Advice For The Do-It-Yourself

Webmaster

As an SME, we can't hire the services of a good SEO company that is going to spend time optimizing the site, adding new content, and gaining good links for the area simply because of the cost involved. Other SMEs are, I am sure, in a similar position. They would all love to have a website that ranked highly on google and the other search engines and brought in a constant flow of new business. However, hiring an SEO company to do all those above is often beyond the reach of many small companies, especially those just starting.

However, as a company providing services ourselves and 80% of our new business coming via the internet, I recommend you find a company, invest the money because you will soon get the rewards back. If you still cannot reasonably afford to go down that path because money in the company is tight, then the other course of action I can recommend is to write articles. I kept seeing and reading all this free advice from SEOs on the Web about the benefits of writing articles and submitting them to article distribution centers and e-zines. When reading these words of wisdom, I used to think how wonderful it would be if only I could do that, but I never did it. Until recently, that is. About a month ago, I decided I would try writing an article.

First, what would I write about? The big problem was what I could write about relevant to my website or the services we provided and be of interest to anybody else. So I searched one of the article distribution sites looking for articles pertinent to my own site's content and found nothing of real significance. So nothing for it. I would have to write my own. It still took another week before I came up with any ideas. I focused on our services and how I could turn these into articles—still, nothing came of these thoughts. Then one night, I walked to one of our cleaners, telling me about her problems with the toilet brushes on the premises she was working at. They were in the wrong shape to do a good job! The following day I spoke to the company, and they agreed we could put our own in. Then I realized this was a problem in many places, especially in domestic households. So I wrote my first article about toilet brushes and the why’s and how’s of how people should approach the purchase of these objects. Once they started, the words flowed. I submitted this to two article distributors and one ezine.

To my surprise, it was accepted, and I have not looked back. I now write, on average, two articles per week and have reached 24 published articles. Each piece gives me about five links on average; some provide more, others less; it depends on who picks them up and republishes them. Most importantly, it has boosted my visitors, backlinks, and search engine position. When I searched who was linking to my site, these articles produced 12 backlinks for google and a staggering 186 on MSN. It was exciting to see where my articles ended up, often in very unexpected places, and it is global so that they can be picked up anywhere in the world.

Do not be put off by the thoughts.

· I cannot write
· I have nothing to write about
· Nobody would want to read the things I know about

Because you are wrong on all counts, there is a lot of free advice on how to write good articles; go search it out. Everybody running a business has expert knowledge on some subject, and lastly, the whole world is your audience, so there will be many people out there who are interested in what you have to say. Surprise yourself, as I did, and give it a go. After the first or second article, you will find that they flow, and writing becomes much more accessible. Very importantly, however, they do wonders for your website.