Friday, January 22nd, 2010
If you want to know the easy way to do SEO, here’s the book for you, and it’s FREE.
I finally got my book on SEO finished. There’s now a page where you can find out more about it and download it.
It’s aimed at beginners, people who are afraid of the web and know nothing about any of this computer stuff. It lays out, in simple step by step instructions, how to optimize your site for search engines.
I’m giving it away for free for a while to build up my mailing list. At some point, I’ll start charging money for it, so don’t miss your opportunity to grab it now.
Click on this link to find out how to download your free copy:
The Care And Feeding Of Search Engines, A Simple Guide To SEO
Posted in SEO |
Sunday, November 29th, 2009
I responded to comment on the original post about Headway this morning.
Headway 1.5 Premium Wordpress Theme
Andrew wanted to know what it could “do”. That’s a reasonable question, so I thought I’d try to answer it.
I think the list of features, or the actual tasks it can do, is probably similar to other premium themes. The big “woah” moment for me was the visual editor.
I had an event happen a week ago that caused me to need to get a site up quickly, like from nothing, no idea or content, to functioning site in like 4 hours.
I could have copied an existing site, using my old handcoded theme and thrown it up, changed the colors and been done with it, but I used Headway.
It was easy to create the pages in Wordpress, then play with the visual editor to decide colors and layout.
I could add a wigetized sidbar, or 3, and put them where I wanted them.
I could control the width by click and drag to the width I wanted. Changing the width of the sidebay is usually going into the CSS file and guessing, then reloading the page, then guessing again. With this, I clicked and dragged until I was happy.
Of course the color pickers were easy and wonderful. You clicked on the element you wanted to color, and clicked on the color picker. That element was now that color.
I want to be sure I’m communicating this clearly. I like this theme, not because it “does stuff”, but that it does stuff in a visual editor. It’s value is not in what it does, but in how it does it.
You can select elements in a drop down menu and style them from there, but you can also just click on the area that you want to style to select it.
The visual editor is a bunch of “floating palettes” over the top of your page. You have to move the palettes around sometimes, to see what’s behind them on the page.
I also used Headway premium Wordpress theme to build my coming business site, You Can Sell Crafts. I spent less than two hours on that site. I’m not promoting that much yet and the products aren’t in place, so I just needed a quick and dirty site for now.
I like it though.
The SEO stuff is great. The transition stuff is great. I haven’t tried the image stuff yet, but I’m sure that’s all great too. Whatever, dude. All the other premium themes out there are great too.
What's totally awesome (I do live near the beach and have long hair, so I can say that without irony) is the visual editor.
But what’s awesome, what’s totally awesome (I do live near the beach and have long hair, so I can say that without irony) is the visual editor. That’s what takes this theme to a new level. When they say “design visually”, that’s what they mean.
It’s like building a site in Photoshop instead of BBEdit, where I usually work. You don’t even have to go to a settings page, save the settings, then check the page. None of that.
You are seeing the page as you design the page, on the page, without leaving the page.
I’ll even complain about the lack of control on absolutely everything. If something needs to be styled or added, but it’s not in the drop down to be selected, I can do it through the editor, by changing the style sheet manually, which is what I’m used to. No loss. No gain.
But, I’m telling you, this visual editor changed the rules.
Woah, dude.
Posted in Wordpress |
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
Here’s a list of SEO terms that you should be aware of, if you aren’t already. There are more where these came from, so go check out the site.
Long tail
In SEO terms, the ‘long tail’ refers to the less obvious, more specific (and therefore less competitive) but still relevant keywords and phrases you can optimize your site for. So instead of trying to optimize for very general and competitive phrases such as “coffee”, a long tail phrase might be “buy Costa Rican coffee.” For a very competitive field such as coffee, you might have to think of even more specific and niche phrases than that in order to find the ones you can rank highly for.
Why You Should Care:
If you are a small business, or just starting out, the long tail will help you find free & targeted (there’s that phrase again!) traffic. You will be able to rank more quickly for long-tail phrases instead of wasting your time trying to compete for very general terms that have established competition.
SERPs
This simply stands for Search Engine Results Page – i.e. the list of results that comes up when you perform a web search.
Why You Should Care:
That’s where you want your site to be!
Read the entire article at:
http://www.webtrainingwheels.com/2009/11/online-marketing-terms-seo-edition/
Posted in SEO |
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
After you build your web site push it out there into the bright, shining world, you wait and wait, but the traffic doesn’t come. What should you do?
The easiest thing that you can do is to build inbound links to your site.
The MOST important and easiest thing that you can do is to build inbound links to your site. Some links are better than others and if you want to learn the nuance of them you can, but the bottom line is the more links that you have pointing at your site, the better your SEO will be.
Volume. More is better.
There are hundreds of ways to accomplish this, but the easiest way is to leave comments on people’s blogs. Go do some searches for sites that are on a similar subject to your site and read what they say. If you notice something cool, leave a comment. It will (should) link back to your site.
People are wary of people spamming them, as they should be, so don’t do that. Don’t drop by and say “Nice post! Buy my stuff!”. That’s just rude.
I actually had an acquaintance leave me a comment on a post that I linked to on my Facebook page. They said “I didn’t read your post, but I was wondering if you would be interested in” buying some product they were selling. I was taken aback. Really? You’re not going to read my post, but you’re going to try to sell me something? Yeah. No. I don’t think so.
Leave a useful comment. One that relates to what the person was talking about. One that adds some information to the conversation. This is all about relating to people, making that connection. It’s not just links.
Links are the byproduct of the connection, so make lots of connections and you’ll get lots of links and links turn into traffic.
Forums are another solid place for this activity. Connect and link. Any place that people are talking, go talk there too.
Focus on the inbound links. That’s the bottom line for building traffic to your site.
Posted in SEO |
Sunday, October 11th, 2009
In the midst of an article on Bing, SEOBook.com has this advice. Nail the basics. This is the best summary of the basics of SEO that I have seen. It’s good, basic advice that you should be following.
Make sure your content is unique, use H tags for titles, use alt tags for images, use unique page titles and description meta tags, one topic per page and ensure your copy is free from spelling and gramatical errors.
I must point out that the word “grammatical” is spelled incorrectly on the original page. Yes, yes, it is. There are two Ms.
That’s why you should get your SEO information here. I’ll give you good advice, PLUS I’ll spell the words correctly!
Read the entire article at:
http://www.seobook.com/optimizing-bing
Posted in SEO |
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
This is a great article on some common SEO problems, but I want to point out two of them in particular. Write it and forget it is one that I wish I could solve easily. It seems that there’s a common idea that SEO is something that you can sprinkle on at the end and then it’s good to go, that you never have to touch the site again. Wrong. The site must be updated at least once a week and more often is better.
This is not a spatula. This is a ramp of people falling into a pit. Look again.
Only looking at ego phrases are also an easy pit to fall into. You know that THIS phrase is the one that everyone should be looking for, but in reality, everyone doesn’t know as much as you do and they search for what they think is the right phrase.
I’m constantly surprised when reading reports on traffic for related keywords. There are always phrases and keywords with what I think is way too much traffic. Don’t people understand the best way to search? Well, no they don’t. You have to look at what people ACTUALLY search for and optimize for that. It doesn’t matter what goodness and truth is. It doesn’t matter what you know is the right way to search. It only matters what THEY actually search for.
by Jolina
2. Write It & Forget It
Website content is not a ‘set and forget’ project. Rather, web content should be treated as a living organism which needs ongoing care and nourishment (read new content).
A ‘set and forget’ mentality when it comes to web content will only keep you successful for so long. Eventually, competitors catch onto to the benefits of SEO as well and if they are creating new content they are likely to trump you for target keyword phrases.
4. Focus on Ego Phrases
Some clients make the mistake of hanging success of the entire program on what we call ‘ego phrases’. i.e. wanting to rank for a particular phrase because they think it is important, not because data predicts it will drive traffic
Read the entire article at:
http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/09/seo-pitfalls/#comments
Posted in SEO |
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009
This recent study shows that small businesses that blog regularly get more visitors, more inbound links, the number one impact on SEO for your site, and more indexed pages in the search engine.
Since search engines have to crawl your site and try to figure out what pages exist, they spend time on sites that are updated regularly. Sites that are not updated regularly, can be indexed anytime, so they do the “hot” ones sooner.
Blogging is good. Must. Blog. Now.
HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog
If you blog, you know that it’s good for your business.
But how — and how much?
To answer to those questions, I looked at data from 1,531 HubSpot customers (mostly small- and medium-sized businesses). 795 of the businesses in my sample blogged, 736 didn’t.
The data was crystal clear: Companies that blog have far better marketing results. Specifically, the average company that blogs has:
* 55% more visitors
* 97% more inbound links
* 434% more indexed pages
Read the entire article at:
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5014/Study-Shows-Small-Businesses-That-Blog-Get-55-More-Website-Visitors.aspx
Posted in business |
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009
I’ve written up a page on Untangling The Web. As I thought about how it fits in with what I’m trying to do, my wife suggested that I make it brand and put all of my ideas into that bucket. Great idea.
I want to train people who are not experts
The idea is that I want to train people who are not experts in how to promote their business on the web. I am almost finished with a book about SEO. I will rewrite my Web Site Starter Kit book to make it more appropriate. I see videos and more pages of information coming. I’ll start to publish the newsletter every week, with valuable tips on how to do things, I want to dump out my brain so everyone can, well, maybe that’s a bad analogy. You know what I mean though.
The first step in that quest is the new design of the site. The blog is now on the home page, where you can see that I’m writing about good stuff, so people will be more likely to stay around and read more. That’s the plan, anyway.
I wrote a page describing the concept. I put on my sales copy hat and wrote what I thought was a pretty good page, describing what to expect and how it will benefit you. Here’s a quote and a link. Go read the rest of it and subscribe to the newsletter.
Untangling The Web – Training
With every new change in technology, comes the rise and fall of businesses as they try to adapt, from railroads to airplanes, from buggies to cars.
Today is no different. It’s adapt or die.
Many people who own a small business know that they should “do something” about the Internet, that there is a huge opportunity out there somewhere, but they are not quite sure how to do it, much less do it efficiently, and if that they miss that opportunity, it might mean the end of their business.
The biggest issue that we heard from small business owners, and everyone else, for that matter, is that they don’t understand this stuff. No one has the time to find and distill all of the information. They do research and the technical information that they find is too complex, too difficult to understand. They are afraid and overwhelmed by it all. It’s frustrating.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.walton.com/untangling-the-web-training
Posted in sell on internet |
Sunday, August 23rd, 2009
I’ve heard that a free offer will entice people to sign up for your newsletter, so I’m going to take some of the articles I’ve written here and write up a book that you can get for free by subscribing. It will be based on some of the information that I’ve already written here, but will also have some new info.
As I try to define what I’m best at, it seems that I keep coming back to the idea that I can explain complex technical information in simple, easy to understand ways, so that even the people who are afraid of their computers can get it.
I want to stand next to you, not in front of you on a platform.
Chris Guillebeau writes “
unconventional guides“. I always liked the title of The Hitchhikers’ Guide To The Galaxy. It has a nice ring to it. I like the idea of a “guide”. I want to “guide” people.
I’m not about telling, or preaching, or speechifying. I’m about guiding. I want to stand next to you, not in front of you on a platform. I don’t want to point at the sky or at you. I want to hold your hand and gently help you along the path.
I like Chris’s “non-conformity” idea that is also in his “unconventional” guides. Those are all good things and I’m all kinds of nonconforming myself, but what I want for you, dear readers, is something that’s easy for you to get.
I know you are not “dummies” or “idiots”. You are smart. You just need some information explained in a way that makes sense without all of the technical jargon.
“Easy-Peasy Guide To SEO.” That sounds fun and makes the point, but it ain’t me. I don’t use the word “peasy”. It’s just wrong.
“Piece of Cake Guide to Building a Web Site.” I’m not Julia Child.
“The Complete Explanation of Selling Handmade Items On The Internet Without Knowing Any Technical Jargon For Beginners.” Um, yeah, but no.
“The Noob Guide To Basic SEO.” That’s true, but you don’t know what a noob is, much less the fact that you are one. (Noob is short for Newbie, which is slang for a person who is new to a field of expertise.)
After some debate with my lovely wife, who knows all things and is always right, she suggested “The Understandable Guide To” as a tag line. I love it. This proves once again that she’s always right. Every book I write will be named The Understandable Guide To whatever the book is about. I’ll try not to mumble or use big words.
My first effort will be to write up a free book on basic SEO that you can get if you subscribe to my newsletter. I get asked about SEO all the time and everyone seems to be more aware of the value of it all the time. I’ll write a second book that you have to pay me for to get everything that’s in my little brain on the subject, but this will be a good head start for people who just want to understand the basics.
It will be The Understandable Guide To Basic SEO.
What do you think? Please leave a comment. Thanks!
Posted in sell on internet |
Sunday, February 1st, 2009
I did some research on my new client, his site, and his industry. He has, or had, a web site built by someone else. I did some checking around to see where we stand before we begin. Here’s what I did.
Using the “SEO For Firefox” plug in and the Google Toolbar in Firefox, I found out that it’s been around for about 6 months. That will help us get out of the Google sandbox.
by NeilsPhotography
Using the “links:” search term in Google, where you type in “links:www.domainname.com”, you can find out how many other sites out there are linking to you. These are your “incoming links”. This one has 10 at the moment. That’s a cool place to start from.
It’s got a page tank of 0. That means there’s opportunity to improvement here! It’s got a good solid base, with a little history and some links to it, so when we start to optimize it, it should really respond.
This is much better than starting from a brand new domain name and new site, with no incoming links. Google doesn’t like those newbies. They could be spammers or child abusers or some kind of perverts.
Just like in the real world, they want to get to know you a bit before they trust you. It’s all about the reputation. Now that this site has been at the party for a little while, it’s time to make sure our hair looks good, that we don’t have bad breath, and there’s no food spilled on our shirt. Then we can walk over and introduce ourself to the host of the party, Google.com.
Posted in SEO |
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
SEO should be free.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. How much it costs will depend on how optimized you want it to be. Nothing in SEO costs any money, only time. You should learn what the techniques are and then you should do them your self.
SEO just wants to be free.
Don't pay for it.
A friend just told me recently “I have many people that do SEO for me already”. Really? He’s a friend, so I won’t tear him apart for that too much, but his site is found for the one thing that he’s interested in and it’s not found for his main products. I looked.
The first thing that you must do, MUST do, is to pick some keywords or phrases that you want to rank highly for. The best way to do this is to think about it from your users point of view. What problem are they trying to solve when they come to your site. Why should they be there? Wedding Flowers? Car Repair? Pizza? a TV Show? What are those words that they will type into Google to find you?
It’s good to get one main phrase that you was to own. That phrase will go everywhere on your site, so many times that’s annoying.
Now you need to pick 3-5 more phrases that you want to do well for. Maybe you won’t own these, but you still want traffic from them.
Remember, these phrases must be from the user’s point of view, not yours. You might think that you sell “water treatment systems”, but your users want to buy “water softeners”. You might think that you sell “hand made, one of a kind, jewelry”, but I’m looking for a “woman birthday gift”. You might think you sell “woman’s action wear”, but my wife’s looking for “woman sports clothes”.
Now that that has rolled around in your head for a while, you can write down the phrases that you want to rank well for and the one that you want to own.
Next, you can scatter those phrases around your site and ask for links from other sites. Make your title on every page contain that main phrase. Leave comments on other sites using those phrases. Do all of the other SEO stuff that you can find on the Internet and that I’ll talk about later.
SEO just wants to be free. Don’t pay for it.
Posted in SEO |
Friday, January 23rd, 2009
Really? Is it really time for Twitter? They have clearly captured the platform and will be the way to the future of microblogging or whatever you want to call it, but I’m just not sure that the numbers are there yet. You need to have people to make it valuable. There are still too many pastors that don’t quite get why they need a web site.
It's Twitter Time for Your Church
Facebook has everyone and their brother on it now. I’ve met more people from my past in the last two months than I knew that I knew. It’s what’s happening now. Twitter is what will happen next year.
Do you use Twitter? Do you use it often? For what purpose? Do you follow more than you tweet? Please leave a comment.
Quoting from Church Marketing Sucks: It’s Twitter Time for Your Church
The Reasons Your Church Must TwitterAnthony Coppedge recently released a $5 e-book entitled The Reason Your Church Must Twitter.
It covers everything from what in the world a Twitter is to how your church can make maximum use of Twitter in various flavors–from simply having public conversations to using Twitter as a devotional tool.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.churchmarketingsucks.com/archives/2009/01/its_twitter_tim.html
Posted in church |
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
I was walking a client through his Analytics stats yesterday, explaining what each page, each section meant. I asked him if he ever looked at these since we set them up. He looks at them as much as you do, which is never.
What traffic are you missing?
He didn’t connect the value of what these numbers and charts mean to how he can improve his site and make more money with it, as well as make it a better experience for his users.
As we drilled into the content part of it, I saw that no one, as in not one person, was looking through his portfolio pages. I realized that these pages have a smaller menu over to the side that people could easily miss.
Also, when I redesigned his site by bringing it into Wordpress (of course), the top, main menu now has a different look and action than the original small portfolio menu. I used to just put a glow around the highlighted menu item and now I was doing the whole colored div background, which is much more apparent.
Now we have a menu that looks and functions differently and no one who ever clicks on them. HHHmmmm. What to do?
Next step, I put in the same style menu as the top, so they highlight the same. That should improve the click on those. We’ll be watching his stats to see what happens.
Read your Analytics pages today. What traffic are you missing?
Posted in statistics |
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009
Wow. Things got busy and my Wordpress blog gets forgotten. I think I’m back. I’ll try to make up for lost time. The weather has been in the 80s for the last week or so, so I may have been a bit distracted.
Knocked Off The Horse
In the last week, I’ve also been busy with, and learned a lot from, clients and would be clients, about what people want, what they know, what they don’t know, and what they need. I’ll go into depth on some of these later, but I’m shocked, SHOCKED! I say, that there are actually people in the world who don’t have the same knowledge and beliefs and understanding that I do.
People don’t seem to understand that Wordpress is free and powerful. I am an old school, hand coder, who would rather do it all myself, so I can have total control, but I cranked out a complete web site, including a custom design, including an image gallery, and including all the fixin’s, in two hours. That’s two hours folks, to build a site that would have taken me two weeks in the old days.
Wordpress rocks. No way around it. Wordpress just freakin’ rocks.
It also seems that SEO is the buzz of the day. Either people want it or they don’t know yet that they want it. I’m finding that the common thread, with everyone that I talk to, is that they just don’t know much about how to effectively do SEO, even though it’s relatively easy.
A client told me this morning, after I gave them an outline of what to do, that it’s not hard to do, they just didn’t know what needed to be done. It’s like I gave them the map and now they are driving the car across the country.
I’ll be talking more about Wordpress SEO and SEO in general. It is really not difficult, once you get a few ideas figured out. I’m surprised that people charge so much for it, but it does give results and most people are not doing anything, so it’s easy to beat most other sites out there.
Posted in web site build |
Monday, January 12th, 2009
I ran into an old friend recently. The usual questions were asked about what’s happened in the 20 years since we’ve seen each other. Yes, I do web sites.
They said they were about to update their web site. Their spouse had created it and they wanted to add some features and update the look. I suggested that they use Wordpress. I sounded like the fan boy that I am.
They were pleasant, but said they already had hosting with GoDaddy and they would just use the web blog application that they provided as part of the hosting package. They had heard of Wordpress and that it was good, but they would use what they had.
I continued on about how cool Wordpress is. They were very nice, but had decided that they didn’t want to pay anything extra when they already had a blogging application included in their hosting package.
I checked it out on my own GoDaddy account. It sucked! It had a tenth of the functionality and the interface was horrible.
Did I mention that it's free?
I told them again that they should use Wordpress. I told them that it is free. You can install it anywhere. It’s got features, and blah blah blah, and IT’S FREE!
Oh. That’s quite different. It’s free you say? You don’t have to buy it?
No! It’s FREE. You can download it, install it, pick a theme, put in some plug ins and have a complete, professional web site FOR FREE.
They said they would check it out. They thanked me profusely. Told me that I had motivated them to get going on their web site.
I have no idea if they will do anything on it at all, but I guess I was shocked that not everyone has the same understanding and knowledge and beliefs that I do. Silly me.
People seem to think that to get cool software, you have to spend money. If you don’t spend money, then you can have cool software. People can’t wrap their heads around the whole “open source” thing.
If you happen to not be aware, Wordpress is free. There is no cost. You can download it and install it on any web server that’s running MySQL and Apache (which is almost every web server these days). You can control all aspects of it. You can build your own theme if you want. You can do anything with it.
Did I mention that it’s free?
Posted in Wordpress |
Thursday, January 8th, 2009
There’s a new product out today, from Remarkablogger, that will teach you about Wordpress SEO. I will have a review of it up on the site as soon as I can.
Posted in SEO |
Saturday, January 3rd, 2009
Quoting from Churches open door to ministry on the Web By Tracy Farnham
Bennie Greene, left, chairman of Media Services for Hopewell Baptist, and Ken Mull, sound technician for Hopewell Baptist, work on a recent Sunday morning to get the churches services online.
Photo contributed by Joshua Norman
MORGANTON – Much like an interactive church bulletin, local congregations are embracing the Internet to broaden the scope of ministry and stay in touch with members.
Hopewell Baptist Church uses the Web for their church calendar, prayer requests and member contacts. Josh Norman, who handles media and technology for Hopewell, said they had a test run in October for previously recorded services over the Internet.
“We record all our services and broadcast them on the Internet. We went full streaming with our Sunday morning services in November,” Norman said.
Along with offering free sermon outlines, questions may be asked and submitted to Dr. Raymond Rowland. The Web site has information about ordering a CD or tapes with messages through the Bible by Rowland. These are free and can be received by following the links on the site at www.afocusonchrist.com.
To view past services for Hopewell go to www.hopewellbaptist-church.org.
Read the entire article at http://www2.morganton.com/content/2008/dec/29/churches-open-door-ministry-web/
Posted in church |
Monday, December 29th, 2008
It looks like there will be some valuable articles on WordPress SEO over at Remarkablogger. Since I’m such an advocate of WordPress and SEO, I’ll be interested to see what he has to say. He usually have some good information that I can learn from.
Quoting from About WordPress SEO
Why WordPress SEO is Separate from Blog SEO or “Regular” SEO
WordPress SEO needs to be its own thing because of all the unique factors a blogger needs to understand when applying basic SEO principles to a WordPress blog. For example, many of the common points of standard SEO advice have to be translated into how to specifically do them for WordPress SEO. Things like:
Title tags
File names
Headings
Redirects
Meta tags
Robots exclusion
This Ain’t the Old Days Anymore
Back in the day, web pages were edited by hand, and you had to know HTML, and, for some of this stuff, a little scripting. How is today’s blogger going to accomplish the above without any editing of HTML or scripting?
WordPress. With WordPress, about the most technical thing you need to know is how to install a theme or a plugin (and with the advent of WordPress 2.7, even plugins have become super-easy). There are plugins for WordPress SEO. Problem is, that’s not quite enough. You have to know what to do with them in order to really improve your search rankings. And in order to do that, you have to know SEO.
Read the entire article at http://michaelmartine.com/2008/12/28/wordpress-seo/
Posted in SEO |
