Why you need to do your SEO research — my big surprise!

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online-business-seo-surprise-1I have a client who is a landscaper. Obviously, his business is local. He paid some good money to have someone build a website for him but has gotten only 7 leads from it in the past year.

He asked me to do a makeover and include SEO (search engine optimization). Besides the fact that the website looked overly busy and confusing, there was one BIG mistake. Most of the text was embedded in images!

Why shouldn’t you embed text in images?

Search engines search for text. They can’t read what’s inside an image.You can attach text to an image — it’s called “alt text” — and search engines read it. You can also use keywords to name your images and search engines read that, too, because alt text and image names become text on your web page. But a page with only images is a red flag. Search engines favor content and that means text. So, a big image may look nice, but it won’t do much for SEO. And SEO is what gets your website at the top of a web search by a potential customer.

My assumptions were all wrong!

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by Ellen Finkelstein

Increase your website traffic with this simple technique

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online-business-increase-website-traffic-1The more traffic you get to your website, the more opportunity you have to gain potential customers or clients. But many entrepreneurs have trouble getting traffic to their website.

Over time, your traffic will increase as you:

  • Write more content
  • Grow your email and social media lists

But that can take a long time..

And you want quick results, right?

Of course, right!

Is there a shortcut?

There are a few shortcuts, but one that you can use now is to take advantage of the pages on your website that are already doing well. These pages have content that people are searching for and are interested in, so they’re more likely to attract attention.

That means that you find out which pages get the most traffic and promote them. How?

I’ll tell you the two ways to promote them in a minute, but first you need to discover which pages are bringing you the most traffic.

Using Google Analytics

You can learn all about your traffic using Google Analytics. If you don’t already have them set up, follow these steps:

  1. Go to google.com/analytics and set up an account.
  2. If you have an HTML site, you need to add code that you get from Google’s site on each page. But for a WordPress website, you use a plug-in. (Read about how to install a plug-in here.) There are a number of good plug-ins but I’m happy with Analyticator.
  3. Follow the instructions to set it ip — it’s easy to set up.

With most WordPress Google Analytics plug-ins, you can see stats in your Dashboard, but because I have more than one site, I usually go to Google’s website.

Watch this 4-minute video to see how to discover which pages have the most traffic.

 

The two ways to promote your best pages Read More

by Ellen Finkelstein

Grow Your Online Business: Day 12 (Ultimate Blog Challenge) Grow your list quickly

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online-business-lists-grow-quickly-1If you have a great website, including an enticing free download, your list will grow, but slowly. This is especially true when you’re just starting out. It can be hard to get traction at first. And that’s frustrating!

So here are some ways you can speed up the process.

Before I start, let me say that one of the most powerful ways to grow your list is through partnerships and events.Those are the topics of the last week of this course.

Meanwhile… Read More

by Ellen Finkelstein

How to format the URLs of your blog posts so they make sense and bring more traffic to your website

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Have you seen blog post URLs that look like this?

www.domain.com/p=789

Not only does it look cryptic (and indeed it is), but blog post names like that do nothing for your SEO (search engine optimization).

Instead, your blog post URLs should look like this:

www.domain.com/title-of-blog-post

This type of link is sometimes called a “pretty link” because it looks so much nicer.

How pretty links get you more traffic

Because you should put keywords in the title of your blog, when your blog post uses the title in its file name, you’ll get more traffic to your website.

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by Ellen Finkelstein

3 steps to easy SEO (Search Engine Optimization) success

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internet marketing - keyword cloud
Courtesy of esocialmediashop

In case you don’t know, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is what you do to get the most traffic to your site from people searching on search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

According to a recent study, the percentage of traffic that goes to sites with positions 1, 2 and 3 in search results are:
1: 36.4%
2: 12.5%
3: 9.5%

Obviously, it helps to be high in the search engine results! That’s where SEO comes in.

What’s a keyword?

A keyword or keyword phrase is one or more words that your target market might type into a search engine to find your website. You can, and should, have more than one keyword.

For example, at one of my other websites, www.ellenfinkelstein.com, I have 2 main keyword phrases: PowerPoint tips and AutoCAD tips. If you try those in Google, you’ll see that I’m #1 for AutoCAD tips and #4 for PowerPoint tips (after the ads).

Try it at bing.com or Yahoo and you’ll see that I’m #5 for AutoCAD tips and #6 for PowerPoint tips.

That’s how I get over 100,000 visits to that website each month.

Use a keyword strategy

You need more than one keyword; in fact, you need several sets. Here’s a strategy:

  • Main keyword phrase: Think big and come up with a keyword phrase that lots of people search for. It will be hard to rank high for this, but think long-term.
  • Several medium traffic keyword phrases: Develop several second-tier keyword phrases that will bring you traffic now. These will have fewer people searching for them, but you’ll be able to rank higher more quickly.
  • Long tail keywords: These are keywords that include several words (3-5). Fewer people search for them, but you’ll have less competition, so you can rank  high more quickly. If you have a local business, including the name of your town can help you to rank highly. Use these for individual posts.

If you know your audience well, you know what they need. If you write to meet their needs, you’ll include a lot of those long tail keywords automatically.

1. Find your keywords Read More

by Ellen Finkelstein