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

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 .

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.

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. :-) 

Later as I was thinking about our meeting I realized that I can’t forget when talking to clients it’s important to remember they are coming to you because they need your help and that means you need to slow down … and not over whelm them with information — even though, if you are like me I am very passionate about SEO and the power of social media and all it has to offer that I could literally lock my self in a room with others and discuss it all night long. 

So here are some key tips for meeting with Clients for potential jobs.

1. set up a meeting face to face (if this is possible — if not a phone conversation at the very least)

2. prior to meeting or talking to them – research them online. Check out their website, their products, their branding .. get a feel for them.

3. prepare a list of your services, include associated costs.. like a alacart menu

4. then run thru each of the items so they understand why each are important. Looking at setting up a micro network on squidoo or hub pages may mean nothing to them and mean so much to you. Or they may think of link trading as one thing while you think of it as another. 

5. Don’t over whelm them. Give them brief explanations of these topics cover the importance so they can justify in their head the expense.

6. When finished ask them if they have any initial questions?

7. Next encourage them to take this preliminary quote home and review contact you with any additional questions. 

8. If you can.. ask them for a budget that day ensure them that you will follow up with in a day or two with a personalized online marketing strategy based on their unique needs that will get them more traffic. DON’T ever promise them top position on google – no one but google can promise that. You can assure them that your work has gotten many if not all of your clients in the past top placement, but it’s better to over deliver than ever underdeliver especially when Google is ever changing and the ways we stay on top are ever growing.  

In summary, do your best, be personable,  be honest, and reliable and your customers will be happy and refer you to others!  Communication is key to making your potential customers happy and comfortable with your services! 

Months prior I had learned about Sherman Hu from a class I had taken, it covered everything related to Social Media it was intense. Sherman was one of the guest video speakers. He did these great video interviews explaining video production, streaming video and the ins and outs to utilizing video online successfully.

Two days ago I looked him up on twitter and sent him a nice little note saying I’m gonna follow him… then a day later he follows me. I send him a thank you.. and then later that evening (which was last night) he sees me on facebook and sends me an instant chat. See how it works.. social media is so awesome!!

We chatted and got to have a real conversation one on one for over an hour. He shared some tips and tricks, I learned about his life, he learned about mine a bit and just talked about general stuff.

Prior to WEB 2.0 I would have probably had to sign up for a conference somewhere to go listen to him speak and hope I had 5 minutes of his time to ask him some business related questions. We would have probably never gotten to know anything more than that about each other.. connect in a real personal way.

I hope you see the importance of WEB 2.0 and what I described up above. It literally shows you — you can achieve anything you want to do because now you are in control of your networking like never before. Don’t get me wrong it’s not all about networking for business it’s about meeting new nice people and developing new connections with others around the world. But if expanding your knowledge, learning or growing your business is a goal of yours then there is no better place to be than on the web to learn, grow, network or mentor others.

I look forward to meeting Sherman Hu some day and will continue to follow his blogs and video UStreams and admire him even more for being approachable, responsive, and real.

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

Now, as I walked thru the down town disney area with my 6 year old, my four year old and my husband I kept thinking why has no one ever written a book called the “Basic Survival Guide for Disneyland Newbies”  I sware I still might go to LuLu and write my own little ebook on it - i think you could make a fortune. Or disneyland for Dummies.  The amount of parents that were there just catering to their kids every wish and dream amazed me.  In tough economic times, money really didn’t seem to hold anyone back. The place was packed and the prices were far from reasonable.  But once again the old marketing motto of being the Happiest Place on Earth prevailed. Because for a few short days you forget about the balance in your bank account, you forget about traffic, about your job back home, your blackberry and your connection to the outside world.  All you know is that goofey or mickey could be up around the corner and you better have your camera ready and charged, your signature book ready and hurry to get in line before “they” take a break. oh and don’t forget to  get your fast pass for space mountain and Indiana Jones.  It’s the only way to go… Now I personally haven’t been there for some 30 years and never had heard of a fast pass but it’s brilliant and a HUGE time saver. You go to the ride you want and get tickets ahead of time it tells you when to come back  and then you get to cruze by all the people standing and waiting because they hadn’t planned ahead and didn’t have a DISENYLAND RIDE STRATEGY!

Being on Weight Watchers back home was hard enough but there was no realistic way for me to stay on track with my points in disneyland The Happiest Place on Earth.. where fresh battered corn dogs, cotton candy and ice cream stare you right between the eyes around ever bend in the Disney park. Needless to say.. 6 pounds later, exhausted and broke we came home. Home to our little abode that felt like paradise.  It’s been a week now and the kids haven’t talked much about the trip since and you wonder what all the effort, time, energy and money was spent for and then you remember it’s because you love your children and you want to make them happy!!  We did have a wonderful trip but we wont be going back anytime soon. There are so many other wonderful family experiences to be had first. 

Now the challenge is to get back into work mode so that we can afford our next vacation.  I wish I had had my mobile twitter set up before the trip .. twitter is really a great way to check in with friends when you don’t have time to email, call or write. And yes Twitter can be a very useful tool in marketing your business.  In the days to come I will be covering the following topics… Facebook, my space, video marketing, twitter, social bookmarking. These are things that are essential in WEB2.0 and if you don’t know what any of those are you might just be living under a rock. It’s time to get on board with these social networking tools because they will become common place to everyone soon right now I’d say it’s for those that are ahead of the curve and I want to be helping you be one of those folks that can be leaders not followers in the world of communicating via the web.

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