8 Nerd-Recommended Do-It-Yourself SEO Tips

With the economy on a roller coaster ride as of late, small businesses are looking for things to cut out of the budget.  Unfortunately for some of us nerds that make a living on the web, one of the areas getting trimmed from the budget is website optimization.

It takes a great deal of time and patience to see the true benefits and ROI from search engine optimization efforts.  And when money is tight, time and patience tend to be in short supply.  As a result, website tweaking and perfecting takes a back seat.

Optimizing a website for search engines is in a companies best interest, even without a budget to hire a professional to do it properly.  Tough times require slashing budgets and cutting corners, but there are things that companies and individuals can do to stay competitive without spending much money or time at all. 

To help companies and individuals on a tight budget, here is a list of 8 nerd-recommended do-it-yourself SEO tips that will help ensure your website competes in seach rankings even when you are on a budget.  We haven't reinvented the SEO wheel here with any of these tips, but we have made them fairly basic and easy to understand, and they are all things people can do on their own.

8. Use Alt/Title attributes whenever possible:  These are little things that often get overlooked.  These are attributes for html tags that help tell browsers information about your page and site.  Alt and title attributes hold keywords and help define the page elements.  

7. Use unique page descriptions:  If you describe every page on your site the same way, search engines will have a hard time distinquishing them from one another.  Take the time, and write a distinict meta description for each page.  This helps search engines know that your site has many different pages with unique content.

6. Use keywords organically and appropriately:  When newbies attempt optimization, more times than not they are guilty of keyword stuffing their content and pages.  Use the keywords you selected for your target optimization words in an organic fashion when writing your content and creating your alt and title attributes.  Resist the urge over use the keywords.  Don't use the same keyword over and over again just because you can.  Don't go crazy with your keywords.

5. Changing content regularly:  Keep refreshing the content on your site.  You don't have to completely rewrite it all the time, but switch it up.  Give visitors a reason to keep coming back to your site and give search engines a reason to keeping crawling it.  Refresh your content and they will come.  As they say, content is king.

4. Pay attention to page titles!  Just like making your page descriptions unique, the same applies to the page titles.  In fact, the page titles are more important, because they are one of the first things a search engine crawls when it indexes your site.  Make the titles unique and use keywords appropriately.  Treat the title of your page as one of the most important factors about that page.

3. Make sure your content is relevant.  This should be a no brainer.  If you are a marketing firm, write about marketing related topics, not about knitting sweaters.  Keep the content on your site relevant to what you and/or your company does.

2. Give it TIME.  Be Patient.  SEO is not an overnight event.  It takes a few months to see any real results, and even longer to see the true benefits of your efforts.

1. Get as many inbound links as possible.  The more popular your site, the more relevant it is to search engines, and the higher it gets ranked.  Having a lot of relevant sites linking back to your site is one of the most important factors in SEO.  Exchange links with other companies on a budget that you partner with.  Post comments on other sites that relate to what you do.  Engage your visitors and they will link back to you and make your site more optimized in the process.

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