DIY (Do It Yourself) Digital Marketing has become quite popular and if you have the time to learn and implement your own search engine optimization and other marketing strategies it can help get your new website off to a very productive start. Here are our top 10 optimization tips for beginners, whether you choose to try it yourself or decide to hire a professional Digital Marketing Company.
1. Make sure your title tag is not stuffed with keywords but does contain your most important ones. Search engines nowadays, especially Google are becoming very good at detecting spam and if you stuff your title tags with too many keywords you can get penalized.
2. Large images and fancy flash websites may look pretty but they can be a big turn-off for search engine spiders and humans with anything but the fastest internet connection. Everyone likes their website to be attractive but the price you pay in slow load times can make SEO and long-term growth online impossible. Clean, simple, attractive websites fair best when it comes to search engines and also everyday visitors. Also many sites with high flash content tend to neglect text and the search engines need content to determine relevancy.
3. Don’t always focus on major keywords, the most important keywords for your industry will be highly competitive and very difficult to rank highly for. When you start off try to rank for some less competitive keywords and longer phrases. As you get more comfortable with optimization and digital marketing strategy you can then optimize for more some of the more sought after keywords.
4. Don’t, I repeat….don’t use black hat SEO or Digital Marketing techniques or backlink schemes. When you are struggling for traffic it can be tempting to take a short-cut and use some of the more unscrupulous strategies available but even if you get some positive short-term results you will be at a high risk of being penalized or banned from the search engines.
5. Do read forums and ask others for advice. Forums are a great way to learn about what is new and useful in search engine optimization and digital marketing. As a professional online marketer I spend around 2 hours a day reading and writing on relevant forums.
6. Don’t be too thrifty to hire a professional. There are only so many hours in each day and good business owners know when it is a better value and use of their time to delegate and hire outside professional help. Nobody can be expected to know (and do it) all, optimizing your website for the search engines and staying up-to-date on digital marketing is a very important part of your long-term business success online.
7. Don’t hire a digital marketing company if their first language is not the language you are optimizing for. Outsourcing is the current hot buzzword of many businesses and I myself do a fair share of my business dealing with folks from many countries and many different native languages, but when it comes to keyword research, content writing and tweaking – it is important that the person/firm you hire speaks the native language you are optimizing, marketing and analyzing for as their first language.
8. You may have heard this one before but it is worth repeating, content was, is and always will be KING. Interesting, well presented content will make your website a winner and make any digital marketing much easier to accomplish. Sometimes you need to go back to the basics and re-build your site from the ground-up.
9. This one should probably be higher up the list and I know it causes many sleepless nights for those new to the field, Google page rank. Don’t sweat it, visual page rank is not very important. If you build good content and get lots of quality links your page rank will rise naturally over time. Google has recently used page rank as a weapon against 1000’s of sites that it feels is selling paid links. Many large, authority sites have had their page rank cut in half or taken away completely. Since it really means nothing I would advise you to not worry about that little green bar.
10. Don’t put-off Digital Marketing any longer. You might be thinking that your website is just costing you a few hundred dollars a year for hosting so no big deal if you don’t work on improving it. The real cost is in business opportunities lost and money wasted on more expensive forms of promotion and advertising. Most digital marketing strategies do not offer instant traffic or profits but if you have a little patience the payoff down-the-road can be substantial, don’t procrastinate any longer, learn digital marketing or hire a digital marketing firm today.
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