What I mean is that there’s no point in spending the time, effort, and money to develop a website if you don’t spend as much – or more – time using techniques that draw Google and other search engines to your website, cause them to index its content, and show it to people who are looking for information similar to that on your website.

That doesn’t happen by accident. But it will happen with design and effort. That design and effort is called ‘Search Engine Optimization’. It means optimizing your website for the search engines.

Now that you’re running a WordPress site, Search Engine Optimization (or SEO, as the title asks)
becomes much easier than if you were managing a static or code-based website. Almost all of your basic SEO tasks can be handled through plugins (look for ‘All In One SEO’ to install under the Plugins Tab – search for it, install now, fill it in, you’re done.)

There are 4 major areas to SEO that you should focus on:

• First and last lines of each post/page. The title of your page and the description of your page are essential areas that get indexed in search engines. You need to ensure that your preferred keywords are placed into your page and post titles and descriptions. WordPress has tools that makes this easy. Make sure that your keywords are also in the last line of each page/post.

• Keyword rich post or page titles. Every time you write a new blog post or page, you are essentially creating a new entity that can be found by a search engine. Make sure you name each blog post or page using the manin keywords for your business that people might search for when looking for content.

• Create valuable, unique content full of useful and interesting information that people will want to share. If information is of good quality, it should get indexed by the search engines much more easily than low quality, poorly written content.

• Speaking of unique content, don’t think for a moment that you can find an article on Google, copy it word for word with a couple of changes, and make Google think it’s unique. GOogle has spent millions of dollars making sure that won’t happen. In fact, your website can be penalized for it. That is the OPPOSITE of SEO.

This is by no means a full explanation of what can be done with SEO, or how to do it. But now that you know that it even exiss, you can begin to build your own set of techniqujes and tools.

This is the final post in this series of Introductory tips, and I hope you’ve enjoyed them. If you ever need help with your Tacoma or Seattle business’s website pleae feel free to contact me.

• Off page link popularity. The more sites on the internet linking back to your WordPress site, the better. To rank your website high on search engines, you need to make sure that you have inbound
links from quality sites. You can do this by participating in social networks or publishing content on other sites. Whenever you do, make sure you include a link back to your WordPress site.

This is called ‘content’. Content in WordPress is done through either posts or pages. There’s a certain amount of controversy about which is better, posts or pages.

Frankly, who cares? Both get your information out there, and both are indexed by Google and other search engines. Thus endeth the debate.

• Every piece of content (ie blog posts and pages) you create becomes a new element that is indexed in search engines like Google. Over time, your site can have hundreds or thousands of index points making it easy to be found by searchers.

• When it comes to creating content, there are several main areas to consider: written content, audio content and video content. WordPress makes it easy to share any of these forms of content.

• How do you come up with fresh content on a regular basis? There are 3 main ways to consider:
o Your products/services and your experiences
o Other people’s stories and experiences
o Reactions and responses to the first two

• For creating content from your products/services, think about the following things. What can you teach? What are questions you get asked over and over again? What do you want to “show off” (i.e. your talents and strengths). Do you have strong opinions on a topic? Do you have war stories or lessons learned from your business?

• For creating content using other people’s input, think about the following: Can you interview someone in your industry using audio, video or written styles? Do you know people who could be guest authors on your site? Can you make a collection of powerful information from other publishers and summarize it on your site into a single post? Do you work with suppliers who have tons of information they will let you use on your website?

• For creating content based on your reactions to certain events, think about the following things. You can respond to another article or news story that you saw. You can do a review of a product or company. You can get involved in social media sites and find trending topics to blog about.

Once you get used to sharing your ideas and information online, it will become as easy as sending an email.

Now that you’ve got a website that’s filling with interesting information, let’s get it FOUND by the search engines. That’s our next topic.

It’s that you have a 500 horsepower hotrod…and you don’t yet know how to drive.

So, the following list covers the basic functions of a WordPress based website:

• In the old days, website maintenance was cumbersome. You would have to use html editing programs like Dreamweaver to customize your site and then upload the pages using FTP software. With
Wordpress, you learn simple tools and make all of the changes live online. This is done through the WordPress Dashboard.

Creating content for your website is no more difficult than using a word processor. In fact, WordPress comes with a built-in word processor. It’s not as powerful as the one you’re probably using for business docs, but you don’t need a ton of features for your website’s content.

• To create a new page on your site, there is a Pages tab in the WordPress dashboard. You simply click Add New to build and publish a new page on your site.

• To create a new blog post, it is pretty much the same process. You go to the Posts Tab in your dashboard and click Add New again and follow the same process.

• Adding pictures, media or files to your site is also very simple. Under the Media Tab in the dashboard, click Add New and follow the wizard to upload files from your computer. They become part of
your Media Library for your website.

• Embedding video on your site is no longer hard or hard to understand. Using Youtube as the example, Youtube provides embed code with each video (find the SHARE button next to the video on Youtube and click it). Simply copy the embed code and paste the code in your page or post and it will be instantly available on your site.

• You can install traffic tracking tools like Google Analytics in your sidebar or in the header/footer of your WordPress website. Those tools will tell you how to do this, step-by-step.

• WordPress automatically creates an RSS feed which is a news feed for your website. As you add new content, the feed is updated. You can publish your feeds on Google at Feedburner.com.

• You can add Paypal buttons/plugins or buy e-Commerce based themes for selling your stuff online.

• You can use WordPress to create private member sites with either themes or plugins.

• You can integrate your WordPress blog posts with social sites like Facebook very easily using plugins.

Next, we’re going to go into what you’re going to use your website for – presenting content to your customers of your Tacoma or Seattle business.

• Anyone can learn to use WordPress and it is the perfect platform to help the business owner create a site that is easy to self manage and reduce overall design cost.

• It reduces the frustration caused by more complex web platforms and it makes it more compatible and fun to use for the business owner.

• WordPress makes it easy for the business owner to leverage technology to spread the word about their company using cost effective tools.

• It makes it easy for business owners to showcase their talent through written and spoken media.

• WordPress promotes dynamically changing websites that are updated frequently causing visitors to want to return in the future.

• It opens the doors for ANY business owner to a have a website available to a global audience.

The ‘control panel’ of WordPress is called the Dashboard. The Dashboard is where you land when you login. Along the lefthand side are the various control areas of WordPress, each of which has a tab. This is where you create content (Posts and Pages), control the way your site looks and operates (Appearance), what it can do other than display text (Plugins), and various utilities (also Plugins). Then there is one tab called Settings which is…general settings for the site and the theme.

Here are the essential facts you need to know when building a high quality website using the WordPress platform:

• WordPress uses the big 5 to build your website: A domain, A hosting account, WordPress installed, A WordPress theme, Coaching or guidance to get started fast.

HEY! By now you realize that you’ve got all of those.

• The theme of a WordPress site is the overall structure and layout of the site (the design). You can choose from free or paid themes. Themes are installed under the APPEARANCE tab on the left-hand side.

• WordPress sites provide a navigation bar making it easy to move from page to page. Your theme determines where the navigation bar is.

• You can add graphics or customized summary images that connect graphic images to your live content.

• There are different sidebar options (depending on the theme) where you can have a sidebar that promotes different parts of your site or acts as a place holder for marketing or advertising.

• Your home page or blog page (your option) will be an ever changing list of dynamic content. As you create new content, the page is updated like a news website with the most recent content at the top.

• WordPress allows you to organize and arrange content cleanly using widgets (in Appearance) and WordPress layout features.

Thsi has been a LONG lesson, so I’ll end here. Next, we’ll go into how to upload a Theme and Plugins.

You can probably get hosting from the company where you registered your domain (such as www.BeSafeNotSorry.com), but you can find a company separate from your domain registrar for your web hosting.

Here’s how to setup your hosting on a cpanel based hosting company:

• Once your hosting account is active, you will get an email telling you a number of important facts. Among them are the IP address of your web hosting (which will soon be holding your domain’s files) and your hosting’s NAME SERVERS. You would be smart to make a printout of that email so that you never lose this information. ITtis that important.

• Make a note of the name servers for your host. It should look something like ns1.yournameserver.com & ns2.yournameserver.com. There will always be 2 nameservers that look like that, and you may have as many as 6.

• If you did not register your domain with the same company your purchased hosting, you can add your new domain by logging into your domain registrar and looking for a ‘DOMAIN NAME SERVERS’ link in the registrar’s settings. Carefully type in the nameservers from your hosting company. Use all the ones they give you (from 2 to 6).

• When that is done, you’re basically read to FINALLY start building your website!

In the next section, we’re going to cover how to build a website with power, elegance, and SEO features…in 5 minutes!!

You need 2 things to have a website: a domain name and a web hosting space where the files for the website are located. When someone typesin the domain’s name – such as mainstreetmarketing.info – the Internet’s domain name servers route that request to where the files are.

Considering that there are hundreds of millions of domain names and sites, it really is a technology miracle that we can load the average website in under 5-10 seconds.

The Domain Name Process:
The important points to consider when registering a domain for your website:

• Use a site like www.BeSafeNotSorry.com to search for available domain names. This service is called a “domain registrar”. Look for something that says ‘search for a domain name’ or similar.

• Once you find a domain name that suits your needs and that you like, you can purchase the domain using a credit card or Paypal for around $12. When you’ve registered the name, you’ll an email verification that you are now the registrant of the domain name.

• Whatever service you used to purchase the domain will have an administrative panel where you can control the settings of your domain. This is called a ‘control panel’ and is where you’ll set up your email accounts and other features of your domain, such as name servers (which is how the internet finds your domain).

• Each domain has a specific setting for “Name servers”. This is the section that determines the web address of the host that is being used to host the site for this domain.

• You must ensure that the name servers for your domain are set correctly to your chosen host.

• Take some time to learn about the various settings for your domain. For example, you may want to add privacy features that block people from searching you as the owner of the domain. These services cost extra but are often worth the investment.

In the next in this series, you’ll learn about hosting and how to use the hosting with your domain name.

This is the first in a series of posts that will give basic information to those looking for a way to learn a lot about websites, their design, and how to build to have built a website for your business (or personal) use – without spending a LOT of time, money, or stressing out.

First of all, a website is a series of pages that are ‘served’ up by a computer program called a web server. The pages are literally code, that the web server sends to the viewer’s internet browser program (sometimes called a client).

Examples of web browsers are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and most recently Chrome. The same page can appear differntly in different browsers. Your computer hardware will also control how a page displays, depending upon its power, its video RAM, and the drivers that it uses for your particular operating system; Microsoft Windows, Apple OSX, or Linux.

You can’t control what your visitors are going to use to view your site. You CAN control what they view, and how it is presented. THis is done by having a place for your website to be located/viewed. This is called ‘website hosting’.

Without getting overly technical, you first need to get space where the files are ‘hosted’ Then you need a name for your website, known as as ‘domain name’. You go to a domain registar and see if what you want your website to be called (the domain). If it is, you can register it as yours. No one actually ‘owns’ a domain. We just register them one year at a time, and keep them as long as we want them. If you were to let your domain expire without renewing, someone else can register it…and someone may actually do that.

In the next in this series, I’ll tell you more about what a domain is and what you need to consider when choosing the name, the host, and the way the website is built.

Website Design Tacoma – Seattle

Google Places (http://www.google.com/places/) is a free service that is a part of the Google search engine that focuses specifically on businesses and their locations. It links to Google Maps and displays a list of companies in the area that offer services or products based on the user’s search terms.

If you type in a search and see a map box on the page, then Google Places can be tremendously important to you.  Sometimes you’ll see1 map location, sometimes 3, and sometimes 7.  There are never more than 7 (although there used to be 10, and Google makes no promises that tomorrow will be the same as today.)

For instance, if a search is made for bookstores in a specific location, all of the listed bookstores within that area will be marked on a Google Map with short reviews and often pictures and/or videos related to the business.

Google Places pages are usually generated automatically for any business that has an online presence, such as a company website. They are also generated for businesses that are already listed in other online directories such as the Yahoo directory, Bing Local, and others.

You DO NOT want to have your business listed on Google Places without claiming it, verifying it, and optimizing it.

YOU DO NOT WANT TO HAVE YOUR BUSINESS LISGTED ON GOOGLE PLACES WITHOUT CLAIMING IT, VERIFYING IT, AND OPTIMIZING IT!  (Yes, I repeated that – for good reason.)

These listings in Places and the other directories are considered as “citations” and are very important in the ranking factors of Google Places pages. I will go more into citations in a later article, so look for it.

When a user performs a search, Google Places listings are usually displayed and ranked in the search results using four simple factors. Based on these factors, each listing is given a score, which determines where it ranks in the results.

The 4 Key Google Places Ranking Factors:

1. The proximity of the business to the center of the specified search location. If it is a town, it would be the CENTER of that town according to Google’s longitude and latitude record of that town.
2. The general SEO rating of the business listing in the Google index.  If you show up well already, you’ll show up evern better on Pages.
3. The quality of the citations that exist online for the business in all of the local directories. Quality would be the age of the citation, and the authority of the directory.  Yahoo or YP.com would have more authority than postyourbizforfivedollah.com.
4. The quantity of the customer reviews that are on the business’s Google Places page.  I have seen that a business with a dozen BAD REVIEWS actually outranked a business with six GOOD REVIEWS.  More is apparently better – it’s ‘social relevance’ to Google.

Once Google runs all of these factors through what we call ‘the Algorithym’, a Places page is given its ranking for certain local keyword phrases.  The results usually – but not always – appear under 3 ‘premiere’ paid ads.  If the map results are mixed in with non-map results, we call it a ‘blended’ result.  Google seems to gradually be rolling our blended results for more search phrases and in more local results.

Recent research shows that consumers prefer a local company when making purchases online. However, they almost always go online first to search or “find” a local company to do business with.

While they’re there, they also read comments – from the citation, primarily –  from other consumers about these companies when making a decision.

For instance, someone in Los Angeles needing a chiropractor may go to Google and type in “Los Angeles Chiropractor” and a list of chiropractors in Los Angeles will come up in the Google Places results.

Google Places looks at these very specific local search terms to return very specifid search engine results to pinpoint the closest and highest rated businesses that match the query.

Users usually then pick the closest business to their location that matches their needs or the one with the best customer reviews.

Because Google generates place pages automatically, there are presently 50 million business oriented Google Place pages that are waiting to be claimed by by the businesses’ owner.

Google Places currently has 5 million listings that have been claimed by businesses around the world, with 2.3 million of them being in the United States alone.

Do the math on that!  It’s astonishing that so many businesses have a primary criterion that Google uses to place them…and so few know about it or have acted on it.

Don’t be one of them!  Give us a call or email to find out how we can help you claim and/or optimize your Google Places page for your Tacoma or Seattle business.

Social networking is vast and it’s being used more and more these days. Research has uncovered that social networking is taking precedence over email for people who wish to reach their contacts. The latter proves the ever increasing popularity of this social experience which is exhibiting massive growth.

There are number of social networking sites in the market, with more coming out every day, but only a handful of them are actually useful because they have a large user base and social networking is all about users. Twitter is one such site than can be used effectively. You are probably aware of Twitter and how it became so popular if you have spent any time at all on the internet. More and more businesses, from small to large, are beginning to use Twitter as a means to increase brand awareness and website exposure by providing high quality, interesting information.

However, does Twitter really have the ability to send relevant visitors to a site?

You can use Twitter as an excellent aid to drive visitors to your website, but you need to have a couple of methods in your toolkit. Therefore, you need to implement an effective marketing strategy.

The current article will show you how to leverage Twitter and how it can be used as an excellent source of visitors for your business.

Gratitude is vital when attempting to market effectively on Twitter. In what way? The principle to tweeting is to give on Twitter; if someone asks you something and needs help. It’s a mental thing rather than having anything to do with marketing. By showing your followers that you truly care and have their best interests at heart, the time you spend helping them out will make them feel obliged towards you. It’s relationship building at its best.

Every marketing strategy you utilize on Twitter relies on the effectiveness of your relationship building skills. When you succeed at this, you will find it easy to send traffic to your website and offers. Giving to the community means you will receive from the community as well. You can tweet links to your articles, offers and many more and people will be happy to visit. The end result is worth the time it will take to reach this stage.

Automating your tweets is another great approach and also makes it very easy. The simple reason behind this is because it’s not easy to be in contact with thousands of followers. Building a profitable business takes time and dedication. This is why you need to automate the mundane task of updating your tweets. Automating as much as possible is so important if you want to scale-up your business. It saves time and money both, and helps you focus on the finer aspects.

Successful Twitter marketing will require time and effort on your part. It’s not an overnight process, so make sure you are patient in your approach and steadily build a long term relationship with your followers.

Social Marketing