Portland Web Design

This week I attended the advanced seo series taught by Colleen Wright of the Search Engine Academy of Oregon.  I am a firm believer that you should never stop learning and you can be knowledgable in your subject of interest but once you think you know it all you are in BIG trouble — Arogance can be the death of your business or at the very least your soul.  With that said,  it’s important to invest in your skill set.  Luckily if it’s your own business it’s a write off and if you work for someone else hopefully they will encourage you to take outside classes and have a budget for continued education.

Going into to this class I was unsure of how useful this class was going to be. I was pleasantly suprised, Not so much for all the new knowledge that was presented because happily I knew most of it, however I did learn new things as well.  Knowing class material can  be a good thing because it reaffirms your competitive abilities in the market place as well as re-stimulates your mind with fresh new ways to look at online marketing.  By no means was it wasted time anytime you learn something new, network or revive your passion is money well spent and a good use of time.         

Collen Wright is a very nice woman and she is a very good speaker and knowledgable.  She provided an organized, well informed class while still having a fun sense of humor.  

Scott Hendison came and spoke on Social Media and provided some great tips, valuable information and shared a lot of knowledge and experience that the group benefited from.  I enjoyed his presentation, his passion for the subject matter and his genuine desire to help others become better at Search Engine Marketing.   He highly recommended this as a great source of inforamation http://www.planetocean.com  I’ve also added it to my blogroll along with numerous other favorite resources of mine.)

Doug Williams spoke about blogging and that was interesting as well. One of my most favorite bloggers that I love to follow is Yaro Starak.  I encourage you to sign up for his newsletter it’s worth reading.

Day three was good too it covered more anaylitical tools and ways to track the competition. The class was small a total of 5 people which I thought was perfect. We had various levels of skills and Thomas and Sarah from Pop Art were there and they were gracious enough to share their skills and talents throught out the week. At times I wish I would have remained in the corporate arena instead of working for myself but honestly the joy and rewards i get from having my own business out weigh any of the envy I may feel at times.

It’s been hard to sit at a desk for the past three days from 8-5.  As a person who works from home I’m used to mutli tasking and definately taking a mind break when needed — But its been a very refreshing week and I met some very nice people.  While having a littel down time I found this fun site to check out  http://www.officesnapshots.com  I’ll have to add a  photo of my cave soon!

Here is a take away tip, I found this useful: if you are looking at places to submit an article go to google and type in “submit an article” +  ”your keyword phrase”.  Cool things from this week to check out: www.Mootools.net, www.Ping.fm & www.Plurk.com

Interested in SEO?  Here is a great article to check out
The short attention span of web searchers: most never read past 3 results

I have also read that it’s better to be positioned in the 3rd spot vs. the #1 result.  So the pressure is on more than ever before to deliver for your clients.  Hopefully you are reading my other posts and learning what it takes to achieve top natural search engine rankings .

Now that I have your attention really the most important rule to remember when participating in facebook, my space, twitter, squidoo, linked in, merchant circle, hub pages and the other thousand of social networks that are taking over the internet is DON’T BE A PITCH PERSON, DON’T FOCUS ON SELLING YOUR PRODUCTS, SERVICES OR SELF. You need to be a real person and actually be a valuable addition to the communities that you join for anyone to notice of you. You need to earn the respect of your peers before any of them will become your customers.

If you are truly knowledgeable in your field, there are a long list of ways to gain followers, referrals and loyal customers. Over time you will have opportunities to introduce your products, services, and sell yourself, just be patient, take your time and know that people are watching your actions and it’s important to really want to enrich the communities you belong to. Contribute often but be selective of your contributions.  Ask yourself is what I’m adding  interesting to others, am I just talking about myself, my products, or services? If so, rethink what you want to add make if of value and interest.

If you want others to follow you, follow others. Join groups that you are interested in, not only professionally, but those that you personally have interest in.  Learn from others, watch those that are successful in your field and sit back and be an observer for awhile, track their actions and see how others respond to them.

Facebook is one of my favorite social networks, it’s powerful and robust! Tons of apps and tools you can use to grow your business. It’s important to set you profile up, contact info, relationships, personal info, education, work info and add a real photo of yourself for your avatar, no-one wants to see a picture of a squirrel they want to see you, a real person, this allows others to make a personal connection with you, which ultimately strengthens your relationship.

Once you have spent time building up your profile, joining groups, participating in groups, setting up your notification and watching and observing others interact, add the business pages app.  THIS is the magical tool to promote your products, services or self. Once you have set up your pages and made them rich with content become a follower of the page and watch others do the same.

If you are active in the Pay per click arena and you haven’t tried facebook ads yet I totally recommend using some of your budget in Facebook. as well.  Facebook allows your pay per click ads to reach an incredibly focused, targeted and active audience. If you try this path let me know what you think.

To sum up Social Networking can be a very powerful tool but if misused it can also be a very powerful tool in a negative way avoid becoming a spammer by following the good practices I have listed above. 

See you online.  Word tracker is calling my name, gotta go run some reports now. If you don’t have a facebook account yet .. go sign up for one now and look me up (Mary Killelea) and send me an invite to become friends and I’ll accept the invitation and learn about you and your interests.

A few years back me and a colleague of mine were going back and forth holding the number one position in the local market for Portland web design and Portland SEO, and it was amazing to watch our efforts change from day to day. Most of what was true back then still applies except you have a lot more fish in the pond now which means local searches are not as easy to dominate as they use to be. But one thing that is more true now than ever before is customers are doing more local searches.

So if you have a local business, let’s say Search Engine Marketing is what you are doing then you should not be promoting your business name Killelea Consulting as your main key word phrase .. you should be targeting Portland SEM: Portland Search Engine Marketing. If you change your strategy to simply do nothing more than this … you will benefit greatly. Think as your potential customers think. Targeting your local market works! Now it doesn’t end there.. you will need to find a page in your site that you are gonna target for these key words as well. Normally your index page will be the focus of your main key word phrase.

Once you have determined which page you are going to promote with your top keyword phrase, you can get to work. Use your keyword phrase term Portland SEM : Portland Search Engine Marketing as your title tag, write a unique description for the page and this description should contain Portland SEM again. Your description might read like this:

Title: Portland SEM : Portland Search Engine Marketing
Description: Killelea Consulting offers Search Engine Marketing (SEM) in Portland and surrounding areas. Providing Search Engine Marketing Solutions for small and medium sized businesses. Call 503-997-6935 today.
URL: http://www.portlandsem.com/

Many want to know how important is it that the url contain keywords? The answer is simple, it helps! But it wont win you top placement by itself. Ideally you have to put some fore-thought into buying your domain and ideally have http://www.portlandsem.com/ if not, and you can afford it, see who owns it and offer to buy it, as long as it’s not a Marketing company I bet you can get it for the right price. Additionally I have read if you register your domain for multiple years that helps in your page rank as well. If you are not in a position to go out and buy a specific domain you can still develop your site smart by using seo tattics when building additional pages. For example you own the domain www.marykillelea.com and you have a services page… if this was my site I’d build that page to read like this <http://www.marykillelea.com/sem-services.html  .

Next you need to go thru your home page content and sprinkle in your keyword terms, Portland SEM or Portland Search Engine Marketing. It’s a bit tricky because you don’t want to stuff your page with these keywords but you want the keyword density to be at about 2-5%. Here is a Keyword density tool to use when you get to that point. Also make sure that you place your keyword terms “Portland SEM” in a H1 tag at the top of the page.

You are almost done. It’s now time to go thru and make sure your alt tags for all of your images and links are tagged with Keyword terms. The terms you have within your site are important and they should not be overlooked as they are fabulous opportunities to use them as links for your site. For example on your home page you talk about Portland SEM Services that would be linked to http://www.portlandsem.com/

As you can see there are many things you can do to each of your various pages in your website to optimize them for the search engines. And you can see it’s not just one thing.. there are many factors to optimizing your site and then there’s even more SEO tattics to take to gain additional success, those tips will come later.

p.s. by the way as of this post 6/10/08 on Google Working Web Solutions is listed in the #1 position for the key word phrase SEO Portland, and #3 for Portland SEO and I’ve lost positioning on Web Design Portland so I need to re-focus my efforts there. I’ve just been busy with helping my clients have success I’ve dropped a bit off the map. So that is an important thing to remember yes you must take care of your clients but don’t forget about your own SEO. :-) 

Working Web Solutions is looking to fill our summer internship program with 1 to 2 canidates.

If qualified and interested please submit current resume to Mary@workingwebsolutions.com

Qualitifiation:

• Basic knowledge of css, html, xhtml, dreamweaver, photoshop 7,
• Familiar with W3C The World Wide Web Consortium
• Basic knowlege of search engine optimization
• Hard working, Reliable, Eager to learn, dependable

Job Duties

• article writing
• html editing
• link trading
• video submission
• seo tasks
• affiliate marketing
• building out facebook pages
• gain training thru direct teaching, projects, and support videos
• work at office located in Wilsonville, Oregon

Compensation: Unpaid position

Hrs: 8-15 a week flex schedule

Secrets from the cave.

So this post is gonna be dedicated to sharing my favorite resources that I have found to be very beneficial and very helpful in learning more about Search Engine Optimization. There are some basics about SEO that remain consistent but the method of optimizing your site for the various search engines change as the Search Engine Algorithms change.

Linking has been around for years and is one thing that still remains strong in helping you achieve high ranking. Granted there is a lot of junk links out there, and link farms that I highly recommend you stay away from. Below is a new creative way I have found to generate great inbound links. Take a peek and let me know what you think.

Catapult Site Search Engine Rank in 30 Minutes

Going to this year just made so much sense since everyone wants to learn more about getting good rankings. The group that was in attendance seems to have grown from last year or should I at least say from the InnoTech event, which just tells you more companies & freelancers are out there spending money to marketing themselves online and to play the SEO game. Terms that were so easy to dominate a year ago are much hard due to the growing number of fish in the pond. Finally people are realizing the power of local searches. As of this post I still came in at #1 for Portland SEO in google which I am amazed at because I just have been so busy with helping others acheive good ranking I haven’t had the time to Promote my own business. A friend of mine named Gregg does very well in dominating the Engines I’ve learned a lot by watching him. He’s got quite the network and in today’s market networks are very powerful. In addition to being busy with clients I have been taking a 12 week course from the most amazing online marketers I’ve ever seen. In the coming weeks I want to dive not only into SEO and WEB DESIGN but also talk about the power of Social media, and online videos. Till then..

Even though a one way inbound link has more weight in terms of ranking.. It is still totally worth exchanging links with similiar sites of interest.
If page rank is what you’re after then the best advice is to beg, plead and buy links from related authority sites. The catch 22 is — you have to have a great site to entice an authority site to link to you. Plus it can be expensive to have inbound links from authority sites.

What it comes down to is ALWAYS focusing on producing great content for your users, updating it regularly, and being selective in who you exchange links with so that your reputation isn’t in jeopardy.

Here are some tips when contacting similiar site of interest for reciprocal linking.

• Take the time to visit the site and find out who the appropriate contact is and include their name in the email. This isn’t alway possible but worth spending 5 minutes looking into it.
• Start with a complimentary statement about what you like on their site.
• Introduce yourself and your site.
• Write why you your site is a beneficial link partner, and mention that you are not a competitor.
• Always try and post their link first on your site and include the url of where they can see their link on your site. You will have a much higher return on your efforts if you take the time to post their link information on your site first and give them a short amount of time to reciprocate before their link will be removed. It’s important to keep track of who you contact, when you have contacted them and where your link to them is and where your link will go.
• Provide them specific linking text that you would like included on their resource page: Include Title, Description, and Linking url
• Lastly thank them sincerely for their time and sign with your first name to make it more personal and natural.

Doing this correctly is time consuming but it will pay off as you build useful links for your users and benefit from inbound traffic from those sites that you exchange links with.

Growing up my dad told me .. if you learned something new then you had a good day. Luckily in the world of Online Marketing everyday can be a good day! So lately I’ve been seeing, reading and hearing alot about Twitter. By now with all the coverage you probably know what it is and how you can benefit from using it. THE MILLION DOLLAR QUESTION is how do you find the time to twitter, surf the net, work on SEO tactics, create Squidoo pages, Hub pages, and also market yourself or your clients on Facebook and My Space????????

Or maybe the big question is how do you become good at all of these tactics? Or is it okay to focus on one at a time and really become a successful twitter or the best at Squiddo pages.

Online Marketing can be overwhelming if you don’t sit down and figure out a strategy. Having a strategy and really analyzing and planning out your approach is what seperates the wanna be’s from the pros.  I have discovered two wonderful tools, time saving tools for making your online marketing efforts easier.   The first is a video submission tool. This is a fantastic tool for anyone who is doing video submission. If you have ever uploaded a video to more than 2 sites you know how time consuming it can be. Well this tool submits your video to 25 + video sites, and to over 10 book marking sites.  Granted you have to have an individual account with each of these for it to work properly and the results are not a 100% you will e required to do some manual submission but overall it’s very useful. The big flaw I see with this tool is that it does not provide result positioning reports.  This too is something you have to do manually.

 The other great tool is a tool that consolidates your Social Networking blogging or posting into one submission process.  So I can twitter and send out that tweet to 5 different social networking type sites, like Facebook, Pounce, My space, bebo, and JaiKu.  Again you have to have accounts set up with each of these in advance but the idea is if you have follower’s in the various accounts that you can make one post and it will be spread in a viral way to all of your networking spaces.  I had trouble setting up the My space account and help was very difficult to find but overall it is a great tool.

No-one can dispute the power of Social Networking and that it has to be a part of your Online Marketing Plan. Personally I think the trick is to break it down and focus on each tactic at a time and follow your marketing map. Also don’t forget after you develop a strategy to actually DO IT!

I was pleasantly surprised that the first day was field with worth while information but an overall review for me, which was encouraging to know that even if I am not in an agency I am able to obtain, learn and apply all the best current practices. Which sometime working for myself I can feel like I’m working in a bit of a bubble. The 2nd day covered more advanced topics and was useful as well. So overall I would recommend it for those looking to learn more about what you can do for others as a web designer and emarketer.