In order to do professional Search Engine Optimization, one has two main options, with two different perspectives:
- One is to get a lot of quality links. 80% in the importance of having good rankings in the search engine comes from having lots of good links. This is called external SEO.
- Another solution is to optimize your own web site. While this matters only 20% in the rankings, it’s much easier to get done (you own the web site) and to see effects. This is called internal SEO.
How can you do internal SEO? Well, you can read online blogs (SEOmoz, SEObook, SELand, and the list can continue), read books on SEO, do some trainings, get an expert on this.
But what I would suggest is having a web site audit for your web site.
I have done on my Romanian and English blog lots of SEO audits for web site. You can only view the public ones, there are still quite a few.
Conclusions? People love to know what’s wrong with their web site, and, generally, they apply what I tell them they should change.
I have a common template for an SEO review, I just follow it and make sure that everything is fine. I look on the web site, on various pages, I check the links, the hosting, the domain name registrar, and generally focus on doing a good job with this by looking at all the small details that make SEO good SEO.
Finally, one important note – take it outside. While you can learn to do SEO by bouncing up with problems, it’s much better to get the help of a professional company and let them do the hard work for you. They have much more experience in this, and, on the long run, it will save you money & time.