Posts Tagged ‘working with google’

• If you have a Word Press blog, which is the platform for this particular blog, you may be excluding your blog from the Google Index without even realizing it.  Two of my clients were being excluded and I was left puzzled and questioning what I KNEW to be true.  Goes to show that you learn something new every day…and today I learned something new about Word Press.

• One of my clients has a Word Press blog, which he built himself using the free guide “blogging for buyers“.  He hired me to help him find a domain name and I felt really good about the domain we chose.  Based on all the research I did, it seemed as though the domain name alone would help him to yield good search results once he added some good content to the site.   Not So Much!  (learn more about how to chose a good domain name here.)

• No matter what we did and how I coached him, we couldn’t get Google to index his blog.  We have all of the SEO tools installed, had hand submitted the site to the Google Index and NOTHING! I hope this will all change with what I discovered today.  I wanted to bring it to your attention as well to make sure you have your Word Press blog set up properly to be indexed and crawled by Google, Technorati, etc.

• Follow these steps to make sure you are in good shape:

• On the left side of your Word Press screen, you will see “settings”, click on it.  A list of options will drop down, and one of those options is “privacy”, click on it. This is what you will see:
  

• Make sure that your site is set TO BE CRAWLED, and not set to block the search engines.  I am 100% sure that both of my clients who had their settings set to “block the search engines” did not choose that setting, which leads me to believe that it is the default setting.   I can’t think of any other way that it would have ended up “blocking” the search engines and I am very hopeful that now that it is fixed, Google will begin to crawl the site and we will see some activity.

• There is much more information regarding getting found on Google in the Getting Found On Google Section.  Good luck to you on finding your place in the Google Index.

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• I recently came across a situation where one of my clients was told by his business consultant that his  blog was for one purpose only.  To educate people  and share good information.  My client was told that his blog should not be used for “marketing purposes” and I tend to disagree.

• If your blog isn’t to be used for “marketing”, then what is the purpose in having it?  Now don’t get me wrong, educating people and offering your visitors valuable information is crucial to the success of your blog, but factoring self promotion and marketing is also important.  You have to find good balance in your blog to make sure you are educating your readers, after all that is what most people are looking for when they read blogs, they want information and providing valuable information will keep them coming back for more.

• My recommendation to you when creating a blog post is to educate FIRST and market second.  If you approach your posts by marketing first, you will most likely loose the interest of your readers within a few moments.

• The best way to use your blog as a marketing tool is to provide valuable information with hyperlinks directly to your product pages where people can take action with the product or service you are offering.  It serves three purposes:

1. Blogs create fresh content which is what “Googlers” want and what Google wants to provide.
2. Leads potential clients to the place to take action
3. Create links throughout your site or from your blog to your site, which helps with your quest to work with Google.

• To learn everything you need to know about how to blog along with what to blog about read “profitable blogging”

• For those who wish to get started on blogging, whether it be to make money or to keep in touch with family and friends, trying to figure out what to name your blog can be one of your biggest challenges.   I have an easy solution to what many find to be a big “road block” to moving forward.

• If you want people to be able to find your blog via the Internet Search Engines like Google, the fastest and easiest road there is to find a domain name for your blog that matches what people are searching for related to your subject matter.  If you have read earlier posts on how to get found on Google, you understand that the Google algorithms are programmed to help people searching on Google to find the most relevant results. Typically, the most relevant results to any search would be a domain name that matches the search term…right?  If you “Google” nadine blogs, the number one result is currently www.nadineblogs.com, because the domain name matches the search term.

• You may be asking yourself how exactly you figure what people are searching for…and again…pretty easy to figure out…IF you know where to look.

• Google has a “keyword tool” I like to use to help me figure out what to name my websites and blogs, which I STRONGLY encourage you to utilize before you name your blog or register your domain name.  The best way to use this tool is to type in different search terms that match the desired subject of your blog.  You will see a list of results with numbers that indicate the search volume for each term.

• Your best bet is to find a term that has the highest number of search volume and try to buy a domain name to match it.  To give you a good example, I will use one of my most recent clients, “Moore’s Martial Arts” in Livermore, CA.  Moore’s doesn’t currently have a website or domain name for the school located in Livermore, so we are starting from scratch.

• The steps I went through to find the “perfect” domain name are as follows:

• I search using the keyword tool for terms that included Livermore martial arts.  Martial arts being the most generic term I could think of to describe what they do.  Upon doing my research, I found that there are close to 600 searches each month for the term “Livermore Martial Arts“.  When you consider the amount of search volume for that particular keyword, it would make great sense to see if I can obtain the domain name “Livermore Martial Arts”, which is exactly what we did.

• IMPORTANT NOTE: It is important for me to note that just because I have identified a great domain name that matches the search term, it in no way guarantees this website will make it to the front page of the search engines.  What helps get you to the front page of the search engines is good content that is relative to the term you wish to be found for.  It is also VERY important to submit your site to the search engines by submitting your site map.  No site map…no search results.

• Learn more about submitting your site to the search engines on this recent post. Your site will not be indexed until you submit your site map.  Make sure to read this post.

• So, I have been watching very closely to see what would happen with our Google Wonder Wheel experiment and I have an update!

• If you have been following this experiment, you know we started on page 14, moved up to page 8, then it was slow moving to page 7…where we were stuck for a bit.  Click here to read first post.

• GREAT NEWS…we have moved to page 5 for the term “Door Hanger Printing”, which shows that paying attention to the Google Wonder Wheel can and does make a difference.

• Let me tell you some of the other steps I took to help “my cause” with Google.

• Though Google specifically tells you not to submit any page to the search engine which has a link from your home page, I did end up submitting the link after waiting…and waiting…and waiting for Google to crawl the page.  Submitting your site to Google

• Once Google finally crawled the page, we came up two more pages in the rankings to page five, in position #3.

• I have also added articles about “door hanger printing” to our PrinterBees Blog because as I have mentioned before, Google likes blogs because the content is fresh.

• You should also note that every time I have used the term “door hanger printing” in this particular post, I have linked back to the door hanger printing page on PrinterBees, creating another link.  ONE-WAY links pointing to your site are one of the factors Google considers when indexing all websites.  The more links you have, the better.  The more links you have from “authority sites”, even better!  I will explain “authority sites” in another post…it’s complicated.

• Use the above tips to help get your website/web pages linked on Google.  It really does work!

• Let me explain….Anytime you can link back to your own site using your specific keywords, it helps your “cause”. Let me give you a  very specific example with a keyword specific to one of my clients.

• The keywords “California mortgage loan” or “California home mortgages”  are being targeted by one of my blog subscribers who owns the blog/site www.cahomemortgage.net.   In the previous sentence, I created three valuable links to his site.

• A direct link by typing his domain name and linking it back to his site.  I have also created two even more valuable links back to his site by using his keywords and linking those back to his blog site.  When you have a link back to your blog/site which is  your actual keywords, it gives Google more clues as to what your site is about.

• The lesson here…create as many links back to your site on other websites or blogs which contain your keywords.  Having links to your site from other sites or blogs is one of the factors Google uses to determine ranking.  You can achieve more links by participating in social networking sites along with participating in other blogs and commenting and creating links that way as well.  Anytime you can participate AND add value to a blog or forum AND create links, it is a real win/win situation!

• The experiment with the Google Wonder Wheel Continues and we are up seven pages in the Google Index in just six days for the search term “door hanger printing”.

• When we started the experiment by using the Wonder Wheel as a way to identify the proper keywords, we were indexed in the middle of the page 14 for the term “door hanger printing”.  The results are astounding and Google hasn’t even crawled the updated page yet!  (Read the details about the Wonder Wheel here)

• On September 15th, I made changes to the web page based on what I found on the Google Wonder Wheel, created a blog post on our PrinterBees blog and of course included the key words in my blog posts on this blog site.  As of today, the page is the bottom of page seven and when I reviewed the “cached” page, it shows that Google last crawled the page on September 14th, so I will need to be patient to see what happens when the search engine crawls the page again.  I have my fingers crossed and again invite to you watch as the experiment continues.

• P.S.  You may be wondering how I knew that Google hadn’t crawled the most updated version of my webpage since since the 15th of September.  In the image above, I have put a red box around the word “cached”.  If you click on the link “cached” it will show you the version of the page that Google is currently using to rank your site in the index.   It will also show the you a date on the top of the page, which is the last time Google crawled your site.  I hope this is helpful to you!!!  Don’t forget to read the initial article about the Google Wonder Wheel and how I used it to increase our rankings.

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!!!!

• 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.

Setting up Google Alerts

When you are struggling to figure out something to blog about, I often turn to my trusted Google Alerts to see what other bloggers are blogging. I wanted to share this with you to make sure you are keeping up with what Google finds daily on your subject matter. I also encourage you to set up a Google Alert with your name, your blog name, or anything else you feel you should be alerted about.

Here is how to you do it. You need to create a Google Account. If you look at the top right corner of your Google home page, you will see an option to create an account. This will give you access to all kinds of tools Google has that are completely free. Once you are logged in, you will see a bunch of different tools available, you are searching for “Alerts”.

Another easy way to find “Google Alerts”, is just to Google it! It will be the first result you find at the top of your search. Click it.  Click here, I Googled it for you!

The easiest way to understand how cool Google Alerts are is to set up an alert with your own name. Setting up the alert means Google will send you an alert every time it finds your name, once a day or once a week. Choose whatever seems to be best for you. “As it happens” really is a bit overwhelming if you read them….but it also lets you know if Google is finding you, your site, your key words or whatever it is you wish to be alerted about. Once you set up the alert, you just need to tell Google where to email it.

Because one of my web businesses is PrinterBees, an onling printing company, I have many alerts regarding key words like business cards, post cards, online printing, brochures and of coarse “PrinterBees”. It also keeps me aware of any potential “bad press” so I can deal with it immediately. This is one of many great tools that Google has to offer. Make sure to subscribe to the RSS Feed for this site because I have many more cool tools coming your way. Remember, my purpose on this Earth is to teach people, and you have to subscribe to the RSS to make sure you get all of my “tid bits”.

Blessings!