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

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In my last posting, I spent some time describing Squidoo.com and how useful it can be as a source of quality backlinks to your site.

Squidoo offers you the opportunity to create your own backlinks that you can custom design. By that I am referring to your ability to use anchor text that uses precisely the keyword phrase you want to rank for, and the ability to direct that link to a specific page on your web site.

Since Squidoo is free to use, there is no reason why you can’t create multiple Lens, and add additional links to your site.  From a search engine optimization standpoint it makes sense to have multiple short Lens rather than one long comprehensive one. So if a home stager wants to create a lens on staging a bedroom and another on staging a living room and a third on outdoor landscaping you now have three sources from which you can send links back to your web site. Within each lens you want to include a couple anchor text links to various pages on your site.

The power of Squidoo comes from it’s internal grouping system. Once you have created your lens, you want to join your lens to every relevant group you can.  If you are a potter, you will want to sign up your lens with all the various pottery groups, as well as art and crafts groups and any others that make sense.

The search engines see Squidoo as a large web site with many different topics. Normally this would be negative as it’s not focused and many lens are not specifically relevant. However since your lens is connected and linked to internally via your group memberships and also by  Squidoo’s own internal tagging system you are seen as part of all the groups you are associated with.   The strength of your  individual link is a product of all these relevant association within Squidoo.  To learn more about the internal linking and groups within Squidoo get a copy of Squidoo Basics.

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A similar venue like Squidoo is the Hub Pages site. Go the www.hubpages.com. Set up an account there, and jump right in.  The set up is different but similar to Squidoo. You will need to create a title of 120 characters or less, which becomes part of your url. Just as with Squidoo, you want it to consist of the keywords you want your own web site to rank for. So if you are following my advice on using geographical keywords you may want to name your site, CincinattiDryCleaning if you are a dry cleaner in Cincinatti.

Just like Squidoo, you want to create anchor texts in your hub pages. You can use much of the same material in your hub pages that you did on your Squidoo pages, but you want to rework it into a different format so it is distinctly different than the way it appears on Squidoo or anywhere else. Make it unique.

Now while you will be including links to various pages on your web site, you also want to create some links from your Hub pages to your Squidoo pages. That’s why we talked about Squidoo first.

Remember last week when we talked about “link juice.” Hub pages have a little less link juice than Squidoo. But they are still a highly ranked site, just not quite a big. Your link from Hub pages pours link juice into your Squidoo lens. This link juice accumulates there and is passed via your Squidoo lens to where it links, ie. your web site.

It is important that you maintain the one way nature of this linking. As we also discussed last week, if you reciprocate links the link juice cancels each other out.  So for my purposes, I always link from my Hub Pages to my Squidoo pages and never the reverse. Since I have many different niches this rule keeps me out of trouble.

Which one you use to link to the other is less important, than that you make sure to keep the one way relationship alive. And please remember that means you cannot link from your web site to your Hub pages as this would create a circle and negate the benefit of all the links.

Next time I will begin to discuss why article marketing is so powerful.

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Two additional tidbits. I have had a lot of projects building up lately thus the delay in getting this post out. I am still doing my analysis of peoples web sites. But am now restricting myself to just four a week. These are very useful to people and I want to maintain my hands on service to as many people as I can. To get details go to http://cli.gs/7gH1Zr

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In addition to maintaining your web site and getting it set up for search engines, the most powerful thing you can do for yourself is to blog from your own wordpress blog. Wordpress blogs are easy to use and free, but can be very bewildering because there are so many options in terms of themes, plug ins, widgets and settings. I have learned a lot about blogging from Mike Paetzold who is a master blogger. He just released a new “How to” eBook and video series Tuesday night and is offering $20 off until sometime Saturday.  It’s called Word Press Made Easy and is a “must have” in my opinion. He walks you through all the plug ins and settings he uses on his plethora of blog sites. If you are going to blog, and you should, it is a good idea to copy a master blogger, until you learn enough on your own to make specific variations. With his help you can have your blog up and running and or re-tuned in about an hour.  Well worth it, I promise you. http://cli.gs/mv5Whd

Technorati Tags: anchor text, hub pages, search engine optimization, SEO, squidoo