Fri 31 Jul 2009
DIY SEO Tips & Tactics For Small Businesses
Blurb by Shaun Anderson (Hobo)If you like our DIY seo guide, Del.icio.us it! A sort-of-beginners-guide to on-site and on-page seo FAQ. I think you could read these (about) 30 tips and go away and create a successful site. I deliberately steered clear of things that might be a bit gray, and I assume you’ve done your keyword research – I might go into that shortly. I just wanted to stay largely onsite seo for the duration of the tutorial, and lay down actual seo advice you could use. I knocked them out with no little planning – so forgive me if the advice is a bit all over the place. I will be checking the information again, after a break. Feel free to comment
SEO FAQ
You may want to read our What Is SEO and of course, get to know each search engine specific guidelines for inclusion.
- Optimise Page Titles
- SEO Meta Descriptions
- Optimal Keyword Meta Tags
- Robots Metatag
- H1 Heading Tags
- How Many Words To Rank
- Optimal Keyword Density
- Link Internal To Relevant Pages
- Link Out To Related Sites
- Redirect Non WWW To WWW, Google
- Optimize ALT Tags
- Search Engine Friendly URLs
- Keywords In Bold & Italic
- Absolute / Relative URLS
- Directories / Files
- PHP, HTML or ASP
- Valid HTML & CSS
- 301 Old Pages
- On-Site Duplicate Content Issues
- Fix Broken Links
- XML Sitemaps
- Nofollow Internal Links
- Only The First Link Counts?
- Link To Important Pages
- Bonus – Put your keywords early in page copy – like high up in the code.
- Bonus 2 – Read Google Webmaster Guidelines
There’s a few things I won’t go into on this site. Unlike some, I won’t discuss blackhat seo on this blog at the moment at least. Nor promote specific tactics that would cause another site issues even if I do find a social network that with a few posts you can swamp Google results. I won’t talk about specific on-site seo test I might do – as Google could easily give me the information they wanted (Tin Foil Hat On of course). I have a few processes and an order of optimisation I’m not quite ready to post yet, but I will probably. I’ve got loads of little tests going on in various corners of the web testing one thing or another – I love that sort of thing. I a not looking how to break Google, more how to work with it. I’ll share the info once I get the results but hey it’s free advice, worth every penny paid. I’ve certainly tried to keep readers right. I don’t really surmise a lot on this blog – not as much as I would like to anyways.
Hope you enjoyed the posts and thought they were of use – I’m taking a small break for a while to go play in the social networks – see you about
Now, you should be linkbuilding or linkbaiting. Check out our beginners guide to linkbuilding. NOTE – Our DIY SEO guide has been updated: Go to Google SEO – Learn Search Engine Optimisation Basics
Republished – Originally published on: Aug 10, 2008 @ 12:00
Did you know when you link to a Hobo SEO post we have search engine friendly links back to your site if approved? Our comments are also search engine friendly you know (once you've commented on a few posts)! Do you need any more encouragement to get involved in the conversation ;)

Thanks so much.. so informative. i enjoyed reading through each section. Helps put things clearly into perspective.
Thanks again!
Michelle
Thanks Michelle
This is the best compilation of easy-to-implement SEO advice I’ve seen online Hobo. So thanks for taking the time to publish it for the whole World to use freely.
Great DIY SEO Guide
Thank you for sharing some of your SEO secrets..^^ I will keep them in mind and try them out for myself..^^
Michelle,
Sphunn, good information.
~ Jim
JImbo….. are you a bot?
Shaun,
No, I am not a bot. I saw this article on Sphinn and thought I would comment. I never comments on my blog, so I thought I would try to send out a few.
I like the layout of this site,
~ Jim
Hey Jim – apologies! LOL – Thanks very much for commenting – hope you found the tutorial useful.
Using this list is quite powerful.. i moved my site from 1574 to 30 with just onpage optimization..
Really like this guide. I have my own that might be helpful to some:
jaankanellis.com/seo-where-do-i-begin/
This is great stuff. Don’t get me wrong. However, this is more like “how to become an SEO expert”, not “DIY SEO”.
If a small biz owner or internal marketing person is going to do SEO, I think they should focus on keyword research, content creation and landing page creation. Then, gradualy learn the rest as they start to see results. This list of things to do and learn makes it seem very daunting.
@ Jaan cheers
@ Peter yes I agree wholeheartedly “keyword research, content creation and landing page creation” are what people should be focusing on (apart from some discovery linkbuilding).
These tips where meant to offer an insight to onsite seo issues seo beginners should and or should not obsess about. I don’t think they are that advanced, but advanced seo for me might be just knowing what not to do – most of the time.
Thanks for the comment
Wow! What a load of information! Thank you so much!
Wow! Your blog is valuable. It contains beneficial information that is helpful for everyone. Thanks for your best tips and suggestions on SEO.
What a great list, this is seriously impressive. Most SEO blogs don’t give this much information. Thank you for talking about the no follow link also, I got alot of useful information.
Thanks, this was very informative as I am new to this.
Thank you for sharing some of your SEO secrets.
I just found your website and bookmarked it in delicious. There is a ton of good information here for me to learn from.
Great post.
great posts
i learned a lot
this is by far one of the best explanations i’ve read, its simple and easy to implement, very easy to comprehend.
Great Job,
Cheers,
Mandy Krowovsky
great post for seo tips
very nice list…saves loads of reading by summarising the core seo
Well put together a list of SEO tips that sure will help SEOs. Well done mate.
This is a very good guide to some essential SEO guidlines Shaun.
I would like you to have included a few more items, like key phrase research, you mention keywords a lot in your blog, and I have always found that keyphrase is more accurate. good keyphrase research is criticle to a good SEO campaign. All too often people spend lots of time optimising websites for terms nobody is searching for and wonder why they get no traffic. My tip is – do the research ! find out the terms people search for before optimising your website.
a good (free) starting point is google adwords keyword research tool.
Anchor Text – the text in inbound links to your website is also one of the most powerful SEO tools, get your keyphrase built into the anchor text of inbound links. This is probably the most important SEO tool, hence the inportance of your choice of URL in the first instance, which you did mention in your blog.
Lastly is my top tip – Nich Marketing, when you do your keyphrase research, you inevitably find phrases that lots of people use, but don’t ignore the smaller phrases. These are the nich terms, and optimising for these will often bring your true customer to your website. For instance, if you sell clocks, you will be competing against many well optimised websites all selling clocks, this will be difficult and get you nowhere, however look at you stock ! if you see that you have a vast array of clocks – cuckoo clocks, grandfather clocks, ect. My advice is to optimise each of your pages for these nich terms. This will bring in a host of real customers for your products.
perfect articles. im starting to read all now.
thanks,
thanks hobo-web for another great article. 5 star rating
This is short & simple ,usefull tips .Bigners like can learn more from these.Any one who want to start SEO must go through these.Thanks Hobo
Not just useful for beginners, useful for everyone.
How about a section about keyword KEI. I read a lot about choosing niche keywords and not using the same keywords that everyone else is using, but suppose you are all offering the same thing. How do you find the best keywords.
I’ve been looking for a clear, concise list to offer my website clients. Looks like you nailed the site construction points concisely. Now the other half is promotion!
Nice article…love it!
This is one of the best out there on DIY SEO – nice job guys
Shaun
What a great article! I knew a lot of the stuff but I have been filled in on some knowledge I was missing. Hopefully catch you soon on the social network scene!
DIY SEO: – Great Article!
DIY SEO For Your Website – Great Article!
i am noob at SEO, but I think, that man, who wants to be a pro can do this. The only problem is motivation.
Thanks, Shaun
Excellent DIY SEO FAQ helping me as I tweak my myriad Page Titles/Keywords.
Added a Tweet for you on my Twitter.
Coincidentally, I happen to have written a book about “hoboes!”