Many people cannot afford to hire an SEO company to do their SEO for them.  If you are in this boat — wanting to rank but short the $500-1000/month that it costs to hire a good SEO company –  then here is a tool  you should check out.

DIYSEO - beginning SEO

DIY SEO is only $49/month and its a great way to learn SEO and optimize your site.  While you could spend a lot of time picking up tips at a variety of sites online, DIY SEO does a good job of giving you a little plan to follow and helping you track what you’ve done and what you still have to do.  Then, so that you don’t just ignore your tasks, DIY SEO sends you a status report/reminder each month, telling you where you’re ranking for your keywords, and what you need to do to keep going!

Before I recommend anything to my clients/readers, I always test it out first.  I signed up with DIY SEO and entered one of my own websites into the system.  Based on my experience, here is my assessment of tool.

Pro’s
The suggestions given by DIY SEO were good, and in fact, the tool brought my attention to an oversight that I fixed.   The tool is very effective in helping you to:

• Understand basic SEO lingo
• Keep your focus on the most important (few) keywords for your business
• Understand how to optimize your site pages for your chosen keywords
• Get specific directory submissions done
• Keep informed of your progress as you rise in the rankings

Cons:
The one thing the tool lacks is helping with advanced link acquisition concepts and techniques.  Sure, links are obtained through directory submissions, and a little social bookmarking, but those are only going to go so far.  Perhaps the best attempt at this is the Competitive Links section, where the tool identifies links your competitors have, and suggests that you attempt to get the same ones.  The problem is that the way they suggest doing it is tedious at best, and often not successful.  But this won’t hurt if you don’t need the links to start with!

All in all, I think the tool is a great help to the new person who wants to get their site in shape.  In a really, really non-competitive market, this tool could help a site rank.  However, link building will definitely be required in medium-high competition niches.

DIY SEO fits into the first bracket nicely at $49/month or $499/year and in my opinion, if you want a step by step way to learn SEO and optimise your site then it’s money very well spent. Yes you could try to learn everything from forums but the thing DIY SEO does very well is to list all the tasks so you simply can’t avoid doing them. The biggest thing that prevents people from succeeding at SEO is procrastinating and not putting in the hard work, especially people new to the industry.

Most of us, when we first create our local business website, do a lousy job of URL / domain name selection.  If we’re in a services business, for instance, we may choose OurName.com. Or, if we have a certain talent, we may choose something like GreatWithDogs.com. Or, we may think of the neat things we have to offer, and craft a domain name the tries to convey a benefit.  (My first serious website was for a online marketing training for therapists in private practice, and  I named it NewGenerationPractices.com).

If you want a huge advantage in your market, use relevant high traffic keywords in your domain name.  Watch this short video to see what this can do for you.

VIDEO: Keyword in URL

Free SEO Analysis

In my first post on this site, I promised that I’d show you how to perform a “Website Physical”.  I was waiting until I had some time to devote to that project, since it there are a lot of steps in involved.  Just as a doctor checks your ears, throat, eyes, chest, stomach, and all our vital signs when you go in for a physical, there are quite a few things to check on your website, too, to make sure that its health is not in danger.

Well, I have a surprise for you.  There is a wonderful tool the enables you to give your website a quick checkup, just to get you started, and this tool is…

• Fast
• Easy
• FREE!

The name of this wonderful service is Website Grader, and you can access it at http://websitegrader.com.

Simply enter your domain name, and voila!  In no time, you’ll have the results of your physical, complete with detailed explanations of each assessment involved.

Now, this is a quick checkup.  There are a few vitals that this tool does not check, and if you work with us, we’ll let you know if you have any problems there.  We’ll put on our stethoscopes and…

• Check to make sure you have an XML Sitemap that helps search engines crawl and index your site easily
• Take a look at your W3C Validation status, to make sure your code is clean
• Check your page load times (the faster they load, the better)
• Check your page sizes – if these are enlarged (larger than 120k), then Google won’t look at the whole page and they won’t be fully indexed.

There are many things that will affect your ability to get traffic, and they aren’t necessarily obvious.

But, in the meantime, go get on the Website Grader treadmill and see how you do!

Let us know if you have any questions.

Becky

Have You Tried Whiz Bang Trick #42, Yet?

These days, there is so much information available about marketing yourself online, that it can be very overwhelming.  You may hear of someone that tried Whiz Bang Trick #42, and it got them tons of traffic and they made lots of money.  You may then think that Whiz Bang Trick #42 is the THE ANSWER and that if only you can do that, then you’ll have it made.

Slow down there, just a minute…

The one thing that seems to be missing from most “trick” stories is the background.  What I mean by that is — what took place, or what was IN PLACE — before Whiz Bank Trick #42 was applied?  What is the “baseline” to which we are applying Whiz Bang Trick #42?

A simple example in the real world…

Let’s say that a new herb came on the market.  It was tested on elite athletes and showed that they were able to recover from muscle fatigue in half their normal recovery time.  They could tell you that instead of it taking them 10 days to recover from a half-marathon, they could now recover fully in 5 days and then they’d be able to run another another one.  In fact, this new magic herbal pill allowed them to now enter into a new half-marathon race each week!  Sounds pretty good, eh?

Well, now, let’s imagine that Average Joe came along and heard this story.  He was a smoker, a drinker, was 50 pounds overweight and had a heart condition.  Do you think that magic herb is going to enable him to run a half-marathon once a week?  No.  Don’t think so.

Is Your Website an Elite Athlete?  Or is it an Average Joe?

Usually, when we’re asked to look at improving someone’s online marketing, the first thing we do is to look at the website.  (Well, to be truthful, we look at the market, too, to see if there is demand for what is being sold.  But assuming that’s there…) We look at the website to see how healthy it is.

What Makes a Website Healthy?

The answer to this question could be a book in and of itself, but suffice it to say, that we look at how well optimized the site is to attract and delight traffic that it should or could be attracting. In other words, we give the website a physical exam.

In my next post, I’ll show you how you can do a “Website Physical” for your own site.  You can quickly see what parts of your site are in good shape, and what parts are struggling.

To your success,

Becky