Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Search Engine Optimization can often seem like a lot of hard work for very little in return. You spend hours and hours working to change all the tags on your website, make sure your keywords are all featured, publish articles in directories to get backlinks to your site, and still find yourself in position 6,721 on Google for your best keyword. And that’s not a place anyone’s going to find you.

My faith was restored the other day when I did my regular check through the main search engines. I’ve optimized my main copywriting site (www.daniboy.com) for a few keywords and the one I’ve tried to push the most has been the phrase “marketing copywriter”. It’s what I have on my business card and what I call myself when someone asks what I do. So I figured someone going on the search engines and entering “marketing copywriter” would be a good person to get seen by.

I’ve still got a way to go on Google’s UK site (10th or so, the last time I looked), but Yahoo UK has been very encouraging. I’m number one for “marketing copywriter” and in the top 10 for “advertising copywriter” and “website copywriter”, too. So hooray!

I’m not trying to boast or big myself up — well, not much — but it made me realise that SEO is really possible for small business owners prepared to put in the time on stuff that doesn’t have an immediate outcome. You don’t need a huge marketing budget to get results, just a plan to stick to.

I’ll continue to write SEO tips on this blog, so please keep checking in. To get tips from a real expert, you could also click on the “52 SEO Tips” link on the right. It’s written by an SEO specialist and has easy-to-do things you can tweak on your website to help with your SERPs (search engine result pages). They’re very good.

Hope you enjoy this business blog. If you do, how’s about clicking on the “blogged” graphic to the side and giving me a review? I put the widget on yesterday and have what seems to be the editors’ default “6.1″ score (meaning: “This is a blog. Other than that, we’re not saying”).

If you’re feeling especially generous and flush with money, why not also help me out with my charity fundraising for this year’s London Marathon? I’m supporting “Tommy’s, The Baby Charity” and my fundraising page is here. Even a pound would be fantastic.