by Andy MacDonald, 3/17/2006
Set realistic goals
You must remember, legitimate, professional search engine optimizers are immersed in their field and are educated with experience. The time, knowledge, talent and effort that you get with a pro is worth every penny.
A professional SEO's approach involves research of your market, competition and many times a significant renovation of your existing site from code to content. The in-depth detail and deep analysis, content development, link and page structure requires a significant amount of time, experience, and a lot of hand work.
In other words, if you want to feel better and improve your self image, you don't have to pay a doctor to tell you that eating healthy, taking a vitamin and regular exercise will make a marked improvement in your well being.
If you want the large scale, lasting and radical change a facelift can give you, you must pay a plastic surgeon for his education, experience and talent.
Don't forget to use some common sense when looking at your market. If you think you're going to rank for a highly competitive keyword that has several well known companies at the top without the aid of a professional, you'll probably end up disheartened.
Achieving first page ranks for competitive keywords in a saturated market is a mammoth task, and at the very least would require a full time effort by an experienced firm with resources to take on such a challenge. Don't be discouraged; with some brainstorming you can think of some related, less competitive keywords and niche markets to target.
How a little knowledge can go a long way
Some very simple copy adjustments in the right place can go a long way on less competitive sites. Let's look at a few easy changes anyone can make.
Page Titles
The page title, the words that display in the top of your web window, is one of the most crucial elements on the page as far as the search engines go. When you do a search for something what do you type in the search field? Unless it's a company's specific name, you type in a keyword or key phrase like "mens cross training air sneakers".
A very common mistake is to put your company name in the page title. Sometimes it's appropriate, but for ranking purposes, use a concise description of your page with a prime keyword from that page.
Bonus Hint- Start your first sentence with that same keyword!
Content Quality
You'll surely find as many opinions about content as there are about politics. Take away the extremes and you'll find the meat is the same. To increase your rank, you have to have searchable content, and it must be quality. What is quality? More importantly, what do the search engines think is quality?
The answers depend on your site and position on the internet. However, all quality content shares some characteristics.
It's useful information about your products or service. Don't throw random free, generic, carbon copied stuff from the web onto your site. Use some thought and creativity. Build copy around different aspects of your target.