I’m a total SEO newbie – I have heard that it’s very difficult to make it work for individuals like me, without thousands to invest in courses etc. Is it really that difficult? What’s the best way to start doing something RIGHT to get higher positions Google?

SEO really isn’t a simple game to play. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do anything – for one simple reason – probably, most of your competitors haven’t done anything SEO related as well! This means, with just small adjustments, you can see immediate results and at least – beat your competitors in SERP’s (Search Engine Ranking Positions).

There are 2 simple steps anyone can take straight away to improve their rankings, get more visitors and at the end of the day, make more money doing so:

1) Compile a list of keywords related to products/services you sell. I can’t stress enough how important this is! Without a keyword list you’re shooting in a dark! You have to know exactly which keywords people are using to find products you sell. And this process won’t cost you a single penny. You see – that’s why people love Google – they give away lots of great, free tools. All you need is Google’s Keyword Tool – just type in the product name or describing phrase and Google will show you all related keywords people use to find that product + number of searches done per month.

Google even allows you to save list of keywords as a txt or a csv file and download it to your PC. Do this for each product you sell. Don’t overdo though – depending on the product, all you need is top 10 to 20 keywords – the ones that get most searches. Of course, if the product you sell is highly popular (like PS3 consoles) there will be thousands of keywords. With products like these, you’ll want to group them in smaller batches of 20-30 keywords, in related groups.

2) Once you have a list of keywords in hands, you can start optimizing your On-page factors. On-page factors in SEO mean all those things you can do with your website and individual pages to get higher search engine rankings. Now, let’s quickly cover most important ones:

• Title – this is the most important on-page factor. “Title” is the line of text you see in blue line in your browser. Make sure to include product’s main keyword in title of the page. Title should be less than 64 characters long.

• Description – this is the biggest mistake e-commerce store owners make – they do not add product descriptions to pages. This also brings up the duplicate content issue. Make sure to add keyword rich description to each product you sell. It doesn’t have to be long sales copy. A 200 word long article is all you need. If you struggle with writing, hire a writer who will do this for you, for $2-$4 per article. (Elance.com)

• Selectively use bolds, italics and larger sized type. Search engines tend to give an extra credit for pages that are formatted for “human use”. Just don’t overuse this strategy as it will look like a spam.

• SEO friendly URL’s – now, depending on the shopping cart you use, you should be able to change URL’s of the product pages. If you can’t – it’s a bad shopping cart you have there. Google loves HTML pages, that’s why ideally your pages should look something like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/product-keyword.html Please note that you should always use hyphens between words (do not leave empty space or underscores).

• Meta Tags – these will help you a lot with Yahoo & MSN (Google doesn’t care much about Meta tags anymore). Make sure you have unique Meta description & keywords for each product you sell.

That’s it – just 5 things you can improve straight away and see results within few weeks.

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE!!! Don’t try to stuff keywords! Trust me – Google is smart enough to catch any spamming activities – sooner or later you’ll be punished so don’t waste your time. There are no formulas to use, forget about keyword density (if you have heard about it). Just write naturally – use keywords as you would do naturally, create pages for visitors NOT search engines and you’ll be ok.

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