Website SEO Tips and Tricks

Like anything else in life and business, you have to invest your time and sometimes a little cash to reap financial and personal rewards. Of course for many, nothing feels better than self-accomplishment, and that’s where I come in — helping you learn about blogging for business. 

Understand what this is all about – monetizing on your current business investment; your website. And of course if your website has a blog, then this article is truly for you. I’ll cover this blogging 101 tutorial as simply as I can and try to keep the geek talk to an absolute minimum. Grab some coffee and something to eat and get comfy because this is a long one.

Know Thy Self… 

Just so many questions come to me about blogging. But you know what? They all have something in common: anxiety and fear of something new and unknown! Once beyond that, your mind is free and this is no longer a chore. Here’s a list of the most common questions/roadblocks I hear: 

1. Who is my target audience?
2. What should I write about?
3. When will people find my blog posts?
4. Where will my readers come from?
5. Why would anyone bother with what I have to say?
6. How does all of this come together and help my business?

Do you see a trend? Ah yes! The classic “WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY and HOW” scenario! The hidden beauty behind this scenario is the ability to answer them all in succession, and that’s just what I’m going to do for you. In other words, once we know Step#1, then Step#2 starts to become obvious, and so forth! So get a pen and make your list of those six questions now before I answer them.

#1 Who is my target audience?

This may seem obvious, but often it’s not. Right now, you’re thinking “my customers or clients are my target audience”. If you’re just starting out with blogging, then this is DEAD WRONG!  You see, you have to build an audience first by making content that people want to learn about, know about, talk about, or email/text/tweet to others (covered more in Step #2 next). Your current clients already know you and are not likely very interested in what you have to say at first. You are blogging to try to attract new customers/clients as well as serve your current ones so people you do not know should be your readers. To recap, your target reader is someone who will find your writing interesting and/or entertaining.  

#2 OK, I have my target audience. What should I write about?

For example, let’s say you’re a dry cleaner. Take a simple inventory of your professional knowledge and see what may be interesting to someone:

• I can clean clothes professionally. (Yep, obvious but boring. Ironically, this is what a beginner would likely blog about)
• I could tell you what clothing to buy that’s most cost effective and durable when it comes to laundering. (Hmmm…)
• I know how and why you should clean certain stains yourself without using a dry cleaner!  (Huh? Why do that!)

Hey dry cleaners! Did I just get your attention? Make you mad? Make you think? That’s the whole point — attraction. Two things I listed above may seem like I’m giving the farm away, and that’s exactly right! And no, I’m not drawing business away from myself either, trust me. You need to learn to look beyond that now. Instead, I’m attracting readership and creating trust and investing in my future. Think about it: what am I doing right now with you? Yep, you guessed it, giving away my knowledge to bring you back for more and maybe even tell others. And guess what? It worked. I now have an audience because I gave the farm away.  Get it?  Napoleon Hill, an early personal success author and advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, once said: “Give more value than you are being paid for and soon you will be paid more than the value you have given.”

Lack confidence in your writing ability? That’s very common, and a good point to consider. If I can’t make sense of what you’re saying, you will never gain me as a follower. But how will you truly know unless you try? Here are two options: write something first and have someone read it before publishing it in your blog. You will know the answer to this question real fast. Another solution: get someone to write it for you, like hire me for example, or a family member or friend who can write well and offer some sort of trade-off.

#3 When will people find my blog posts?

By now, you found something to write about and who to direct it to. Now for the golden question: how do people find my blog articles? By far, this is the biggest question I receive — and the most important one to explain carefully. The answer comes in many forms but I will mention two of the easiest ways here.

Instant Search Engine Notification: If you are using WordPress for your blog and/or website, then you may or may not know that WordPress can be set to automatically notify a well known blogging resource called Ping-O-Matic each and every time you create and click “Publish” a blog post (your article). In layman’s terms, Ping-O-Matic notifies search engines of your new content immediately!

Before blogs were around, website owners created articles and had to wait for search engines to come and find their new content before the world could search for it. But this could take weeks if your site wasn’t real popular and proved quite frustrating. Blogging revolutionized this whole process and is the single-most important reason why I use WordPress for websites and blogs.

You already know why you have a website (hopefully!): to get people to find you when they search for what you do and where you do it. So each time you write in your blog and publish it, you are telling the WORLD about your new information immediately! This way, you don’t have to wait for search engines to come to you. They are already notified and quite capable of using your information right away. Don’t belive me? Well try it for yourself. Have a Google Account yet? Then try this free Google tool: Google Alerts. Google Alerts can notify you almost immediately about any topic, anywhere, anytime as soon as it goes online just by typing in a topic of choice. Be careful though, it could potentially flood your inbox so play around with it first. Hmm… maybe that’s why CNN and others large communication networks all use blogs!

Social Media: Once you publish your blog post, notify people via Twitter and Facebook with a link to it. You will be amazed just how fast this can bring comments to your blog post and create links from other websites. Also, use newsletter services like I do. I use Constant Contact but there are several other services out there two. In fact, if you really want to get a jump on using these avenues, I’d suggest learning more about Twitter. This training resource on using Twitter is a guide I feel accomplishes this quite well. It’s a small investment of about $47 bucks I think but it’s well worth getting and taking the time to apply it.

#4 Where will me readers come from?

My first reaction to this question was “who cares!” But really, it is important to know. First of all, you aren’t creating a fan club here. You are making content to be found in search engines! Remember, every blog post you write has keywords people use to find your article. However, as you gain readership, even one person at a time, you develop a personal relationship with them and become a trusted resource, which in turn, also makes you a reliable search engine resource!

Patience! Work at it an you will reap rewards but YOU HAVE TO BE DILLIGENT AND PATIENT at the same time! Commonly, bloggers get frustrated and feel like they are talking to nobody because they aren’t getting comments. Trust me, just keep writing. Search engine focus on good, quality content. The more you write, the better you will get at it, and the more you will represent your website to search engines as an important resource to send its searchers to. 

#5 Why would anybody bother with what I have to say?

Simple answer: for the same reasons you are reading this blog post! I’m sure you will figure it out.

#6 How does all of this come together and help my business?

You may know the answers by now:

1. You want more new customers
2. You’d like to retain your existing customers
3. You want your website to make money for you somehow or pay for itself at least
4. You want a low-to-no cost marketing solution
5. You would like to be known as the town expert with what you do and grow by word-of-mouth
6. Your blog creates a personal relationship with new clients or customers
7. Everyone on the planet is recycling their phone book so where else will they look for what you do?

8. …you fill in the rest…

Final Lessons

Here’s what this blog post did for me:

1. Who is my target audience? Owners of websites and blogs.
2. What should I write about? The most common questions they want answers to.
3. When will people find my blog posts? Via my newsletter, Twitter, MySpace and searches for this topic.
4. Where will my readers come from? Search engines, blog subscribers, people who had this post sent to them to check out.
5. Why would anyone bother with what I have to say? Seriously? Just kidding.
6. How does all of this come together and help my business?  I help you and you help me by either using my services or telling others to use my services.

Make sure you share the love and give me your feedback. I’d love to hear from you and your experience with this lesson.

To get Google Analytics, you must first have a Google Account set up first. Once you have an account, sign up for Google Analytics.

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This video is a step-by-step demonstration on just how to get it done.

IMPORTANT!  If 6×6 Design manages your website and performs all technical changes for you, simply copy and paste the tracking code you get on sign-up and email it to support@6×6design.com.  Once installed, it takes about 24 hours before tracking results begin. To view your stats, just log back into Google Analytics.

All others: If you have admin access to your website code (or admin priviledges for WordPress), then you can edit the HTML or PHP files on your website to install the tracking code yourself. Make sure it is placed just before the closing BODY tag. For WordPress admin’s, install the tracking code serial number only in the Analytics plug-in and enable. This will insert the code on every page for you.

If you’d like to have Google Analytics on your website, first get yourself a free Google Account. I’ve whipped together a quick video on just how to do it – as of this date anyway! Once you have it, go to the next post about getting a Google Analytics account.

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Blogging

In Part 3, we wrapped up how the meta data can be edited on each and every blog post and pages of the website. By now you should understand the point of doing all of this work: to broaden the search efforts of your website and allow the opportunity to have more than one landing page appear in the search results for many different ket terms of your website. You see, most people have websites that only focus on the home page. The home page is important, but not tweaking the other pages is a missed opportunity. You can have this edge over some of your online competitors!

This last tutorial addresses taking the knowledge you’ve gained so far and applying it to the blog on your website. Blogs are very popular in search results, often because their content is updated and linked to often. You should seriously take advantage of the blog’s power to help your website edge over your online competitors. I’ve already made a You Tube video tutorial on blogging for an automotive website group so I suggest visiting it before watching this video. Regardless of the industry you’re in, the blogging concepts in the video are universal.

To finalize this tutorial, you might be feeling a little overwhelmed by all of this information and hesitant when it comes to applying it. I understand. This is my business it it has taken years to learn what I know. If you feel that your time is better spent elsewhere BUT feel doing this stuff is important, you may want to consider my consultation services to manage your SEO for you. I’d be happy to offer you an estimate. You can contact me here or call 877-504-7483.

DON’T FORGET!! Share the love and and leave me your feedback below!

More on Meta Data

In Part 2, we introduced you to the SEO plug-in. Now we’ll put it into action and see how it affects the page content, and more importantly, how search engines and people will view your changes.

We’ll also talk about Heading tags. Heading tags are meta data you control to show the hierarchy of the page’s content. In fact, the title of this page is an H1 title, the “More on Meta Data” is an H2 title. Most people have learned to use it for formatting the size of the font – not what it’s for at all!  Title tages like H1, H2, H3 etc. provide information on the structural hierarchy of a document. It facilitates accessibility as well as web code standards. In most cases, using this order of heading identification will make your document easier for not only your readers, but also search engine spiders browsing your content as well. Go to Part 4 here.

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Meta Data in the Source Code

In Part 1 of this tutorial, we did some searches on our example website using key phrases to see how Google ranked the website for that search phrase. We also saw how the title meta tag and meta description are used in the actual search results and how they influence how the page was indexed in the first place.

In Part 2, we’ll see how you can make the needed meta adjustments to each and every pages of your website, including blog posts, using a plug-in installed to do just that very thing. It is called the All-In-One SEO Pack plug-in created by Semper Fi Web Design for WordPress. There are several SEO plug-ins for WordPress but I find this one works best for controlling individual page meta content. This tutorial does not cover every aspect of this plug-in, just what is required for on-page optimization by the page editor.

Understand that meta data, or as I like to refer to it, “content in the source code for search engines”, is not the only solution or technique to help your page ranking in the search results. It is merely one way to help search engine identify what may be on your web pages – that’s it! It IS NOT a guaranteed way to get your pages listed. But as I said, this is just one brick of dozens in the building of our wall, but every brick is as important as the other when combined to complete the construction.

The next video will show you an introduction to the All-In-One SEO Pack plug-in. We’ll get into more detail on this too in Part 3.

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How Do Search Engines See Your Website?

This article series is broken into 4 parts, all with videos, and dedicated to all of you who have a website built in WordPress. Why? It’s not just any website. It’s the world’s leading (and open source) blogging platform. The best-of-the-best in this world use and trust WordPress; and now so do you.

Getting down to business: you have the ability to enhance the search effort of your website, whether you know it or not! This first video is an introductory to some basic search concepts. I’ll take you through a tour of the resources available to you as well as use a live website to demonstrate search results and how it is seen in the eyes of a search engine.

After watching the video and completing Part 1, be sure to give me your feedback! I’d like to know what you and other want to know in the future so be sure to leave a comment on this page. Go to Part 2 here.

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OK, you have a website now. If it’s through me, it’s likely built with WordPress as a Content Management System if done recently, or it’s a static page website built from scratch. Whatever you have, now you would like to see it perform.

Here’s a TOP 10 website start-up check list to be sure you’re getting the most of your website:

1. CONTENT! Be sure to complete the content of each page on your website! Try to have at least 200-300 words or more per page and place the most important words (keywords) in the page’s H1 title and within the first paragraph. Make sure you have the correct address and phone number as well.
2. GOOGLE ANALYTICS! If you haven’t done so already, sign up for Google Analytics to track your website visitors and trends. I can add the tracking code to your website for you.
3. GOOGLE LOCAL! You know that little map at the top of the search results? You can register your business for FREE to be included there! Just go to Google Local Business Center and sign up. It takes a little while sometimes to appear there so be patient.
4. B2B DIRECTORIES! To name a few that offer online registration and a link: Yelp.com, MerchantCircle.com, YellowPages.com, YellowBook.com and others. Most online directories are free, however many offer upgrades – be careful! Not every upgrade is worth-while. Use their free link for a year first. If it made any money for you, then considering upgrading. Other paid directories include Yahoo ($299/yr) and Business.com (also $299/yr). I’m not saying you need to get these but these ar higher quality directories and may be worth paying for, depending on your business type. Do some more research and see who else advertises with them first.
5. START BLOGGING ASAP! Your blog adds content so use it wisely. Be sure to watch my video about blogging here.
6. VIDEO! Know a kid with a digital video camera? Make a short (less than 10 minutes) You Tube “welcome” video of your business and staff and place it on the home page. You Tube is FREE and owned by Google and the description text used to describe the video is searchable too. Why do you think I have so many videos? Hmmm…
7. ADVERTISE YOUR WEB ADDRESS! Make sure your customer know you have a website. In fact, make it a part of your regular conversation. It’s easy: “Did you know I have a new website? I run specials on there so check it out”.
8. DISPLAY YOUR WEBSITE PUBLICALLY! Place signs around your place of business, put your webs address on your business cards, make flyers with the web address on it, place specials on a web page or blog page, and encourage them to leave testimonials on your website. This will quickly build returning website visitors.
9. GET INVOLVED WITH FORUMS AND BLOGS! To quickly get some traffic to your website, participating in other blogs and forums and sharing good quality and relevant information with them is a great way to pass along a link to your site.
10. MONITOR YOUR WEBSITE TRAFFIC! In step#2, I mentioned getting Google Analytics for your website. Be sure to go to it regularly and see how people are finding and navigating your website. This data can help you spot trends and may suggest needed changes or updates to your website.

If you haven’t done so already, consider upgrading your static website to a WordPress Content Management System website.This would allow you to have total control of your website WITHOUT needed to know about code, servers, uploading, or anything else involved with creating web pages. It is a simple do-it-yourself system.

WordPress is an open source blogging platform. But blogging is such a small part of it’s potential. I love this platform mainly because it offers a SEO optimized website almost out of the box. With some tweaking, it’s a well-oiled search engine machine and user-friendly for just about anybody administering it.

If you’re interested in having 6×6 Design upgrading your website to WordPress CMS, give me a call at 877-504-7483 or send me an email and I’ll give you a free estimate asap.

Now get to work!

In Part 1 of this introductory tutorial series, we used an example business type to discover how to create an overall theme for the example website, “John’s Auto Repair”. In this article, we’ll learn to use some free and simple tools to help confirm our keywords are good to use and maybe even find others we didn’t think of.

By far, my favorite tool to use is Google Keywords. This tool is actually to help users figure out what keywords would work best for Pay Per Click campaigns. But I like to use it to spot popularity of words, monthly search volume using them, etc. So to use it to help John’s auto shop website, let’s use this tool to see just how much these words are used in a search. I typed in “auto repair” on the first line then “Penfield NY” on the next line.

Enter one key word or phrase per line

The results will filter a long list of actual search result in the last month using those terms. Notice “auto repair” is quite popular! But using just this key phrase would mean John is trying to compete with the entire world of auto repair – not a wise choice.

Google's results for your search for keywords and phrases

Looking down this list, other related search terms are also displayed. The key here is NOT to pick the most popular keywords and phrases, instead, try to find a way to make use of several popular and not-so-popular terms together. The more specific your keywords are to your website, the more likely you will get great search results!

So for John’s website, I want to be sure to include “auto repair” in his title because I certainly know people are using those words when searching, but just not by itself. I want to combine “auto repair” with “Penfield” and “NY” or “New York”.  If you remember from the last article, without doing any research, I already mentioned what I would use in John’s home page title:  “Auto Repair Penfield NY | John’s Auto Repair”.

What About Titles for the Other Pages of the Website?

John will have services he’d like his customers to know about, therefore he will need more pages to describe them – all separately! The home page established the website’s main theme (or book title and location inside the book store) but the sub pages need their own titles (or chapters of a book).  If his first service page is about brakes, then keywords describing brake servicing, auto repair, and Penfield should all be in the title too. For example: “Brake Service Penfield | John’s Auto Repair”. Notice the use of the “pipe” character between the key phrases. This divided the key terms and avoids the use of what are known as “stop words” like: “in, the, at, and” etc.  Stop words is the name given to words which are filtered out prior to, or after, processing of natural language text.  So help out by not using them in your page titles.

What Keywords are Your Competitors Using?

Another interesting and free tool is called a Keyword Cloud.  This tool is great for looking to see word density on a page. Just find your competitor highest in the free search results for the search terms you want to be found for, copy the URL (the entire website address in the address bar) and paste into the search bar. What’s shown next is a visual representation of how dense the words are on the page as well as their placement. Now try other sites in the search results. You may notice the sites with the higher keyword density sometimes appear higher in the search results.

Now before you get all excited here, stuffing your content with search keywords may not necessarily help you. In fact, it could hurt you if you over do it. The last thing you want to do is make it obvious you’re using those words to enhance your search. The copy reads bad to people and search engines alike. What you do want to do with this tool is find a correct range of keyword density and try to keep your as close as possible and a little higher than the competitors.

I hope you found this series helpful. Again, keyword usage  is only a small part of the world of search optimization, but a very important part none-the-less. Feel free to leave me your thoughts an discoveries of your own research.

In the last article, I talked about introductory SEO titled “Search Engine Optimization and Your Business 101” where i focused on an understanding of search engine use and how content impacts your website search results. In this article, I want take this to the next level and focus on how to run a simple “do-it-yourself” approach to researching your website’s keywords and content.

To do this, we’ll use an example business and come up with keywords to make a list of and consider using. Note is said “consider” using. Not every word you think of can or should be used. Don’t worry, we’ll get there and explain that more! Something important to note here: when people search for something, they search using words describing the topic and location.

Keyword Discovery

Let’s call the example business “John’s Auto Repair” and say his repair shop is in Penfield, NY. If I was hired to perform SEO on John’s website, the very first step is to identify his website theme and specific content details. Here’s what I’d list to figure out keywords to use:

• Theme: Auto Repair
• Location: Penfield, NY
• Services: Alignments, Brakes, Tune-ups, Diagnostics, Import and Domestic service

Something important to note here: when people search for something, they search using words describing the topic and location.

If you remember from the last article, I said a website is like a book when it comes to organizing content. The title of this website IS NOT to be “John’s Auto Repair”! If people knew who John was, and that he had an auto repair shop, they wouldn’t have to search for him now would they? No, John wants a website for advertising his shop in the free (organic) search results to new customers or maybe those looking for specific services he does. So what should the title be? Well to know this is to know how the title is used in a search.

Selecting a Page Title

The text that appears in the blue link within the search results is actually the website or web page title!

The link shown was clicked already but it shows the actual website page title for this auto repair shop in Rochester NY

Underneath that is the page description text put in place by either the search engine or the website developer.  An SEO specialist or any knowledgeable web developer will create a page title and description for every page within the website’s code.

You will also see this in the top of the browser window:

Web page title is always shown at the top. This example uses Internet Expoler's browser.

The title of the website generalizes the entire website and should be something different on every page of the website. The reason being is to identify the content on each page of the site. The added benefit is having more potential pages showing up in the free search results.

You can see we just avoided a very BIG common mistake already. Most newbies would have name the website home page after the name of John’s business. Instead we learned that people who don’t know John will search for repair shops in his area. His business name does contain two important search keywords “auto repair” but without a location added to his page title, he would be competing globally for the search term “auto repair!

In this case, I would name the title of John’s website page: “Auto Repair Penfield NY | John’s Auto Repair”.  Notice I used the main keywords first then the business name last. In fact, the business name doesn’t really need to be there but it does add more keywords in this case. Using keywords too many times can backfire too and get you penalized or even banned from the search engine altogether for spamming! In the case of the title, the keywords shouldn’t be used more than three times each nor the search engines may consider you as a spammer!

In Part 2 of this topic, we’ll look at free online tools to see what keywords people actually use when they search and whether or not they could benefit you!