Hey folks! I want to just spread a little ray of hope out there for everyone who is serious about getting more customers online. Getting all your ducks in a row online can be hard. Blogging and podcasting can be absolutely grueling if you don’t do things in the right order.
Tonight I have tweaked my web pages and synched them up with my blog and pinged the appropriate search engines. Something wonderful happened. The same pages that I created this morning and uploaded to my server are the same ones that popped up in the Yahoo top ten.
I got THE NUMBER ONE SPOT…… In fact, I occupy the top two positions for beauty products.
This is for a company called Windsor Beauty Supply in Farmington Hills, MI. Check out this link to see our top position -- seeing is believing --- we are at the very top in Yahoo. The beauty of this is that I found a combination that worked.
I was literally shocked to see how effective this was. I want to tell you a little about how I did it. First of all, I used BLOGGER. I used that because it is owned by Yahoo. It made sense to use it so I could be recognized quickly. Go Daddy’s blog system however is pretty good. I like all the tools that it comes with so I set up different blogs using different software to get a feel for what I like. I suggest you do the same.
Picking Out The Keywords
The keywords are important if you want to get your search engine rankings up. You should make sure you put enough of them in your copy. But what is even more important is referencing them when you make your hyperlinks. This is where a lot of people lose steam.
The common mistake is that when people go to link something they will hyperlink the phrase, “Click here for more information”. I admit I was guilty of doing that in the past - at some point - we all have done it.
The problem is that the search engines will not reference your pages properly. Instead of indexing your keywords they will highlight words like, “The, And, For, Go To etc.” This sounds pretty basic but its more common than you think. I was horrified when I reviewed the traffic reports off a site I built recently. Even the companies tech department were oblivious to my recent discoveries.
Create The Perfect Pages To Ping Off Of
There is a certain way you should lay out your keywords in your meta tags. Depending on who you listen to there are two ways you can do it. I learned of a technique where you can stack up four rows of meta tags related to search engines. You can see an example of this if you right click on your mouse and View Source to see what I mean………
Log onto:
http://www.windsorbeauty.com
You will notice that it looks a little different. Now here is the funny thing. According to the software package, Hello Engines, I am actually doing this wrong. This is an Australian product but they could be right. However, the US based search engines like what I do and I have gotten favorable results.
If anyone can commit on this - please do so. I would like to find out the proper coding for keywords. One would assume that I am doing this right by my recent successes.
Know Which Blog Search Engines To Ping
Not all the blog search engines are created equal. Some will add you to their databases by hand. They station a live person to go through the requests. DMOZ does this. They added a blog feature but still have a live person deciding if you will get accepted or not.
This can be very frustrating.
There are only 10 really important blog search engines that you should be send to. The others are a crap shoot and there is no telling if you will be included in 2 weeks or 48 hours. Some directories will automate daily. The other thing is that a lot of these blog search engines don’t even bother sending out email anymore to new sign ups. This is due largely to the recent spam they receive on a daily basis.
Hint: check splogs….etc.
(spam blogs)
Still though….. 3 hours…. Is pretty sensational.
Remember back in the not so distant past you had to wait 7 months to get listed on Google. Now you can get on there in a few hours. Its pretty outrageous.
Now before you run out and try this keep in mind that you want to encourage participation. Setting up your blog with subscription feeds, RSS, and capturing email addresses is a good idea. It would be advisable too to get a hold of the traffic report. I would stay clear of posting these results on your blog -- this is for your own benefit and its no one else’s business to see how popular you are. This is something that you will need to do so you can see what is working.
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Article written by Ted Cantu, freelance correspondent for FASCUBE, The Fashion Culture Beauty Network. Cantu handles online marketing, copywriting, graphics, SEO - SEM, Blogging, Podcasting and can be found on his home site of www.911copywriters.com. Cantu is located in Walled Lake, Michigan.
