Long Haul To The Top of Google

Editor’s Note: There are enough basic SEO Tips to fill a book, and they have filled books, so they can’t all be listed here. Any essentials you’d like to add to the list? Let us know in the comment section.

Quite likely, you’ve found yourself in the same predicament as Eric Dytzel of Madisonville, Kentucky, who operates the website TruckerHub.com. Eric’s basic dilemma: pay $12,000 to an SEO firm or research and do it himself.

And well, he decided to give it a go himself. As he boasts on his blog, he took his site from rank 600 to rank 14 in about 100 days for the term "trucker jobs," his prime target keyword phrase. Not first page, but not far from it, and not bad for his money.

Dytzel credits a few well-known SEO bloggers as resources – names you’ll probably recognize if you’ve followed the industry, like John Chow, Andy Hagans, Aaron Wall, and Chris Garrett – and he lists the ten most valuable DIY lessons for novices at that post.

WebProNews got in touch with Wall and with Chow, as you can see from our video, to get some more practical SEO tips. Wall reminds that if you decide to hire an SEO that you do indeed get what you pay for in today’s competitive market, and says that "cheap SEOs either don’t know what they’re doing or don’t know what they’re worth." So hire cautiously.

At the end of the day, though, you’re creating a site with three masters: the end-user; the business; and the search engine. I’ll leave it up to you which order those should be in, but it might be best to leave the end-user first.

So what type of magic did Dytzel perform to get his site to rise so fast? No magic, just fundamental SEO that involved content, design, links, and good old fashioned marketing.

And so, here’s a quick review of some of those fundamentals:

Content

Stay on topic. This isn’t your home library where you can just bounce from subject to subject. Make sure your site is targeted and stays that way. Have a site about shoes and another about dinosaurs, but unless you’re carving a niche for dinosaur shoes, leave them separate.

Your site needs a blog. Especially if the site content doesn’t change often. (Search spiders like fresh text.) Three times a week minimum, the more the better, mostly about dinosaur shoes or related topics. Watch the video.

Product reviews. Intelligent shoppers like to know all they can about a product before they buy it. They research and research and then they find your site where you’ve provided an extensive review and have extensive reviews of other things. You get bookmarked and/or linked to. (Be creative – doesn’t have to be a product.)

Press Releases. This goes in two places, in Content and Good Old Fashioned Marketing. Whatever you’re company’s doing that’s positive, write up a press release to publish on the site as fresh content, then submit it to a press release distribution service. There is an art to press releases, which should also be optimized, but that’s another topic.

Industry news. You could have a section on your site devoted to your industry’s news, or provide a news feed there instead. It’s another way to keep your site freshly updated with relevant content.

Feed the Spiders

Keywords. Spiders look for keywords and keyword phrases, so make sure the language contains a decent density of the words and phrases you want to be found for. But also remember that people vary their words at times (so find a thesaurus) and often misspell words. Your blog’s a good opportunity to misspell a word from time to time (not too terribly, or you’ll look unprofessional) – you know, just leave the "h" out of tecnology, or sneak one or two into the keyword tags where nobody but spiders see them anyway (but don’t overstuff the tags or you’ll be flagged for spamming).

Links. A burst of low-authority, low quality links will get you flagged and dropped by the search engines. When building links, make sure they are from quality sites that are relevant to your topic.

Submit to directories. Directories have suddenly become a controversial topic in light of Google’s recent assault on paid directories that pass PageRank. Submitting your site to a directory is one of the first steps in SEO, and as a general overarching rule, keep your site in good neighborhoods. Google’s not going to hit Yahoo, notes Wall, and Chow recommends DMOZ.

Good Old Fashioned Marketing

Nothing beats getting the word out via email, on the street, snail mail, and these days, of course, online communities. If applying brick-and-mortar world ideas online, then you should arrive at the creation of link bait – something so compelling people won’t be able to help but link to you.

Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz supplies a nice sample list of things that can work as link bait in his Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization. They include things like offering free tools, Web 2.0 applications, top 10 lists, industry-related humor, event reviews, interviews, surveys, data, contests and giveaways, and, of course, expert advice.

» Watch the video with John Chow, Eric Dytzel, and Aaron Wall