I’ve been operating two successful websites since 1998, and is self-taught in SEO. I have luanched new websites for others and have maintained top ten organic listings for my own sites and new sites I’ve designed. My websites are now in the top ten organics for 200+ keywords and in the top five for 50 using my own SEO.
I’ll offer this advice:
These are currently the biggest factors in promoting SEO:
1) This one is HUGE! Register your domain for ten years, not year-to-year. Search engines first look at WHOIS data for the date you’re registered through before they look at anything else. They figure a site that’s paid up for a few years will be around for a while.
2) Content, content content! Content must be added or change as frequently as possible for a good ranking. New articles, blogs, etc. The longer content remains static, the lower the ranking drops.
3) Forget keyword saturation. It has been spammed so hard that SE’s have dropped the importance of keywords way down on the list. Use no more than ten keywords in the Meta tag (I use six to eight). Make sure each of the ten keywords appear at least twice in the content of the page and relate to the page. USE different keywords for each page! This is a pet peeve of mine from those who say they can’t get ranking. Meta tags need some time spent. They should never be generic.
4)Title Tag: Keep it very short and make sure each page has a different title. It really helps if you have at least one keyword in the titel.
5) Description Tag is key! The description tag will be what appears after your title in listings. It should contain two keywords if possible and be no more than two short sentences.
6) Link popularity is another SEO technique that’s been overused and abused so while it is still important, even critical, it should not be done half-way or YOUR SITE WILL GET PENALIZED! Link farms DO NOT work. Links from websites with unrelated content DO NOT work. Mirror sites NO LONGER work. Approach websites with similar contenet for link exchange. It is better to have 20 links from related websites than 1000 from unrelated. Keep at it. It takes years to develop link popularity.
SEO companies amd individuals are like chiropracters. No SEO company can help you long term unless you hire them to do what you yourself should be doing every month or so, which IS EXPENSIVE.
Many SEO companies are still using techniques designed to manipulate Google, Yahoo and Bing which no longer apply as the SE giants have made major changes due to rampant spamming by SEO companies. By the way, many search engines simply use Google results. Examples of what no longer works are: keyword saturation, mirror sites and link popularity.
Even if you use an SEO companies, you still wind upo doing half the work. The key is content and few SEO operators know your content better than you do so they’ll keep bugging you to update pages every month while you pay them 1000’s of dollars.
No SEO company will ever provide a guarantee in writing for more than one keyword, if that, then they’ll only guarantee it for a while. They suck you in and then try to keep you on the line.
Hope that helped.