Posts Tagged ‘how to blog’

In the last post, I described how to use the new tool found on Google to help your rankings and as promised will follow up with videos and posts to check our progress with this test.  This is a totally new approach for me to SEO, so we will learn as we go along and I will show you step by step what I have done and what I have changed to increase the rankings for the search term “door hanger printing“.

One of my other tactics is to make sure I am also creating links back to my website using the term Door Hanger Printing to help my cause of climbing up the ranks.  Currently, Printerbees is on middle of page 14 for the search term Door Hanger Printing.

The first video recorded in this series is located here. Hoping the “Google Wonder Wheel” will help us get ranking for Door Hanger Printing.

One Day – advanced 4 positions so far.  Up from middle of page 14 to the top of page 14.  Page 13, here we come!!!!

P.S. Thank you for taking your time to visit and hope you find the information useful. I hope to help you learn everything you want and need to know about blogging. I welcome your questions (site specific is good) and definitely your suggestions. I hope to answer your questions before they come up or when you find that you have one. By clicking on the Orange RSS Feed button on the left side of the screen, you will be automatically updated of new information available without having to "check in" to see what's new. It's the easiest way to keep up to date. Thanks again for stopping in, I value your time!

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• I am often asked how to go about choosing the right keywords to optimize for with regards to Google and I have to tell you that it really is no easy task, it does take research and more importantly it takes time.  For companies that provide SEO services, one of the most time consuming aspects of doing SEO for any website, is determining the right keywords to optimize for.   There are several factors to consider when choosing your keywords and I am hoping this article will help explain what to look for and how to do it yourself.

• What needs to be considered when choosing your keywords is the following:

1. Who am I trying to attract?
2. What might they be looking for (“Googling”) when they enter a search term
3. How will I identify the most qualified prospects, the ones looking to make a purchase?
4. What is the competition for the keyword?  When you “Google” the keyword, how many results come up?  Is it 35,000,000 or is it 500,000?  Obviously it will be much more difficult to compete with 35 Million other websites vs. 1/2 million.
5. How many people are actually searching the keyword you wish to optimize for?
6. What words are “related” to the keywords you are optimizing for?  This is called your “semantic keywords”.  Semantic keywords are explained in the youtube video below.

   Here is the link to the Google Adwords/Keyword Tool so you can try it yourself
   The keyword we are after is “door hanger printing”, so you can Google it to see how we are doing.

• I encourage you to watch the video, which will explain how to accomplish what I have listed above.  It is also VERY important that you you use the tools Google makes available to you to increase your chances of being indexed.  If this all seems like a bit more work than you have time for.  I do have a team of people who do much of my SEO.  It is very time consuming, but if you have more time than money, I do encourage you to try it on your own first.  What have you to loose?  If you feel like you need help with your SEO and managing it, I provide SEO services for a monthly service fee starting at $499/mo.  The clients I work with do rank, do get traffic and do see an increase in business when we start optimizing their sites.  The investment pays for itself several times over.  Again, following all of the tutorials included here will help you to rank yourself.

Follow the series of videos to see how the rankings are coming along for “door hanger printing” and if what we are doing is working or not.

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• The word “Blog” comes from the term “Web Blog”.  Web Blogs became a popular and easier way to communicate once the Internet came along than past methods like having a Pen Pal, mailing cards or even writing emails.  With a “blog”, friends and families can communicate with everyone at one time by simply adding a blog post and allowing everyone to have access to it

• When “blogging” first became popular, people used blogs as on-line diaries and journals.  One of the things that made it fun and exciting was giving family and friends the ability to comment on blog posts and interact with one another via their web logs.

• Websites like MySpace, used mostly by teenagers and young adults  really helped blogging  explode in popularity giving users the ability to post something on MySpace page and other users/friends could respond and interact about whatever had been posted.  Posting photos, change themes and customizing MySpace pages to fit personal tastes, the latest trends, or simply rebel against parents made it even more exciting and fun for this generation.

• Blogging became a new way of communicating with friends.  When other social websites like FaceBook and Twitter began to catch on, it closed the generation gap and kids found not only their friends had Facebook and Twitter accounts, they even found their grandparents “twittering” as a way to stay in touch.

• “Twittering” is considered “micro blogging” because you are limited to 140 in each “tweet”.  Read more about Twitter and how to participate in the post “Six Easy Twitter Lingo “Twips”.

• Because blogs offer dynamic content vs. static content with a standard HTML web page.  Search engines like Google have become more fond of blog sites because the content us much more fresh and up to date and therefore end up closer to the top of a search result in many cases.  With all of the talk about Search Engine Marketing and businesses trying to figure out the secret recipe to being indexed on page one of Google, more and more businesses are turning to blogs to create current content, make announcements and keep their clients up to date about their businesses.

• For businesses, a blog could and really should include announcements, market updates along with any and all commentary having to do with the industry the business is serving.  The more relevant and important the information, the more people will frequent the blog.  Businesses who have blogs and depend on their blogs as a communication tool, need to commit to keeping their blogs updated and current.  Businesses who don’t make that commitment and are fortunate enough to make their way up to the front page of Google because of their blogs, will soon find their websites lost in the shuffle without such a commitment.

• With regards to maintaining a company blog, it should fall under the specific job description of someone in the company who should be held accountable to keep it up to date.  In an ideal world, a blog is updated daily, but updating it two to three times per week is totally acceptable as well.

• The big thing to remember is to provide your readers quality and relevant information.  Filling your blog with a bunch of fluff meant to keep search engines happy will not help your business in the long run.

• Learn more about blogging for money by reading the free e-book, Profitable Blogging.  Profitable blogging includes everything you need to know to help you get started.

• Feel free to ask any questions you have regarding blogging or how to blog either below or on the “ask a question page”.

Happy Blogging! ~ Nadine

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IMPORTANT!!!! You NEED To Back Up Your Blog

• Lesson I learned THE HARD WAY…BACK UP YOUR BLOG.  My blog was hacked and completely down and frankly I wasn’t sure how the heck I was going to fix it!   New experience…never been hacked before and hope it never happens again.

• Obviously we worked out the kinks and the blog is now back up and running, but there was some definite panic when I paid a visit to my site only to see a huge banner on the front of it “tagged” this site has been hacked…with a logo!  The person who hacked the site, has their own logo saying they hacked it along with proud link to their website and blog…. Are you kidding me!

• Thank goodness, Wordpress had an upgrade and this is what I did to get our site back up and figured I would share in the event this “special” person/bot pays a visit to your site.

1. I upgraded our WordPress because there was a new release available.   This is one of the many reasons I LOVE HOSTGATORS!!  Hostgators makes everything so easy and automated.  I went to Fantastico, clicked on WordPress, it showed there was an upgrade available, I click it and upgraded.  It automatically created a back up for me as well…which is highly recommended.
2. I found that most hackers attack your wp-blog-header.php, which I checked and nothing obvious there.  I am no “technical wizard” so if there was something there, I am pretty sure I wouldn’t have noticed it anyway….probably the case!
3. I read that you should immediately change your user name and password as the friendly hacker who tagged your site may have created an additional account as well, which is what happened in my site.
4. Make sure to check your User Administrator Accounts.  My friendly hacker, was kind enough to set up his own administrator account.  Wasn’t that nice of him???  Delete the user account immediately…obviously.
5. I then went to my handy dandy “artisteer” program, which I ABSOLUTELY LOVE for creating my own templates and exported a new template thinking that if the hacker did something in the CSS or the HTML template file, deleting the old and replacing with a new one may do the trick!  It worked and it only took about five minutes because the program is so easy to use!
   

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RoboForm – I use Roboform all day, every day and it saves me so0 much time and frustration!   With RoboForm, I am able to keep track of all my passwords, website links, affiliate sites I belong to and so much more.  Click here to check it out!

 

I keep all of my information on a flash drive that is with me at all times. I also keep a back up of it in my Drop Box in the event I loose my drive and then I always have access to my website addresses, log ins and passwords from anywhere in the world.

 

Drop Box - Can I tell you how many times I have been saved by my faithful dropbox, which costs me all of about $9/mo?  Dropbox keeps a copy of files on your hard drive out on the Internet and available from anywhere in the world!  At a seminar yesterday, we needed a Power Point Presentation that wasn’t with us badly.  No Problem!  Pulled up Drop Box, opened the file and was editing it within about 1 minute.  If my hard drive were to crash, while it would SUCK big time…I wouldn’t have the stress of having lost all of my data, because there is an exact copy of it out on the Internet in my Drop Box account.  I also love that it is fully automated!  Click here to check it out and save your data from being lost!

 

A spreadsheet – if you don’t have Roboform - If you get tired of logging in to my affiliate sites to get the same link codes over and over, keep them in a spreadsheet, and make sure to save it in your Drop Box.

 

I personally use the “safe notes” feature in Roboform, because my Roboform is always up and then I don’t have to keep opening files.  When I get a new link code that I know I will want to use again, I copy and paste it in to my Roboform.  All the links are all in one place and I just copy and paste from there.  My recommendation would be to use Microsoft Works, because every windows machine comes with it and you can open it anywhere, even when using a computer that doesn’t have MS Office.  Make sure to note the expiration dates of any of your link codes so you can update them when necessary.

 

Artisteer -  Generate Your Own Word Press themes in Artisteer.  I have mentioned this blogging tool several times because I use it so frequently.  I can create a custom theme in less than 5 minutes if I am in a hurry. I can also get really creative and spend as much time as needed to get it just perfect.  You need absolutely NO PREVIOUS DESIGN EXPERIENCE to use this tool and it is super user friendly and easy to learn.  I have created videos to help you learn even faster – click here to see how fast and easy it is.

Quick Press -  Have you read a great article or had a great thought, but didn’t have the time to write a complete blog?  I use the Quickpress feature in Word Press to make notes to myself about blogs I want to write.  I write some notes, save it as a draft and come back it to later so I don’t loose my thought or idea.  If it is going to be a good blog post, it will still be a good blog post two days later!  I wrote this particular blog post as a draft that I came back to later when I had the time to complete my thoughts on it.

 

Ring Central Phone and Fax- Ring Central is a time saver for bloggers or any small business owner.   This is the service that we use for PrinterBees that makes it “appear” we are in an office location vs. working from a home office.    You have the ability to create extensions for different departments that can all ring to one number, you can accept all of your faxes through Ring Central, to the same number.  All faxes come in through your email and they come through on a PDF so you don’t even have to worry about misplacing pieces of paper and they are very easy to forward to the person who needs to deal with it.  We are very happy customers of Ring Central.

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