Cloud Computing Helped Us To Become
An Affordable SEO Company

To some "the cloud" or "cloud computing" is a foreign term, thus many people are confused by it or they don't understand it. Often times people shy away from what they don't understand, and that's ok, it's human nature. But once you understand what it is and how it can help your business you are going to want to dive in head first.

Cloud computing is essentially files or applications that work without needing to store file on a local machine like a desktop or laptop. Files and applications are stored on a server somewhere so that they are there when you need them. You can access them anytime from any computer. If you have a Gmail account you may have already been using the cloud if you have used the Google Docs connected to your Gmail. If you have you know that this can be quite convenient. You can create documents, spreadsheet, presentations, drawings and even forms all from within your Gmail account, and everything is saved within your Gmail account. This way you can access all of these things from any computer the same way you access your email.

Cloud computing has helped us to become an affordable SEO firm because it has saved us money, and the more money we can save the less we have to charge for our services. So I have read a few articles that seem to insist that moving to "the cloud" does not save businesses money, but I would have to disagree. This may be true for large corporations, but for the little guy cloud computing can save you time and money. Let me explain exactly how cloud computing has saved our company money.

As an affordable SEO service we do a lot of documenting. We have a lot of spreadsheets for all of our data, we document all of our business processes, and it's almost all done on "the cloud". By having our documents and spreadsheets located on the cloud fewer of our employees need copies of MS Office (which can cost almost $200). Think if you have 10 employees who are editing spreadsheets and you have to purchase MS Office for each of them.  That's $2,000. By utilizing the cloud you can save that $2K to use for other things.

With cloud computing you can have an employee editing a spreadsheet and you have the ability to login and view the spreadsheet live as changes are being made. This allows you to feel more comfortable about allowing your employee to do more work from home and have the peace of mind that they are getting their work done and not screwing around.  The more your employees are able to work from home the better. When employees work from home you save money, and saving money is what has allowed us to become a great affordable SEO company.

How does employees working from home equate to saving money?

It really is quite simple. If you have 15 employees working for you, but you only need 5 of them to actually come into the office that means you don't need an office that can accommodate 15+ people. The smaller your office space, the more money you save. If you only have 5 employees rather than 15 coming to your office everyday then you are going to save money on utilities. Your businesses won't be using as much electricity and therefore you are going to save money.  You won't need as many phone lines so you will save money. You don't need a hard during internet connection to accommodate 15 connections at once so you save money. Now, here's the real kicker! If your employees don't come into the office you can pay them less. Why? Because they no longer need to spend money on gas, in many cases their auto insurance will go down because their daily commuting distance is nothing, and they aren't spending that time commuting. Many employees would love to take a little less pay for the benefit of working from home.

You can get started on the cloud today for pretty much nothing if you have 10 or fewer employees. The reason I say "pretty much nothing" is because if you are not tech savvy you may need to hire someone to set things up for you.

So how can you get started for free?

Google Apps for small businesses. If you go here then you can get started with Google Apps for free for up to 10 email accounts. Google used to give you 50 free accounts, but I am guessing that with the growing popularity of Google Apps they give less accounts for free so that they can make some money. As I stated before if you are not tech savvy you may need to hire someone to set things up, but I wouldn't pay more than $150 for this as it is not difficult to setup. If you are tech savvy then Google has step by step instructions on how to set everything up.  With Google Apps you get email, a calendar, Google sites, Documents (which include word processing, spreadsheets, drawings, and presentations), Google Groups, and tons of apps that you can download for your organization.

One thing I should be clear about is that Google will only give you 10 accounts per domain so if you had 15 employees you could have 10 on one domain create aliases (email forwarding) for the other 5 and set them up with a similar domain. Otherwise I believe Google charges $25 per month per account. Which isn't bad considering the money you save.

In the end it's up to you to determine whether or not "the cloud" is right for your business, and you should first think about whether or not you can save money by switching to the cloud.

Free WordPress Hair Salon Website Design

We are offering a FREE WordPress theme to first 50 people to submit a request on this page. These themes are geared toward hair salons, but can be used for any business.

There are many reason why a new WordPress based website would be good for your business.

1. Your website needs a new look and feel.

2. Your website does not have an admin area for you to easily edit your content, which means any time you want to make changes to your site you have to call your "web person". WordPress makes it easy for the average person to add/edit content on their website.

3. Your website utilizes an intro page, was built with flash, or is just not good for Search Engine Optimization.

How to Get Your Free WordPress theme.

1. Download the the theme layouts and color profiles here.

2. Unzip the file. (You can unzip the file on most computer by either double clicking the file or by right clicking the file and selecting "open with") The zip file contains 2 folders. One for layouts and the other for colors.

3. Open the layouts folder and browse through the images and find the layout you like best. Enter the layout number in the form below.

4. Open the colors folder and browse through the images to find the color profile you like, and enter the color profile name in the form below.

5. Upload your logo. It is important that your logo has a transparent background. If you have a white, black or colors background this will show up when your theme is created. Since we are offering this service for free we will not spend time removing backgrounds from your logo. You can submit a transparent gif, png, eps, psd or Illustrator files. If you don't have a logo that is fine we can create a theme without a logo for you.

That's it. The form will get sent directly to our designers and you will usually have your new theme withing 24 hours.

If you don't currently use WordPress as your website's content management system you can find installation instructions here. If this is too complicated for you and you don't have a go to "web person" that you use we would be happy to install the WordPress content management system and your new theme for you for a flat $50.

Suggested WordPress Plugins

Below are a list of free plugins that we recommend installing and using in your WordPress site.

1. Page Meta -  This is a plugin designed to allow you to edit your title tags, pages descriptions, and keywords for each page of your website.

2. CKEditor for WordPress – This is the best WYSIWYG editor we have found for use with wordpress.

3. Google XML Sitemap Generator – This plugin automatically creates and updates your xml sitemap when you make changes to your website.

4. Ultimate Google Analytics – This plugin allows for easy setup of Google Analytics.

Word Press Video Tutorial Links.

This page is a great resource for learning WordPress.

Onpage Search Engine Optimization for Starving Artists

Many people don't know this about me, but I went to an art school for college; Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio. One great thing about the school I went to is that they have you take a digital media class where they go over the basics of things like Photoshop and Dreamweaver and as an assignment you create a website for yourself. Even though I already knew how to do all of this stuff when I attended I think this is a great tool for artists today. Every artists should have a website with images of their work posted; like an online portfolio.

The one thing the class didn't teach is how to get your website found and your work in front of people. Just because you have a website doesn't mean people are going to find it. If people can't find your website without typing in your domain name, then the only way people are going to see your work is if you have a gallery show, or you give them your website address personally. In this day and age being an artists is almost as much about marketing yourself and your work as it is about your art itself. Getting your work in front of as many people as possible gives you a better chance of evolving from starving artists to successful artist. The best way to get your artwork in front of as many people as possible is the search engines, namely Google. So here are a few pointers to help get you moving in the right direction!

1. Don't use flash! I tell this to people and businesses all the time. Sure flash is great to make your website look, eh, flashy, but it does nothing to help you get found in the search engines. Technically, the use of flash itself is not bad, but it really depends on where and how it is being used in your website. Most of the time people use flash in the wrong way, and if you use it in the wrong way you won't get any love from Google. So, to reduce the chances of using flash in the "wrong" way I simply advise people not to use it.

2. Research your keywords! Simply put a keyword is a word or phrase typed into a search engine to find things you are looking for. A great example is if you are trying to find a Chinese restaurant in your area you might type something like "Columbus Chinese food" into a search engine. The keyword, also known as a keyphrase, in this case would be "Columbus Chinese food".
 

You want to find keywords that people are searching. It does you no good to optimize your site for a keyword if nobody is searching that keyword. An example would be some small obscure town like Zanesville, Ohio. You wouldn't want to optimize your website for a keyphrase like "Zanesville artist" when there is nobody searching for that term.

A great tool to use to find if people are search for a specific keyphrase is the Google Keyword Tool. this is a free tool that you can use to find out if people are searching for specific keyphrases. You can find the keyword tool here.

To use the Google Keyword Tool simply type in the keyword or keyphrase you want to research in the box near the top of the page (you can type in a bunch of keywords at once by hitting enter on your keyboard and placing the next keyword on the next line). In the left sidebar under Match Types be sure to check the box for "Phrase" and uncheck the box for "Broad". the keyword tool does it's work and returns results. It even returns similar suggested keywords. For our purposes the only data that matters is the "Keyword" column and the "Local Monthly Searches" column. The rest of the data doesn't apply in this case. The "Global Monthly Searches" pertains to the entire world, and the "Competition" column only pertains to advertising competition. What you want to look for are keywords that have a good amount of search volume, but aren't too general.

3. Choosing the best keywords for your work! This can get a little complicated at times because it is sometimes difficult for people to understand that more is not always better. Let me try to explain this in simple terms. If I go to the keyword tool and I type in the keyword "artists" it tells me that 4.09 million people search this term each month. Often times when people see this they immediately want to optimize their site for that term. While and experienced SEO pro would shy away from going for that term for a couple of reasons. First the competition is going to be high, really high. Not only is the competition high, but the websites you would be competing with are very established websites. Another reason would be relevance. Type in the keyword "artists" into Google and see what results are show. For me I get results for Dick Blick's, Wikipedia and others that aren't really what I would want to be competing with.

Choose a longtail keyword that fits the type of art that you do. (For more information about longtail keywords you can read my article on longtail keywords here.) But essentially you want to be as specific as possible with your keywords and still have search volume. so you might want to go after keyphrases like "charcoal artists", "charcoal drawings", "watercolor paintings" or "abstract paintings". These keyphrases are more specific and will yield better, faster results.

Another thing you will want to consider is geo-targeting your keywords. Geo-targeting is a way of using a state, county, or city within your keyword. A good example of this would be "Columbus watercolor artist". This is a great way to achieve results faster and easier than just "watercolor artists" This way your competition is localized and therefore, you have less competition. You still want to me sure that there is search volume for the entire keyphrase "Columbus watercolor artist", because as stated before you don't want to optimize for a term that nobody is searching. I advise people all the time to optimize first for geo-targeted keywords and try to rank for national terms only after your website is ranking for the geo-targeted terms first. Think of it as baby steps. You can't run or jump before you can crawl.

So now that I have discussed keyword research and choosing your keywords you might be wondering what you are supposed to do with those keywords.

4. Content, Content Content! The first thing you want to do is add content to your website. In this case when I say "content" I mean TEXT! I know, I know text is boring. It can be boring to write, and some people even find it boring to read, but the truth is search engines can't view images, they can't view videos, and they can't view flash. The only thing search engines see is the text. Each page on your website should have between 400 and 700 words of relevant text. This means that the text on each page should be relevant to your website, your work, and the page itself.

Some of my artist friends ask me if it's ok to have a gallery or slide show on their website, and the answer is YES! This is great, but if you have a main gallery page try to have at 400 to 700 words of text about your work. If possible you should try to have text within your slideshow as well. Be sure that you use text and are not adding text to your images because this is the same as not having text at all.

The next thing you need to do is use your chosen keyphrases within your text. You want to have 1 keyword about every 75-100 words of text. This means if your page has 700 words of text on it you should have your keyphrase appear about seven times within your content.

There are a few other places you should have your keywords, and this is where it get's a little technical. You need at least some basic knowledge of websites to understand how this works.

5. Title Tags. Title tags should be on every single one of your pages. Title tags are in the code of your pages, and the only place you see this is in your browser window's header bar. (see image below)

Title tags are important because they tell search engines the overall theme of your pages content.

Title tags should be located within your

tags with the rest of your META Data. In the cod of your web page the title tag should look like this….

tags in your pages code just like the title tags and should look something like this…

As a San Diego SEO company that specializes in Local SEO for small to medium sized businesses I get so many people asking me, "What is the difference between search engine optimization and Local SEO?"

The answer is both simple and complex, as some things are much the same but just done with different techniques.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of getting a website ranked on the first page of the search engines, preferably in the top three spots.

Local SEO is no different in this respect. Our aim is to get the clients website on the first page of the search engines for the keywords relevant to their business.

So let's discuss some of these differences.

1. Most local SEO clients are offline businesses. This means that they have a website, but more than likely they have a brick and mortar business. This means that they have a store or an office where they see and meet with clients, and this is where they make their sales. This is different from many national SEO clients who are online businesses. An online business can have an office or wharehouse, but most of their sales are made online via their website.

2. Local SEO usually utilyzes geo-targeted keywords. A geo-targeted keyword is a keyword that contains a geographical location like "Columbus hair salon". This is important because as a local business many time you want to be found by people in the same city you are located in. For example, if you are a hair salon in Columbus, Ohio you don't really need for people in Baltimore, Maryland to find you business, unless they are looking for a hair salon in Columbus, Ohio. Likewise if you are a roofing company in Pheonix, you don't want to receive leads from your website from people looking for roof repair in Tampa. This not only wastes your time going through your leads, but also wastes the time of people search for businesses like yours in their area.

3. Local SEO utilyzes local profile sites like Google Local, Yelp, Kudzu and many others to drive geo-targeted traffic to your website.

4. Local SEO utilizes GPS companies to get you listed on GPS devices like Tom Tom and Garmin. this is important for people who use their GPS devises to find businesses like yours in their area.

5. You usually see faster results with local SEO as opposed to general SEO. The reason for this is because local profiles can be used to help build links as well as drive traffic to your website faster.

General SEO is not as effective for local businesses as much as it is for online businesses, and these are just a few of the differences. Check out some of our Local Search options.

I wanted to write an article about longtail keywords because of some questions brought up recently by one of our clients. Now we don't actually do SEO for this client, we do their web design and development work. They already had an SEO they were working with, and was referred specifically to us for web work through an old college.

As we were making some changes to the clients site we noticed the new title tags that were on the homepage. One of the keywords used in the title tags in particular jumped out at me.

"Jacksonville Florida Investment Property"

Now normally this wouldn't have jumped out at me because I don't have that great of a memory these days, but when we first began creating the new website for the client we did do some minor keyword research for keywords to add to things like title tags and descriptions as we were making changes and adjustments so that the site could begin to get indexed by the search engines. I remembered (a miracle in and of itself) that this keyword had no search volume. So I double checked this, and sure enough I was correct.

The term "Jacksonville Florida Investment Property" has ZERO search volume.

I sent an email to my client suggesting they might want to discuss this with their SEO team and find out why this term is being used.

This is part of the email response they received from their SEO team.

"…I will mention that we are not targeting your best key phrases yet…for one, I'm still learning what they are, but two, we are starting from the bottom/medium keywords, with the end goal of your best, high competition keywords… This is why you are hanging in the 20-30's already for the keyword "investment property". You're outranking quickenloans, gmacmortgage, biggerpockets, and others trying to rank for this term and we haven't even started working on that phrase yet. It is happening from the relative longer tail phrases, and because your titles descriptions, and content contain the broad phrases within them."

So while what this guy is saying is true there is either some misunderstanding of how longtail keywords should be used or some scamming going on. I want to be clear on why I think some scamming could be happening. Some SEO companies or individuals will try to rank you for a term that has virtually no competition, but at the same time no search volume. Then they tell you we got your ranked on the first page of Google for this term so that you will be impressed with their work. All the while the term they ranked you for is worthless because nobody is searching that term.

Now I'm not saying this is the case in this situation because I don't know anything about my client's SEO team, but this guy is saying that the client is ranking in the 20's and 30's for the term "investment property" and as I checked the client is not even ranking in the first 50 pages. But this makes for a great opportunity for me to explain a little bit about longtail keywords.

As the SEO guy stated in his email going after the longtail keyword "Jacksonville Florida Investment Property" is getting them ranked for "Investment Property" at the same time, and he is 100% correct about this. However, that is not what makes this a poor longtail keyword.

Lets take a look at a few keywords and the search volume surrounding each keyword.

"Jacksonville Florida Investment Property" – 0 searches
"Jacksonville investment property" – 36 searches
"Florida Investment Property" – 2400 searches
"Investment Property" – 90.5K
"Jacksonville Florida" – 450K
"Jacksonville" – 6.21 million
"Florida" – 37.2 million

Now, we can see that if the site was ranked well for the term "investment property" that would be stellar because of the search volume for that term, but trying to rank for that term is going to be quite difficult because it is highly competitive. So we would go after a longtail keyword in order to begin ranking for a term with smaller search volume because it is a faster way to begin seeing traffic from our efforts.

So why is the term "Jacksonville Florida Investment Property" a bad use of a longtail keyphrase. So the #1 problem with this keyphrase is that there is ZERO search volume around it, but the longtail keyphrase does contain some smaller primary keyphrases that do have search volume so let's take a quick look at those.

The term "Jacksonville investment property" does get some search volume but it's only 36 searches per month so that term is pretty much a waste of time to try to rank for. Especially since the site will more than likely rank well for this term once it begins to rank well for other terms simply by having the term within the content of the site.

The term "Florida investment property" gets 2,400 searches a month which is great. This term is targeted specifically to the market the client is going after and also contains a shorter more completive keyword as well.

If we look at the rest of the keywords they are simply the city and state which, by themselves, have no relevance to the clients business other than that is where the business is located. A better longtail keyphrase for this client would be "Florida Investment Property"; leaving out the "Jacksonville" all together.

Good Example Of A Longtail Keyphrase From An SEO Pro

Now let's look at an example of a good longtail keyword, the primary keywords that make up this longtail keyword and the search volume for each of them.

"how to buy penny stocks online" – 260 searches
"how to buy penny stocks" – 1900
"buy penny stocks online" – 880
"buy penny stocks" – 5400

There are several reasons this is a good longtail keyword. but first let's discuss the ultimate goal and why we use a longtail keyword rather than a primary keyword. So the ultimate goal for a site that is trying to rank for these keywords would be to rank for the phrase "buy penny stocks" because it gets the most search volume, but that term is going to be more difficult because the competition is higher and so if we were going to try to rank for that term we would begin to see results much slower that one of the other terms, thus it would take longer to begin to see organic traffic to our site for that term. Our goal is to drive traffic to our site as quickly as we can so we can start making money faster, get new clients faster, get more users faster or whatever your end goal is. So we use the longtail keyword that gets less search volume because it will be faster to rank for. So having a longtail keyword that doesn't get any search volume pretty much defeats the purpose of using the longtail keyword at all.

So let's now talk about what factors make this a good longtail keyword.

1. The longtail keyword itself has search volume and get's 260 searches per month.
2. The longtail keyword has three primary keywords within it. 
3. Each of the three primary keywords are relevant to the business.
4. Each of the keywords have search volume.

So as we are trying to rank for the longtail keyword, "how to buy penny stocks online" we are simultaneously do work to rank for "how to buy penny stocks", "buy penny stocks online" and "buy penny stocks" That is four phrases each with it's own search volume and you are only doing the work to rank for one keyphrase. There is never a reason to try to rank for a longtail keyword that doesn't get any search volume. Find a shorter longtail keyword that not only has search volume, but it relevant to the business as well.

Check out other articles by an SEO Pro.

Reciprocal Linking From an SEO Pro

So I received an email the other day from a company requesting me to exchange links with them. I was so surprised by the fact that some people are still trying to use such outdated techniques to rank higher in the search engines that I decided to write this article about it. I consider myself to be an SEO Pro and it's sad to see people who are either completely uninformed or just too lazy to keep up with SEO best practices.

So here are the first few lines of the email that was sent…

"Hello! I wanted to request an opportunity to trade links with your website. An exchange with us will allow your site, proseo.pro, to get more exposure to new visitors and help both of our sites obtain a higher importance with search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Please consider this exchange with us."

This email was coming from a "link manager" at a time clock company. It seems this 'link manager should consult an SEO pro.

The first thing that caught my attention about this email was the fact that this random "link manager" for a timeclock company was trying to school me on ranking higher in Google and Yahoo. It was quite obvious that the "link manager" was not even paying attention to the fact that he was sending link exchange requests to an SEO Pro company.

The next thing that caught my attention was that this person was trying to use this outdated process of reciprocal linking. Since reciprocal linking hasn't been effective in years I seriously couldn't believe that people were still actively and agressively still seeking link exchanges.

As a pro SEO I also found it quite funny as to how this "link manager" request his link be posted. See the request below…

"Title: Timeclocks
Description: Timeclocks can help save your business more money than you may think. Let your employees be accountable for the time that they work.
Link text: Timeclocks can help save your business more money than you may think. Let your employees be accountable for the time that they work."

So not only does this "link manager" not have a clue about current SEO best practices, but he doesn't really have any idea about  anchor text either. If I understood him correctly he wanted the "link text" to be his anchor text.  When his anchor text request should simply be either "timeclocks" or "time clocks" If he consulted an SEO pro he would know this.

Another issue with the "link manager's" request was that he wanted to put my link on a "resources" page which contained only lists of links that he was obviously exchanging with other websites. Most if not all of these links had no real relevance to his time clock website, and it was so very obvious that this was a page dedicated to reciprocal links. Not good!

Being the kind of SEO pro that I am, I really just wanted to help the guy so I responded to his email. I let him know that link exchanges, the way he was requesting, no longer work and why. I also spent some time doing some breif keyword research, and even suggested how to correct the poorly done title tags on his website. I doubt he will take my advise because I'm willing to bet the "link manager" is simply an outsourced laborer in India or Asia somewhere.

Now that I have vented a little bit about the email that started this whole subject let me discuss why link exchanges, like the one our "link manager" requested are outdated and useless, and how a good SEO pro would go about a proper link exchange.

So why would an SEO pro consider link exchanges to be outdated?

The simple answer is that search engines aren't stupid anymore. Search engine like Google who I consider to be the ultimate SEO Pro can tell if you are using tradtional link exchange methods. The search engines are the ultimate link trackers. They know if you are linking to a website that is linking straight back to you. They also know whether or not that website has any relevancy to your website. Google specifically calls this "Link Schemes" This answer in Google Webmaster Tools talk specifically about ths very topic. Google bots can see if you have a page with nothing but links to other sites, and they can tell if those links are for the purpose of getting links back from those websites.

Now, I'm not saying you can't have a page with a bunch of links to other sites. Having a page full of links does not, in itself, constitute reciprocal linking. You could, for example, have a page of resource links for your users. These would be websites or products that think will be of value to your users or visitors. It becomes a link exchange when each one of those websites is linking back to your website, and Google doesn't like that. I can't think of a single SEO pro that would recommend it.

SEO pro advise for those who already have a vast majority of reciprocal links.

So lets say that you have been exchanging links for a while, and you already have a ton of recirpocal links between you and other sites. You don't want to lose that "link juice" for fear of dropping either further down in the search results. What should you do.

As an SEO pro my answer to this is not easy, it's time consuming and you are probably not going to like it.

First of all you are goin going to need to spread those links out within your website. My suggestion would be to write blog posts that are relevant to your websites as well as the websites you are linking too. I know this can be a daunting task, because sometimes this could mean you have to write a blog post for one single link which could equate to hundreds of articles that need to be written. If this is the case it would be a good idea to use a service like Odesk to find cheap article writers.

The next thing you need to do, and this could be the most difficult part, is get your link partners to do the same. This is difficult because, like I said before, this is a very time consuming effort, and convincing others that this needs to be done is like threading an elephant through the eye of a needle. If you can't convince your link partner to do this globally try to convince them to do this at least for your links. This will definitely be easier for them to swallow. You could even offer to provide them with the article yourself so that they don't have to worry about it. (make sure the article is unique!)

An alternative to the traditional link exchange from an SEO Pro

So as an SEO Pro I'm totally against link exchanges. They are risky, and don't yield the results you want for the effort it takes to implement them. But if you feel yourself compelled to involve yourself in link exchanges I will give you some SEO pro advise on how to go about doing it the best way possible.

For this method you will need to control at least two websites. For this description I will call them website A and website B. Website A is your main website and website B is an alternate website. We will also have website C which is the website you will be exchanging links with.

You get website C to send a link to website A. Then website B send a link to website C.

There are a couple of catches with this. More than likely the owner of website C will want the pagerank of Website B to be as high as the page rank of website A. Another thing is that to make it look completely legit it is a good idea if website A and website B are not sharing the same IP address. It would be even better if they didn't share the same server. My SEO pro advise is that you still don't want to have link pages but rather include the links within the content of your site, but it would be less spammy this way, and look like less of a "link scheme" to Google.

The best advise an SEO pro can give though is not to get involved with link echanges. This will only cause you headaches in the long run. Either follow SEO Pro best practices or hire an individual or company that does.

Don't just take my word for it. Do some research and find out what another SEO pro has to say about it.

Keyword Research Pt. 2 – Choosing the Right Keyword

So in this article I will be covering how to go about choosing the keywords you plan on researching.  This is important because keyword research can be a time consuming task and choosing the right keywords to research will save you a lot of time and headache. This part of the keyword research process is simply a brain storming step. Use the keyword spreadsheet I posted in the week 2 article and write in all your keyword ideas.

Get in the mindset of your potential customer.

The first thing I want to talk about is simply choosing keywords in general. It’s a good idea to try to get into the mindset of the people who are searching for your services. Think about how you search for things or services on the internet. What type of words to you type into a search engine when you are searching for stuff. If you are searching for a new eye doctor you might enter terms like eye doctor, optometrist or eye exam. If you are trying to find a DVD player you might search for terms like DVD player, home electronics or even a specific brand name. The goal here is to try your best to think like one of your potential customers entering search terms into the search engines. So think of all the keywords you can and enter them into the keyword spreadsheet.

Be specific. Make sure your keywords are specifically relevant to your business.

The second thing I want to mention is keyword relevance. This is really an important part of, not only your SEO, but also your overall conversion strategy (turning traffic into money). Turning Traffic into money is most likely your ultimate goal, whether you’re a photographer, a hair salon, or a dentist. You either want to get someone to fill out a form, pick up the phone or buy something. This is why you want your keywords to be highly relevant. A good example of this would be a person who is looking for education about real estate investing. If you sell real estate investing education you don’t really want to try to optimize for a term like real estate. One, the term is going to be extremely competitive, and two if you do get your site to rank well for that term; you are going to have a lot of traffic from people who are simply looking to buy real estate. Most of these people are not looking for investing education.  You want to narrow the scope of the keywords you are optimizing to be more specific to what you are offering. So, for this example good potential keywords would be terms like “real estate investing education”, “how to invest in real estate”, “education for real estate investing”. While these keywords are long they are more specific, and are going to bring you more qualified traffic than more general keywords. Go through the keywords you entered into the first spreadsheet and filter out the most general keywords and keep the more specific, more qualified keywords.

Think Local

Optimizing local keywords can be the difference between working 6 months on your SEO and working 18 months on your SEO. Especially if you are a local business such as a dentist, plumber, optometrist or hair salon. So what do I mean by "Think Local"? I mean think about optimising for your local area. We call this Local SEO. If you are a hair salon in Columbus, Ohio you might try keywords such as "Columbus hair salon" or "Columbus beauty salon" These type of local keywords are going to be beneficial. They are going to be easier to rank for and the traffic you get from these keywords are going to be highly qualified. Now, there is no perfect formula for local SEO. The reason being that one set of rules for one local area and niche market are not the best set of rules for another local area with the same niche market. A good example for this would be an electrician in Rhode Island. An electrician in Providence, Rhode Island might service the entire state simply because the state is so small. So in this case it would be a good idea to research a term like "rhode island electrician" as well as a smaller city like "Providence electrician". Where as an electrician in San Diego California could never service the entire state unless they have many offices throughout the state. An electrician in San Diego would want to research keywords like "San Diego electrician", "La Mesa electrician" or La Jolla electrician. If you keep local SEO in mind when thinking about your keywords many times it's going to be easier to rank for a keyword and the traffic is going to be more qualified.

When you begin doing the actual research for your keywords you will most likely notice that the general keywords are getting many times more traffic than the more specific keywords. Don’t be discouraged by this because more traffic doesn’t actually mean more money what you are looking for is qualified traffic.

This is the first part in what will be a six part series about keyword research alone. You may ask why I’m spending so much time on keyword research, and the answer is simple. It’s the most important thing! You could be awesome at onpage optimization. You may even be a link building superstar, but if you are optimizing for a bad keyword then none of that other stuff matters. Using the right tools for keyword research makes all the difference in the outcome of the SEO work you do, and could be the difference between driving a ton of “qualified” traffic to your site, and wasting all of your time for nothing.

What is a Keyword?

So I know I’m getting pretty basic here, but for those of you who really no nothing about search engine optimization at all, this is for you.  A keyword (also known as a key phrase or key term) is a word or phrase that a person uses to find or search things in the search engines. When you go to a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing and type in a phrase like “Columbus Hair Salon” You are typing in a keyword.  Any key word, phrase, or term that you type into a search engine can be considered a keyword. With keyword research it is your goal to figure out the best keyword to try to optimize for your site so that relevant users can easily find your website when searching for that keyword.

Tool for Search Volume

The tool that I use for finding the search volume of a keyword is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This is a free tool where you type in a term and it tells you how many searches there are a month for that keyword.  You can find this keyword tool here https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal Google does some weird things and sometimes requires you to login to use this tool so you may as well just sign up for a free Gmail account. You will need a Gmail account for some of the stuff we do later anyways. I will talk more about how to use this tool properly in a later article when I discuss search volume in depth.

Tool for Researching Competition

I really like this free tool called SEO for Firefox. It is a Firefox extension that is essentially a Firefox toolbar. You can find it here http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html. This tool is great for showing you the number of incoming links to a site and a sites page, which are two factors to look at when checking out your competition. I will talk more about this as well when I discuss researching your competition in a later article.

Market Samurai

This tool is not a free tool like the previous tool, but is a decent keyword analysis tool. I used to use this tool, but no longer do since we have developed some internal software that does all of the things this tool does.  You can find this tool by searching for Market Samurai in Google. This tool is used for overall keyword analysis, and could be helpful for beginners.

These tools, along with manual searching can get you to where you need to go when it comes to keyword research for search engine optimization.  I will discuss each one of these tools in depth later when I talk about specifically how to use them. Learning to use these tools correctly will save you a lot of time, headache and stress. In the next five weeks I’m going to be covering “Choosing the Right Keywords to Research”, “Researching Search Volume”, “Researching Your Competition” and “Analyzing the Data”. So go check out the tools I listed above so you are at least familiar with them when we cover them in the coming weeks.

Now, let me start off by saying, I know this is not the most interesting Search Engine Optimization topic, in fact, I even find it down right boring to write about. But the fact is, it is a very important topic for what we are going to be covering.

In future articles we are going to dive into topics like keyword research and analysis, setting up various web accounts and linking strategies. If you don’t keep organized all of your efforts, your hard work, will be for nothing.  You’ll end up redoing keyword research, setting up accounts all over again, and you’ll lose out on the benefits of a solid linking structure.

We have built a web based system to keep us organized. It’s good for us because I can login to our system at any time, and see exactly what our employees are working on, what they have completed and what stage of the process they are in. But the development of our system cost a lot of money, and was time consuming to develop. You on the other hand can use a scaled down version for your SEO work.

What might that be?

SPREADSHEETS!!!

Spreadsheets are a perfect way for you to keep organized. You can use excel, Google spreadsheets or any other type of spreadsheet you prefer. But keeping all of your data in spreadsheets is going to help a lot.

You are going to need three basic spreadsheets; one for keyword research, one for account usernames and passwords, and one for link building. I have done some of the work for you, and created two of the spreadsheets, while my business partner (the excel genius that he is) created the third keyword research spreadsheet. You can find links to the three spreadsheets at the bottom of this article.

I will be covering each of these spreadsheets in much more detail in later articles, but for now it’s a good idea to just look over the spreadsheets to get an idea of where we are headed.

I know from past experience that is really easy to slack off and not enter data into your spreadsheet each time you complete a task; but your Search Engine Optimization will suffer. Remember, there are a lot of tasks to complete when doing SEO for your site, and organization is going to be key to reaping the benefits of all your hard work.

Spreadsheets

Keyword Research

Usernames and Passwords

Linking

So let me introduce myself. My name is Josh McCann, and I am co-founder of Pro SEO. Now, you may be asking yourself who is this guy and why should i be taking SEO advise from him? My answer to that question is I'm really nobody. But I do have years and years of SEO experience, as well as this great ability to research a subject so intensely that I can walk away with a complete understanding regarding the subject matter. I have taught myself a ton about SEO over the years by simply doing a ton of research, but I have also had great mentors who have taught me a great deal as well. So I wanted to give back.

Now, in my spare time I dabble a little in writing music, and there is this software that I use in my song writing process that I absolutely love. I have been using this software for about a decade, and I thought I knew it inside and out. Over the past year the developer of the software came out with a 52 tips video series, and even though I thought I knew all there was to know about the software I began to watch the videos. What I learned was that I didn't know nearly as much as I thought I did. I have to say, I learned almost as much as I already knew about the software, but I also realized how much more I could do with the software that wasn't even part of the training series.

That series gave me the idea to do my own 52 tips series on Search Engine Optimization. So, I began writing an outline of what I would cover. After coming up with my basic outline. I scaled it down to 23 weeks. Now, there may be things that come to me along the way as I'm writing these articles so I may actually extend the series a couple of weeks if I come up with new tips along the way, but for now it's outlined at 23 weeks. Ok, so I'm done with my introduction so let's get started on some SEO.

Choosing the Perfect Domain

Now before you stop reading this and say, "I already have a domain." You should know that you can still use your existing domain and you will reap the added benefit of using an SEO friendly domain in conjunction with your existing domain.           If you are like most people when you bought your domain you looked for either the name of your business, or something similar. Something like "ECorporation.com" or "SmithAndSons.com". This is great if you own an already established business like "Wendy's", "Fedex", or "Nike", but if you are a little known small business you are missing out on the fact that your domain name can work for you. I would also like to point out that even if you have made a name for yourself you are still missing out on NEW customers.

Domain names play an integral part of your SEO strategy and many times can be the difference between a struggling grueling climb up the search engine mountain or taking the ski lift to the top. I have seen new websites streak to the top of the search engine rankings with little or no offpage SEO (I will discuss this term in detail in later weeks). While sites without "good" domain names struggle even with lots of offpage SEO work. A "good" domain name can be very beneficial to your overall SEO strategy. I want you to think about this, "Your website is like your introduction to new customers, and the search engines are like your friend making the introduction." If people can't find you in the search engines then you are losing out on new customers, and we all know that new customers grow businesses.

What is a "good" domain name?

In short a good domain name is a domain that contains keywords that a user would use to find your website. See a few examples below.

• Orlando-Animal-Hospital.com
• LosAngelesHairSalon.com
• SeattlePlumbing.com
• Columbus-Construction.com

All of these are excellent examples because this is, in fact, the way most people search for businesses on the internet. Again, unless you you are already a well established business most people are NOT going to be searching for your website directly unless you've spent a small fortune on marketing to get your name and website address out there. And even then think about the potential traffic you are losing because they didn't see or hear your ad.

Think about it. If you just moved to Denver, Colorado from Baltimore, Maryland and you are looking for a hairstylist chances are you are going to use the internet to find a new hairstylist. And there's a good chance that you are going to type in "Denver Hair Salon", "Denver Hairstylist" or "Beauty Salon". you wouldn't search for a specific salon simply because you don't know of any. Having "good" keywords in your domain give your website a little extra SEO boost because search engines love this.

So How do I find out what domain is the best one for my business?

There are really 3 things you need to do when trying to find the right domain for your business and your website.

1. Brainstorm Your Keywords

Sit down and brainstorm the keywords you think people type into search engines that pertain to your business. Think about what you would type into search engines to find your business. Think about what you would search to find your competitors.

2. Keyword Research and Analysis

This can be a quite complex process and so, I am going to cover this in depth in a few of the upcoming weeks within this series. I'll break it down for you in simple easy to swallow chunks, but just know that it's not about guessing. It's about researching how many times a particular keyword is searched, how much competition is out there and how easy it is to beat that competition. Again, I will be covering this in depth later in the series.

3. Search for a Domain that Contains the Best Keywords for Your Industry

What I mean by this is go to Go Daddy or 1and1 or whichever website you register your domains at and start searching for available domains. This in and of itself can be a chore as many domains you look for are possibly taken. Be vigilant in your search and don't be afraid to mix, match and move your keywords around in the domain name. Just do your best to find a domain name that has keywords relevant to your business.

Example: "DenverHairSalon.com" could also be "Hair-Salon-Denver.com"

Also, just because a domain is not available at GoDaddy doesn't mean it's not available. Check to see if the domain is being used. Go to your browser address bar and enter that domain name directly. If you don't see an "actual" website, if you see something like an ad page or a page that looks like it is the default page of the hosting provider there may be a chance that you can purchase the current owner. To buy a domain that is already "taken" you need to find out first who owns the domain as well as their contact information. You can do this by way of a "whois lookup". There are several sites out there that allow you to serach a domain name and find out who it is registered to. One example is www.whois.net. Just go to the website and enter the domain in the search box. Sometimes you willneed to do a little researching to find the domain owners contact information. Or you can use a "domain buy agent". GoDaddy offers this service as well as many other sites.

Once you have the registered owners contact info contact them and make them an offer on the domain you want to purchase. We have bought several domains this way and there is a bit of haggling that goes on sort of like selling your car. Domains are a commodity, but you can sometimes find a great domain for pretty cheap this way. One more thing to note is be careful when purchasing domains this way. If you are spending hundreds of dollars on a domain you don't want to be ripped off so either put the money in escrow or use a domain buying service or transfer service. This way you are covered and you don't lose your money to a scammer.

Now, I mentioned at the beginning of this article that just because you already have a domain name doesn't mean it's not a good idea to go out and get an SEO friendly domain name. You can easily benefit from having both. I have outlined 4 steps below.

1. Buy and setup your SEO friendly domain.

When I say "setup" I simply mean get it pointed to where you are hosting your website. This is a little technical so if you don't understand this you should have your tech person do this as they will know what this means.

2. Move your existing website to your new domain. (or have your tech guy do it)

This is usually just a matter of copying your website files to another folder (directory) on your hosting server.

3. Forward your old domain to point to your new domain.

Most registrars, if not all, allow you to forward or "point" one domain to another, so that when you type Example.com in your address bar you are automatically redirected to YourDomain.com. This is usually very simple to do in your registrar's control panel.

4. Setup 301 redirects for your old domain.

This step is only needed if you have begun link building for your website, have purchased links to your website, or already have a bunch of organic links to your website. This is definitely something a more tech savvy person should do, and you can find a lot of great articles by searching "SEO 301 redirect" in Google.

Don't go out and buy that new domain just yet. In 2 weeks I will begin covering keyword research and analysis which is an important part of finding the right domain for your business.  Watch out for next wee as I will be covering SEO organization, This is a highly important step as you begin to research, compile data, setup, create content and build links for your site.

See you next week!

-Josh McCann