What Does SEO Stand For And Why Do I Need It?

If you’d like to hear a fun interview about SEO, head over to my friend Jenn Givler’s Create A Thriving Business podcast. She and I discussed search engine optimization last week and had a blast doing it.

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.

Teaching Tuesday: How To Drive Traffic To Your Site

Gregory submitted a question to our survey:

What is the best way to get people to my site?

This is a pretty broad question. So I took a look at his website to see if I could tell what marketing methods he was already using. And that’s when I discovered several problems, that I actually just talked about a few weeks ago at Winning Sisters.

I would like to recommend SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which is the most cost effective method of of driving people to your website who actually want what you are selling. Do-it-yourself SEO is free, and if done properly, will grow your business by leaps and bounds.

When done right, SEO enables your site to rank within the top 10 search engine results for the terms people type into the search engines when they are looking for your products.

Of course, the key is “done right.” For this reason, I believe it’s wise to invest in learning the proper methods of SEO. And I recommend SEO Power Up as the place to go to receive that training. It’s very affordable at $10 a month for 12 months.

What I noticed on Gregory’s site is the use of frames, session IDs and javascript navigation. Each of these website elements alone will prevent the search engines from properly indexing your site. This means that when the search engine visits your site, it can’t access your information, so it can’t store your web page content. This means that when people search for terms that are related to your products, your website will not appear in the listing.

My solution: What Gregory needs to do is find a shopping cart, like the Shop Kit Plus, that does not use frames, session IDs or javascript navigation.

Once he has removed those elements from his website, he needs to invest in SEO training, such as SEO Power Up, and learn how to properly optimize his site. Once he has done that, he can look into other marketing methods, such as press releases, article marketing, email marketing, etc.

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.

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.

Should I automate my site directory submission?

One of my clients asked if she should purchase a directory submitter, which is software that will submit her site link to hundreds of online directories. Some submitters even claim to submit to thousands of directories.

Claims like this are dubious at best.

So, before you drop any money or time on software that claims to handle your directory submissions for you, you need to ask yourself these questions:

Which directories is this software submitting to? If you can’t find that answer, then you need to run far, far away from it. You can have thousands of backlinks from thousands of directories, but if they are low quality sites — they are worthless.

Do the members of my target market use this directory? If you’re a jewelry seller and you want to submit your site to dozens of popular jewelry directories, you’ll get the SEO benefits AND the traffic sent your way by the directory itself. But if you’re submitting your site to thousands of unknown directories that no one, much less your target market, uses, you’re wasting your time.

Will submitting my site to this directory have any benefit at all? Submitting to an obscure directory is not going to help you. If your target market uses it and you will get traffic from it directly, then it is worth it. One of my clients has listed her site in a directory of natural products and she receives hundreds of visitors per month from it. Definitely worth the submission!

However, if the directory isn’t going to send anyone your way, you’re better off, in my opinion writing articles and submitting them to niche and popular article directories, like Lady Pens. Not only will people go to your site from the article directory, website owners will reprint your article, sending their website traffic to you. Mutually beneficial!

Not sure how article marketing works? Take a peek at Easy Article Marketing.

Note: Am I saying that you shouldn’t submit your site to directories? No! I’m just saying that you should be very careful where you submit. Finding the specific directories that your target market uses to find your products is an excellent idea. Submitting blindly to thousands of directories? Not so much.

Tips For Optimizing Your Website

OK, so unless you’ve spent several hours with your nose buried in SEO forums and talking to various SEO gurus (or at least reading their blogs) you probably have no idea what optimizing your website involves. And if you did, there is a good chance that you have the WRONG idea from BAD advice.

I’m going to let you in on a few secrets. First of all, here is what optimizing your site for search engines does NOT involve:

1. Submitting your sites to search engines
2. Slapping meta tags on your pages
3. Measuring the density of your keywords in your content (Say what?!)
4. Filling your pages with tons of keyword phrases whether related to your site’s content or otherwise
5. Creating doorway pages.
6. Hiring someone who does any of the things mentioned above.

So, what exactly DOES optimizing your website for search engines involve?

First, I recommend you do your research to find out what keyword phrases people are actually using to find your product. Then name your pages appropriately.

For example, if you are selling baby slings using a Shop Kit Plus site, you might do your research and discovered that there were 472 searches for “baby slings” in the past 90 days and 426 for the phrase “baby sling.” However, the term “baby carrier” received 583 searches. So, I would recommend using the “baby carrier” phrase as well as the “baby sling” phrase.

Second, you need to name your pages using the keyword phrases you found. So, if you’re using the Shop Kit Plus, you would name your product “Red Widget Baby Carrier.” In the Shop Kit Plus, this will give your single item page the same name as the product.

On your product information pages, you might have a page with care instructions. So you might name the page “Baby Carrier Fabric Care.” This will give the page, at the top of the browser, the same name.

In the Shop Kit Plus, I would also recommend hiding the page title in the content area itself, then writing your own headline, using the keyword phrases, but written with your human readers in mind.

And third, the most important part: Write your content with your human visitors in mind. It must be compelling and either informative or persuasive, depending on the purpose of your page (sales or education).

This is optimizing your site in a nutshell. There are several methods of offsite optimization, but we’ll get into those later…

(For more information about proper search engine optimization, join SEO Power Up.)

Avoiding Google Hell

If you keep up with search engine optimization (SEO) news at all, you may have heard the buzz caused by this article in Forbes and Matt Cutts’ (a Google software engineer) response.

So, what’s the big deal? Basically, a couple of dudes were making mad loot in the diamond selling business until Google dumped their high-ranking pages into its supplemental index. This resulting in both guys losing hundreds of thousands of dollars each in a few months time.

No one seems to know for sure what happened, but there is some speculation that the sites were “slapped” for employing shady SEO tactics, like creating more than 300 links to outside sides, most of which were not relevant to diamonds or even jewelry; and creating duplicate content.

Matt, on the other hand, says this:

It’s perfectly normal for a website to have pages in our main web index and our supplemental index. If a page doesn’t have enough PageRank to be included in our main web index, the supplemental results represent an additional chance for users to find that page, as opposed to Google not indexing the page.

So, what does this mean to you? Well, my advice is this:

1. Don’t try to manipulate your search engine rankings. Give your visitors what they want, making sure you use solid, white-hat, non-tricky SEO common sense.

2. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Don’t let your search engine traffic be your only source of income. The Google “powers that be” can be fickle — even if they are just a bunch of bots. In short, spread yourself around.

Here are some methods of generating traffic that don’t rely heavily on search engine traffic to your site:

• Article Marketing
• Blogging For Business
• Press Release Marketing

So, have you experienced a Google slap: A suddenly dive into the supplemental index? And what are you doing to prevent a sudden downswing in your Google traffic from killing your business?

How’s Google Treating Your Site?

Google’s making changes and the Page Rank for many sites is going up — or down.

Say what?

Code Monkey at vbModder says the Page Rank on his site has been nuts for the past couple of days. He said, on January 23:

This current Page Ranking export looks like it ended without completing. Lets take vBulletin Modder for example.

Our front page went to Page Ranking 4. It’s predicted at 6 which is meaningless, but with a three month old snapshot PR 4 would probably right for the toolbar. However, our forums are still PR 2. And the google webmaster site keeps switching between the two as the top PR page and has been since before the alleged snapshot date.

On top of that, we have newer forums that are now Page Ranking 4 and contain posts that are PR 4. Which would indicate the result of a front page at 6 and a forum home at 5 or 6. Then , we have older forums from when I started this site that still have 0 PR. What the heck is that. And to add insult to injury, (but I will take the PR) we have an archive page for a forum that has two threads that is a PR 5. This is bleepin nuts if you ask me.

There are authority sites out there right not that have 10’s of thousands of backlinks that were Page Ranking 7 before this export that now have 0. Something is seriously wrong and the bad part is it’s costing people money.

The updates appear to be done now — and I’m happy. This site used to rank 0, but now it’s a 4. Woohoo!

My vbMojo site was a 0 when I created it Dec. 5, 2006 — but now  in February 2006 it’s ranked 3. I’ll take that for two month’s work.

So, how’re your sites doing?

SEO Myths: Submitting Your Site To Search Engines

Elena posts some great ideas for increasing the number of visitors (read: prospects) to your site, and keeping them coming back. The ideas I like best include:

• Great content (That’s a given, right?!)
• Add a newsletter
• Offer freebies
• Write articles

However, she made a comment at the top of her post that I want to address:

You don’t submit your site to search engines once, and be done with it.

It is not necessary for you to submit your site to search engines — at all. Don’t waste your time. Don’t waste your money for someone else to do it.

Spend your time doing the things I mentioned above (especially) and you’ll automatically appear in the search engines.

Of course, there is more to search engine ranking than just the few things mentioned here, so sign up for SEO Power Up to learn more about what you should do.

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