You’ve made major progress when you take care of your on page SEO issues.

Your page factors again are your title tags, keywords and description in the hidden meta tag area, and use of H1 tag, and appropriate keyword usage on your page and at least 425 or more words of text on you landing page.

For some people that will by itself be enough to get your site to the first page.

For others, in more competitive markets it won’t be enough all by itself. For example one of my most recent clients Ann Alderson from Tampa is trying to do business in a market that has almost as many home stagers as it does Realtors.  Well maybe not, but it seems the various schools are having frequent classes in the area resulting in a lot of competition, especially for web site ranking.

In today’s economy the various schools are having a hay day, as more and more people are looking for supplemental income.  And that means more competition for you.  And more web sites trying to climb to the top of the search engines.

In Ann’s case we were able to raise her from somewhere in the deep dregs of page 23 or so to #35 overall just by making changes to her onpage factors.

Her site is located at Home Staging South Tampa which is a good example of an anchor text using her keywords of Home Staging and Tampa. (And she just got another backlink)

She uses GoDaddy as her web hosting service. It took them 3-4 days to turn around and do what she wanted, but it did have an immediate effect.

But it’s not good enough by itself in her case and perhaps in yours as well.

That’s why you need to pay attention to the off page factors. And they come down to one phrase. BackLinks, Backlinks, Backlinks to paraphrase our Realtor friends.

Your first step should be to set up an account and post on Active Rain. By putting a link to your web site on your posts, you will create your first back link.  Now ideally this should be an anchor link as I have explained in past posts.

But while Active Rain is a great site, you need to get links from many different locations.

My next set of recommendations is to set up an account at Squidoo and Hub Pages.  www.Squidoo.com and www.hubpages.com.  Just signing up and creating a profile will give you a backlink if you include you web site in your profile. But what really counts is when you set up a page on their sites.

These need not be works of art. They don’t need to be long. They should be about Home Staging in your town.  And your town name and home staging should be in the title.  You have two possible audiences, Realtors and homeowners.

Make two pages to start. One for home owners and one for Realtors.

Do it first on Squidoo.  Write a lens on the Top Three Things a Minneapolis Home Owner Needs to Know about Home Staging.

Then do it.  If  you want make it the top 5 or 7. Feel free to buy my guide on Squidoo Basics if you need help, although they have tutorials on both sites.

Then publish your first Squidoo lens, and immediately start another.

Write a lens on the Top Three Things a Minneapolis Realtor needs to know about Home Staging. Once you get the hang of it, you should be able to get one done in 30 minutes, but plan on spend a couple hours the first time.

Make sure both of them have a link back to your web site.  If you have a separate page on your web site for Realtors, make sure your Lens on Realtors links back to that page.

Once you have these two lens done, go to Hub Pages.  If you’re lazy, use the same text all over again but put the three hints in a different order. Ideally you would reword the entire thing.

The more effort you put into these the better. But you are better off with many short Squidoo lens and Hub Pages than with one or two comprehensive ones.

There are three reasons why you are doing this.

First, they will give you added stature and credibility. Second, these Squidoo lens and Hub Pages sometimes get higher rankings than your web site intially, so it’s quite possible they may get to the top of the search engines before your main site does. That means real potential customers who may never have heard of Squidoo or Hub Pages may find them and you.  The third reason is that the backlinks from these sites carry more weight than many other sources of backlinks. So you want to get them set up for you as soon as possible.

Once you are done with these, you may want to switch to article marketing.

The Good part of article marketing is that your articles can become viral. Once you publish them, they can be posted to hundreds of different blogs each of which will create a backlink to your site.

Most will be from smaller sites, without as much clout as Squidoo or Hub Pages, which is why we start with them. But in the long run, the article marketing effort is what will not only move you to the top of your local search engine results, it will keep you there.

With all the newbies entering the market, that’s one idea you may well want to consider.

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, hub pages, squidoo

When you repost a blog post or active rain post on an article directory like www.ezinearticles.com you are allowed to attach a resource box to the bottom of your article. Anyone can republish your article for free if they agree to include your resource box.

When preparing your resource box, you are generally allowed two links that you can direct as you choose. It’s important to use anchor text for these links based on the keyword you want your destination site(s) to rank for.

Particularly if your goal is to build your search engine standing as well as generate traffic.

Anchor text is simple html code that creates a hyper link to the web site you want people to go, while displaying your anchor text. Your anchor text should be the keyword you want your site to rank for.

One of my newest clients is a home stager in Tampa Florida. The keyword she wants to rank high on for her business is “Home Staging” and “Tampa” or “Home staging in Tampa”

So to maximize the value of her resource box I advised her to use the following statement:

Ann Alderson is an expert at <* href=”http://stagingsouthtampa.com”>Home Staging in the South Tampa region. You can get more information on home staging on her blog about <* href=”http://blog.stagingsouthtampa.com”> house staging tips.

[Insert a letter "a" where the * are to appear as

When placed in html code it reads as follows: Ann Alderson is an expert at Home Staging in the South Tampa region. You can get more information on home staging on her blog about house staging tips.

In this case, we used the second anchor text to use an alternate keyword, “house staging” and sent traffic to her blog. This creates a back link to an internal part of her site which improves its standing in Google’s eyes. Google likes links to internal pages as it shows there is interest in more than the front page of the site.

As we’ve discussed before, the three main reasons to do article marketing is to establish yourself as an expert in your field, drive traffic to your site and build back links to raise your standing in the search engines.

In Ann’s case, the articles may help establish her credentials and even send a few people from Tampa to her web site. But most people who see her articles will be far from her marketplace.

More important to her is the knowledge that the Google bots and other search bots will find her site and rank it for the keywords she wants her site known for: home staging and house staging and Tampa.

Most of her competitors are not doing this, and as a result in the relatively near term, she should rise from her current relative obscurity in a highly competitive local market to the first page of the listings. In time with additional articles and other postings she may even win the coveted top spot.

That is the power of Article Marketing and the proper use of anchor text and keywords in your resource box.

If you want to learn the fundamentals of internet marketing, but didn’t know where to look, you’re going to love this.

One of the internet’s best trainers of online marketing has redirected his business and rather than selling single courses has set up a “one-stop resource center.”

I have to tell you this is a great opportunity. I have taken well over a half dozen individual courses from Bob the Teacher, happily paying hundreds of dollars for some. Most of them are now available to you for just $47 a month as a member of the Internet Marketing Success Library.

Internet Marketing Success Library

As I said, I’ve personally learned from Bob The Teacher in the past, and I’m always impressed with how organized and methodical his training courses are.

They’re step-by-step video and audio courses that cover EVERYTHING you need to know about things like:

- website management
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- affiliate marketing
- and a lot more.

And while not all of the courses are critical for a home staging business, many of them are. These are the fundamentals taught by a former high school science teacher who knows how to make everything clear and complete, even for newbies.

If you have ever thought about learning more in the way of internet basics this is your golden opportunity. Join and take one, two, three or more courses in your first month and quit if you want. Or continue on and take additional courses.

If you enjoy learning how the internet works and/or are interested in developing your personal or business skills online, this is a superb deal.

I specifically recommend you put discover cpanel and discover auto responders at the top of your list. But there is so much more that could benefit you and your business.

Now much of these courses are aimed at people who are looking to develop an online business. But don’t let that dissuade you.  While your primary business is hands on in your clients homes, you need to learn how to use the internet to maximize your marketing.

Click on the banner and check this out. You must keep learning if you are going to be successful in the long run. In today’s world, like it or not that means getting comfortable with the internet.  You won’t find a better teacher, not even me.