Site Owners with SEO: DOs and DON'Ts

By: Mike Pham

As an optimizer, I've had a great opportunity to work with many site owners for website submission and optimization services and had some working experiences to share with you in this article. Site owners come from different categories: e-commerce sites, services or personal pages. Some of them have the expertise in Computers and Internet but most of them are the neophytes in the search engine optimization (SEO) religion. So, the purpose of this article is providing novice site owners with some useful rules of behaviors (DOs and DON'Ts) to come along with their SEO campaigns.

* SEO firms DON'T help you out. DO help yourself - Search Engine Optimization process is more and more manipulated and it is becoming the big market nowadays. Many websites are offering SEO service with different costs. They promise that customers' sites will be on top of search engines. If so, who will be kicked out of the list? No one? So if you are a site owner with a small budget and modest knowledge of SEO, lean on SEO firm as just an advisor. They cannot do all the things for you. To help you out in SEO, do it yourself. In most cases, the site owners will play an important role in the success of SEO campaigns.

* DON'T submit your sites to thousands of search engines and directories - Simply, in reality, there are not even thousands of "engines" to submit to. There are, however, hundreds of search directories, hybrid search engines, free-for-all (FFA) pages and classified ad sites. They are simply a list of unorganized links to the last fifty or so URLs that were submitted to the service. The primary purpose of these sites is to gather email addresses from Web marketers so they can be sent offers for other products and services. By submitting, you are unknowingly giving your consent for them to email you. Some major search engines (e.g.: Google) are not fond of such link farms and may actively ban this type of site.

* Repetitive submissions DON'T improve your rankings in search engines - Many site owners misunderstand between search engine submission and search engine optimization. So they just dig in finding as many as possible free submission services on the Internet and hope that someday their site will be on the top. Search engine submission is just the first step to quickly notify the search engines about the nascence of your site on the Internet. How your site grows or how your site is optimized is more important to search engines to place your site at the top of the search index. So repetitive submissions don't work in these cases. Take time to pay more attention to your site's content and link building.

* DON'T try to trick the search engines in any way - The search engines today are smarter than you have ever imagined. The techniques like most times keyword repeated in a row (keyword stuffing), same color text used as the background (hidden text), doorway pages.. are obsolete and they may be against you. Search engines don't like to get fooled and they may penalize your site for that. Moreover, be careful with the services like automatic link exchange or buying text links. You can use them on your own but take precautions.

* Your websites' exposures on search engines DON'T mean top rankings and web conversions - Some SEO firms guarantee that your sites will be included in search engines. It is so easy because when your site is indexed, it is included in search engines right away and you can see it there by some simple but useless keywords. No one will find you with that keywords or syntaxes. In addition, pay attention to for which search engines the SEO firms will be optimizing your site. It will be easier to get listed on some less-reputed search engines comparing to Google or Yahoo. On the other hand, distinguish between standard and sponsor listing. You must pay for sponsor listing but get less visitors and sales. So make sure you understand clearly what SEO firms are offering. A successful SEO campaign requires the acumen of site owners as well as a tight cooperation between site owners and optimizers. Before the campaign starts, they should discuss the price, the time for the campaign, keyword selection and the specific search engines for optimization....

* DO get familiar with SEO tools such as search engines, HTML, PageRank - Some site owners lean on the webmasters on every task related to their sites (e.g.: add a text link, change page title). In most cases, the site owners will play an important role in the success of SEO campaign by getting familiar with SEO tools like search engines, HTML, PageRank. Search engines and PageRank evaluation will help you search for competitors' sites, evaluate the keywords, check sites' link popularity (number of links to your sites) and link saturation (number of pages on your sites have been indexed). Besides, with HTML basic syntax, you can easily exchange links with other sites on your own and stop calling the webmasters all the time for modifying pages with links.

* DO start writing today - Site Owners may be beginners in SEO but experts in their industries. And today, writing is a significant skill to do SEO. Start writing some articles about your business now and submit them with your backlinks (links to your website) to article directories to increase the popularity of your site. For instance, suppose you were a mother at home and managed an ecommerce site selling some strollers and baby accessories. That will be wonderful if your share your experiences in choosing and using the strollers with other mummies-to-be on some women forum and article directories. Not only are search engines notified but also some potential customers will be attracted to your site.

In this article, I've provided the site owners with some basic rules of behaviors to do SEO. They include but not limit to myths about Search Engines, SEO firms, importance of SEO tools and article writing skill. Learning them today to make friends with search engines and shove your competitors aside.