Let me start by saying that I am not the world’s foremost SEO expert. Far from it. But since I launched our first website in 2003 (www.global-translation-services.com) I have learned a thing or two about SEO. And our updated website (www.gts-translation.com) has top ten positions in dozens of keywords. Having said that, the best SEO advice I can give you is: DO IT YOURSELF! 99% of the people that label themselves ‘SEO experts’ are incompetent, liars or both. I learned that the hard way when I first started out after paying a lot of money to SEO companies. If you are a webmaster, then do your own SEO. And if you own or manage your company’s website, develop and nurture an internal SEO operation and be wary when your webmaster asks to approve budgets to external SEO companies.

There are numerous reasons for keeping your SEO in-house:

  • All of the search engines publish a wealth of information on how to promote and SEO your website; nobody has any private information that you yourself can’t access.
  • Every industry/market requires a different SEO strategy and a different knowledge base. External SEO companies may not make a serious effort to learn the specifics of your own industry.

Here are other things that we have done at GTS which I recommend:

Content is king. Everyone knows that but just like a basketball coach, you have to keep teaching the basics. Create good content, as many pages as you can. See if you can develop a web gadget, an online application or a good code snippet. Embed a link back to your website into the gadget if possible.

Create effective internal links. Once you have some high ranking web pages, create links on them to other pages on your site.

Purchase one-way inbound links from leading directories and resources in your own industry. Find out where the top ranking companies are getting links (do a Google ‘link:www.your-competitors-website.com) so you can get new ideas on where to purchase links.

Start blogging. If your company does not have one, start a blog. If your company already has a blog, then start a new one. Use the blogs to publish new content about your company as frequently as possible.

Update your website content frequently. Search engines like pages that get updated and will crawl your website more often when you update your content.

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