I came across an ad the other day promising “Number 1 Placement in all of the Search Engines Guaranteed!”. Wow, that sounds good to me. And heck, there’s a guarantee, so what could be better than that? Uh, how about the truth.

Allow me to be brutally honest, and perhaps save some small merchants their life savings. There is absolutely no known way to guarantee number one placement in any search engine, unless of course you bid on the keyword and appear on the top. Other than that, anyone who makes promises that sound too good to be true, are swindling you. Or, perhaps they’re over confident in their abilities.

If you’re like most small merchants, spending money on SEO is a necessary evil. It can be incredibly expensive to hire a firm to do this, and there are a few good reasons. For one, very few people are good at it. Two, it’s tedious work. Finally, it’s worth a lot if it’s done well. You may be happy to know that there are many, many things you can do on your own to improve your organic rankings without putting out a dime. It’s going to cost you a bunch of time, but it will be time well spent.

1. Spend time seeking out quality link partners. Don’t randomly email millions of people looking for links. Look for quality websites in your industry and solicit link exchanges with them. Industry sites like associations and organizations are a good place to start. Or, sites that compliment the products you sell.

2. Be sure your meta tags are well written and unique on each page of your site.

3. Make sure the copy on your site is keyword rich and written well.

4. Be sure that your internal link structure is easy for site visitors to navigate and access every page on your site.

5. Use links that describe the page they’re linking to instead of generic links like “learn more” or “click here”.

These are only a few tips, there’s much more you can do on your own. Please continue to read this blog and other blogs on the subject for more tips on SEO.