SEO for Winners

How is local SEO different from general SEO?

admin — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 22:18:49 +0000

SEO is great. By putting it to work, you get free traffic from the search engines. And not only is it free–it is pre-qualified, since it found you by entering one of your chosen keywords into a search engine. You don’t pay for it; it’s not an ad. You just make sure that your site appears within the first few search engine results for particular keywords.

But if I type “electrician” into Google, I get over 10 million results. Now, a lot of the results have some interest to me; Google is smart enough to guess where I am, and it favors local results.

So I type “electrician mountain view ca,” and now I get only about 43,500–and virtually all of them are of interest to me. Especially the first page, which starts with a little map, showing me a bunch of electricians in Mountain View, where I live.

If you are a Mountain View electrician, you probably don’t want to invest in optimizing your website for “electrician” on a national basis. You probably don’t care if anyone outside of a few towns in the South Bay area of Northern California knows you exist. But if someone in Mountain View, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, or Cupertino types in “electrician” and the name of their town, you’d really like to pop up as number 1–or at least, on the first page of Google’s search results.

Now, this is not a trivial subject (see this link for a more complete treatment). But it’s important that if you are seeking local business, you do NOT simply follow general SEO guidelines. If you are someone who provides services locally, you need to find out how to get ranked locally. That’s a far better use of your time and/or money. (I offer local SEO services, regardless of your locale; write to me for a quote. Tell me a bit about your business, your location, and where you are seeking customers.)

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Joel’s SEO adventure

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:47:02 +0000

Hi! I’m Joel Orr. I’ve been intrigued by search-engine optimization for years. It seemed obvious: Get traffic from the search engines by ranking for specific keywords. Of course, that traffic then needs to be “converted” into customers–but that’s a separate issue. The first challenge of every would-be Internet marketer is getting traffic.

Of course, there’s a really quick way to get traffic; it’s called “pay-per-click (PPC)advertising.” You open an account with Google or Yahoo or Bing, compose your ads, bid on your keywords, and watch traffic arrive almost instantly. It’s fast, and if you learn to write good ads, it can pay off.

On the other hand, you can also lose money–by getting a lot of traffic that doesn’t buy anything.

Also, as soon as you shut down the ad, the traffic stops.

So while PPC ads may have a role in your Internet marketing strategy, if you want to minimize your risk and expenses, and maximize your long-term traffic results, you need to do SEO–search-engine optimization.

Search engine companies see end users as their customers, and they want to give their customers the very best search results they can. So if a customer types in, “dog houses”–the search engine wants to give the customer the highest-authority sites with the most useful content. (“Highest authority” begs definition, I know; stick with me here.) They DON’T want to present, at the top of the results, the spammiest sites, the ones that are less likely to offer what the searcher is seeking.

SEO, therefore, is about marketing with integrity: Offering the very best content, and excellent products, to the market.

It is also about marketing wisely: You can have the best info and the best stuff, but if you make it hard for people to find, you are hurting your business.

So I decided to study the subject to help my websites get lots of good traffic, people genuinely seeking what I have to offer.

While I’ve done this with dozens of sites, I am currently focused on these:

JoelOrr.com, for my engineering and architecture friends
JoelTrainsAuthors.com, for anyone who want to learn to write a book quickly–and build a business around it
MonetizeU.com, for solo professionals who want to monetize their expertise and make money from what they know
SEOforWinners.com–this site, which teaches about SEO and offers SEO products and services

JoelOrr.com has a Google Page Rank of 4; JoelTrainsAuthors.com has PR 1. MonetizeU.com and JoelTrainsAuthors.com are in the mid-hundred-thousands in Alexa, and rising rapidly. SEOforWinners.com is brand new; I’m just starting to optimize it. (If you don’t understand any of the jargon, Google it–or hang around here, where it will be explained…:-))

Leading SEO experts agree: There is craft and art to SEO. Everyone in the field understands the craft, and keeps up with the changes induced by the search engine companies. The art varies.

I hope you’ll join me in this adventure!

Warmly,

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Free SEO analysis!

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:35:08 +0000

For a limited time, I am offering a free analysis of your website, to find out exactly how you rank for keywords of your choice in Google. This is a useful step to take to learn how to get to the top of the search engines quickly, and stay there.

Why am I giving away a service that costs me time, and for which others charge hundreds of dollars? Because I want to show you the value of my services by giving you value. Then, if you decide to go further, you might consider investing in some of my other services. It’s that simple.

For your free analysis, please fill out this form:

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Free SEO course!

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:47:39 +0000

There are many good SEO resources on the Web. I’ve examined many of them, and I’ve selected one to offer to you.

Why this one? Because:

It’s free.
It’s comprehensive, touching upon all aspects of SEO. Do what it says, and you will be ahead of 99% of Internet marketers, without spending any money.
Its author, Dan Richmond, actually responds to questions posted by anyone who reads the book.

Now, Dan has a number of SEO software products, and he mentions them in the book. But he makes it really clear just how to do what he teaches WITHOUT buying his software. The purpose of the software is simply to save time. I own and use all of it, and the link to the book is an affiliate link. (If you know of a better product, please let me know.) That should not prevent you from benefiting from the free information.

Click here to go to the free book.

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Why you should care about SEO

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:53:09 +0000

“SEO” stands for “search engine optimization.” When you or anyone wants to buy something online, you put some words into a search engine–probably Google–and see what comes up. If you don’t find what you want on the first page of results, you think of some different words and try again.

So if you SELLING something online, you need to know what words and phrases people type into the search engine when they are looking for what YOU are selling.

SEO is about learning what those words are (that’s the part called “keyword research”), then doing what is required to make sure YOUR site shows up in the top spots in the search results. That’s what results in getting you FREE traffic; you don’t pay for ads, the customers come to you through “organic” search results.

There is a lot to SEO, and there is no “magic bullet”–no one thing that will give you your desired results. I’ve been studying the subject for quite a while, and I still feel very much like a student of the process. (For one thing, the search engine companies–especially Google–keep changing the rules. It’s not easy to keep up.)

I want to share lessons I’ve learned with you, and useful tools and books. Sign up for the email or RSS feed, above. Or just come visit here from time to time.

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