Do it yourself search engine optimization ( SEO )

First of all, if you're planning to do some SEO, whatever that may be, then please don't. I have said before, and I'll say it again, that SEO is a highly misunderstood concept. I don't say that it's wrong, but if you look at from Google's point of view, all they expect you to do is follow the basic rules and be an expert on whatever you're writing about. What are the basic rules? Google webmaster guidelines. Just follow their guidelines, and be knowledgable about your subject.

Nothing more is required. Ideally. Which is not the case - Most of the time. Since you rarely know what you're talking about on a web page. All right. You'll get what you wanted. Below the fold are 'my' webmaster guidelines, which you can say would cover everything you need to be your own SEO consultant.

Disclaimer: No guarantees. You are responsible for whatever happens. If you are not sure of what will happen if you do something, stay away from it. Remember - If Google and Yahoo chuck you out, you might as well go back to that day job. One mistake - Just one, and you're out.

If you're still interested, continue reading...

The image above was found here. And funny as it may seem, I have been at the recieving end of Google's anger, and it's not funny. Your entire world comes crashing down. All your plans go out the window. I harp on this so much because this is an issue which almost every webmaster, who dabbles with SEO himself, is bound to face at some point of time - Generally after optimizing for 3 to 6 months. I won't open this subject again in this article, so I hope I drummed it into your head.

Planning: For a site which is trusted by Google, which gets regular incoming links from important websites, only the content matters ( what words you use ). But if you are a newb, and your site has no important sites linking back, you need to focus on a lot of things.

• Select a template(s). Do not change it after you start the site. Why? Because changing templates generally produces changes in the way search engines see the text on your page. Affects rankings. If the template is sitewide, and creates a major change, you might lose any and all rankings you had before the change. Again, I note that if your site is important enough, you can change templates twice a day and google will dutifully reach out for the main text and ignore the template. A related issue - New sites should try to keep template text to an absolute minimum, so that it is easy for Google to reach out to the main text. This has the added benefit of preventing Google from thinking that all your pages are the same ( which can happen if the template is big and main text very small )

• Font size - Important site? Big font, small font - All the same. New site? No linkbacks? Big font. Lot of text. Bold headlines which are full sentences, and not H1 or H3 tags with two or three words.

• Titles - Every page has to have its own title. The title has to have the keyword associated with that page, and as far as possible, nothing else. Titles with dozens of words are meaningless. What you need is short title, and maximum of two keywords. Remember that the title text will rarely help you rank for two or more keywords. It is helpful for increasing ranking for a single keyword. Maximum two. No more.
• URL - Everything in the URL matters. Just remember that you can go down upto a link depth of two, and no more. Why? Because Google will ignore ( for a new site ), link depths exceeding two. What does this mean? yoursite.com/category/your-page.html ( This is fine ). yoursite.com/category/sub-category/your-page.html ( your-page.html will almost certainly be ignored )
• Grammer - The most important thing to remember is never to use caps within a sentence. Only the first letter of the first word of each sentence. No more, no less. Not for the title, not for the headline, not for anything. Why? Because, as a general rule, Google will not display any text which contains caps inside the sentence. Exception to this rule is names. Names ( people, organizations, places ) are allowed to have the first letter in capital. An abbreviation of an organization ( eg: UNICEF ) is allowed in all caps. If you write anything else in all caps, you need to be taken out into the public square and shot.
• Sitemap - Whatever your site structure and internal linking system, a sitemap ensures that Google knows about your site. New webmasters are often confused by the requirements of creating a dynamic site map, which automatically updates itself as you add pages. If creating your own sitemap is diffcult for you, use http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
• Blogs - If you're starting a blog, then follow the steps outlined next. Get your own domain and hosting. Sign up for a blogger account. Inside Blogger, create a new blog, but do not accept their sub-domain. Use the setting to publish using FTP on your own domain. This ensures that Google has full access to your blog, but others see it as your own site, and not a sub-domain. While Yahoo will tend to ignore these blogs initially, after some time Yahoo stops sulking and will pick up your pages. Advantage is that Google gives a big preference to blogs set up exactly as I have explained above. Google will pick up changes to your blog home page instantly - By instantly, I mean instantly. Set up a blog like this, add a post, and then go see what Google shows about your blog. You'll see the first line of the new post in the description in Google. If you change the arrangement even slightly, please do not come crying here.

Ok. we're done with the planning. Again, I stress that not everybody has to jump through all these hoops. If your site is important, if you are an expert and well regarded in your community, and people link to your site without you asking them to do it, all the things I noted above hardly matter. Now it's time to actually do some SEO.

This is probably what you came here for. I can't tell you about writing styles for your site, because that dpeends on the subject matter. What I can tell you is that often times, traffic comes from keywords which you were not targeting. So use names - Names of people, names of websites, names of companies, names of streets and places - Anything which is highly specific, and relates to the subject of your site. That is generally what people search for. Generic keywords are good, and you can target pages with a specific keyword, but within the page, make sure you use as many names as possible.

Secondly, home page traffic is good, but not good enough. What SEO really means, the core of SEO, is to get direct traffic to your inside pages. Only one way to achieve that - Other sites should link directly to these inside pages. How can you do that? Lots of ways. Exchange links for inside pages, instead of the home page, with sites similar to yours. Use press releases. Write articles on other sites, and linkback to specific pages on your site. Post links to inside pages on discussion forums, blogs and anywhere on the internet that you can find a related topic page, which also allows you to post a comment.

Lastly, and this is irreplacable, whatever else you do or don't do - Add new content every single day. If you don't do this, you are not doing SEO. At the very minimum, one new page a day. Building user communities, where people post new threads and others offer comments, relieves you of this burden. Which is why forums and blogs are highly rated by Google. A heavily visited forum essentially adds dozens of new pages every day, and these pages are constantly updated for the next few days or weeks, as more people respond and post comments. So while every day new pages are being added, old pages are also updated with additional content. It's impossible for a single person to do this by himself.

In summation - What you need is some planning before you start, knowledge of your subject, and the ability to write content every day which contains related keywords in plenty, an aggressive link strategy where you not only acquire links to your home page, but also to each new page, as and when it is created and an ability to build a user community. Do this, and you're a home grown SEO.