When it comes to website design and Internet marketing, the general perception is that there is some big secret to how to design your website and optimize the content for better performance in search engine results. This is exactly what SEO companies want you to think. The truth about SEO is that you can do it, and for the most part, you can do it for free.

1. When it comes to website design and Internet marketing, the general perception is that there is
some big secret to how to design your website and optimize the content for better performance in
search engine results. This is exactly what SEO companies want you to think. The truth about
SEO is that you can do it, and for the most part, you can do it for free.
That is the biggest secret to search engine optimization. If you knew that most of the things SEO
companies and Internet marketing companies are offering you is free, they would not have many
sales. Even I get those calls and emails from these SEO idiots. Well, maybe not idiots if they can
sell you something that is free.
A good example of this is submitting your site to Google or Google places. Google crawls the
web continuously and there is no need to submit your site. They will find it. It is however
commonly believed that submitting your site may make it harder to rank. To this part, I'm not
sure. However, Google provides a submission form that is free to use. They also offer free
detailed instruction about how to setup a Google Places page and how to optimize it for your
business. And then there are the AdWords management calls that want to manage your AdWords
campaign and charge you hundreds of dollars each month. This is crazy.
Google provides lots of free tools to help you find good keywords and suggestions, detailed
article and help links if you need them as you work on your setup, and it is easy to follow the
prompts and fill in the boxes for setting up Google products like places and AdWords. This work
can be done by a novice in less than 30 minutes if they can sound out the words, and these
companies are charging hundreds monthly for this free service that is already done. To me, it
looks more like stealing.
The best things you can do for your website to get higher traffic and ranking in search results is
keep your site clean and user friendly, get quality links that add value and push traffic through
your site, and make sure your page titles and descriptions accurately fit the content of your page.
Some things to avoid in optimizing your website are excessive links that are not useful, unnatural
linking, over use of keywords, and in general things that feel like you are just pushing too hard or
spamming.
Search engines like Google are very complex in their design but easy to use. They are always
improving in their ability to identify unnatural links, content, confusing link structure, and spam.
If your website is easy to navigate and don't have excessive links that are not necessary, people
will stay longer and the search engines can see this trend. They also see sudden large increases in
inbound links and patterns of increases that may look unnatural which may lower your overall
ranking and positioning in search results.