Do-It-Yourself SEO in Orlando

Enough is enough! I received another spam email today from what we like to call a "craphat" SEO company. These folks, in very broken English, offered to "...bring Traffic to Your Site and rank You Top with our LSI based Google's Algorithm at affordable rates" [sic], [sic], [sic]! That's what it made me: sick!

Truth is, you can do it yourself with SEO but you probably don't want to. Unless you are an SEO company you didn't go into business to do keyword research, competition analysis or write copy. We did so you don't have to.

So here is what it takes to do SEO yourself following essentially the same steps we do to rank high on the search engines. I'm going to use this blog entry as the example. Journey with me now down the not so rocket science road...

Step 1: Keyword Research

Do some homework with any of the various keyword tools that will show you what people are actually searching for. In the case of this post I used the free Google AdWords Keyword Tool and typed in "diy seo." I'm looking to make sure people actually look for the term "diy seo" and I find that about 1,900 per month do. Great, "DIY SEO" it is.

Step 2: Competition Research

Now let's search Google for "diy seo" and see what kind of results we get. DIYSEO.com is #1 and won't be beat because DIYSEO.com is their domain. Going down the first page it is pretty clear that there are at least 10 sites optimized for this term and since they are all SEO sites we can be pretty sure they will be defending their turf. No reason to optimize for just "DIY SEO" because we are not likely to rank.

Let's add "Orlando" to the end of the term and search again. This actually follows the way people often search. They start with something relatively broad and then add more terms to refine the search. "DIY SEO Orlando" may seem like a strange way of searching, but we see these types of searches all the time (and they are usually easier to rank for because people get hung up on optimizing for sentence structure instead of search structure, i.e. "Orlando DIY SEO" instead of "DIY SEO Orlando.") Looking at the results we see this is an area where we can compete. In fact, I'm willing to bet we'll take the #4 spot pretty quickly behind the first 3 entries for OrlandoSEOConsultant.com.

• Update: Just checked Google 3 days after this entry was added and the page is ranked #4 for "diy seo orlando" as shown in the screenshot above.

Step 3: Write Copy

All that's left is to write the copy and weave in the keyword "DIY SEO Orlando" as much as makes sense. This is where being a native English speaker (or whatever language your site is in for that matter) is so important. Only a native speaker is going to be able to tell if a term like "DIY SEO Orlando" has been overused or used in a strange context.

To prove the point I am going to leave this entry with just those 3 steps of optimization. In our process we do a lot more, but just those three steps are often enough for DIY SEO in Orlando (or any other city for that matter) to start getting some rankings.

Best of luck with your SEO, and if you agree that you would rather run your business than be a DIY SEO, give us a call and we'll be glad to help.