Promised changes to SEO Power Up

During Product Sellers Seminar last month, I mentioned that the price of SEO Power Up is going to change this month.

I just finished making the changes which you can see in the letter at SEO Power Up.

Starting today the SEO training course will be $30 per month for six months.

My original goal was to write 52 weekly lessons. So far, we have 28 lessons.

After listening to feedback from my customers, I’ve realized that an entire year of SEO is a really long time. Your goal is to get your site optimized and a plan in place NOW, not a year from now.

So I’ve decided to cut short SEO Power Up to just six months long.

What does this mean for you?

Well, first of all, you’ll get all the amazing information in a short time. The first few weeks of lessons will remain the same and will still help you jumpstart your optimization efforts. But I won’t be dragging out the rest of the information. I’ll sprinkle everything else throughout the lessons, so you won’t miss anything.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

Can You Achieve SEO?

I overheard a business owner today say that she had “achieved SEO” on her site.

Achieved SEO? As in, she was on a mission for SEO and she now has it? As in, she has climbed the mountain and is now sitting on top of SEO?

This mindset is what will result in search engine optimization failure for many business owners.

Let’s talk a little bit about what achieve means, so we can understand the error behind this statement.

First, achieve can mean “to carry out successfully,” according to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. For example, you can achieve an increase in traffic to your website.

Achieve can also mean “to get or attain as the result of exertion.” You can achieve first place in the baseball tournament.

And finally, achieve can mean “to attain a desired end or aim.” It means to become successful.

While all of these can, on the surface, seem to apply to SEO, the problem I see is that SEO is viewed as something that you reach out for, a goal to be met. It’s viewed as the end of a means.

This cannot be further from the truth.

SEO is actually a process, it is something that you DO. You achieve higher rankings in the search engines as a result of the search engine optimization you do on your website.

You achieve higher sales as a result of the SEO that brought more traffic to your site.

So SEO is actually the means to an end — with the end perhaps being more traffic to your websites, better targeted traffic and a higher conversion rate.

It is possible that the business owner misspoke herself. Perhaps she realizes that SEO is just one tool in the marketing bag. However, there are a lot of home business owners today who think that if they just achieve SEO, people will beat down their doors.

And I don’t want to see you fall into that trap. Remember, SEO is a tool, an ongoing process, to promote your website. If you want to know more about what that process is and how to implement it on an ongoing basis, you need some SEO training.

Come Hear Some Awesome SEO Advice

Do you have questions about search engine optimization? Would you like to hear an expert talk about what you should avoid when trying to optimize your website?

Head over to the Winning Sisters Skype room at 11:30 a.m. Central Time today. I will be discussing SEO and my new product, SEO Power Up.

Lynn Terry’s Take On How To Optimize Your Ecommerce Site

One of the most common questions new product sellers have is how to optimize their newly minted ecommerce website. Lynn Terry, in her ClickNewz! blog, talks about seven methods to properly optimize your ecommerce site.

A Page For Each Product
Lynn’s first recommendation is to create a page for each individual product in your store. This is very easy to do in my ecommerce software, the Shop Kit Plus. You simply add your products and the script creates the optimized pages for you.

High Quality Backlinks
Obtaining high-quality inbound links is the second method to optimizing your ecommerce site that Lynn recommends. Basically, you need to get other people to link to each page of your site.

Unique Product Descriptions
Start by making sure your product descriptions are unique. If you’re a product manufacturer, uniqueness won’t be such as issue. However, writing a description that will increase your link worthiness may be a bit tricky. So I recommend my friend Melissa Ingold’s Product Descriptions Pack to help you learn how to write those descriptions. Basically, include as much information as possible.

And if you’re a wholesaler or affiliate and you’re using the manufacturer’s descriptions, rewrite them so that they won’t be identical to the original.

Related Items
Lynn also suggests posting related items on your product pages. This is very easy to do in the Shop Kit Plus during the process of adding your products.

Customer Reviews
Have you considered asking for reviews? Lynn notes several sites that you can go to in order to request user experiences and feedback. Reprint these on your site. With the SKP, you can reprint them in your product page’s description area, and on your home page.

Social Networks
If you haven’t created a profile on sites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, now’s the time! Some of my clients who have done this include Earth Friendly Goods, who can be found at StumbleUpon and The Cloth Diaper Shop, who has embraced Facebook.

Useful Content
Finally, Lynn recommends adding content to your store that will enrich your visitor’s experience. I see some clients using video tutorials, how-to articles, checklists and more.

As I’ve suggested before, adding a blog to your site can help you leverage an RSS feed and open your business up to the comments of your customers. This can be an invaluable tool for letting your customers get to know, like and trust you — but also so you can learn what your customers want, so you can provide it to them.

Has this given you some ideas? Are you already using these techniques? Tell me what you think…

Do Your Homework Before You Hire A Web Designer

I am completely flabbergasted.

Just finished reading a post at a mothering forum I frequent about a WAHM who has hired three nuts to design her websites.

Normally, I’d just chalk this up to to the original poster not knowing what to look for in a web designer. An isolated case. But I have just finished teaching a web design class at my local technology center and the sites my students had paid people to build were just as nuts as what you’re describing. Apparently, there are a lot of people out there that have been hoodwinked by a web designer who knew less about building websites than their clients … who at least know that what the web designer is doing isn’t working!

One of my students had a web site that was nothing but a huge graphic with two little bitty frames in which the designer quite literally hid the content and navigation.

Another student had a site in which every page was completely different and the content looked like it had been puked up on the page by a toddler.

Yet another student had a fairly decently organized site — but you were too busy playing with the flash bubbles in the header to notice what the site said.

ARGH. Where are these people learning web design?!

Before you hire a web designer, you need to follow the advice below to make sure you don’t pay for a website that will do your business more harm than good.

How To Avoid Bad Web Designers

1. Ask the designer you’re going to hire what methods they’ll be using to build your site, and then look through their portfolio. Go to the sites and see how those sites are ranking for their keyword phrases.
2. Run far away from designers who are more interested in building a pretty site than a site that works — in other words, sells your products.
3. Finally, I’d like to suggest that you read my SEO friendly website special report* that I’m offering at SEO Power Up (or sign up for the course, once we go live with the site).

*This report is no longer available for free. But you can receive it as part of your membership in SEO Power Up.