BIKES ONLY

Today was tougher than normal. There was a pretty strong North wind. There is normally a slight breeze from the West, off the ocean. Not today.

I have a 6 mile route on the bike path at the beach. 3 miles North and 3 miles South. My goal is to do a mile in 5 minutes, so 6 miles should be 30 minutes.

Going North, with the strong wind blowing right at me, made that part of the ride a struggle. My legs were burning and my heart rate was up. It was cold. It was hard. I was not happy. I considered ways that I could cut short the ride and which excuses would work. Instead of a mile in 5 minutes, it was taking 7 or 8 minutes to go a mile.

Too much work and not enough progress.

I got to my “turn around” point and headed South. Wow. What a difference some wind makes. I was flying South with the wind at my back. I was making a mile in about 4 minutes. I was going almost twice as fast going with the wind compared to against the wind.

Click To Play The Video

The beach is very seasonal. Big waves, narrow beach, no tourists in the Winter. Smaller waves, wide beach and lots of tourists in the Summer. It’s been like that for as long as I can remember.

Sidenote:
Because I think about things to blog about as I ride my bike, I took a video as I rode by to help me explain what I was I seeing. You can click on the video to watch it. I’m curious what your experience with the video is like and how I can improve it. Feedback welcome.

Part Three:
Surfers have to paddle out through the waves on their surf boards. Then they wait out there, letting smaller waves pass until they see one they can ride. They paddle hard and hope to catch it. If they do catch it, they become one with the wave and ride it as hard as they can.

It’s been described as “euphoric”.

The Moral:
Each of these stories are about tough times coming before good times. Things change. They go up and down, in and out. They “cycle”. A “wave” is a pattern of highs and lows. They get high, then they crash down, and wash back out to sea.

Keep Peddling!

Just like the surfer paddling out before he can catch a wave, just like me riding into the wind before I could ride with it, and just like the beaches that get washed out before getting washed back in, you have some work to do before you get rewarded.

But you will be rewarded.

Keep working. It’s worth it.

The wave is coming. The wind will be at your back. Don’t give up now. The reward is just up ahead.

Keep peddling.

If you read my page describing the SEO book, you’ll see that I actually wrote that the book addresses the 80% of SEO information that you need to know and not the 20% you don’t really need to know.

The sheer avalanche of SEO information can be overwhelming, for beginners and experts alike. Who do you know who to listen to? What information do you need to know, and what information is filler?

1. Most Information Published On SEO Is Filler
You can learn 80% of what you need to know about SEO pretty quickly. You don’t need the additional 20% in order to achieve.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.seobook.com/learning-seo-noisy

I suggest that you spend a set period of time, every day, to do some activity that will build more inbound links for your site. Leave comments on other blogs, post in forums, guest blog, submit articles to directories, the choice is yours, but the key is having a plan and doing it on a schedule.

Link building has, classically, been a tactic slapped on to a marketing campaign or website post-launch. I believe that those companies/sites that treat link acquisition as an afterthought, rather than building it into the product, will always lose out to those who treat link building strategically.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/strategic-link-building-how-to-productize-link-acquisition-and-dominate-your-niche

Conrad Walton Headshot

My wife and I have an obligation that keeps us from leaving our immediate area for any period of time, except for one day a week. We can take one day off and let someone else deal with it. We take mini vacations. We drive as far as we can and find a great place to eat.

One of our favorite places is a remote beach named Jalama Beach, near Lompoc, CA. It’s a 14 mile drive through farmland and cattle ranches until you get to the beach. There’s nothing but green for miles in all directions. It was like being in Ireland or something.

Green hills on the way to Jalama Beach

We got there after sunset today, but the drive was amazing. The road crosses a railroad track before dropping down to the beach. As we got to that crossing, we see a train coming in the distance right then. It would be there in a matter of minutes, so I parked next to the No Parking sign and jumped out with the camera.

I have a iPhone video of the train passing by. Very exciting stuff. It brought out the 9 year old in me (which is apparently not a hard thing to do.)

Jalama Beach Train Crossing

With the dramatic sunset in the background, I asked my wife to take some photos to use here and on Facebook. She did a great job, I thought. I’m happy with it.

I put a dime on the track before the train got there. I didn’t have a penny and I didn’t want to invest a quarter. After the train went by, I looked for my dime. It was no where to be found. I did find another dime that someone else had put on the track. It was partially covered with dirt and corrosion.

You never know what you’ll get back. You just have to keep putting stuff out there.

What have you put out there recently and what did you get back when you did?

When I got the comment below on one of the last posts, I realized, “Oh, yeah… I need to explain this stuff, huh?” I keep forgetting that.

All of the five would have been wonderfully informative IF I knew the DEFINITION OF EACH TERM. For those as dumb as me, what is an H1 Headline Tag? How about Internal Link Anchor Text? I was so excited to be led to the most important five and then I dropped from the cliff when I couldn’t understand what you were telling me. Eeeek~

Read the entire article at:
http://www.walton.com/2010/02/25/search-engine-ranking-factors-seomoz.html#comments

So here’s what those mean, and more importantly, what they mean to you.

Flowers on cactus in my backyard

You can see where it actually is on a web page by doing the “view source” in your browser to look at the code behind the page. Look at all that gibberish. Look towards the top of the gibberish. There will be a bit of information that says “<title>This Text Is Whatever Your Title Is And Where Your Keywords Should Be</title>”. That’s the title and what this says is that your keywords should be inside of those “title tags”.

You can control the title in many different ways in many different systems. In Wordpress, the title of your page or post becomes the title, following the name of your site. In Etsy, the title of your product becomes the title, followed by your shop name. You’ll have to look at your own site and figure out how this works.

What you should do is make sure that your keywords are in that title. If that means adding it to the name of your product or your post, then do it. Experiment until you know how to make it work.

2. Keyword Use as the First Word(s) of the Title Tag
The second most important factor is having those keywords as the FIRST words in the title. I’ve actually heard the they should be after the initial word, but I can’t prove that. The trick is to get them in the title towards the beginning of the title.

Since Etsy seller Warmth left the comment, let’s look at one of her products on Etsy.
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=22247701

The title of the page is “Jilly-from the Easter Mice Felt Mouse Collection by Warmth”. I’m guessing her keywords are “felt mice”, so I would reword this product, so the title changes, to “Felt Mice Collection: Jilly, from the Easter Mice by Warmth.” See how the keywords are first now and it still make sense to real people?

3. Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name
Third factor is having your keyword in your domain name. If you have a domain name, then it counts to have the keyword in it. If you’re on Etsy, the domain name is “etsy.com”, so unless you are targeting “etsy guide” or something, you’re out of luck on that one.

4.Keyword Use Anywhere in the H1 Headline Tag
Fourth refers to an “H1 headline”. The H1 tag is one of 5 levels of headline. They are named H1, H2, H3, H4, and H5. They correspond to levels of importance and usually have some formatting attached to them, like they are larger and bolder. If you don’t know what these are or you can’t actually touch the content of your page to put them in, you’re out of luck on that too. If you’re using Wordpress, you can actually put in <h1>the text you want to highlight</h1> into the HTML edit field on your post.

5. Keyword Use in Internal Link Anchor Text on the Page
“Keyword Use in Internal Link Anchor Text on the Page” means that when you link from one page to another on your site, which is an “internal link,” you should use your keywords in the link. If you link to other web sites, those are “external links”. The “Anchor text” is the actual text that you use in to link with. So if your keywords are “felt mice”, then you should use the words “felt mice” to link to other pages on your site.

If you are using Etsy, this is difficult. About all you have for links are the ones from your shop page to your product pages. If you have your keywords in your product names, these links will already have your keywords in them.

Yes, I'm wearing sunglasses on a rainy day.
Dude, this is LA.

I’m fan of Tony Stewart and have been for years. He used to drive for Home Depot, so my wife, (just because she’s like that), started to support Jimmy Johnson, because he drove for Lowes.

When Tony won a race, we’d go to Home Depot and buy something for the house. When Jimmy won, we’d go to Lowes and buy something for the house.

When Elliot Sadler won, we’d buy M&Ms.

Since those days, Jimmy Johnson has won the last 4 straight championships. Tony hasn’t won any championships.

Sunday, the first time we’ve ever attended a NASCAR race at our local track, Tony did well all day and came in 9th! The winner of the race? Yeah, it was Jimmy. sigh…

Thought struck me that there were a lot of people at the race and millions more watching at home. We bought hats and shirts and stickers. Each race team spends literally millions of dollars a year to support that car and driver. Each team has sponsors who give them that money in hope that you will buy what they are advertising. (I guess that worked, didn’t it…)

What does all of that effort produce? How does it make the world a better place? What good is it?

Entertainment.

People like to be entertained. I live near Los Angeles, so I’m familiar with the entertainment industry. Billions are spent on it. It must be pretty valuable to everyone.

If I was going to apply this to your web site, I would say that you should be entertaining. You should tell stories. You should be funny. You should make people say “cool, man.” Johnny B. Truant wrote about this concept at The Real Secret to Becoming a Popular Blogger

I’m going to try to write more about me and what happens in my life. I’ll try to be more entertaining. I hope that works for you.

How entertaining are you? Have you ever thought about that? What can you do to be more entertaining? Please leave a comment and tell us.

On-Page (Keyword-Specific) Ranking Factors

1. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag
66% very high importance
8% moderate consensus

2. Keyword Use as the First Word(s) of the Title Tag
63% high importance
11.3% light consensus

3. Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name (e.g. keyword.com)
60% high importance
11.2% light consensus

4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the H1 Headline Tag
49% moderate importance
10.2% light consensus

5. Keyword Use in Internal Link Anchor Text on the Page
47% moderate importance
13% moderate contention

One tip to take away from this is when you are using Wordpress and the “All in one SEO” plug in, the default for all of the titles is: “%blog_title% | %post_title%”. Change that to “%post_title% | %blog_title%” to get those keywords closer to the beginning of the title.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#on-page-keyword-specific-ranking-factors

You want more traffic?
Build more links to your site!

What will happen to the way search algorithms score links is already happening. The Google algo has become much more elegant and advanced, devaluing staggering amount of links that shouldn’t count, and placing more emphasis on trusted links. And the trust and juice given by those links is then verified by elements like user data, domain age, and other relatively hard-to-spoof factors.

But please, don’t fool yourself. Links that should count are still the key to rankings (in Google, at least — and MSN and Yahoo! are only a few short years behind). In that spirit, Aaron and I have created our 101 Ways to Build (and Not Build) Links. (Yeah, it just so happened that there were exactly 101!)

Oh, and mad props to our inspiration, 131 Legitimate Link Building Strategies, one of the original authority documents on link building. It was just getting a bit rusty, that’s all (“Host your own Web Ring”?). Anyway, enjoy the update.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml

The web site is the truck of the tree, the thing that holds it all together, the thing that you hang everything else on, the things that everything else grows out of. Which metaphor do you like the best there?

After you get your keywords, before all that other stuff I wrote about for SEO, you need to get a domain name and build yourself a web site. This is not a definitive post on how to do this, but more of an overview of the process.

Here’s what I wrote:

This will all boil down to “keywords”. You need to decide what keywords you want to be found for. The more general the keyword, the more results will match it, which means more competition for that keyword. You want to be as specific as you possibly can, to narrow the results enough that you can beat your competition, but wide enough that you can actually get some traffic. It’s a balancing act.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.walton.com/2010/02/14/sell-handmade-stuff-on-the-internet-seo-part-one.html

The web site is the trunk of the tree, the thing that holds it all together, the thing that you hang everything else on, the things that everything else grows out of. Which metaphor do you like the best there?

Don’t use dashes. I’m not sure why, but no one likes them and Google will give you points off for them. I guess that spammers liked using them and they got a bad reputation.

There’s a link in my right sidebar that will take you to a page that will allow you to check if a domain name is available or not.

Domain Name Look Up

The steps to building a web site are:

1. Register a domain name.
I suggest GoDaddy for domain name registration. (NOT for web hosting!) Check on to make sure the domain name you want is available at the page above, then go here to register it. You have to point the domain name at the web host server to make it all work. Again, the details of how to do this are beyond the scope of this article.

2. Rent some web hosting space.
This is the subject of much debate, but I like PowWeb. There are many web hosts out there and they have pretty much become a commodity. I also host sites and if you want us to host your site, we have better customer support than the big guys.

3. Install your web site.

Under that number 3, I’m going to tell you that using Wordpress is the absolute best way to build a web site today. I’ve been building them since 1994, for large companies and small. Today, I only use Wordpress.

Steps to using Wordpress:

1. Install Wordpress.
Usually the web host has an option to do this for you with a click of a button. There are many “how to” guides out there for this. If you read this post and ask me to do it for you, I’ll do it for free. No strings. Just mention the secret word “penguins” in your email. (My personal addiction.)

2. Pick a “Theme”.
There are a bunch of free themes and some “premium” themes that cost money. If you want a custom theme, I can build you one. This topic has more depth to it than I can address here, but pick a theme and install it.

3. Write pages.
Create the static pages that you want on your web site. These will be the normal “contact us”, “about us”, and other stuff that stays the same.

4. Write posts.
You need to blog. Yes, you do. I’ll talk more about what to say and why later, but for now, make sure this is set up.

That is a quick overview of how to set up a web site. I have 15 years of experience to pour out into a long, rambling post about the details of each step, but I’ll save that for another day. Today, you should just know that this is the overview of steps you need to take.

Which keyword should you focus on?

I’ve gotten a couple people asking me that very question in the last week. The answer is tricky, but needs to be answered before you do anything else.

Green grass and trees

The second consideration is what are people looking for when they find you? What are they thinking of when they want to get to your site? What are they about? Who are they? What are their desires?

The third consideration is how many other web pages are targeting the same keyword? How much competition is there? How good is that competition?

Deciding what you are about if pretty easy. Just say it. Say it a few different ways.

Now do some research on what they are looking for. Use the Google Adwords tool to look up the number of searches for your terms.

You might find out that people don’t search for what you think they search for. They use different terms than you use. They say it a different way. They misspell the words.

Recently, I was looking for a black backdrop for some video tutorials that I’m working on. I looked up “material” in Google maps. Not a lot to be found. I looked up cloth. Still not a lot. I thought and thought. What did my mom call that stuff that clothes are made out of?

Fabric. It’s called fabric. I don’t call it fabric, but everyone else does. I found a “fabric” store and all was well with the world.

It’s that kind of stuff that you need to consider for the “who are you” part of this.

Google Adwords will tell you how many people search for a specific term on average, compared to other words. That’s one thing to know.

You can search for your term yourself and see what that “1 through 10 out of blah, blah, blah” number. This is your competition, the second thing to know.

Then, look at your Analytics. What keywords do people find you with now? Are those good keywords? There are always some strange ones in that list. You can also ask your clients if you have that kind of relationship with them.

The hardest part of this is that you have to think about it, use deductive reasoning. You have to look at the data you can find and figure out what the best keyword is to target. You might have to do a little math to get ratios if you know how to do that.

Look for a keyword that makes sense for you, makes sense for your clients, has enough traffic to make it worthwhile, and doesn’t have much competition.

That sounds easy, doesn’t it?

It’s not a human, so it can only guess, using calculations based on what it finds. What does it find and what is important? How would you determine what a page is about?

Tip Number One - Just say it!

How many time have you looked at a web page and not quite known what it was about? There were a lot of sales talk mumbo jumbo, but they didn’t tell you exactly what the product or service was.

Tip Number One – Just say it!

If people don’t know what your page is about, how do you expect search engines to know? You need to indicate, with no doubt, no ambiguity, what this page is about. You need to tell people and you need to tell search engines with focus and clarity.

You know what people take their cues from, because you a people. What do search engines take their cues from, not being as smart and nuanced as us humans?

Here are some ways they decide what the page is about:

This is not keyword density.

Something that matters a bit more is the use of heading tags. Those <h1> and <h2> tags that are usually used to make copy bigger and bolder. Google sees them in a different way. They are seen as giving the page organization. A heading defines a section of a page, so they must be important. If the heading has the keyword, then the page must be about that keyword. The trick here is that the style for the heading is usually way too big. Change the style sheet to make them look normal or at least reasonable, then use headings to control what’s important on the page.

“Anchor Text” is the actual text that you click on on a web page to take you to another place. You can click on images or text, but the text that you actually click on is called “anchor text”. I said that twice because it’s important. Think about this. When you click on a link that says “bicycle seats”, what do you expect to find at the target page? That’s right. So search engines, being stupider than a normal human, figure that the anchor text used somewhere else to link to YOUR page, must indicate what your page is about. That seems to be a pretty good indicator of what your site should be ranked for in the search engines.

It now becomes critical what anchor text people use to link to your site from their site. All you have to do is change the anchor text on their sites. Oh, wait. You can’t do that. It’s on THEIR site, not yours. You have no control over their site. You might be screwed.

This is where the post on Building Links comes in handy. There are ways to get links to your site and control what the anchor text says.

The next thing that a search engine will use to figure out what to rank your site for is the number of links to your site, to your page. They actually score each page, but they know that those pages are on your site, so your site might, probably will, get ranked higher than an individual page for a keyword. If you can just blast out a huge number of links to your site, that will help.

If you can just blast out a huge number of links to your site, that will help.

The last factor that I want to cover here is the page rank of those pages that do link to you. Google is putting more weight into what they are calling “authority”. A few links from a high authority site is worth a lot more than a ton of links from a low authority site. I’m not sure how to tell which is which, but larger, established, long term sites will be higher on the authority spectrum. Try to get links from these kinds of sites.

All of these factors get thrown into a big ‘ol bucket of numbers and they score your page for different keywords or phrases. When someone searches on a specific keyword or phrase, the look at all of the pages that have scores for those keywords and compare them. Whatever page has the highest score at the moment gets the top ranking. Some keywords get thousands, or millions, of searches a day. Some keywords have thousands, or millions, of pages that mention them. How does your site compare?

If you search for “does wordpress cost money” or “how much does wordpress cost” or even “wordpress cost” and you will find a page on my site ranked number one. That is primarily because one site out there put a link to my page in their blogroll, so they link to my page on my site from every page on their site. This is great if I wanted the world to know that Wordpress is free, which I guess I do. I just want them to know that I’m awesome at SEO and web design also.

People do find me and I’m thankful for that. As long as I have enough stuff in the sidebars to get their attention and tell them that I do web development and SEO also, then I’m happy.

Anchor text is king. Long live the king.

Why Do They Rank So High?

Why are these ranked so high? Let’s use Yahoo’s Site Explorer to investigate them. We want to know how many pages and internal links they have on their site and how many people link to them externally, from other sites. These two factors are huge in determining search engine rankings.

westcoastseaglass.net
westcoastseaglass.net has 773 pages, more than I expected. It looks like every product has a page, using the same template, so they all link to each other. 773 pages is more than we can generate quickly.They have 2,149 total links, including internal links and 1,774 external links. That’s a lot. This will not be easy. Where do they get these links from? Browsing through their links quickly, it looks like they got picked up by 3 or 4 prolific blogs and put in their blogrolls. That means that there’s a link to their site from every page on these blogs. Every post on a blog can mean a lot of links quickly and easily. We’ll have to use the same strategy and maybe even target the same blogs. This looks like the top site to target.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.walton.com/2009/06/06/small-business-seo-%e2%80%93-sea-glass-jewelry-keywords-and-competition-part-2.html

Do a normal Google search on each of your keywords. Write down the top 10 results. Names and URLs are enough. If you have 5 keywords, you should have 5 sets of top 10 results now.

Review those results. Do the same sites come up in more than one of them? Are there a set of sites that seem to “own” these keywords? Some might do a little better with these keywords and others might do a little better with those keywords, but generally, there’s a couple sites that seem to rule the results pages. These are your competition and we are going to crush them, and I mean that in the nicest possible way.

Now, you should have a feel for the best keywords and who your competition is. They are high on the results pages for these keywords. We need to ask why they are so highly regarded by the search engines. We’re going to dig in deep and find out what’s making them do so well.

We're going to dig in deep and find out what's making them do so well.

Review each of the competitor sites. Search engines love keywords. They love them in the links. If they have a menu, the menu links will contain these keywords. Blogs that are updated regularly are also great for search engines. Lots of pages and lots of content. Just having a bulk of content is good in the eyes of the search engines.

Now, let’s do a little mathematical analysis. It’s not really harder than anything you had in third grade, but I like using big words sometimes.

Go to the magic SEO site, SiteExplorer on Yahoo. Use the input at the TOP of the page that says “Explore URL”, not the one in the middle that says “My Sites”.
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Type in a URl from a competitor. First, let’s look at the total number of pages that they have on their site. You want “pages” for “all sub-domains”. Write down that number next to your list of competitors. Did I tell you to make a list of the top competitors? Go back and write that down, then add this total number of pages next to their names.

Step two is to find out who links to them. Inbound links are probably the biggest impact on page rank and SEO. If you can just get a bulk of inbound links to your site, then you’re probably going to do pretty well. There’s another button, up there at the top of the Site Explorer page that says “Inlinks”. You want to see how many “From all pages” to “Entire Site”. Write down the total number of inbound links to their site.

Repeat these steps for each of your competitors. At this point, you should have a bunch of list with names and numbers on them. You should have:

• List of keywords
• List of top 10 results for each keyword – name and URL
• List of competitors – Name and URL
• Number of total pages on each competitor’s site
• Number of total inbound links to each competitor’s site

Run this analysis on your own site. Do you see why they rank higher than you do? Yes, I thought you would.

Next, we’ll talk about how to do what they did and beat them at their own game.

Keywords are the root of SEO. Picking the correct keyword is critical. You can’t optimize for everything. You can only optimize for one or two things. You need to figure out what those specific things will be. One keyword different can make the difference between a flood of traffic and a trickle of traffic.

Here’s an excerpt, but go read the whole thing.

What Keywords Should We Target?

Starting with “sea glass”, I used Google’s keyword tool and found that “sea glass” had 2,433 searches a day. I assume that people were looking for all kinds of sea glass, where to buy bulk sea glass, methods for finding it or cleaning it or whatever else. It’s not that targeted at jewelry.

Next came “beach glass”. I’ve never heard to it referred to this way, but Google has. 1,332 people search for “beach glass” every day. We also have “seaglass” at 398 searches, “sea glass jewelry” at 325 and “beach glass jewelry” at 95. From there, we have all sorts of other keywords with less than 100 per day, including “sea glass jewellry” at 24, so make sure to check those misspellings.

These are the keywords we’ll concentrate on; sea glass, beach glass, seaglass, sea glass jewelry, and beach glass jewelry. Next we’ll look at who else ranks for those keywords.

Who is the Competition?

We’ll do a search for each phrase or search term and see who comes up in what order.

When we search for Sea Glass: Wikipedia comes first. I don’t think we’ll beat them, but they aren’t selling jewelry, so I don’t think we have to. The seaglassassociation.org comes next. Again, not sure we need to beat them, but it would be nice if we could. The next two are westcoastseaglass.net and naturalseaglass.com. These look like they might be our biggest contenders.

Let’s look at “beach glass” next. Wikipedia is first. The next two are relishinc.com and bytheseajewelry.com. These are the ones to beat here.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.walton.com/2009/06/06/small-business-seo-%e2%80%93-sea-glass-jewelry-keywords-and-competition.html

The most important, and first, thing for you to do is to figure out a strategy for SEO, search engine optimization. Going through the exercise will get you thinking about your site and how it fits into your overall business model.

What is the goal of your site? I asked that of a potential new client last week and it stopped him. He didn’t really know and said he’d have to think about it. I assume that the goal of your site is to sell stuff. That means that people have to find it through search engines. It might be to only add credibility when you talk to people in other sales venues. It might be to make yourself feel good about yourself because you have a place to tell the world whatever it is in your head.

If you want to sell stuff, who will you sell it to? What will they be searching for when they find you? What are you selling? Exactly? How specific is your product?

This will all boil down to “keywords”. You need to decide what keywords you want to be found for. The more general the keyword, the more results will match it, which means more competition for that keyword. You want to be as specific as you possibly can, to narrow the results enough that you can beat your competition, but wide enough that you can actually get some traffic. It’s a balancing act.

It's a balancing act.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool

Put in a keyword that makes sense for your site. Take a guess, if nothing else. Do a search for related keywords. You can sort the results by clicking on the column headers. We want to see how many searches for a keyword there are, on average, for a month.

Look at the “additional keywords to consider” at the bottom of the page. Look at the number of searches for these. Are there any that are relevant? Feel free to slice and dice these results, adding keywords to search for and sorting on the results, until you get a feel for what the best keyword(s) are for your site.

Make a list of the top 5 to 10 keywords. You’ll know which ones seem to mean the most in your niche. Write down the number of monthly searches for each one.

We want to compare the number of searches for each keyword, per month, with the number of competitors out there with web sites for those searches. Do a normal Google search for each of your top 5-10 keywords. Look at the number of total pages out there that use that phrase. At the top of the page, it will say, to the right, “Results 1-10 of about NNNNNNNN”. Write down that number of other pages next to that keyword.

You now have a list of keywords, the number of searches per month and the number of other pages that contain that keyword. If anything jumps out at you, you might have a good idea which keywords to target. If nothing jumps out, do the math. Divide the number of pages by the number of searches. This gives you a ratio. Compare the ratios. Pick the top 3-5 keywords that you think you have the best chance of beating, that is, the most searches compared to the least number of pages for that search.

Does that make sense? You’re trying to find out what keywords you want to try to rank for. Everything else we do for SEO depends on picking these keywords well. You can always readjust later, but pick good ones to start with.

Now that you have your list of keywords, we’ll move on to what to do with them in the next part.

Please take a minute and look around. Most of the site has been aimed at small businesses, but lately I’ve focused on the needs of crafters.

Regular readers of my blog know that I built a site for my wife’s friend, Deborah at www.mermaidspurseseaglass.com which opened my eyes to the needs of the whole crafting community.

I think there are some posts here that will be valuable for a crafter. I plan on writing more with crafters in mind. It seems like there’s a huge need for Internet marketing information here.

I see a lot of pleas for more traffic to your Etsy shops. I think I can take my experience and knowledge of small business (and large business, for that matter – read my “about me” page), and apply it to crafters.

I do plan on more good things for crafters, so please stick around. If you have a specific question, drop by the forum and ask it there. I’ll answer it as soon as possible.

Heartfelt Mouse

I want to especially thank Etsy seller Warmth for her kind review of my SEO book. That was beyond gracious. It means a lot to me to see someone say, “I am no longer feeling stupid and helpless regarding SEO.” Warmth warmed my heart with that.

If anyone wants a really cute mouse, you know where to go!

Stay tuned!

Timothy Adam Designs

I started reading the Etsy forums to see what people are talking about there that might apply to my products here.

One area popped out at me and that’s the problem with getting traffic to your Etsy site. There are 21 items posted every minute there! There are 135,000 new people joining every month! I was shocked. No wonder products get buried there.

The first post I read there was from Warmth, saying they were ready to pay someone to help get more traffic. There seems to be some real desperation. (If you like cute little felt mice, check out their store on Etsy.)

Of course, I think I have all of the answers, but that’s just my personality type. The answers would be having a blog and promoting it off site. There are things to do on Etsy, but I know more about the off site stuff.

I found this thread in the forum and they had a lot of great advice. There were 569 responses when I saw it.

Here’s a quote of a small part of the initial post. It’s worth reading the whole thing. Notice the mention of a blog and a mailing list. Key factors there!

By Timothy Adam Designs

I am only going to hit a few key types of off Etsy marketing.. There are so many, so i will share the 3 that I use the most. At the end I show how put all three together along with on etsy promo to get 500 views to my shop in just over 1 hour.

Blogging:

I have been blogging for a little over a year. My blog has played a very important role in the growth of my Etsy shop. With my blog I have grown an e-mail list through my monthly giveaway.. This list has grown to 1500 people.. Last spring I held a product test with the small list I had at the time, which was 250. Long story short.. I sold 15 of the product test necklaces in less than 2 hrs. E-mail lists are very powerful!

Your blog should include links to your Etsy shop. These link should be very visible so it is easy for your readers to navigate to your shop. The best method for acheving this is to use the Etsy mini that is provided by Etsy.. here is a how to video I created all about the Etsy mini.. CLICK HERE

Facebook:

I recently joined facebook, and I have found to be a very powerful marketing tool. I use my facebook for networking and marketing my business, but you have to tread lightly. Facebook is cracking down on accounts that are doing this.. make sure your main account is set up in your name and not your business. You can set up a group for your business.. where you can promote all you want.

Twitter:

Twitter is my big hitter right now.. it is very powerful.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. wiki

I am running a Lunch Time Shoppers Series, which generates great traffic. The most popular post is the Top 10 Monday post.

Tune in every Monday at lunch time (12pm) for my top 10 Etsy picks. This list is generated from the top 10 monday thread forums on Etsy, which starts at 11 am sharp. This is part of my “Lunch Time Shoppers” series… you can find these posts from 11:30 am to 12.30 pm. Check out more details HERE

Read the entire article at:
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5959620

My apologies to Stanley Kubrick.

I was talking with a potential client the other day. They had been referred by someone else, so I asked if they had seen my web site. They replied “Yes, and you’re not going to get me to blog!”

I understand how much some people hate to write blog posts, people like me, for instance.

We all need to get past that.

The advantages of write blog posts on a regular schedule are huge. I know. I know. You don’t have time and you’re not a good writer and you have nothing to say and blah, blah, blah.

I don’t want to hear it. If you want to have any success at this stuff, you need to have a blog and you need to write on a regular schedule.

Google loves a “regularly updated” web site. You get points for not being stale. If someone is taking the time to update a site, it must be more valuable than one that’s not been touched in years. I love to blog.

If you have 5 posts written, publish one a day for 5 days instead of 5 all on one day. Google loves that too. I love to blog.

Google will come back and crawl your site more often if you publish more often. If nothing changes for a week at a time, why should they come back any sooner than that? I love to blog.

Every time you publish a new post, your blogging software creates a new page with that post on it. More pages equals more authority for your site. I love to blog.

On every one of those new blog post pages, you have a menu that links back to pages on your own site. More pages have more menu links that increases the number of internal links that your site has. I love to blog.

Every time you publish a new blog post, there are more words on your site. If those words are your keywords that you are trying hard to rank high for, then you will rank higher for them. More words equals higher rank for those words. I love to blog.

Every blog post that is interesting will draw in links from other people who are interested in it. More external links is good for search engine ranking. I love to blog.

There are probably other good reasons to write blog posts, but these are all I can think of off the top of my head on a rainy Friday afternoon.

Did you get my point? I love to blog! You should love it too.

1. Make the subject line interesting.

People are in a hurry, so even if they like you and want to read your email, they may not feel like it at the moment they see it in their inbox. If you make that subject line tempting enough, they will have the impulse to open it now.

2. Send when everyone opens their email.

People tend to read email first thing in the morning every weekday. That means that you should send your email first thing in the morning, maybe even 4am. That gets you in front of them when they are concentrating on their inbox.

3. Don’t send when everyone else sends their email.

Since first thing in the morning is when everyone else is sending email, you might want to try sending it in the afternoon, just to stand out. You might catch some attention for being out of the ordinary.

4. Don’t send email on the weekend.

No one reads email on the weekend. Well, I do, but that’s me. Most people are out living their lives and doing things in the real world. Never send email on a weekend. You will have no response.

5. Always include a call to action.

Why are you sending the email? Usually, you want the recipient to do something. Come to my web site. Check out my new product. Read my witty blog post. Tell them what you want them to do. Do that now. Click here for more info!

6. Be brief and easy to skim.

No one has time to read your entire email. They will tend to skim through it, so give it headlines that stand out. Make bullet points that are easy to read. Make it short and to the point.

7. Use [brackets] around an identifier in the subject.

It’s become a convention to put the list name or some brand identifier in the subject line of every email that you send. It should be short. It should have square brackets around it to set it apart in the list of email in the inbox. [Walton] is what starts all of my emails. You know instantly who it’s from and probably what it’s about.

8. Send both HTML and Text versions.

I know that you love those cute backgrounds and pretty colors, but some of us still prefer to get our email in plain old text. It’s easier to read. There are no formatting problems. You should always send email in both HTML and text formats, so each type of person gets what they want.

9. Write for your readers.

The subject of all of your emails should be on one topic and that topic should be the one that your readers are interested in. It’s nice to throw in personal stories or wander a bit, but if your readers want to know about a specific subject, tell them about it.

10. Send email on a regular schedule.

People like routines and knowing what to expect. You should schedule your emails to always be sent on a regular schedule. Some lists that I’m on send an email every day. Some do it twice a week. Others are every other week. I’m used to that and I read them when they get here. Don’t surprise anyone, or you might get ignored. Sending email more often if better than sending it less often. Twice a week is a nice balance.

I asked for my landing page to be reviewed and got some great feedback.

They pointed out that the story of how I beat Wikipedia for the word “survivor” was powerful and I should move that up a bit. I added a new image that points out the rankings on Google.

It’s really important to ask other people to review your site. Other people will always see things differently than we see things ourselves. That’s true for everyone, no matter how experienced or smart you may be.

This is especially true for copy. Having a proofreader review your copy is really helpful. Review it from the marketing point of view, did you hit all your marks?, and from the proofreading point of view, did you make any typos?

No matter what you write or design or post, run it by someone else first. It will ALWAYS make it better.