There are a lot of businesses that have developed around helping people get to the top of the search engines. For popular mass market products and high margin items the competition to gain top billing in organic search has lead to intense competition. This has resulted in constant innovation, and many efforts to out smart Google and the other search engines.
At one time, just getting your meta tags right was enough. Then keyword stuffing came into vogue with some Viagra sites repeating their selected keyword hundreds of times. That’s why you now want to use your keyword from 1-4% of the time today. The search engines are constantly changing their algorithms to keep ahead of the Black Hatters, who try to game the system.
Today with the emphasis on back links, there are black hat and less offensive but still “gray hat” techniques used by some to cheat there way to the top. These include various services that can get you thousands of back links for a fee, or article spinners that use software to automatically rewrite you articles so they appear to be different. And many more.
Most main street businesses don’t need to use black or gray hat techniques to get to the top of the search engines in their local areas. While these techniques can work for a while, they are almost always shut down by changes by the search engines. That’s because the goal of the search engine is to be as useful as possible for the searcher. If they offer up an article that is clearly pigeon English, they loose face, and eventually market share.
In the long run, you will earn your top listing by providing useful information to your prospective customers in as many venues as possible like your web page, Squidoo, Hub pages, and through blogging and article marketing.
These approaches will work now and for the long haul. The sooner you build a base of such useful content, the sooner you will gain an insurmountable lead over your competitors.
Right now, even at this seemingly late date in the evolution of the internet, in most industries, including home staging, your competitors are asleep at the switch. You have a temporary advantage if you are the first mover in your industry, in your marketplace.
But this Blog and the ebook I am preparing based on the lessons I’ve discussed of the past several week will begin to reach out beyond the internet marketing world into main street. You may already be behind. If so it’s all the more important that you develop a plan of action. Beware of those who will try to sell you black hat and gray hat solutions. While they may work for a while, they won’t in the long run.
One final comment on the subject. Many firms will try to sell you a package of services that include getting you listed on the “Directories.” This used to be important, but is not anywhere near as important today. If you set up a back link from a Squidoo Lens to your website, Google will find you. In fact if you merely tweet a reference to your website on Twitter, Google will find your site.
Their search bots are all over these services and once the see the link to your site they will find you. In my opinion, there is no reason to pay for such services.
Setting up a web page is only the beginning to online marketing. Now you need to get it seen by potential customers. This used to be challenging in many markets, but there has been a big change in what matters. Today, what matters is being seen on the Google Places Page, and you don't even need to have a web site to do that. (although you should.)
The good news is that its free, and if you know what you are doing, you can maneuver yourself to the top listing in many markets.
That's one of the skill sets I bring to the table. If you would like to get your Google Places Page properly set up send me an email at enetwal@gmail.com and put "Free Initial Evaluation" or something similar in the subject line.
Be sure to include your current web site and contact info.
Our recent series that started out as an investigation into how to get your business web site to the top of the local search engine rankings has brought us to the topic of article marketing.
This is an important topic on its own. So much so that I have started a new web site dedicated to the topic called Article Marketing Hints.
Actually the web site is http://ArticleMarketingHint.com because someone beat me to the punch and grabbed the url with the extra s on the end.
My most recent post there discusses 6 tips for writing better articles. I encourage you to stop on over and read the article. I will continue to develop that site with more and more articles on article writing.
Note that I created two back links above. One as anchor text and the other as a straight url, so you would know how to get to the site. I used the plural in the anchor text as I want to be found when people use both the singular and the plural forms.
When you go to the site you will see an eBook for sale in the right sidebar. If you were to look at the offer by clicking on the image of the book, you will discover that I am offering a bonus video series with the book. This series offers some excellent tips on how to write effective articles in an easy to follow video format.
It’s very well done and useful for newbie and intermediate article marketers. I know I learned a trick or two.
The ebook is written by Mike Steup. Mike is one of the young up and comers in the internet marketing arena. He shares a number of insights that will certainly help you get going on the right track as you begin to promote your business with internet marketing.
Setting up a web page is only the beginning to online marketing. Now you need to get it seen by potential customers. This used to be challenging in many markets, but there has been a big change in what matters. Today, what matters is being seen on the Google Places Page, and you don't even need to have a web site to do that. (although you should.)
The good news is that its free, and if you know what you are doing, you can maneuver yourself to the top listing in many markets.
That's one of the skill sets I bring to the table. If you would like to get your Google Places Page properly set up send me an email at enetwal@gmail.com and put "Free Initial Evaluation" or something similar in the subject line.
Be sure to include your current web site and contact info.
You have decided to use the power of internet article marketing to draw eyes and back links to your web site. Good idea. Article marketing can be a very effective tool to accomplish both objectives. But where do you start?
Good Question.
Just as a distillery needs to first gather grapes and then run them though a series of steps before turning them into a fine brandy, you must first gather your ideas, before you write your article.
Before you begin
Whether you are brewing a single article or a series of them, the prerequisite is deciding what your topic is, and understanding why you are writing.
Your writing will enjoy greater clarity of purpose when each article has a clear singular keyword or phrase. Whether writing one or multiple articles it’s best to identify each of your keyword phrases in advance before you begin. They will help you form your thoughts, and may encourage you to explore nuances you may have otherwise ignored.
When writing an internet marketing article, your objective is to get eyes and or back links to your site. To do that, you need to get accepted into an internet article directory and then get noticed and republished by ezine editors before you’ll get read by end users. That’s a lot of different audiences. While you know what’s in it for you, begin the writing process thinking about what’s in it for your ultimate reader as well.
Now that you are clear on your topic and why you are writing, you are ready to begin the next phase.
Brainstorming
As you mull over your keyword and topic, ideas will come to you. That’s the main benefit of the prior exercise. Once your conscious mind is clear on the task at hand, so too is the subconscious. It will send you flashes of brilliance that may surprise you.
You want to capture those ideas. Even the bad ones, but search out the brilliant ones. Bad ideas can morph into good ones. Don’t judge, record. Write them down. Use whatever system that works for you. Long hand, computer, voice recorder, whatever.
Think about possible titles. What would grab people’s attention? Remind yourself of your readers. Who are they? Why would they want to read your article? What do they want to know?
What is the essential one element of your article? If it had to be just one sentence, what would it be? What are the key facts you want to share? Write them down, or list where you will look them up.
What will your call to action be? What do you want them to actually do when they are done reading your article? How are you going to get them to do it? What are you going to tell them that will make a difference in their lives?
This process can take days or 30 minutes. The results will vary by the amount of time you can devote. If you can, daydream about your topic while driving or doing other work. Your subconscious can be a powerful tool. What every time you have, use it to enlarge your topic.
In the next step, you are going to tie it down and begin to do some pruning.
The Outline.
We’ve all been taught the writing outline format since grade school. They are easy. You already know the main parts to your article. It will have a title, an introduction, a body and a close. And in the case of internet article marketing it will also have a resource box.
See, you are half done already. While it may vary, let’s assume there are three main points to the body.
• Title
• Introduction
• Body
o A
o B
o C
• Close
• Resource Box
Review your brainstorming notes. Pick the three most important ideas that must be in the body. If you have more that three, which can be grouped together?
If you absolutely cannot fit everything into three groups, add or subtract. It’s your article. By trying to nestle ideas into groups, you define the essence of your article.
You then assign an order within and among the groups in your outline. Once that’s done, you’re done with the outline. You can always add more, but at this point, you have captured and ordered the essence of your thoughts. If this were a book, rather than an article you would perhaps need to get more detailed. But it’s not, so it’s time to write that first draft.
Setting up a web page is only the beginning to online marketing. Now you need to get it seen by potential customers. This used to be challenging in many markets, but there has been a big change in what matters. Today, what matters is being seen on the Google Places Page, and you don't even need to have a web site to do that. (although you should.)
The good news is that its free, and if you know what you are doing, you can maneuver yourself to the top listing in many markets.
That's one of the skill sets I bring to the table. If you would like to get your Google Places Page properly set up send me an email at enetwal@gmail.com and put "Free Initial Evaluation" or something similar in the subject line.
Be sure to include your current web site and contact info.
Do Your Internet Marketing Articles Meet this 5 Question Test?
If you ignore the five essentials to effective internet marketing article writing, you may as well not waste your time. Article writing is a powerful tool. When done well, it will attract a lot of eyes and back links to your web site. Do it poorly, and your results will be meager.
Ideally, it should let the “right” readers know the information in the article is for them, and it should intrigue them to at least take a look. The goal of a headline or title is to get the reader to read the first line. If they don’t, your article fails its purpose.
Specifically, you want to catch your ideal prospects attention. A too cute title may catch a lot of attention, but if the people attracted aren’t candidates for what you are selling, in the final analysis you are just wasting their time. So while you want to be provocative, focus on that which would be appropriate for your specific audience.
Once you have them reading your first line, make sure it’s powerful enough to carry them into the first whole paragraph and beyond.
A good internet marketing article is succinctly focused on one topic. That topic may have multiple parts, but they are all specifically tied to one idea. As internet marketers, that idea should be a single Keyword or Keyword Phrase.
People will search for articles in article directories by keyword, and so you want them to be able to find your article. When they publish your article, you want to get back links to your web site based on that keyword. Thus it is imperative that you decide specifically which keyword you are trying to rank for, before you write the first word.
It goes without saying that the keyword and the article should be directly related to the site you are referring people to, or again you would be wasting everyone’s time.
If possible you should include your keyword in your title. This will resonate with people who are searching for articles on your keyword. But don’t force it. Your primary objective is to get people to read your article. Including the keyword is a distinct plus, but not mandatory.
You want to use the keywords as often as possible within the article, but again don’t overdo it. Too many internet marketing articles are overstuffed with the keywords to the point that they don’t read well. So rather than trying to meet some artificial keyword density, concentrate on writing a readable article but do try to use your keywords wherever appropriate.
Provide your readers with value. If an internet marketing article is to get picked up and republished elsewhere, it will be because it caught an editor’s eye and delivered content worth sharing with their readers.
People respond well to facts, figures and statistics as long as they are not overwhelming. Anecdotes and stories that make a point enliven articles. Rather than adding a lot of adjectives to an article, focus on your verbs. Active verbs and a positive message are always welcome.
The goal of an internet marketing article is to drive people and robots to your website. Your resource box is therefore critical to the success of your article. If you are not allowed to include anchor text in the article itself, it is essential that you do so in the resource box. Repeat your keyword and link it to your target site. But do so creatively.
As much as possible, develop your resource box as a continuation of your article. If it flows as thought it were a continuation of the article above it, a larger portion of your readers will read it as well. And then be sure to include a call to action. Let your readers know what step you want them to take.
If you have been able to hold their attention from start to finish of the article, it is only logical that they will want to follow on to the next step, by visiting your web site, blog or take whatever additional step you desire.
If you write your internet marketing articles with these five questions in mind, you will be rewarded with lots of traffic and back links to your web sites.
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[Below is a sample of a resource box I will be testing when I post this article on the article directories.]
Setting up a web page is only the beginning to online marketing. Now you need to get it seen by potential customers. This used to be challenging in many markets, but there has been a big change in what matters. Today, what matters is being seen on the Google Places Page, and you don't even need to have a web site to do that. (although you should.)
The good news is that its free, and if you know what you are doing, you can maneuver yourself to the top listing in many markets.
That's one of the skill sets I bring to the table. If you would like to get your Google Places Page properly set up send me an email at enetwal@gmail.com and put "Free Initial Evaluation" or something similar in the subject line.
Be sure to include your current web site and contact info.
Article Marketing as it has evolved on the internet is a classic win-win-win-win institution that has become one of the backbones of the internet. There are four essential players in the article marketing game, all of whom benefit, each in their own way.
Like any market, article marketing is a business of supply and demand. There are end users, who get material from their local vendor who in turn gets material from their wholesaler, who in turns gets material from individual producers.
Unlike most markets, the transfer of goods in the article marketing arena is largely free. The end user wants free access to information. The magic of the article marketing model is that it has created economic incentives to all the parties to meet that demand.
There are many places online for people to get information. These include static web sites, blogs, forums, ezines, ebooks, etc. The producers of these sites, blogs etc are frequently monetizing their efforts with products and services they sell directly or on behalf of others or by various forms of advertising revenue.
Several of these, blogs and ezines in particular require a constant source of new material to keep their site fresh and to attract information seekers with the expectation that a certain percentage of them will also take a revenue producing action. The challenge for these venues is coming up with new material on a regular basis.
Their options are to write it themselves, hire it out or find a free resource of relevance to their specific niche of readers.
Article Directories have emerged to fill that role. They are the wholesalers of articles across a vast array of topics and specialties. They recruit article submissions from individual writers and group them in easy to search categories for the blog writer to search.
Most offer this service free of charge to the blog writers and anyone else who just wants to research a given topic. They make their money the same way most of the blog and ezine writers do. They usually have Google Adsense ads on their site as well as other advertising. They sometimes offer additional premium services for article writers and users as well, but these vary widely.
To be successful, article directories have found it necessary to be editors. They want their customers on both ends to benefit from the equation. To assure this they develop specific rules for the type of material they host on their site and editorial guidelines. These vary by individual article directory. Article writers must meet these standards to be accepted into the directory. This in turn assures a quality product for the blogger and their readers.
One of the most frequent editorial restraints is to contain blatant advertising. Most article directories have strict rules that prohibit advertising except in a section added to the end of the article called the Resource Box.
So who produces all this free editorially up to snuff material? What’s in it for them?
There are three primary motivators for the authors. Some are born writers who just need to write to express themselves. Or perhaps they are motivated to establish themselves as an expert in a given arena or niche.
Another major group are individual business people who seek to inform prospective customers about their product or service. In some cases they may share the desire to brand themselves as experts.
The motivation for most businesses lies in the utilization of the resource box. Most article directories allow authors to include two or more hyperlinks in this appendix to their article. These offer two major benefits to the submitting business. They can send people to your web site, called “traffic” in internet circles. They can also serve as back links to a specific page on their web site. These back links are helpful in getting attention from search engines and serve to help increase the targeted web sites ranking
As articles get picked up more and more bloggers and ezines these back links appear in more and more places increasing the relevance of the site in the eyes of the search engines. They are in some sense votes for the targeted web sites.
As importantly for many businesses is the traffic they bring as more and more people read the articles and go to the sites where a certain percentage will buy products or take other desired actions.
This entire arrangement is interdependent on each of the elements. The fact that is has evolved as an essentially free service for the most part is one of the marvels of the internet. The end user gets information, the blogger gets readers, the article directory traffic that they convert to revenue through ads, and the authors who get recognitions, traffic and search engine ranking. A win-win-win-win situation.
Setting up a web page is only the beginning to online marketing. Now you need to get it seen by potential customers. This used to be challenging in many markets, but there has been a big change in what matters. Today, what matters is being seen on the Google Places Page, and you don't even need to have a web site to do that. (although you should.)
The good news is that its free, and if you know what you are doing, you can maneuver yourself to the top listing in many markets.
That's one of the skill sets I bring to the table. If you would like to get your Google Places Page properly set up send me an email at enetwal@gmail.com and put "Free Initial Evaluation" or something similar in the subject line.
Be sure to include your current web site and contact info.
So far in this sequence I have stressed the need to get your on site ducks in a row if you want your web site to appear at the top of the search engine rankings. This is a critical first step that most people never get around to. Have you? If not, I still offer my Wart Services to analyze your site. Then make the changes. They matter.
The second part of my sequence has been focused on back links and how to get them. We’ve talked about anchor text, and several social networking sites you can use to build backlinks to your site. The advantage of these sites is your own ability to custom create your own backlinks. This give you control over the actual keywords used in the anchor text and where they link on your site. This latter control allows you to direct links to internal pages, which bolsters your standing in the eyes of the Search Engines.
Today, we start a series on the most important way to build links and traffic to your web site, article marketing.
I will explain how it works tomorrow, and then in subsequent posts explain the four things all articles must have, how to create an outline for your articles, easy ways to get you creative juices flowing, what to do before submitting to article directories, and some red hot tips on how to get your articles read, and perhaps most importantly, how to write a resource box that makes people click. I may even offer suggestions on what to do if you hate to write.
Article writing requires a bit of work and it’s like slow feed fertilizer. The results of article marketing take time to build. The plus of article marketing is that it does ultimately flourish and will generate an exponential growth in the number of back links to your site. And as we have demonstrated, backlinks matter. They matter even more when they are coming from a wide variety of places and grow over time.
The essential mathematics of article marketing comes from posting a single article with an article directory service. Once it is accepted there, you have a back link to your site from a generally high ranking resource. But even better, as first a couple and then many more people find your article and post it on their blogs, newsletters etc, you start getting back links from many different places. So instead of having one back link, you may now have six or sixty.
There are thousands of article directories, some of which are very large. You can post the same article to more than one directory, multiplying again the number of potential backlinks you can create for your self with one half hour of writing. Since these articles stay on the directories indefinitely, it’s possible that an article you write today could be published off and on over the next five or ten years.
A disciplined approach of writing an article a day or even an article a week can over a period of a year or two lead to thousands and tens of thousands of backlinks. That level of backlinks could put most people on the top of their respective niche even in highly competitive niches. And put them there to stay.
The best part of article writing is that it is essentially a free way of building your standings. Although as we will learn, there are some worthwhile paid services that can be real time savers.
One last tidbit for today. You don’t need to be a great writer to effectively use article marketing. So if the thought of writing scares you, don’t despair. The power of article writing is too significant to allow your lack of skills or fears to get in the way. We will discuss some options that will allow you to be successful without writing a single word.
Setting up a web page is only the beginning to online marketing. Now you need to get it seen by potential customers. This used to be challenging in many markets, but there has been a big change in what matters. Today, what matters is being seen on the Google Places Page, and you don't even need to have a web site to do that. (although you should.)
The good news is that its free, and if you know what you are doing, you can maneuver yourself to the top listing in many markets.
That's one of the skill sets I bring to the table. If you would like to get your Google Places Page properly set up send me an email at enetwal@gmail.com and put "Free Initial Evaluation" or something similar in the subject line.
Be sure to include your current web site and contact info.
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In my last posting, I spent some time describing Squidoo.com and how useful it can be as a source of quality backlinks to your site.
Squidoo offers you the opportunity to create your own backlinks that you can custom design. By that I am referring to your ability to use anchor text that uses precisely the keyword phrase you want to rank for, and the ability to direct that link to a specific page on your web site.
Since Squidoo is free to use, there is no reason why you can’t create multiple Lens, and add additional links to your site. From a search engine optimization standpoint it makes sense to have multiple short Lens rather than one long comprehensive one. So if a home stager wants to create a lens on staging a bedroom and another on staging a living room and a third on outdoor landscaping you now have three sources from which you can send links back to your web site. Within each lens you want to include a couple anchor text links to various pages on your site.
The power of Squidoo comes from it’s internal grouping system. Once you have created your lens, you want to join your lens to every relevant group you can. If you are a potter, you will want to sign up your lens with all the various pottery groups, as well as art and crafts groups and any others that make sense.
The search engines see Squidoo as a large web site with many different topics. Normally this would be negative as it’s not focused and many lens are not specifically relevant. However since your lens is connected and linked to internally via your group memberships and also by Squidoo’s own internal tagging system you are seen as part of all the groups you are associated with. The strength of your individual link is a product of all these relevant association within Squidoo. To learn more about the internal linking and groups within Squidoo get a copy of Squidoo Basics.
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A similar venue like Squidoo is the Hub Pages site. Go the www.hubpages.com. Set up an account there, and jump right in. The set up is different but similar to Squidoo. You will need to create a title of 120 characters or less, which becomes part of your url. Just as with Squidoo, you want it to consist of the keywords you want your own web site to rank for. So if you are following my advice on using geographical keywords you may want to name your site, CincinattiDryCleaning if you are a dry cleaner in Cincinatti.
Just like Squidoo, you want to create anchor texts in your hub pages. You can use much of the same material in your hub pages that you did on your Squidoo pages, but you want to rework it into a different format so it is distinctly different than the way it appears on Squidoo or anywhere else. Make it unique.
Now while you will be including links to various pages on your web site, you also want to create some links from your Hub pages to your Squidoo pages. That’s why we talked about Squidoo first.
Remember last week when we talked about “link juice.” Hub pages have a little less link juice than Squidoo. But they are still a highly ranked site, just not quite a big. Your link from Hub pages pours link juice into your Squidoo lens. This link juice accumulates there and is passed via your Squidoo lens to where it links, ie. your web site.
It is important that you maintain the one way nature of this linking. As we also discussed last week, if you reciprocate links the link juice cancels each other out. So for my purposes, I always link from my Hub Pages to my Squidoo pages and never the reverse. Since I have many different niches this rule keeps me out of trouble.
Which one you use to link to the other is less important, than that you make sure to keep the one way relationship alive. And please remember that means you cannot link from your web site to your Hub pages as this would create a circle and negate the benefit of all the links.
Next time I will begin to discuss why article marketing is so powerful.
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Two additional tidbits. I have had a lot of projects building up lately thus the delay in getting this post out. I am still doing my analysis of peoples web sites. But am now restricting myself to just four a week. These are very useful to people and I want to maintain my hands on service to as many people as I can. To get details go to http://cli.gs/7gH1Zr
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In addition to maintaining your web site and getting it set up for search engines, the most powerful thing you can do for yourself is to blog from your own wordpress blog. WordPress blogs are easy to use and free, but can be very bewildering because there are so many options in terms of themes, plug ins, widgets and settings. I have learned a lot about blogging from Mike Paetzold who is a master blogger. He just released a new “How to” eBook and video series Tuesday night and is offering $20 off until sometime Saturday. It’s called Word Press Made Easy and is a “must have” in my opinion. He walks you through all the plug ins and settings he uses on his plethora of blog sites. If you are going to blog, and you should, it is a good idea to copy a master blogger, until you learn enough on your own to make specific variations. With his help you can have your blog up and running and or re-tuned in about an hour. Well worth it, I promise you. http://cli.gs/mv5Whd
Setting up a web page is only the beginning to online marketing. Now you need to get it seen by potential customers. This used to be challenging in many markets, but there has been a big change in what matters. Today, what matters is being seen on the Google Places Page, and you don't even need to have a web site to do that. (although you should.)
The good news is that its free, and if you know what you are doing, you can maneuver yourself to the top listing in many markets.
That's one of the skill sets I bring to the table. If you would like to get your Google Places Page properly set up send me an email at enetwal@gmail.com and put "Free Initial Evaluation" or something similar in the subject line.
Be sure to include your current web site and contact info.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
We have established that to advance up the search engines your site needs to be set up properly in terms of on page factors, and also needs to get Back Links from other sites to boost your credibility. Ideally these backlinks should be in the form of anchor texts that highlight the specific keyword you want your page to rank for. For most locally based businesses, it also makes sense to have these keywords and anchor texts include your specific geography such as Home Staging Atlanta or Minneapolis Best Meat Market, etc.
One point I should have made already and didn’t is that these back links need to be one way backlinks. I’ve used the term “Link Juice” before. Imagine that a web site by linking to you is passing on to you some of their Link Juice. If they are a high value web site the back link may be a gallon jugs worth, if it’s a lower ranked site you might just get a pint. That’s if the link is one way to your site from theirs. If you return the favor, you have a hole in your bucket, dear Liza. The Link Juice leaks right back to where it came from. Now if you have a higher ranking than the person linking to you, you may actually loose juice in the process.
At one time it was all the rage to build reciprocal linking arrangements, and one of our readers reported just that after my last post. Unfortunately these are no longer wise moves in terms of search engine ranking. That said, they may still make sense if they send traffic and business from one market to another as part of a referral system. If that’s the case, you may well want to keep them even if they cost some “juice.” But don’t build reciprocal relationships hoping they will help out your search engine ranking. They won’t.
Nor can you set up a circle, where A links to B and B links to C and C in turn links to A. Such circles are readily detected by the search bots, even when inadvertent. So pals we may be, but mutual admiration societies are not the way to get ahead on the search engines.
So how do we get these one way links? There are a lot of ways actually. I mentioned a few to you last time and today we will take a closer look at one of my favorites, Squidoo.
Squidoo is one of many so called Web 2.0 sites, which merely means it is part of the recent wave of sites that allow visitors to interact with the site rather than just read it like a static web page.
There are four primary things I like about Squidoo. First it’s Free. Second, it allows you to put blatantly self promoting commercial messages on it. And thirdly, it’s relatively easy to use. A fourth factor is that is has a high page rank of 7, which means that back links from Squidoo to your site send you giant economy size bottles of Link juice, which is very nice indeed.
To get to Squidoo just go to www.squidoo.com. Once there, sign up for an account. It’s free and easy.
Once you have your account, you are going to create your first site, which Squidoo refers to as a lens. Perhaps the most important thing to remember when setting up your first lens is that what you name it is critical.
For my Minneapolis Meat Market, I want to name the Lens “Minneapolis Meat Market” – if that is the phrase that I want to rank for on the search engines. Now every lens on Squidoo needs to have a different name, so your favorite term may already be taken. If that is the case try adding hyphens between words, or an extra relevant word before or after your desired name.
Some times it is easier getting your Squidoo lens ranked high in the search engines than your main web site due to Squidoo’s high page rank and its tens of thousands of pages, many of which are new every day. The search engines are crawling all over Squidoo constantly, and they will find your new lens very soon after you publish it.
Once you have created your title, you need to fill in the introduction module. Here you want to repeat your keyword/title in anchor text with a link to the page on your web site you want to drive traffic to. So if you are Shar Sitter, one of my Home Staging Clients you may introduce your lens as: “Rooms with Style is a Minneapolis St Paul area Home Staging firm specializing is serving the South Metro Area etc etc…”
If you did a good job creating your web site’s meta tag description, you may want to use that here. It should have your keywords in it, and be a pretty good sales pitch while including the key geography you serve.
By using HTML code to create a link on “Minneapolis St Paul area Home Staging” as I did above, the search engine bots learn that the end link is about Minneapolis and St Paul Home Staging and they have good memories. This is called anchor text and we went over how to set up this HTML code a few messages ago.
This is one of the advantages of Squidoo. Since you are creating the link yourself, you can control the way the link is created. You always want to use anchor text links. The only exception is when you are specifically letting people know what your web site address is and even then, make sure you use anchor text elsewhere in the posting.
If you go to Shar’s site via the link above, you will see it doesn’t go to her home page. It could have, but instead I set it up to link to her page titled “services.” This is called internal linking because it links to an internal page on her web site. Google in particular likes this, and you get a little extra juice for your overall site because of it. Since you have control of the link creation on sites like Squidoo, it makes sense to create these internal links whenever you can.
At any rate, the goal is to use anchor text right away in the introductory portion of your Squidoo lens. That will serve as a powerful back link to your web site. Complete the first module with what other introductory material you feel appropriate.
I’m already at book length for this post. So let me quickly say that the rest of the lens can be simple or complex. It’s up to you. Squidoo uses modules. I tend to use their text modules and fill them with text and pictures. To insert pictures you will need to learn a tiche of HTML code, which is not difficult. You can search on Squidoo for a lens on HTML, there are several good ones. Alternatively, I publish an inexpensive ebook called HTML in Simple Terms for under $10. The advantage of the ebook is that you can print it out and keep it handy by your computer. I find it easier to look things up in print than online.
I also publish an eBook called Squidoo Basics. It costs $17 and will help get you acclimated to Squidoo quickly.
The thing to keep in mind about Squidoo, is that you can publish as many lens as you want. For link building purposes they don’t need to be fancy or even complete. But spend a little time on them and focus on one topic about your business. Create another lens to discusss another aspect. If you serve more than one town, you can be DryCleanersOmaha and OmahaDryCleaners or SouthOmahaDrycleaners. Etc. Each additional link of this sort will help increase your ranking for Omaha Dry Cleaners.
If you are a home stager, you might want to create a lens just for Realtors, and use the Lens as the place you make your special pitch to them. Just be sure to link back to the Realtor page on your main web site.
Once you get the hang of putting up pictures, and I promise you that learning the little bit of HTML code to do that is not difficult, you may want to create a before and after lens for each of your projects.
Just be sure to include back links in each new lens to your web site’s various pages and in no time you will discover than not only is your web site on the top of the search engines, so too will be a number of your Squidoo lens.
When your prospects find you not just on the top, but also number 2, 4, 6,7 & 8 on the listings, they get pre-sold pretty fast that you are the dominant player in your community.
Yes, it will take a little work. You may need to learn a couple new tricks, but with a bit of persistence you can do it.
Next week, we will look at a similar site called Hub pages and maybe a couple of others. If you have questions about today’s post be sure to leave a comment. As I did today, I will incorporate any questions into the next posting.
Setting up a web page is only the beginning to online marketing. Now you need to get it seen by potential customers. This used to be challenging in many markets, but there has been a big change in what matters. Today, what matters is being seen on the Google Places Page, and you don't even need to have a web site to do that. (although you should.)
The good news is that its free, and if you know what you are doing, you can maneuver yourself to the top listing in many markets.
That's one of the skill sets I bring to the table. If you would like to get your Google Places Page properly set up send me an email at enetwal@gmail.com and put "Free Initial Evaluation" or something similar in the subject line.
Be sure to include your current web site and contact info.
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Once you have your on-page ducks in a row in terms of search engine optimization the next step is to get back links to your site. All back links matter. They can all deliver traffic and most will be tracked by Google and the other search engines. Some back links are considered to be more valuable by Google however. These are back links from relevant authority sites.
There are two aspects to that. Relevance and authority.
If you are a home stager and get a back link from my favorite site on ice fishing it will not “weigh” as much in Google calculations of your rank as it would if it were coming from a site dealing with interior decorating. I don’t think I need to spend much more time on this aspect. The link is still worth having, just not as valuable. The key point here is that the Google bots know what’s on the page the link is coming from, and it matters.
More to the point is the perceived “authority” of the site. This topic is far more actionable. Some sites have been online for a decade or more and are the “go to” sites for specific types of information. For example in the health care arena, WebMD is an established player. Your website about Weight Loss will get much more benefit from a link from WebMD than it will from a link from your cousin’s three month old blog no matter what its topic. And when you think about it, it should.
Some years back, Google started giving web sites what’s called page rank. Web sites are ranked from zero to ten based on some internal process at Google. I have a Google toolbar on my Firefox browser that lets me see the page rank of any web page I am on. Now the bulk of what I read on SEO these days says Google no longer uses page rank in its formula for ranking the value of back links. That may be, but page rank can still be assumed to be a pretty good indicator of relative weight.
So here’s the bottom line. You want to get back links from relevant sites that have high or at least relatively high page rank. Fortunately, that’s not hard to do.
With the advent of the Web 2.0 era, there are lots of new authority sites that are easy to access and that carry significant page rank and more importantly seem to convey significant “Google Juice” or weight to their back links.
The next series of posts here will discuss a couple of these in more detail.
Some of the more popular of these sites for search engine optimization are: Squidoo; Hub Pages; Weebly; Learn Hub; Wet paint; Yahoo Answers; Google Groups; and Yahoo groups.
I am most familiar with Squidoo myself and also have some Hub Pages, so I will discuss those in more detail in my next posting. If you are already familiar with any of the others, you will want to pay particular attention to opportunities to create back links to your web site.
When you do, keep in mind that you want to use anchor tags as we have discussed before and you want to link not just to you home page but also to internal pages as well.
—
If you are interested in learning a lot more about search engine optimization you owe it to yourself to take advantage of a special offer from the stomper net folks. It’s about to expire so you need to move quickly. They have a top level course called Stomping the Search Engines II. They have sold this for $497 but are now offering it for $1 as a promotion to launch a new monthly newsletter called Net Effect.
I encourage you to grab the offer, and check out the first copy of their newsletter. If you aren’t interested in the newsletter you can cancel within the first 30 days and keep the course. I know a lot of people who are grabbing this deal, who have no intention of subscribing to the newsletter. So don’t feel bashful about it. http://cli.gs/TpmR1u
But hurry, this offer ends soon!
Setting up a web page is only the beginning to online marketing. Now you need to get it seen by potential customers. This used to be challenging in many markets, but there has been a big change in what matters. Today, what matters is being seen on the Google Places Page, and you don't even need to have a web site to do that. (although you should.)
The good news is that its free, and if you know what you are doing, you can maneuver yourself to the top listing in many markets.
That's one of the skill sets I bring to the table. If you would like to get your Google Places Page properly set up send me an email at enetwal@gmail.com and put "Free Initial Evaluation" or something similar in the subject line.
Be sure to include your current web site and contact info.
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Marketing Tip
Setting up a web page is only the beginning to online marketing for a home stager or any other local based business.
Now you need to get it seen by potential customers. This used to be challenging in many markets, but there has been a big change in what matters. Today, what matters is being seen on the Google Places Page, and you don't even need to have a web site to do that. (although you should.)
The good news is that its free, and if you know what you are doing, you can maneuver yourself to the top listing in many markets.
That's one of the skill sets I bring to the table. If you would like to get your Google Places Page properly set up send me an email at enetwal@gmail.com" and put "Free Initial Evaluation" or something similar in the subject line.
Be sure to include your current web site and contact info.
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June 27, 2009 
10 Comments 
back links, Black Hat, Gray Hat, Meta Tags, Search Engines
