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While I promote this particular blog to Home Stagers, most of what I write here is equally applicable to Realtors and other local based businesses.
Thus the other day, I was happy to begin working with OC Signature Properties of Villa Park California – one of Orange County’s premier real estate firms.
Seems that despite their long history in the community, they were not showing up in the Google listings for the towns they serve. What was worse from their perspective is that others were, some of whom had little established history in their market.
Now, I have set out to do a number of things for them, that will in time make a difference in their visibility in the local market. One of which is to grab them some Google juice using Squidoo.
In this case, I have set up six Squidoo lens focused on some of the target communities we want to rank for. I used Squidoo standard introductory module, and then what they call a “text – plexio” module. That was followed by a plain text module and then a final module in which I list some of my favorite links. In this case my favorite links are new pages I added to OC Properties Existing web page focused on each of their target communities.
This will provide them with backlinks from Squidoo which has a high authority standing with Google and will help build their standing as individual pages.
The text plexio page is what I want to share here though. It’s an idea you could use in your home town and the surrounding communities you serve.
With a Plexio, viewers to your Squidoo page can add new categories and rank the various possible answers to what ever question you ask them. In this case we are asking residents of the community to rank what they like most about living in their respective communities.
People like lists, and they like being given a chance to share their opinion and rank things. In our case they are also likely to suggest other good reasons to like their home town. We will eventually put the results on our main site as the top reasons people like to live in each city.
It’s a good free way to gain exposure and do a little market research as well. While no one backlink will make a huge difference by itself, it will also boost our SEO campaign.
If you live in any of the cities, please feel free to visit your site and participate. If you don’t live in the area, please visit one or another of the sites, and check it out. If you think, this is a good idea, do me the favor of giving me a Thumbs up or “Like” on the top of the lens.
If you really like it, be sure to “Favorite it “: as well.
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 like video. People watch videos, which is why its a great idea to produce your own to display on your web site or blog. But also on You Tube. You tube is the world’s second largest search engine and growing fast. When you do create a video make sure you put your URL to your web site or blog as the very first thing in the Description box, and then tell people to click on it in your video or by way of annotations within the video.
That will help you get traffic and backlinks to your site.
Then write an article for the article directories and put a link to both your video and to your site in the resource box for the article. That will help drive traffic to both and increase viewers to your video on YouTube. This second step will help raise the video within YouTube and start you on your way to enhanced results from your YouTube efforts.
This video doesn’t need to be long. The following video is only a little over 2 minutes long and focuses on decluttering. Keep it simple and short and on topic.
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.
My long time readers know that I like to use Squidoo as a tool in my internet marketing. I have often suggested it to others as well.
Why? For two reasons mainly, in addition to it’s being a free service.
First Squidoo is relatively simple to do. Once you know your way around you can get a “Lens” or Squidoo page up in about 10 minutes, even if you have no technical expertise.
And it only takes a little while to learn the basics to know your way around.
This makes it easy for people who do not have any type of web presence to create one for themselves. What separates Squidoo from many of the other social networking sites out there like Facebook, Myspace and others is that they welcome commercial content.
So it’s perfectly okay to create a lens on Homestaging in MyTown, USA and talk about your business and solicit customers. You can get banned from other sites for doing so, if you are not careful.
(Another site similar to Squidoo that is fairly open to commercialization are Hub Pages.)
The second reason I use Squidoo is it’s value as a source of back links.
Backlinks to your web site, blog or individual blog entry are one of the key criteria in how high your site ranks in the search engines. I counsel my clients to set up Squidoo lens with this in mind.
If you are in business, you want to be on top of the search engine results when someone searches for home stagers in your community. The more backlinks you get, the greater the likelihood that your page will appear in that top position. And you want to be there.
Now Squidoo has what’s called a high page rank. And what that means basically is that search engines like Google consider a link from a site with a high page rank to be more important than a link from your cousin’s occasional blog posting.
There are ways to enhance that value further by joining groups within Squidoo of other homestagers. It seems the groups, add to the weight of the link, because they represent links from similar types of lens on related topics.
That relevancy is another of Google’s criteria. In this case the theory is that a link from a site about home staging or perhaps real estate is more relevant that a backlink from someone’s blog about dog training.
Now both of these reasons are good reasons to spend some time learning about Squidoo.
Some quick tips. You are probably better off from a Search Engine Optimization point of view to create several related lens on your topic than just one long one.
Thus you may want to do a short lens called Homestaging, your town and another called Your town, home stagers: and perhaps another on Selling Your House In Your County.
In each of these lens, you will want to insert a link to your main web site that you want to rank high.
I recommend that you include your geography in your lens titles. If people use different terms when thinking about your area, consider creating lens that highlight each of them. That way when they search for information on home staging, they may well find your lens.
Your lens then should provide a soft sell on how exceptional your services are and encourage people to go to your site.
If you are interested in learning more about Squidoo and how to put it to work for you, you might want to invest in a Squidoo eBook.
There are also people who will create Squidoo lens for you. The longest running such service is offered by Squidoo experts Tiffany Dow and Lewis Smile. They will build your lenses FOR YOU! Dow & Lewis
I’m a do it yourself type of guy, but I recognize most homestagers are more interested in doing home staging than they are in creating web properties.
There’s a lot more to Squidoo and even more to getting a good ranking on the search engines. I welcome your questions or comments.
If you are new to Squidoo, you can sign up here for Free.
[tags]Squidoo ebook, Squidoo, SEO, Backlinks, Search Engine Optimization, page rank[tags]
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.
Over the past few weeks I have posted several articles on this blog that I got directly from ezinearticles.com. You can do the same thing. It’s easy and it’s free.
Just go to www.ezinearticles.com and look for the article search tool in the left column. For this blog, I just type in Home Staging and I usually can find a half dozen new article every week or so to consider adding to this blog. You can do the same thing for almost any niche market.
When doing so, there is one hard and fast rule that you must follow. You need to use the entire article as written, including the author’s resource box at the end.
Now sometimes I will add my own content before or after the article to explain why I used the article or to comment on the issues it raises, but this is optional. As long as you include their entire content, you are fine.
The author of the article gets several benefits from the process. In fact if you go back in this blog, I have written extensively on why you should write articles of your own to achieve these same benefits, to wit..
They are more likely to be perceived as an expert in their field. People who see the article may want to learn more and will follow the link in the resource box back to their site. More importantly in many cases, is that the little bots the search engines like Google and Yahoo will follow these links, even if no once else does and record it as a back link.
Back links help raise your sites relative ranking in the search engines. And the higher your page shows up in a Google search in your market, the more likely your site will get seen, and in turn the more likely you will get new business.
Now by promoting someone else’s article from another marketplace 100′s or thousands of miles away will not interfere with your own local rankings, so there is no reason not to help them and yourself by posting their article.
You get to add worthwhile content to your blog with minimal effort. And the regular addition of content is a major component to successful blogging. Your readers get worthwhile content consistent with your overall topic and are thus more likely to continue to monitor and read you other offerings.
Some blogs are all borrowed content, but I prefer to write my own material and intersperse articles from article directories as a supplement. But the mix of original and “borrowed” content is up to you.
There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of article directories online that you can find article on. I’ve personally had best success with ezinearticles, but if you want to search for others just type in a good keyword for your industry and then add the word article directories and you will find many more.
One last tidbit. If you are interested in learning how to monetize your blogging efforts, so that they become a profit center on their own, you may want to get a copy of my blogging mentors new eBook called Profitable Blog Steps. I write a bit about it in another blog of mine called A Profitable Blog
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.
==============
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 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.
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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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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November 28, 2010 
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