SEO For Beginners

You remember I talked about Raphael, my new taxi-service buddy from St Kitts, BVI?  I wrote about him on the blog recently and how well he looked after us….and just yesterday there was a comment on the blog from someone who wanted to book a taxi tour for six, on St Kitts in March.

Just think about that for a moment.

That’s pretty amazing isn’t it?  Some woman writes on her WEALTH CREATION blog about Empress Coaches, on St Kitts, over the other side of the world and within a week or so, he’s got a booking enquriry out of it.

How did that happen?  Because the search engines love blogs, especially Wordpress blogs.  They love the way they are set up apparently.  I also included

I just went to Google and put in “taxi service st kitts” and lo and behold, my blog post is No #5 on the organic search results.  If you put in just “taxi st kitts” it comes up No #8.  That’s amazing.  This is how it looks…

Need A Taxi Service On St Kitts BVI? | The Money Gym
Our New Friend Raphael Originally uploaded by TheMoneyGym We wandered out of the port, looking for the train station, for a tour of the island only to.
www.themoneygym.com/blog/2009/01/need-a-taxi-service-on-st-kitts-bvi/ – 45k -

So you can see that having the key words Taxi Service St Kitts in the title of the post, and the metatags, without it even being in the first line of the blog posting…hey!  I can improve the results even further by editing the first line of the description!  In the words of Gordon Ramsey……DONE!

And Raphael doesn’t even have a website yet!  Just think, if he had a website with the key phrase in the title, the meta-description and the meta-tags…….wow!

The other interesting thing is that there are NO Google Adwords ads when you put that search term in Google.  If Raphael boned up on how to do Google Adwords, he could be the ONLY ad over on the right hand side.  And if he used the little known but totally legit trick of making sure his ad was shown, no matter WHAT key phrase the searcher typed in, he’d be there every single time.

Do you think that would help him grow from two Empress Coaches empire to three, then four….now I know there is probably not much competition for the key phrase “taxi st kitts”…actually there are 337,000 pages returned when you type that in, and most of them are not about St Kitts.

However, when you use a simple tool I know about, to search how many of them have the phrase “taxi st kitts” in the title of the page, you find only 114 pages competing with my blog post.  Or Raphael’s website, if he ever makes one.

What has all this to do with your business?

Just think for a second what your idea customer might be searching for on Google.  They usually have a problem, in which case they put in the solution they are looking for (if they know what it is) or they actually type the problem in.

So, for the Money Gym, the problems could be “how do I make more money” or “how can I pay off my mortgage” or “how can I get out of debt”.  Key phrases there are “make more money”, “my mortgage” or “get out of debt”.

There are 16,900,000 pages competing with you on the key phrase “pay off debt”.  But only 9,740 pages competing with you that have the key phrase in the title of the page or the URL itself.

That levels the playing field a bit doesn’t it?  Do you see how easy it might be to dominate the search engine results by blogging on topic and just paying attention to a few simple rules?

Front page of Google anyone?

Would it interest you to know that the majority of the new visitor traffic to our site comes from Twitter, Facebook and Ecademy?  So much for those who “don’t get” Twitter!

If you find this intriguing, and want to get more traffic to your business website, I’m going to be hosting a free 2-hour webinar this Wednesday 11th February from 6pm-8pm GMT.  This will be a visual presentation as well as audio, with a good amount of time allocated for questions and answers about your business.

I’ll be covering some totally simple traffic generation techniques, dead easy search engine optimisation, and the benefits of building a community around your business, in the form of social networking and a membership site for your visitors and customers, and you really need to be there.

It will be recorded so if you miss it, and you have registered, I’ll send you a link to the recording, so you can listen afterwards.  Line spaces ARE limited so don’t miss out and secure your seat now.

Just book yourself onto the webinar here>>>

There is no charge, but you will have to go through the shopping cart process (no credit card details needed though).  Then you will recieve an email that will tell you how to register for the webinar and get all the details to watch live, or view the recording later.

Look forward to seeing you there!

Blog On The Move

Well, you can probably see that we moved our blog from our beloved Typepad to Wordpress eventually and after a very false start a few weeks ago.  Hmmmm, it’s more correct to say that Lea Woodward of www.ProjectWoodward.com moved it for us – and at a very reasonable fee too!

There were issues with our server and if you are not in the know, as I’m not about that level of techie’ness, it can stop you dead in your tracks.  But Lea sorted it out.  Which is ironic as Lea used to be one of my internet marketing mentoring clients – still that’s as it should be, the client outstripping the coach!

Now, for all of you out there who have started a blog on Typepad on my advice, don’t worry!  And keep blogging!

1.  No matter what they say, Wordpress is not as easy to use as Typepad, even with expert instructions

2.  You can very easily export your Typepad blog and import it into Wordpress if you want to, later.

So why have we moved then?

I’m on a mission to get our traffic up, and to improve our Search Engine Optimisation even further and I have finally been convinced that having your blog hosted on your own URL is one of the ways to do this.

Read more..