In step 1 we discussed keyword research, now we’ll dive into step 2 – Planning and on site optimization

Planning can be as complicated or as simple as you desire, but if you don’t have a plan, chances are you will fail.

The structure of your site and how easy it is for Google, Yahoo and Bing to traverse is extremely important. Luckily if you followed my advice and built your small business web site on WordPress you already have the basics of a well made site. Simply by adding the all in one SEO pack and a few other pluggins you can start with the real work and not waste your time arguing with developers who don’t know jack about SEO.

On-Site optimization is the easiest part of search engine optimization. Do you know why? We’ll I’ll tell you. It is because you have control over it. Really it’s the only part of optimization that is all you. It’s success or failure is your fault. Not Google’s, not Yahoo’s, not Bing’s.

So let’s do an easy check list for your on site optimization. For some more reading you can check out my Google is stupid post.

1. Unique meta title on every page.
2. Unique meta description on every page (this is the text that shows up to search engine users)
3. Good content written for the human (it’s important that you write for human readers and then update to be search engine friendly. Do not write for search engines only)
4. include alt text on images
5. include title tags on links
6. use h1 for important items, h2 for secondary (if you are using wordpress it mostly does this already)
7. use the footer to link back to your home page
8. link to yourself. where applicable link to yourself from other pages, besides just your navigation
9. www or not www. Don’t use both. personally I prefer www because when people type your url or copy and paste it will automatically be a link in their email client or facebook.
10. Stay on topic – one topic per page
11. check your keyword density
12. test your site. (you’d be surprised how many people have 1/2 functioning web sites out there)

If you want more details on anything I’ve written be sure to ask.

I also do training seminars if you’d like to be able to handle search engine optimization in house.

If you can understand a grasp this simple reality your search engine optimization will improve 100 percent. Googlebot, with it’s complex algorithms and 200 points of measurement is nothing but a computer program (or a collection of programs). It can’t think and rationalize. Can’t get angry or happy. It’s just a blind, dumb program that takes input and gives back output.

Now I’m not saying that the people behind Google are stupid, just the googlebot itself.

For your site to be indexed for the proper terms and come up for relevant searches you need to tell Google everything. Don’t just think because everyone knows your brand that Google knows your brand, it doesn’t.

It only knows what you tell it. Computers aren’t evil, computers don’t lie, computers don’t make decisions based on anything other than input.

So, do yourself a favor and give Google what it wants.

• Unique meta Title and description on every page – I’m sorry, but I’m just a bot and I can’t tell that your pages have different content or what the theme of the page is. In my defense you do have 500 lines of bad code, 1,000 lines of off topic text and only 100 lines of real content.
• H1 tags used properly – again, how am I supposed to know which heading is which? I don’t read css or javascript, please give me some info.
• Use alt tags on images – I’m a computer, I can’t see. How am I suppose to know Dsc30011.jpg is a butterfly instead of a horse? Hell, it might even be a moth. You need to tell me! You know what, why not rename it to moth.jpg while you are at it. Help me, I’m stupid.
• Anchor text/title tags on links – Why are you linking to that other page? What does that page have to do with widgets? If you would fill out the title text I might know it’s your search page for widgets instead of ‘click here’. What does click here even mean
• One page for one piece of content – I know I’m a computer and I might be stupid, but these strings of characters don’t look the same to me: www.sitpretty.com sitpretty.com www.sitpretty.com/index.php sitpretty.com/index.php

Now the incredibly smart people behind Google have been able to solve a lot of the problems with its stupid bot, but do you really want extra lines of code trying to guess what your intentions are? Tell the bot everything, don’t leave things to the bots lack of imagination and you’ll be reaping the rewards.

You can search any day of the week on SEO and find a hundred experts telling you the exact opposite of each other. There is a lot of fighting and wrangling amongst SEO experts on many topics.

The reason ‘experts’ can say the exact opposite of each other is because it’s all minutiae that they are fighting about.

The largest pieces of search engine optimization are all well known to everyone in the field. The only thing left to fight about is the minor things. The minutiae makes all the difference in the world when fighting for a search term that receives 300,000 searches a day, but more than likely the terms you want to come up #1 for are not in that class.

So let’s focus on the basics for a few minutes, because the basics can get you to the top of Google.

Build a site that has rich content and people want to link to.
Do on-site optimization that uses your researched keywords.
Get some people to link to you using facebook, twitter, digg, stumbleupon, etc.

So don’t stress about things like page load time, reciprocal linking, the exact percentage of your keyword density, sitemaps, link neighborhood, anchor text, page rank, etc.*

Just build a good site that is on topic and people want to use and your site will come up.

*These things do matter when all added up. Don’t try to cheat and you should be OK. If you are thinking about cheating (buying links, stuffing keywords, hiring a shitty SEO company that spammed you) Please, Please consider giving me a call and discussing your situation first.