Helpful WordPress Pluggin

For those of you that market on Twitter and run a WordPress blog I wanted to give you information on a pluggin that I love.

Tweet Blender

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweet-blender/

It installs easily and displays your latest tweets in your sidebar area.

Here is how I do it:

Go to pluggins section of your wordpress admin.
At the top click the “Add New” button/link.
Search for “Tweet Blender”

Click the link to “Install Now”

Next click “Activate Pluggin”

Now you have Tweet Blender installed it’s time to do something with it.

Go to your “Appearance” link in the left navigation of your Dashboard.
select “Widgets” sub menu.
You get a list of all the available widgets – and over on the right are all the areas on your site.

Decide where you want to place the latest tweets and drag “Tweet Blender” (no the tweet favorites or tags) in the desired section.

I’m going to put it in my sidebar under categories and follow the hashtag SEO (#SEO)

click save.

You are done!

Very easy, no advanced configuration needed.
If you do want to go more advanced you can set a bunch of options in the settings page and even follow multiple topics or people on your blog.

Very cool and very simple.

The Very First Thing You Need to Do for SEO

The very first thing you need to do is install Google Analytics.

Seriously, if you don’t have Google Analytics installed on your site, you need to stop reading right now and go install it.

I’m not kidding. Stop reading and go install it. It’s easy!

OK, since you are still reading I can assume you fall under one of the following categories:

You have Analytics installed – Great! stop reading this post and move on to something more interesting
You don’t know what Google Analytics is or how to install it – It’s OK, read on, I’ll help
You don’t believe me – you are a fool

What is Google Analytics?

It is a small piece of code you add to your website that sends information to Google.
Google crunches the data and gives you amazing reports that help you make money.
You don’t really need to know what it is to know you need it.
If you are hiring any SEO or Webdesign company and they don’t tell you to get analytics – I wouldn’t necessarily trust them.
If you’d like a more complex explanation check Google’s site.

How to get Google Analytics

It is extremely easy, don’t get discouraged, just do it.

Very basically you:
Go to www.google.com/analytics – sign up – fill in all needed info about your site – add a small piece of code to your site.

If you follow along Google’s step by step guide you should have no problem getting the small piece of code you will need to add to your site.

You can click the image to the right to see what my code looks like.

If you are using wordpress you would add the “analyticator” pluggin to wordpress and add the code there.

If you are using some other CMS or hand coded site you will need to add the code to your header or footer. Google would prefer you put it in the top of the code so it tracks even if your page fails to load, but footer works fine as well.

After you get it installed go back to analytics and click the “check status” button to make sure it’s working.

That’s it – you are now tracking all the important information about your site that anyone helping you on your site will need.

Now leave it alone and let it do it’s job.

I’ll do another post next month with the reports you should be paying attention to.

How can video help SEO?

Videos on your site don’t have a direct influence on search engines.

Indirectly though, videos can help your search engine optimization by increasing the amount of time an end user spends on your site.

Google sees the longer time spent on your site as a good end user experience and a good indication that it should send more people to your site.

When adding video you should first make sure that the videos are relevant to your topic, engaging, and informative (or entertaining).

Negatives:
Having a video that is slow to load and boring could have the exact opposite effect on your rankings.

If your video is set to auto play it could annoy people.

If the video is added to the site incorrectly it could be extremely slow to load and cause people on poor connections issues with even bringing your site up in the first place.

Don’t forget all the internet connected phones either. iPhones and iPads don’t play flash video – if you don’t have text to go with the video you could be abandoning all that traffic.

In closing – Video can be a great addition to your site and help tip the scales in your favor as long as it’s done correctly.

Have direct experience with adding video your to site? Let us know in the comments or on our facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/South-Jersey-Search-Engine-Optimization/

Anatomy of a Google Page

Every time you search Google different results are brought up in different ways depending on what you are searching for.

If you are searching for something that Google believes to be related to a local search – this is what the page will look like.

The page has many elements that make it up.

The first thing is “Paid Listings”. This is a strong reason why Google stock is currently trading at over 600.00 per share. You can use Google Adwords to get listed here.

Next are “Organic Listings”. You’ll notice that organic listings, the reason everyone and their grandmother use Google, take up very, very little real estate on a search that Google thinks is local. To get listed here you need some good on-site SEO and mainly inbound links.

Next up are the Google Local listings. These listing have images, phone numbers, map locations and all kinds of other good stuff to get local businesses clients. Getting listed here is easy. Log in to your Google Account and visit Google Places. Your ranking on here is also determined by Google’s algorithmic nuances. Include your keywords in your profile.

Understanding the basics of Google will help you better understand how to make money from Google.

If there is something you want to know more about, let me know.

Local Listing Special

When looking for a florist, a pizza shop, or a place to host their next event – People start by searching Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Get your business listed in Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing Local – all for only $100!

Even if you don’t have a website, you can still have a listing. Help customers find you!

7 Guerrilla Marketing Ideas

Guerrilla Marketing: small bits of free or cheap marketing that you can do with limited resources, but still get big results.

As with guerrilla warfare, you can take on much larger competitors and by being fast, mobile and cheap you can do things that they can’t imagine. The big guys don’t have the hunger, desire, or lenient legal department to win the same way a small business does.

There are plenty of good books written on the subject. I’ve read a few from Jay Conrad-Levinson. For 10 bucks I would recommend Guerrilla Marketing, 4th edition: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business.

**Warning** – Attempt at your own risk, I make no guarantees that these ideas comply with all business ethics or business laws governing those businesses. I believe they are OK, but I’m not a lawyer.

7 Guerrilla Marketing Ideas

1. Clever placement of business cards

Put them at everywhere. Leave them on tables outside food courts. get a plastic holder for the side of your vehicle. put a coupon on them and hang them at convenience stores. Your Dr. Office, Dentist or anywhere people are stuck sitting in waiting rooms (stick them in the magazines). Chinese Food, pizzerias, libraries. I once bought several cartons of cigarettes and placed a few cards in each one along with a note to take one and a card. I then left packs of cigarettes everywhere I went at a convention. You might not love smoking, but I loved the attention it got me. You could also do that with breath mints, candy, etc.
You can get 2,500 double sided, business cards (on a nice stock) for under 50 bucks. If you need me to design them for you just say the word.

2. Stickers

Again, cheap and easy. place them everywhere. I don’t like putting them on street signs or people’s property, but I’ve bought hand sanitizer and sun tan lotion and put my customers stickers on them. An alternative could be magnets. Same as stickers, but you can get people to put these on their cars a little easier, you can also place on cars without getting sued. The extra cost might get you extra visibility.

3. Give stuff away

You can have a contest where people need to spread your name around to get a prize. Make them add links or like your facebook page or follow you on Twitter. You’d be amazed at how many people would follow in the hopes of receiving a free t-shirt or chance at an xbox 360.

4. Sponsor local parties

Tell your facebook and twitter followers that you will help sponsor their next party or BBQ. in exchange for adding your stickers to all the soda bottles and placing all your brochures or business cards on the tables you’ll give them 25 bucks (or more depending on the size of the party). Make sure your shwag is funny and entertaining to get people talking about it. Official party sponsor, official toilet paper sponsor, official keg stand sponsor (you get the point).

5. T-Shirts

Get t-shirts made up and wear them. Make sure you carry your cards as well. Better yet, get beautiful people to wear them. If you can make your shirts cool, people will wear them for free. Cool enough and people will pay to wear them. Remember to get some girl styles. So many companies forget about women when marketing.

6. Car wraps

Now these can be pricey, but if done right can be awesome. I love the idea of putting something weird on the side of a car that people will want to take pictures of. Don’t just wrap your car in your logo, wrap it in something odd that combines your business ideas, branding effort, and humor. Now you still have to drive your car, so let’s think of something cheaper and smaller that is removable: cardboard window inserts.

7. Temporary Tattoos

If you can make is slightly funny, sexy or bad ass it will go further. It really depends on your overall approach to branding and what you want on people. If it’s good enough people will take pictures of their tattoos and place them on their facebook or other social networks. hundreds or thousands of little ads out there – for next to no cost.

Be unique, interesting, funny, sexy. Connect with your readers and they’ll reward you!

Keyword Density – what is it and how to check it.

In general I try to write my posts so anyone can understand what I’m talking about, whether or not they’ve spent 10 years doing SEO. I believe I succeed quite well, but sometimes I don’t.

I recently wrote a post about On Site Optimization and included a brief mention of checking your keyword density.

This might have gone over a few people’s heads, and even if it didn’t, you might not know how to check your keyword density.

Keyword Density basically means the amount of times a word, or word phrase appears on a page. Simple enough.

So how do you check keyword density?

There are a hundred tools out there that will help you out. I’m going to go through a fast but detailed tutorial on how to use just one.

The main keyword density tool that I like to use is SEOQuake Add-on for Firefox. (they also have an add-on for Chrome)
The add-on has a ton of information about SEO in general, but it can be overwhelming and slow your browsing experience down.

First we’ll install seo quake and disable most of the features:
In FireFox go to: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3036/
Click the Green button – add to firefox
Install the add on and restart Firefox. During install it will ask if you want instant reports or on demand. change to on demand, you don’t want it looking up every site you visit, it will slow you down too much.
After you restart you will have a small “SQ” in the bottom right of your browser.
Click it once and it will turn gray.

You now turned off all the annoying things with this pluggin that you don’t need right now.

Browse to a site you want to check
I’ll check my on site optimization article:
Right click on an empty are, select SEOQuake, select Keyword Density.

once you select keyword density report it will open in a new tab with all kinds of wonderful information.

You can see my top words for this page are: optimization, search, seo, site, engine, tips

That is right in line with my overall keyword strategy and I’m pretty happy with it. You can also look lower down and see what your 2, 3 and 4 word phrases are.

My top phrases, again right in line with my keyword strategies:
search engine, engine optimization, on site, site optimization, learning center, contact me, seo tips
search engine optimization, on site optimization
marketing tips seo tips, tips seo tips website, seo tips website tips, of search engine optimization

How important is my keyword density?

It’s minor. Keyword density isn’t going to get you to the top of the search engines, but it will give a slight edge when fighting for a particular spot.

You shouldn’t kill yourself trying to get the right recipe of keyword density percentages. Try to write naturally for humans. Then after you finish writing your article check the density and try to improve what you can. I’ve often used keyword density tools to find accidental omissions of words from my keyword research list.

How do I increase my density for my product?
easy – use the words more.

One way to easily and quickly increase your keyword count it to look through your paragraphs for use of pronouns. Replacing pronouns with the proper noun can naturally increase your word counts and not read like it was written in some other language and then translated poorly.

Let me know if you find this article useful and if there is anything you’d like more information on.

Holy Bad Design Batman

If you ever use a design company that has an ad that looks like this, you deserve to be removed from all future ad buying decisions.

Just in case you are color blind, or all the way blind, let’s take this ad apart.

Uses bad gradient in every bit of heading text. Guess he just learned how to use that tool in class this week?
too many different fonts.
no respect for the color wheel
did you notice he/she also uses the gradient in every one of his/her backgrounds?
everything is in boxes with thick borders
too much bold. Where are my eyes supposed to focus?

Might as well point out a couple of good things while I’m here:

No typing mistakes. You’d be surprised how many ads have them
Stays on target. Tells you what you get in 3 bullet points per item

You don’t need a website

If you don’t want customers, don’t want to grow, don’t want to expand, then you don’t need a website.
Your website is not a place to send people from your business cards, it’s a place to get business and find new customers. It’s important and it’s easy. Don’t be a fool!

When I’m looking for tree services in Cherry Hill NJ I don’t look at the phone book. I don’t go to my roledex and flip through cards. I go to Google. I go to Google and I search “Cherry Hill Tree removal” or “Cherry Hill tree service” or similar. I asked my wife who we used last time and she said to “Google” it up and it should be there.

I know the last time I had my trees pruned I used Express something or other. Guess what, they don’t come up. Even though they are located in Maple Shade NJ and I’ve seen their trucks in my neighborhood, and I used them!

We would all love it if our customers thought of us first when thinking of purchasing products and services, but they are lazy. Google has made them that way. They are going to “Google” the type of service they are looking for.

according to my research “tree service cherry hill nj” receives 150 searches a month.
Express Tree NJ – 60 searches a month.

That’s 140 potential customers that are seeking out your business and can’t find your company.

Do yourself a favor. Stop wasting time talking to your cousin about building a site and get serious about making money and growing your small business.

Search Engine Optimization – Step 2 – On Site Optimization

In step 1 we discussed keyword research, now we’ll dive into step 2 – Planning and on site optimization

Planning can be as complicated or as simple as you desire, but if you don’t have a plan, chances are you will fail.

The structure of your site and how easy it is for Google, Yahoo and Bing to traverse is extremely important. Luckily if you followed my advice and built your small business web site on WordPress you already have the basics of a well made site. Simply by adding the all in one SEO pack and a few other pluggins you can start with the real work and not waste your time arguing with developers who don’t know jack about SEO.

On-Site optimization is the easiest part of search engine optimization. Do you know why? We’ll I’ll tell you. It is because you have control over it. Really it’s the only part of optimization that is all you. It’s success or failure is your fault. Not Google’s, not Yahoo’s, not Bing’s.

So let’s do an easy check list for your on site optimization. For some more reading you can check out my Google is stupid post.

Unique meta title on every page.
Unique meta description on every page (this is the text that shows up to search engine users)
Good content written for the human (it’s important that you write for human readers and then update to be search engine friendly. Do not write for search engines only)
include alt text on images
include title tags on links
use h1 for important items, h2 for secondary (if you are using wordpress it mostly does this already)
use the footer to link back to your home page
link to yourself. where applicable link to yourself from other pages, besides just your navigation
www or not www. Don’t use both. personally I prefer www because when people type your url or copy and paste it will automatically be a link in their email client or facebook.
Stay on topic – one topic per page
check your keyword density
test your site. (you’d be surprised how many people have 1/2 functioning web sites out there)

If you want more details on anything I’ve written be sure to ask.

I also do training seminars if you’d like to be able to handle search engine optimization in house.