5 Things You Can Do RIGHT NOW to Improve your SEO For FREE.

04/30/12

Shadi Khattab

 

I know. Economy is tough.  Budgets are tight. All of the usual suspects in a small business owner’s world.  SEO is often categorized as a luxury expense.  Improving your website seems like something to do when you want to take your company to the next level not bring it up from the cellar.  However, if you have some intelligent people on your staff or you yourself have some time. Fixing and improving your SEO through small steps can gain excellent returns without having to hire some expensive firm.  Will they get you to page one?  Probably not, but SEO isn’t just about improving your rankings.  It’s about making your website and company an asset and a value to consumers even when they aren’t buying.  This value in turn develops a relationship which will foster future sales.  The following steps help you improve your online presence by turning your website and company from a seller of goods and services to a source of endless value.

 

Stop Talking about your Product and Start Writing.

No one is telling you to stop ranting about your product or service at happy hour. I’ve landed many leads just telling complete strangers over a drink what I do.  When business owners talk about the past, present, and future of their industry or company it provides us with glimpses and insights into their businesses.  These insights are what you should be writing about in your blog instead of ranting about it over a pint of Stella Artois.

Start writing two Blog posts a week.  Have everyone who’s knowledgeable about your product in your company write a blog article a week.  If they complain. Fire them.

 

Contact 10 sites and offer them to exchange links.  

Find websites in your particular market place.  Make sure you have related or somewhat related business. So if you’re a local baker see if the local party supply, wedding planner or a caterer would want to exchange links.  And here’s one I love. If you want to put “yours” on the table, contact a leading competitor and offer to exchange links with them.  Oddly enough one of the best links is a business in your same field.

 

Get on Stumbleupon and Reddit

Don’t Just bookmark your blogs, but reading others and adding them to your profile.  There are Rules of Engagement in the Social Media realm, and you can’t just flout rules because you’re lazy or clueless.

 

Add an RSS Feed. ADD TWO.

Find some interesting and relevant websites.  Then add their RSS feeds to your website. 

 

Stop Doing Dumb shit.

See how I just put a curse word in the title.  It probably isn’t offending anyone however it just made me seem unprofessional and adolescent.  An attempt at entertaining an audience came at a cost of earning a customer.  Don’t do silly things that will hurt your rankings or even worse, get you blacklisted.  If you have endless links coming in from horrible sites, have them removed. Remove any outbound links from your site that just go to crappy sites. Stop doing any number of black hat practices and avoid any quick and easy fixes.  SEO takes time and effort, but piece-mealing the effort is a better option than doing nothing or trying the wrongs things that will get your website blacklisted.