Abracadabra! Keywords are the magic words you will need to come up for to be found by your potential customers on the Internet.

Yet like other magic words, it is amazing how many people don’t know what they are or how to use them.

Here are some basic SEO tips:

• Your keywords are most likely going to be phrases rather than single words since the single words are too general and very competitive. If your business is new and is selling shoes, you are most likely NEVER going to come up for the word “Shoes”. But you may come up for the keyword phrase, “Cool Shoe Store Atlanta” or “Women’s Tango Shoes”.
• Make a list of the 10-20 Keyword phases you would like to come up for in a search. You might ask people you know how they would search for your product or service.
• Once you have your initial list, use Google’s Keyword tool to do some [Read more...]

Last week I did an SEO workshop with Jenny Munn for about 20 people. It turned out that the majority of the class was made up of people whom I have known and watched build their businesses using WordPress over the past several years.

The heartwarming thing was that our group included people who, at one time, would never have blogged or even added words to their sites because it might interfere with their design!  And here they were, adding content and learning how to use keywords to attract people to their sites that are looking for the services they provide.

I like to say that creating an online presence for your business is a lot like [Read more...]

In the old days publishers created great content and sold the books and magazines or subscriptions to the books and magazines. When things went online people still created good content and got found from search engines for it by putting keywords in their content. But the “Internet Marketers” came to town and started gaming the system. They bought Keyword URLs  for many niche markets, threw up basic websites and found many ways to get a lot of content on those sites, none of them good. Three of the ways they created content for these sites were writing lots of basically bad content,  scraping good content from other people’s sites, and using RSS feeds from other sites to feed their sites. Then they found ways to attract the search engines using lots of keywords on each page and getting links in less than legitimate ways, in order to monetize these sites by selling  ads or affiliate products.

The first round of people doing this made multi-millions and then these marketers put on seminars teaching others how the game is played. These people also made money and this methodology caught on.  When this happened, these sites started springing up everywhere. It got to the point where  a search for something brought up pages of these smarmy websites.  Since search engines compete with each other for people to use their sites, if a particular search engine routinely pulled this kind of result, then they may lose users to the competition. over the past few years, search engines like Google started making changes to their algorithms to see how this could be thwarted in favor of “real”content. [Read more...]

Reduce Blog Bounce Rates

We should have a goal to reduce blog bounce rates and get people to stick around and visit other pages and posts on our sites. We want them to read more of what we have to offer and come back regularly.  Hopefully, our visitors will  find our information so compelling they will sign up for our newsletters or buy our goodies.

We can use Google Analytics to track Bounce Rate and another important variable, Visit Duration. Bounce Rate is the percentage of people going to only one page, or post, of your site before leaving. Visit Duration is how long they stay on the site. Often we think of having a high Bounce Rate as bad since it could mean that someone landed on our site, took one look, said, “Yikes!”,  and left.  But, it could also be that they Googled an issue they were having, clicked on one of our search results, went right to what they were looking for, stayed and read the post, got the information they were looking for and left the site to get on with their business. These are two very different scenarios.  Looking at Bounce Rate along with visit duration can help determine which group you fall into. You can safely [Read more...]

Search Engine Optimization is a bugaboo, full of misinformation put out to prey on the fear and anxiety business owners have about wanting to rank high in a particular niche.  If you could do just one thing that would help a lot would you do it?  Yes you would of course. So I am going to give you 10 pieces of advice to take the edge off and will make a difference in your site’s visibility. [Read more...]

Does this type of search engine spam e-mail sound familiar?

Dear NewTricks Team,

I thought you might like to know some of the reasons why you are not getting enough Social Media and Organic search engine traffic. Your Social profile is not available in top Social Media websites. Your SEO score is 87%. We can bring it to 100% by implementing on and off-page factors which will fetch better results in major search engines. Your site has 1 Google back link, this can be improved further. ( by the way, none of this is true. They go on to say….)

There are many additional improvements that could be made to your website, [Read more...]