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Lisa Shepherd

search engine. It’s your job to make sure that your website
ranks near the top in searches related to your business.

Having a good SEO program can propel your listing from
page ten to page one. There are many firms that do SEO
exclusively and can help you improve your results. If you’re
lean on budget, the basics of SEO aren’t hard to learn. The
harder part is patience: it can take anywhere from three to six
months to see results from your SEO efforts. And constant
maintenance of your program is essential to success—SEO
is never “done”.

Some tips on D.I.Y SEO:

1. Index your site on Google—This sounds simplistic, but it’s
always wise to double-check that your web vendor has
indexed your site on Google. If not, a quick visit to http://
www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl should fix that.

2. Page Titles—Every page on your website should have a
unique page title; avoid generic names, such as “About”
or “Home Page”. The titles should include the most
important keyword phrase(s) used on the page and be no
longer than sixty-five characters.

3. Meta Description—A meta description is a few sentences
of text embedded into the code of each web page that
search engines display when your site is listed in results.
Your website’s meta description should be a few short
sentences that describe your company and what it does.

(“Meta descriptions” are the main type of meta tags used
for SEO. They are often confused with “meta keyword”
tags, which are useless. Years ago, search engines used
websites’ meta keywords (lists of keywords embedded
into the website code) to rank results. But because this
made it easy for unscrupulous people to game the system

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© 2012 Lisa Shepherd