A blog for truly small businesses
Getting page one search results – the top 4 things you must do
Are you getting page one search results?
- Remember your website visitors are more important than the robots/computers that read your content. Above all, make your content of value to the people looking to you for solutions, products or services.
- Place your primary key word phrase in your title. For example in this post my keyword focus is “getting page one search results“.
- Include your keyword phrase in the first 100 words of your main content.
- Use your keyword phrase in the Image title and alt tags. (move your mouse over the image below to see the words we used on this image)
This is IMPORTANT NEWS for small businesses and website owners
If you are spending time marketing your products on Facebook you should STOP NOW and read this!
Attention Business / Website owners: As I have said all along, FACEBOOK IS NOT YOUR FRIEND – they DO NOT WANT YOU TO BUILD TRAFFIC ON YOUR OWN WEBSITE THEY ONLY WANT YOU TO BUILD TRAFFIC FOR THEM!!!
As of September 30th 2011 you’ll no longer be able to send an update to fans using Facebook Messages. (for example, your blog posts will no longer show up as status updates).
We want you to connect with your audience in the most effective ways possible, and updates that go to Facebook Messages may end up unseen in the “Other” folder.
For those of you that say “well gee so what,it’s a free service” keep this in mind – if you focus your marketing energy
building interaction on FACEBOOK and not YOUR WEBSITE you will be providing an excellent place for your competitors to advertise!
If you do not have an interactive website then figure out how to get one – start telling your Fan Page fans to subscribe to your WEBSITE NOT YOUR FACEBOOK FAN PAGE.
Make it easy for them to get your website posts by email instead (see our home page).
We will be dropping our pages within the next 6 months and working with our clients to do the same. As an SEO Expert I cannot, in good concience let my clients invest their hard earned marketing dollars building a place for someone else to get rich! PLEASE SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE!!!!
Why I haven’t posted for awhile about Search Engine Optimization or anything else…
Well, there is only one reason – I’ve been busy!!
I am pleased to say that our ideas and suggestions on search engine optimization and social media marketing work!
That has meant a lot of referral business coming our way. I’m not complaining, I just wanted my followers to know I have not forgotten you. I am still gathering data and have some articles in the works that address the latest trends I’m seeing in “SEO and social media marketing”.
For today I just want to mention that we have been “right on” about the concept of using social media to drive traffic to your site instead of using your site to drive traffic to social media sites.
We have helped several clients leverage Facebook and Twitter by implementing technology for them that allows us to teach them how to post on their own website and let it feed to their social sites. This allows them to stay in touch with their customers that prefer to get news via Facebook or Twitter while building quality inbound links to their own website.
If you know how to get a “feed link” for your website or blog there is a tool that makes “feeding it” to your Twitter and Facebook pages relatively easy. We posted a quick how to in the FAQs of our do it yourself websites for small businesses website: http://betterwebsitebuilders.com/blog/can-my-posts-show-up-on-twitter-and-facebook/
Happy New Year! Make your website have it’s best year ever!
We are working on several minor changes in our SEO strategies. Of course, the biggest challenge continues to be how to use Facebook instead of Facebook using us. The other big challenge is that Google is really focused on “local” results.
So how do we deal with this? Well, first of all you have to look at your business – is it a local business? You’ve got it made! Just focus on adding content to your site that helps Google to realize how your business meets the needs of the locals. Make sure to include the name of your town/service area in your content where it makes sense. Use keyword phrases like “handyman services for the Portland, Oregon area” or “fitness training in Vancouver, WA” or “Home cooked food served at your favorite Vancouver, WA Restaurant“. If you are posting this content on another website (say you have a blog on Yelp or you are posting it on your Facebook page) make sure that you use these keyword phrases and make them links to your website – this really helps Google to understand what your website is about. You also need to “claim” all of your free local listings.
Are you a national company? No worries! You still serve customers in their local areas! No, you can’t claim a local listing on many sites unless you have a verfiable physical address and telephone number… but don’t worry! You can still use those keywords that tell the world you are available in their area! Create content on your website that is directed toward each of your “local” markets – be cautious about “duplicate content” though! Find unique ways to write interesting content on your site where you can be very “local”. For example you could have a page on your widget site called “Why Our Widgets are Popular in Topeka Kansas”. Now do your homework! Find out what makes people that use (or would use) your product in Topeka Kansas unique and write an article on this page that addresses them directly.
Speaking of Facebook…. yep – they have 540M (more by the time you read this) users and growing exponentially… you cannot ignore them but you can make sure that anything you post there drives traffic to your website and make sure that the things you do on your website get your content posted on Facebook in a manner that drives traffic to your website. For example, don’t say “become a fan on Facebook” and send people to your Facebook fan page – instead, say “Like” this page (article, whatever) and then that page/article/content will be highlighted on the person “liking” it’s Facebook wall!
Want to have a “pretty Facebook URL”? (i.e. http://www.facebook.com/seodominance) just get yourself 25 Fans and you will be able to create your “alias”.
How do you get fans? Use your website tools such as your blog and newsletters – INVITE them! Ask them! People LOVE to help … let them!
Look for more on these subjects in upcoming posts. If you have some specific questions please post a reply to this post and I’ll do my best to answer.
Keyword rich content – do the right things and win the search engine optimization game
When you are adding words to your website, whether in a blog post, an article, your home page, product descriptions etc, you are creating “content”. You will often hear me talk about “keyword rich content” – what I mean is, use the keywords you want to get listed in the search engines for as many times as appropriate – but don’t use them so much that your readers will be irritated.
If you use this as a guide you will insure long term success. Here are some basics about letting the search engines know what keywords are important on the particular article (product description, blog post etc):
- Use your keyword phrase in the title
- Use your keyword phrase at least once in the first 100 words
- Highlight the keyword phrase at least once using bold and/or italics and, if you know how, make sure your keywords are used in <h1>, <h2> and <h3> tags.
- If appropriate, use the keywords to link to another relative article or product on your website
Use Title Tags and Alt Tags on your images and links – include your keywords (if it makes sense) but don’t use the same title and alt tags over and over again on the same page. (I’ll talk more about title and alt tags in a future post)
As the search engine computers get programmed for more and more accurate analysis of the millions of pages they are indexing and listing, it will become more and more important to “do the right thing” on your website and not just use your keywords a gazillion times.
Inbound links from relative, authoritative (meaning the search engines see those sites as consistently offering valued information) are becoming critical. The way to get these inbound links is to provide content on your website that makes people that have relevant (complimentary) websites (blogs, review sites etc) want to link to you.
Another way to get these quality inbound links is to provide the tools for people to share them on “authoritative” websites. My earlier post about the Facebook “like” button is one way to do this, but there are others I will discuss in future posts.
