DIY SEO Tips to Get High Google Rankings

SEO is quite a new industry. But although it hasn't been around for too long, it's one of the fastest developing niches online. The reasons for this are obvious. No matter how you look at it Google, Yahoo!, Bing and a handful of other search engines are the major source of online traffic. And it looks like the situation won't radically change soon. This ties your website's rankings on these search engines directly to your bottomline. Love it or hate it SEO is here to stay and you can't succeed without it.

Now let's look at the ways you can improve your search engine rankings, increase website traffic and ensure long-term growth of your business based on effective SEO strategy. Here're some DIY SEO tips that will help you get your website to the top of Google.

1. Keyword research or Picking The Right Keywords

It's not just about ranking high on Google that's important, but ranking high for the right keywords. Sure, you can get a top placement for any weird term you like, but unless people really search for it, there's no use ranking high for that keyword. So it's obvious that you need to pick the keywords that feature high search stats.

Although the traffic behind the keyword is important it's not the only factor that matters. The cornerstone of effective keyword research is the right focus. You need to target the search terms and phrases that are closely related to your business, your products and your customers' needs. If you get to rank high for broad terms you'll get more clicks, but on the other hand ranking for long tail will bring you more conversions and will ultimately provide a higher ROI.

SEO Tools You Can Use

There are quite a number of keyword research tools (both free and paid) that will help you develop your keyword list, estimate the potential traffic and set the priorities. Some of the best are Google Adwords External Keyword tool, Google Search Based Keyword Tool, Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, Word Stream and Rank Tracker.

2. Optimize Your Content

Content optimization is not as powerful as it used to be, but it's still an important part of effective SEO. The single most important element on your webpage is the title. Optimizing the title is a very tricky task. On the one hand you need to put your targeted keywords so that they stand as close to the beginning as possible, and make up the biggest part of the word count. On the other hand you need to make your titles sound natural and appealing to the users so that they will click through to your page when it comes up in the search results. Come up with a catchy and well optimized title and you'll improve both your rankings and click-through rates.

SEO Tools You can Use

There are not too many tools for content optimization out there, I for one recommend WebSite Auditor.

3. Build Links

Link building is the heart and blood of your SEO. The link building theory is simple get quality and relevant links to your website with keyword-rich anchor texts. The practical part is much more complicated you need to be constantly on the look for quality websites in your niche that you can get a link from. Here are some of the most popular and effective link building techniques

- Directory submission - Article submissions - Social media - Blog commenting - Forum Posting - Competition Research

SEO Tools You Can Use

Link building is perhaps the most consuming SEO tasks and you'll certainly need SEO software to speed up the process and boot your productivity. The best link building and link analysis tools you can use are SEO SpyGlass, Backlinkwatch, Webconfs SEO tools and LinkAssistant.

These are some of the proven SEO techniques that alone can improve your search engine rankings, increase your website traffic and get you to the top 10, 5 and finally 1 on Google for your most important keywords and search strings.

SEO Liverpool is part of the UK SEO Network. Please also visit our sister sites SEO Essex and SEO Services London [l]