Many people see SEO as a highly expensive and time consuming business, well, they’re right but there are several methods that a DIY approach can improve the foundations of any site for absolutely no cost whatsoever. If you are a small business or site owner and have been quoted with an astronomical figure, which I definitely have, it’s worth making some minor adjustments yourself.

Keyword research is the first place I will tell anyone to start when creating, optimising or updating a site. Make sure they are not too generic and not too niche, this may be a fine line but put yourself in the shoes of the user, what would you type if you wanted something similar to your brand.

Secondly ensure that your meta structure is as optimized as possible. This means keeping the info in the title, description and keyword tag as accurate and concise as possible. The number of website sourcecode I visit that have lots of keywords or no keywords in the meta keywords tag, and similarly with the other meta’s. If you can keep in mind that spiders will only read approximately one line of data try and keep this information to a minimum.

Content is king as they say, and this is my next point, Google and Yahoo! treat content with a lot of respect, if you can get a decent amount of fresh content with your selected keywords appearing often then you’re onto a winner.

And finally sort out your domains and canonicalisation. If you have a site entitled e.g. http://www.seoconsult.com then when you type in http://seoconsult.com it should direct back to the original full URL automatically. If it doesn’t do this then essentially you have two homepages, and therefore there’s a chance that authoritative incoming links could be split between 2 as opposed to 1 page.

These factors are just to point you in the right direction, from my experience if you do nothing else at least the spiders are recognizing your site and will therefore crawl it more frequently.

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