Tag: SEO

Building a Blog Post

Blog posts add umph to your website!

Let’s talk about websites, the key to a blog, and what they can really do for you.

  • Websites are your on-line brochure.
  • Websites hold your photo gallery.
  • A website is the hub of your online marketing.
  • All of your social media points back to your website (or a landing page).
  • Your website is the repository for your blog articles.key to a good blog

The key to a good blog is to write one. Regularly. Let’s talk a bit about search bots. When your website is new and you first publish it, the bots come and scour your site to see what you have out there. They check out the keywords and all of the goodies that you put out there to make it bright and shiny. They come back in about 30 days to see what other new shiny stuff you added. If you added several things, the bots reprogram to come back more quickly than the last time. If you didn’t they wait till maybe 45 days to come back. The more frequently you add new items to your website the more often the bots return ranking your higher in organic search results. The less often you add new items or changes to your website, the lower your ranking becomes until one day…

Whenever I build a website for someone, I typically use a WordPress platform. If I do that, I always include the Yoast SEO plug-in. Here are the tips I give to my clients when they write a blog post:

Make your blog heading a continuation of your title with the keyword in the beginning. Highlight the text and make it a heading 2 from the WYSIWIG bar.

Make sure to employ the “Press this” option offered so that when you read another person’s article, you can use the handy dandy tool to add a post to your blog and write your opinion on what you just read.

If you do that, make sure that you include a link to the original. Like this: You can read the whole article here. Highlight the word here, click on the chain link in the WYSIWIG bar and add the link to the original article – Ensure that it opens to a new window.

Write your thoughts. Include an image. There are many resources for free images. Don’t use any images from a website with a UK extension. One resources to check is pixabay.com Read about more options here.

Make sure to write 270 to 300 words. Complete the Yoast SEO boxes that appear below the blog post content frame.

Your keyword should be in your title, heading, meta data and body text.

Select the category on your website in which you want your post stored.

Add additional tags, especially if you have a tag cloud on your website. If you mention an organization or a searchable term, add the tag.

Last but not least, make sure to share your just finished post on your social media!

Let me know if I can assist you in any way.

Reputation Management and Social Media

When it comes to Reputation Management, how can you use social media?

In my last article we talked about customer service and reputation. Now I want to talk about how you manage that reputation through social media.Your reputation is under a magnifying glass.

When you post something on your social media, it keeps pressing the previous items down on the list. Sometimes, when you actually want to find something, it is buried so deep, it becomes almost impossible to find.  The same holds true with search engine results.

When someone searches your company name (when was the last time you searched for your company on Google, Bing or Yahoo?) they get the most recent results.  Sometimes, they may find something that is several years old, but has not been pushed down in the SEO rankings below the first page. Worst yet, is when the person looking can’t find your company because someone else has commandeered your name on the internet.

One of my clients had experienced a lawsuit some years ago and it was showing up on page one of search results. By adding the additional social platforms and posting regularly, they were able to push the negative post down to page two of the results.

On review sites, it is important to balance any negative comments with a higher ratio of positive ones. Are you aware of all of the sites in your industry where customers can leave a review? One way to be aware of what is being said about your company is to set up a Google alert with your name, company name, company nickname, and any other keywords that have to do with your business.  That way if someone mentions your company by name, you will get a notification about it. That way you can deal with the comment before it festers and ruins your reputation.

The best way to counteract a negative comment is to have an overwhelming number of positive ones.  Do you need to develop a plan to accomplish that? Give me a call, we can talk.

Using a Boolean Search

How can you take advantage of a Boolean Search?

All of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing let you enter keywords you select to find the topics you are researching. This works the same way in LinkedIn and many other platforms. If someone doesn’t know your name, but enters the words for things you provide, will they find you?

I do a great deal of work with job seekers. Since LinkedIn is my passion, it is only natural to spend time teaching job seekers how to make the most of their profile. One of the suggestions is to make sure that their profile is able to be found when the right string of keywords is entered into the search parameters.What are your keywords?

When teaching hands-on LinkedIn classes, I demonstrate how recruiters may enter six or seven keywords to limit the number of search results they obtain when seeking candidates. The goal the recruiter is seeking is 3-6 people who have all of recruiters keywords entered in their profile. You can use this same technique searching for a recruiter or a potential client.

I recently found this article from Beyond.com about using the various Boolean search patterns. While this article was written for job seekers, it is transferable to business owners to understand how someone may find them when doing a search. I don’t want to start an entire discussion on SEO, but understanding how Boolean search works will help you make sure that the right keywords are listed on your various webpages and social media profiles.

Please contact me if I can assist you with your LinkedIn personal or company profile. I am happy to consult with you in-person or through a webinar to help you optimize your LinkedIn or social media presence.

Word Cloud and Keywords

Word Cloud and Keywords

We have figured out by now that keywords are the way to find things on the internet.  Use a web browser and “Search” for what you need and that browser will render results based upon:

  • Ads that people pay for to increase their visibility. They use a process called pay-per-click or PPC to drive traffic to their website. Most businesses opt for this paid search system, as it means they only have to pay for their ad every time someone clicks on it.
  • Organic results based upon how the website has set-up their back-end data, in-bound links and how people have searched in the past.

A great article that I just read includes 60 tools to help you find keywords for your website. If you have a website, I encourage you to check out the list and try a few of the tools.

Using a PPC approach could become costly.  Unless you can track your lead source, you may be spending money without results.

Organic results can be improved by social media engagement.  We can talk more about this option if you would like to improve your presence.

Both of these opportunities are fine for people with business website.  What I would like to discuss now is how do you find the keywords to represent you, especially if you are in job search mode. When I teach LinkedIn sessions either in a class or one-on-one, I recommend using keywords in your personal profile.

My suggestion would be to use a word cloud tool. A word cloud as shown to the right is aThankful grouping of words into a shape or a random shape that highlight the most important words. I used this particular one in an article on Thankfulness I wrote around Thanksgiving a few years ago. This tool could be very useful for a job seeker to find the keywords that they need to include in their resume or in their LinkedIn profile.  Take a look at this article to see a few of the options that you can use to create a word cloud. I have used a couple of them, but I think Wordle.net might be the most versatile.

Watch the video below to see how you can combine several job descriptions into one word cloud to find the keywords you should be using in your resume and on your LinkedIn profile.

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Blogging – why should you?

Do you write a blog for your business?  If not, why not? If yes, Congrats! Read this article to get Hubspots writer Pamela Vaughan’s perspective.

Let me boil down my perspective on BUSINESS blogs –blogoptions

1. Blogs need to be attached to your website – why give another platform your SEO.  There are a number of options from which you can choose.  But a self-hosted blog that has a static page option will give you the most flexibility.  If it is attached to your website then search bots will recognize the changes and it helps boost your pages in the search engines.

2. Share what you write – post to social media.  Always use an image in the body of your blog article so that the post gets more attentionSocial Media post with image on social media. Remember people are visual and an image will grab their attention. If you don’t have an image, all they will see if the text from the post.

3. Provide expertise – what do you know that you can share that will position you as an authority in your field.  Let’s face it, almost everything has already been said or what you are about to say is your opinion.  Make your opinion sought after by others. BUT do not give misleading facts.  It is too easy to check to see if you are accurate about what you are saying.

What other sort of things do you include in your blog articles?

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