Here’s a tip for home stagers and any other locally based business that is both easy and quick to do. More importantly for many of you, in smaller markets, this tip may be enough in and of itself to get you ranked on the first page of the search engines in your market.
For those of you in more competitive markets, this is one of the major prerequisites to accomplishing that task, but you will need to do additional work. I am ready to help with that. All you need to do is contact me, and I will do my best to work you into my schedule in a timely manner.
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.
I am recommending a new free report by Ryan Deiss for anyone who either buys pay per click ads or who wishes to get their web site or blog ranked higher on Google. Its called the Perpetual Traffic Report. It runs some 29 pages and was must reading for me, and perhaps for you as well.
It covered a lot of different topics including a bit of a history on Google and how its ranking algorithm has changed over time. But what I want to focus on today is just one element of the report.
It used to be that to get the most traffic from Google, it made sense to buy pay per click ads. That’s no longer true. Now I have been a cheap s.o.b. for some time, so I have always preferred to do what is called search engine optimization to get as much free traffic as possible.
According to the report it appears that my time is now.
Based on their research, it appears that the top ads, the one that shows up on top of the organic listings get only 2-3% of the people who come to the page to click. The ads on the side get only 1-2% of people to click.
This is in contrast to the top organic listing. It typically gets 41-45% of the people who come to the page to click.
The #2 listing gets 11-18%
The #3 listing gets 7-15%
The #4-9 listings get 2% putting them on an even base with the highest paid advertisers, and
The #10 listing gets 3-4% as it appears that some people start at the bottom up, or some other rationale.
What does this mean to you as a home stager, or any type of business online.
Clearly, the place to be is #1 on the organic listings for your keywords.
Number one is 4 times as valuable as the #2 slot.
And the bottom line is that you must start paying serious attention to your search engine rankings.
The report goes on to stress the three major contributing aspects toward getting top search engine rankings. Two of these I have written about in detail and will pick up again in coming posts.
The two old ones are, Getting your page set up right in the first place. Even now, after some 16 months of harping on the topic, most home staging and other small business web sites are not set up properly. This is particularly true of most of the group template websites so many new homestagers use.
The second key to the game is getting backlinks from not only a lot of places but also from highly ranked authority sites. I will also take up this mantra in the coming weeks.
Finally, the third aspect that I have not given much direct attention to is what Ryan referes to as “Activity.” By which he means proof in Google’s eyes that a sight is a real site with people rather than robots running things.
This may seem strange to those not familiar with all the people who sell black hat tools and programs to try to fool the search engines.
I will return to this topic again as well. But frankly need to do some additional research of my own.
In the meanwhile I recommend you get your own copy of this excellent free report. Ryan is one of the Good Guys, who actually does his own research and knows what he is talking about.
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.
There are a plethora of social media sites out there from Twitter, to facebook, and so many more…
Some of the tools are of particular value to Home Stagers who are interested in driving traffic to their blogs or web sites. The more traffic you get, the more likely you will get better ranked in the search engine, and the more likely ultimately that your next customer will find you.
I ran into an article on StumbleUpon today that I thought might be worth passing on. This is just one more tool you can use to help market your site and raise you visibility online. I hope you enjoy it. Let me know if you would like more items like this, by commenting on the article.
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Have You Discovered StumbleUpon?
StumbleUpon is an Internet community that allows its users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos. It is an Internet community that allows users to discover web pages. StumbleUpon is a social network online desktop. Many consider it one of their favorite social media sites, not only can it drive traffic that matches or often exceeds that of Digg, StumbleUpon users are much less critical/confrontational/judgmental than the typical Digg user. StumbleUpon is less about communication and more about discovery, which I think is an under served problem on the web.
StumbleUpon gained its popularity as a toolbar for Firefox while Digg isn’t browser-depended as Stumble. StumbleUpon chooses which Web page to display based on the user’s ratings of previous pages, ratings by his/her friends, and by the ratings of users with similar interests. StumbleUpon was owned by eBay from May 2007, when it was acquired for $75,000,000, until April 2009, when Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith and several investors bought it back. StumbleUpon is now an independent, investor-backed startup once again, with offices in San Francisco and New York City.
Traffic from StumbleUpon ordinarily has the lowest bounce rate. Traffic coming directly from Digg is much less memorable, and most Digg users don’t venture farther than the front page. Traffic from any source is welcome I agree, but I personally prefer StumbleUpon. If you Stumble the right way, it will get you huge traffic. Webmasters have realized the potentia lof StumbleUpon as a marketing tool and therefore have started to stumble each others sites to gain traffic and exposure for their sites.
Users rate a site by giving it a thumbs up, thumbs down selection on the StumbleUpon toolbar, and can optionally leave additional commentary on the site’s review page, which also appears on the user’s blog. Users can post comments in the manner of a discussion board in these groups and post links to Web sites that apply to the specific topic. Users can also use the Stumble Upon toolbar as a form of social bookmarking. Users can also see others who gave kudos to a page and follow their recommendations. They can now simply start on StumbleUpon’s site, for example, and stumble all over the Web using their Web browser as guide rather than a toolbar.
StumbleUpon is more widely accepted by mainstream users while Twitter is more accepted by the power users. StumbleUpon is more to an entertainment website (just one button will bring you to a new page that you might not have visited before) while Twitter focuses more on communication and keeping in touch.
StumbleUpon is an amazingly fun tool and having the StumbleUpon Toolbar installed, I often play about with it myself, the result being it leads me to great sites I’m interested in and excellent articles I might not have found otherwise. It is one of the handful of services launched on the consumer web in the last few years that can truly be said to have significant cognitive benefits for the people who use it.
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.
I’ve covered much of this material one way or another in the past, but my friend Ken Koh of Leadleap fame has added another posting in his ongoing series on getting people to find your web site.
It’s surprising how many home stagers and others think that they can just put up a web site or have one put up for them, and expect to get traffic and jobs from that alone.
You need to get you page set up right, with both on and off page tactics to raise your web sites visibility online.
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.
I recently read a Blog Post on Leads Leap discussing the value of back links. I’ve preached on this topic before, but thought it might be worthwhile to share another person’s take.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
A bit of a detour today. I have had several people ask how they can find out how many backlinks they have to their web site. A good question and one I can answer.
First thing you want to do is go to Yahoo.com rather than Google or MSN and search for the term “linkdomain:” and then the web site you want to inquire about using the Yahoo search box. This will take you to Yahoo’s Site Explorer site.
When you do this for your site you will see two boxes at the top of the page. One will show the number of pages on your website, and the second will show the total number of inbound links to your site. These are your backlinks.
Now if you want to see what you need to do to outrank that pesky competitor of yours, it wouldn’t hurt to enter their domain name the same way and see how many backlinks they have. You might want to check out who they are, because there is a good chance you should be able to get back links from some of the same places.
Now as we mentioned before, not all backlinks are created equal. Some have higher page rank and are thus weighted more than others. So it’s possible that someone with fewer backlinks could rank higher.
As an experiment, go to Google and enter the keyword “Home Decorating” in the Google Search Box. When I did it for this article the top three “organic” listings were www.home-decorating-made-easy.com; www.tuscan-home-101.com and www.hgtv.com
I looked at each site with the Yahoo Site Explorer and found the top ranking site had 627 pages of content and 1726 back links. The second ranked site, the tuscan one, had 88 pages of content and 794 backlinks. I believe the number of backlinks to be the major determinant in the higher ranking by home decorating made easy site.
But what about the third place site, HGTV? It has 203,974 pages and 7,285,773 backlinks. A behemoth by anyone’s standards. This is where relevance plays a role. HGTV has a lot of pages and backlinks, but not all of them were specifically relevant to the keyword term “Home Decorating.” At least not in Googles eyes.
If you enjoyed this exercise, play around with a few other keywords, and see if the number of backlinks doesn’t seem to play a role in most of them. As you do, you will come to appreciate how important backlinks are to ranking.
In our next article we will discuss some easy ways to get a bunch of high value backlinks. [ I should be charging for this. ]
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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September 22, 2010 
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