use keyword rich internal and external links.
- Try to get as many external links as you can linking to your site using keywords for your site, but be careful not to cross the line into illegitimate ways of generating these links like using "Back Link" services. (I have very few back links to my site and I haven't spent a lot of time on this.)
- Post relevant content to a blog.
- Write relevant articles and work on getting them published around the internet.
- Use Social Media to share relevant information.
- Post often.
I'm sure I'm overlooking some other things that could easily be done, but these are the ones I used most and so are the ones I'm basing my results on. What results, you may wonder? Before starting these practices, my site regularly would come up in the 7th to 10th page rank range on an organic Google search. Within the last week, I have regularly placed on page one or two and I've been working on this intermittently over the past two months. About once a week, I'd check where my page ranking was, then work on another "best practice", followed by coming back in another week to see how things had changed. I conclude therefore, that these practices do work and that my case study proves it.
As I mentioned, there are other things one can do including, submitting to Search Engines, use of sitemaps, use of video and local directories, to name a few. For those wanting to improve their SEO, my recommendation would be to start with Google Webmaster Tools. It offers most of the information in one convenient spot. (I have no affiliation with Google.) The other thing that I consistently ran into was the advice that "it takes time", and that seems to generally mean up to three months. Be patient and practice, practice, practice.
End of story? Hardly. It's great to get to page one in an organic search, but the real question is, will that translate into results? Stay tuned.
