10 DIY SEO Tips For The Holidays
This is a guest post by Michelle Strassburg Head of Sales and Marketing at online wooden worktops vendor Wood and Beyond. Michelle has over 10 years experience managing online marketing. When she's not at work, Michelle is also a mum who enjoys every minute of it!The holiday season is the perfect time for any business owner to take a break from the day to day running of the business and look ahead towards 2010. Most businesses nowadays have a web site, be it a brochure or e-commerce website and in most cases its potential isn't fully met. If you're thinking of taking some time to optimize your site in anticipation for 2010, here are 10 small businesses SEO tips divided into 5 do’s and 5 don’ts. Let's get to it.Small Businesses SEO 5 Do’s:1. Do populate the metadata tag - Each page should have unique metadata which is comprised from a page title and page description. To optimize your site for Google, limit the page title to 70 characters and page description to 150 characters. The information in the page title should describe the content on the page and the page description could be used to generate a call to action and to give further information. It's important to pay attention to content duplication and avoid using the same page title or page description twice. If you're using a blogging platform such as Wordpress or Blogger, you'll have this option build-in (just refer to the help section in your blogging platform if you can't find it), otherwise if you're using a content management system or an e-commerce shopping cart and don't have this option you have two alternatives. If you're comfortable coding then place two html tags within the body of your page below the <head> using <title>type the page title here</title> and <meta name="description" content="type the page description here" /> or ask your developers to create those fields for you. 2. Do write new content - An important factor for ranking well is to constantly produce quality content. If you're struggling to find ideas for new content, use wisdom of the crowds and search for ideas on Twitter trends or Google trends. 3. Do make your site more social - Social links that come from the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Stumble Upon, etc. could drive large amounts of traffic to your site. To make your site more social, consider adding a sharing button such as addthis.com across your site and actively ask users to share your content, don't be shy. 4. Do find and fix broken pages - Broken pages and "page could not be found" will result in poorer user experience and if those pages had some back links pointing to the, you're missing out. To find your broken pages, you can use the free utility xenu which will test all your pages one after the other and report back its findings. 5. Do try to make your site load quicker - Google recently announced that the speed in which your site is loading will likely matter in terms of SEO. For this DIY guide, my recommendations are to optimize images across the site and consider investing in upgraded hosting. To find which images might be causing problems try the new Google speed tool. Small Businesses SEO 5 Don’ts: 6. Don't delete old content - If you have old posts, newsletters and press releases, don't be quick to delete them. Some might be linked to from other sites so consider redirecting them to more appropriate pages. 7. Don't make huge changes at once - For established sites which are already receiving traffic from the search engines, changes should be made on a small scale followed by testing. 8. Don't take shortcuts - While it might be tempting to take shortcuts, always bear in mind you're here to stay for the long run. You might come across a service offering to get you on the first Google page over night, but in all honesty, SEO takes time and there are no shortcuts to be taken. 9. Don't build your links unethically - Together with writing quality content, increasing the number of links pointing to your site is very effective for SEO. There are legitimate ways to increase your links such as articles, niche quality directories, asking suppliers, asking family members, etc and less legitimate such as buying links and comment spamming. 10. Don't over optimize your site - At the end of the day, the site is intended for you and me. While taking SEO into consideration is all fine and well, remember to optimize it for humans not just engines. I hope my tips will point you in the right direction. Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.