SEO means Search Engine Optimisation. One of the facts of life is that if your website is not listed by Google in its first two or three pages, then very few people will visit it. Unless you get a reasonable number of visitors, your time, effort and expense have been wasted.

Here is a DIY plan to improve your position in Search Engines:

1. Search terms
   What are your focus key words or phrases? i.e. What search terms do you want to be found by? e.g. Motorcycle Maintenance.
2. Domain name
   This is the most important place for focus key words. For a website about motorcycles, a name containing the word “motorcycle” will be listed ahead of names not containing that word, where all other factors are equal.
3. Site Title
   This is the most important place for focus key words. If the website is about Motor cycle maintenance, those words should be in the site title. A title like Bill’s Website doesn’t tell the search engine what it’s about.
4. Content
   Put as much content as possible containing key words or phrases into the website. Make separate pages for different aspects of the website, e.g. who, what, where, why, how, etc.
5. Page Titles
   Page titles are very important sources of key words for SEO. Titles like Home Page and About Us are no use for SEO. A page can be listed on the menu as Home but its title should contain the focus key words.
6. Length of page
   The recommended length is 300+ words
7. Internal Links
   On each page create an internal link (to another page in the website).
8. External Links
   On each page create an external link (to a page in another website).
9. Meta title and meta description
   These are recommended to be 60 characters and 160 characters long. Each should contain focus key words.
10. Readability
    Use active rather than passive voice. Use shorter rather than longer sentences and paragraphs. Include transition words.

There are wordpress plugins that can help you with the above. We find All in One SEO helps us with all our own websites. That plugin gave 100/100 for this page.

Incoming Links

As well as the website being search engine friendly, it also needs to be seen by the search engines as popular for its search terms. i.e. It needs incoming links from other relevant websites.

Every day we receive offers from “SEO Experts” to get our website onto page 1 of Google. We find that often these “Experts” don’t have a website of their own. According to our clients,  some of these “Experts” will charge $US99/month to provide a lot of incoming links to make a website seem popular and therefore relevant. However that only works while the monthly fee is paid.

With the low cost of domain names and hosting, we find it’s cheaper long term to own other websites to link to the one we want to promote.