Google Pagerank: 0 to 3 in 12 months

Not a spectacular accomplishment, but an accomplishment none the less. Especially if you consider how many websites are out there for years and never achieve any pagerank.

I am not an SEO expert, nor do I know everything there is to know about building websites. I’m an average person with an online business.

My first step was to purchase desktop software so I would not have to rely on the onsite builders offered by most hosting company’s. I wanted to have complete control over every aspect of the design, keywords, content and SEO of this site and the only logical way to do this was to not be reliant on software that didn’t quite do what I needed it to do.

After a bit of research and advise from a mentor I decided on XsitePro. Designed specifically for network marketing it gave me the advantage of being able to check things like keyword density, alt tags, meta tags, total number of words on page as well as other important SEO qualities.

The next step was Keyword Research. Knowing what keywords work for your site and your industry will play an important role in the success or failure of your website. Sure you can get lucky using keywords that are standard within your industry, but knowing which words are good, profitable and niche is what will make your site stand out above the rest.

I limited the total number of keywords for each page to 10 or less. This doesn’t mean I used only 10 or less keywords within a page, I only listed 10 or less. This created a keyword rich page that was very SEO friendly.

I tried to use solid keywords within my industry to name each of the pages within my site. There is some debate on whether this is a good strategy for solid SEO, but it seems to work for my site.

I also spent a fair amount of time on developing my site content. Providing good quality and unique content is just as important as SEO for your website. It needs to flow as if conversational and it needs to provide information. I made it a point not to use the typical hype that is so common in MLM, but did try to inject my own excitement for my business and product line.

I paid particular attention to the Meta tags for each page. Many people use the Meta tag as an advertisement when it’s purpose is to describe the page. Earlier websites I had built never did well and part of the reason is because of how I used Meta tags and the overuse of keywords which tagged the site with the major search engines as a spam site.

Paying attention to your alt tags is also important. Again the proper use of an alt tag is not to provide an additional advertisement, but instead to provide a description of the image associated with the alt tag.

Link strategy has always been an issue for me and my websites. I knew paying for links could harm my site and link exchanges pretty much cancel each other out so I had to find a way to bring in some one way links that were legit.

I currently am using several techniques to achieve links into my site. Articles are a primary source for inbound links to my site. I also use endorsements of other products and services which provide links into my site. And I’ve put other domains I own up as mini sites or landing pages that link to my primary site.

Traffic is another important factor for any website. Simply putting up a website does not automatically mean you will have traffic. When you start a new site you have to let people (your target audience) know that it’s there.

Because of the massive amount of money I had lost in my first two years of business, my husband pulled in the purse strings. This meant I had to find creative ways to drive traffic to my site that did not cost money.

I had used Traffic Exchanges in the early days of my business and I decided to revisit that option. I opened accounts with several exchanges and started surfing. It was slow in the beginning but picked up after a couple of weeks. I continue to use traffic exchanges to drive traffic to my site, and while it’s not “targeted” traffic, I view any traffic as good traffic.

Now that it has been just over a year and I have seen a steady increase of search engine traffic generated by my choice of keywords grow. Natural traffic doesn’t happen overnight and to get it you have to take the time to do the keyword research and find those profitable keywords and niche keywords that will put your site on the first 2 or 3 pages in the search engines.

Amazingly enough, many of the terms used are quality keywords that are not listed in my keyword list. This was surprising to me and helped to reaffirm the importance of providing quality content for my site visitors.

Understand your own industry and make your choices based on what works within that industry. Provide your site visitors with information they are looking for and take the time to do your keyword research. These steps will set your website apart from the others.