Google SEO 101, Is it really that hard to get your website listed high on the search engines?
Google SEO 101
Well… yes and no. If you are trying to get on the first page of Google for “lose weight” then good luck… However for the average online business then it is very often not too hard at all if you keep to the basics and do just the 10 tasks below.
Like most things, the SEO “experts” will tell you that you need to implement a thousand things to get ranked high and yes everyone may make some difference however we are most interested in the ones which make the biggest difference, not the changes which barely the move the meter. Also called, the law of diminishing returns.
On our eBay and online businesses we are continually testing SEO strategies (SEO is short for Search Engine Optimisation) to find which ones make the biggest differences and which ones take a ton of time for very little reward. i.e. 80/20 principal. (20% of what we do makes 80% of the difference).
The good news is Google is on our side for SEO and continually shutting down sites which try to trick the system.
Recently on Google’s “Penguin 2” update, thousands of websites which had false backlinks, (that is they paid people to put links on other peoples websites back to their own sites) all got heavily penalised for “Link farming”.
This is great news for the average Joe Blow as it makes the playing field even fairer.
If you have not done any SEO work on your site before, applying the 10 items below should make a massive difference to your website ranking and also potentially give you a ton of FREE traffic.
I will not explain exactly how to change each item as there is a ton of info out there on places like Youtube showing how to change each item like page name etc. The purpose of this article is to help you optimise your site through SEO by implementing 10 easy steps.
SEO Checklist
- Page Title – Every page on your website should have a “page title” matching what you are selling. Make it match your keywords i.e 1970-corvette-poster
- Page Name as above. Make it match your keywords i.e 1970-corvette-poster
- Picture names as above i.e 1970-corvette-poster.jpg
- Picture captions i.e 1970 Corvette Poster
- Alt tags (what shows when you mouse over) yep, you guessed it, 1970 Corvette Poster
- H1 Text (The large text on your page) Make sure your keywords are in your H1 text i.e. 1970 Corvette Poster
- Content – Make sure the keyword(s) 1970 Corvette Poster are in the content in the page. Make sure the amount is reasonable and not obviously rigged at having too many keywords out of context.
- Metatag descriptions – Add Keyword(s)
- Make sure if you write a blog or put a video up on Youtube that you put a backlink to your page i.e http://www.xyz.com/1970-corvette-poster.html
- Robot.txt file – This tells the Google robot where to look in your website and most importantly where not to look. Recently I looked at one of my clients sites and Google was finding a ton of old directories which had programming tools which the website developers had left there. The problem with this was Google is trying to put everybody’s website in a niche. In the example above, Google had wrongly put the website in the programming tools niche!
Check your site by going to your browser and typing site.xyz.com (replace xyz with your site name) to see which pages Google is looking at on your site.
Good luck with your SEO and please, let me know your thoughts.
Next week I will do some 80/20 on Google’s webmaster tools.
Best regards,
Neil Waterhouse
Author – Million Dollar eBay Business from Home – A Step by Step guide – https://www.neilwaterhouse.com
Which Items make eBay Sellers the most money on eBay? http://www.waterhouseresearch.com
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I have tried to work out SEO for years and it has been confusing and like a puzzle and you have simplified it with ten rule. Very helpful. By the way your book Million Dollar Ebay Business was excellent
Thanks Sheryl
wow.. that simple? i had no idea. so this works with ebay ads also?… ( i mean not just your own website) .. ive been selling for years on ebay and had no idea. thanx for another VERY informative email Neil 🙂
i cant get this to work….
typing site.xyz.com (replace xyz with your site name)
site.bevandecoffee.com.au
did nothing
Try site: with a colon instead
Fantastic checklist Neil. Can I ask a question please Neil… on my website as well as my product pages I have a lot of other information about green healthier living ideas and information for raising children. A lot of it is relevant to all my products. do you think I should be inserting links like the ones above (not the obvious one of ‘here is a production achieve….’) to my products somehow in these too? It will be hard in the title etc but I could do images at least… have you writtten a post about this?
I also have just received your book and am finding it a great read thank you. I’m an Amazon seller but always looking to improve… Thanks so much for your great content.
Great to have a checklist but like most things it’s “easier said than done”. (I have 12 websites so I know).
There should be a subcategory of people who fall into “I know that it’s important but don’t want to do it” And for them, the solution should be suggested outsourced providers that I tried and tested and offer good value.
Thanks Neil.
That was meant to be “are tried and tested” not “I tried and tested”
…. it certainly works on ebay listings!! Photos I have taken for ebay listings come up on Google searches – and link back to my ebay page 🙂 Same happens with keywords in the listing. As an ‘experiment’ a few years ago, at the end of one of my ebay listings, I inserted an extra sentence. In that sentence was a totally made up ‘keyword’ that ‘related’ to the listing. I made the text colour of the listing white (not visible on the white background).
If I enter that made up ‘keyword’ in a Google search, even today, it brings up that ebay listing where it is hiding!! 🙂
This just goes to show / backup what Neil says …. powerful stuff.