The first fallacy of “free SEO” will hit you pretty quickly if you are familiar with an old business formula known as “time=money,” but it is still possible to optimize your website for free. Here’s a step-by-step process for getting Free SEO. For the purposes of this post, we will assume that you already have access to a computer and you already have a website of your own, and you are not paying a webmaster for the changes you’re going to need to make.
- (Most Unlikely) Create an instant success that sells itself. Facebook, YouTube, and Myspace don’t need much SEO because they are popular through word-of-mouth. These sites fit the model of sites that would probably be popular if search engines didn’t exist. The #1 paradox of SEO is that you wouldn’t need it if everyone knew about your site. Popular sites get “viral” link building that would cost millions of dollars if someone wanted to do it from the ground up. One of the good things about SEO is that a good site in its field can use optimization to get the ball rolling, and then fuel further link building through popularity.
- Go to the library and check out some of the books on Search Engine Optimization. Note that if an SEO book is over a year old you should read it for historical purposes, but you will still get the background of how SEO works and what the general principles are.
- Go online and check out SeoChat and SearchEngineWatch.com. After a few hundred hours of reading, you should be pretty well versed on all the nuances of SEO and the debates in the industry.
- Use free tools from sites like webconfs.com and our own seo tools section which will let you know how your site stacks up to other players in your niche.
- Do your keyword research. The best free tool out there is the Google Adwords Tool which gives a surprising amount of information about keyword demand. Be sure to properly use the options on the tool that define your audience and separate all the broad terms that are too vague.
- Write titles and descriptions for each page on your site. Ensure that each one is most relevant to the traffic demand for its topic.
- Write content for your site. Pay careful attention to keyword density and try to avoid keyword blurring. If search engines like Google or Yahoo see more than one page on your site with the same general topic, usually all the pages get a lower position than a single page with focused keywords.
- Build your links. It is very difficult and time consuming to do this for free. At Web.com Search Agency, we pay several full time people to build custom links, and there is extensive training on how to pick the most relevant sites and solicit links from them.
- Submit yourself to “free” directories. Best Catalog has a list of directories you can submit yourself to by hand. Before you spend too much time doing this, you can also pay a few hundred dollars to get this outsourced, but you must choose your anchor text wisely. Note that the quality on these directories is low, but aggregate links are a good first step.
- Use our free ranking report tool to check your progress. Note that our paying customers get a more in-depth report and analysis of the results.
- Add Google Analytics to track your progress under TrafficSources>Search Engines so you can see what keywords are driving traffic to your site. Although we use a lot of different analytics tools at Web.com Search Agency, Google Analytics is still the most popular with our customers.
- If your site is new, you may want to find something to do for a few months unless you have found ways to get around the Google Sandbox, the existence of which is debated among SEO professionals. You are more likely to believe in the sandbox when you see it firsthand. Most of the time, we see that new sites will receive artificially low rankings in the search engines until they gain some trust by getting links from other good sites, and demonstrate a certain level of quality.
- Sign up with Google Webmaster Tools to see how your site is viewed by Google and check if you’ve made any mistakes that got you banned. One of the contrasts between paid and DIY SEO is that experienced, well trained optimizers have been part of a collaborative learning environment, so they know what to look out for when running an SEO project. There are a number of innocent and inadvertent things that may put you into Google or Yahoo’s profile of a bad site or spammer.
The biggest problem with “free” SEO is that you get what you pay for. Many of our customers come to us because they had “enough knowledge to be dangerous” and either did not get the desired results, or watched their site placement drop after work was done. Even worse, we have clients who hired an “expert” with experience optimizing 2-3 websites, and ended up with sloppy SEO or dangerously outdated link building (link exchange, anyone?). Even though many of our account managers and strategists got their start doing optimization the “free” way, the value of multiple projects and a team environment becomes obvious because every site is a little bit different, and sometimes subject to nuances that have only happened a few times out of hundreds of projects. Paying for search engine optimization gives you the benefit of profiting from everyone else’s well documented misfortunes. Finally, (and to reiterate the starting thesis) the collective time you are going to spend learning and implementing your SEO is going to cost more on a dollar/hour basis than the price of getting a good program in place.
