If you’re like most people, you probably started with wonderful ideas of fulfilling your dreams, to be successful and to take charge of your own destiny.
I hope you have achieved those or are well on your way.
You wouldn’t think of starting your business without a business plan and you shouldn’t even consider marketing your product or services without a marketing plan. A solid business plan and marketing plan are your roadmaps to help you to know where your going, how to get their and to achieve your goals.
Nobody likes to think about what would happen if those accomplishments were suddenly pulled out from under you, yet unfortunately it does happen.
Do you have a plan if an event such as a hurricane, tornado, fire or simple computer crash should happen to you? If not, then it’s time to start thinking about adding a business continuity plan to your list of things to do. What is a business continuity plan? Simply put, a business continuity plan is a set of planned and documented procedures that will help your business back on track in the event of an emergency.
If your business is managed from your home, both your residence and your livelihood are at risk due to unexpected loss. Natural disasters are not the only risk factors. As devastating as it is to think someone else was in your home, robberies can happen anywhere.
Something as basic as a hard drive crash can cripple your home business indefinitely. I recently spoke with two people in the last month that had said that they experienced hard drive crashes and lost everything.
When you think of how much time, money & effort you have invested in your home businesses, it only makes sense to make sure it is protected and can survive an emergency.
Welcome to the zany ideas of a productive writer. My students keep reminding me of my unusual tools and how helpful they have been for them. I also thank my students for their concept testing and refinement. Now, I feel much more confidant about sending them out into the world.
For the next few minutes let your imagination run amuck. Okay, amuck is a little too far out there, so what about allowing an open mind for the time being. Afterwards, you can let your mind ruminate.
My office has a beautiful “u” shape ash wood desk that I’m proud of. Partially due to its price and uniqueness. It is here, I handle my emails, pay bills, read, coach, and edit there. Yet, I had difficulty setting the ground work for my writing. Tasks like creating first drafts, deciding on the major points, or creating a table of contents. Because of this I usually seek another environment that sparks these efforts.
Probably like yourself, I found my best ideas arrive when I’m in the shower, when I first wake, while driving, or while walking. Just to name a few. Let’s take a short side trip, I want to share with you how I capture my thoughts during these light-bulb moments.
While walking I use a tape recorder on an adjustable camera strap around my neck. Voice activation and the mike pointed up towards your chin are musts. To start recording all you need to do is tuck in your chin and begin speaking. I say my name first usually because the first one or two words get lost while the recorder’s activation mode kicks on. Heavy breathing or puffing, since it goes forward and not down, usually does not activate the recorder.
In the shower, I use a pen I purchased while visiting NASA in Florida. It can write in extreme temperatures and underwater. A grease pen works well if you don’t mind writing large. It is also cheaper. Add a diver’s under water board and you’re ready.
For driving, I use the same method as I do for my walks. Normally the engine noise will activate the recorder if left on the seat. That is, unless you have a car that is perfectly quiet inside.
Okay, side track over, back to zany ideas.
During the day I found myself playing musical chairs when writing. At home and in the office. My lounge chair in my bedroom was right for personal journaling. Early outside sunrises was for new inspirations.
My living room recliner was good for brainstorming from reading. For writing personal development topics, the left seat of the couch next to a very large scenic picture window is the place. For long how tos, it was the dining room table or a specific McDonalds. I don’t know if it was the smell of grease or the acoustics that lit a fire under my pen.
The library and its smell of old books make me tired and snoozy. Sometimes my mind felt too vibrant and jumpy with all the possibilities and paths open to me.
Do you like to stare out the window? Me too! I have an awesome view from my wall-to-wall office window. I use to think day dreaming on a topic wasn’t productive but have found the openness feeling brings in expansiveness to my writings. As long as I’m not sitting at my desk while staring.
What can you do when you need to spark the imagination and you have already taken a shower? Do you take another? What about driving? With gas prices jumping skyward who wants to drive just to spark the creative bug.
Here are a few ideas on how to solve:
Buy a miniature waterfall to recreate the shower feel. Or use a sound devices that imitates a rambling brook or rain. Place it carefully where you want to fuel a particular type of muse. Turn it on, close your eyes, and place yourself in the shower. Toss some water on your face before hand if that helps. One of my clients, turns on the shower, sits in the bathroom for a few minutes to kick the process in, and then she moves to a chair.
Instead of driving, sit in the car with your left hand on the steering wheel, close your eyes, and imagine the movement, holding a pen in the right hand with paper balanced on your knee or on a board. If you are returning home do this after you have parked. The movement of the car will remain.
Some of these may be zany for you, some not. Spark your imagination, try new and different things. Try them at least three or four times and adapt to what feels right for that moment. Your writing productivity and creativity is sure to double.
By following these steps you will see that most closely guarded secret– the search algorithm. Remember the movie “The Matrix?” The Matrix is there, you just can’t see it. So is the search algorithm.
It’s easy to pay a Search Engine Optimizer to give your pages some ranking power. Unfortunately, given the inherent time factor involved in climbing the ranks, your money may be long gone before you know if you’ve spent your money well.
THERE IS NO MAGIC PILL
Forget any advertisement you see for instant number one search results or automated this or that. Most are scams, and the ones that aren’t might get you positioned, but it will be very short lived.
Search engine optimization is an ongoing process. Achieving and maintaining a high rank, especially on highly competitive keywords, requires constant maintenance. If you do find a legitimate SEO firm, it is well worth the money to pay their monthly maintenance fee and let them continue to help you after the initial project. At least for 6 months or a year as you establish yourself.
In this article we’ll look at some of the intricate and complex tasks of optimizing a page for long term ranking power. You will learn how to read between the code and the content to find what is necessary to bring you to the top. Being number one is easy to say, but is quickly overwhelming when you stare at tens of thousands of pages you want to out rank. So how do you begin?
The starting line on the road to that first page SERP (search engine results page) ranking is not as blurry as you might think. In fact, you can uncover the starting line, the route, and all the scenery along the way to the finish line without knowing the search engine algorithm.
STEP 1- YOUR KEYWORDS ARE THE CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT OF GRUELLING DAYS OF WORK
If you have investments in the stock market you know how much research and thought goes into choosing those securities. Now take that same effort and multiply it by three. That’s how much planning and revision your keywords should take.
A simple, broad key phrase like “shoes” could hypothetically bring you up in a countless stream of different searches. Women’s shoes, baby shoes, sneakers, high heels, etc. If somehow you manage to settle into a good ranking (which would be difficult) you would have more traffic on your site than you could handle. But traffic is worthless is it doesn’t get to it’s destination. Chances are, you weren’t that destination.
Your keywords must be focused and precise, specific to what you are selling. Using a key phrase like “Gucci mens black leather loafer” will bring a targeted lead to your site. You may not reach as many people as the more generalized keyword, but the people that do come to you have a much deeper interest in the specific product you are selling.
Therefore you have much greater chance of converting that targeted lead to a sale. Your keywords are your magic beans, your winning lotto numbers, your energizer bunnies, your sales force, whatever you want to call them. They must be perfect.
STEP 2- WANT TO BE NUMBER ONE? LOOK AT WHO ALREADY IS
Competition Analysis- no SEO book can give you this information.
Now take your keyword list and type them into a search engine. Who comes up in the first ten results? That company that is number one is because they have most closely matched what the search engine algorithm says should be number one. You can learn a great deal from them.
A. INTERNAL FACTORS
Take that number one page, and the other top 9 pages and study them, look at the code, break them down. You are looking at the first half of what is needed to rank in the top 10 pages for your key phrases on that particular search engine. The list of what to look for is enormous.
Studying the Internal Factors on a page is taking it apart to see how it’s put together. Not how it works, but statistical research into the precise construct and layout of keywords and phrases in relation to each other within the page.
Start with these areas:
URL address, Page Title, Meta description, Meta Keywords, First sentence on the page, Body copy, Bold or Emphasized Phrases, H1 or other tags, Alt Tags, Navigation system
In each of those sections, look at:
Keyword densities- the number of times your phrase and each word in your phrase appears compared to the text around it
Where and in how many times the same phrase and words appear in different sections
The word and character position of each phrase in each
The total number of characters
The total number of words
The quality and thought of the content
Beginning with these comparisons should keep you quite busy for a while. A spreadsheet is quite useful. Some commercial products are also available that can make this daunting task much more feasible. Keep looking for other patterns and differences. You want to duplicate them in your own page. NOT copy and steal. You want to mimic the patterns that are bringing that page to the position it is. Then move onto to examining the external factors of these pages.
B. EXTERNAL FACTORS
External factors of a web page deal with the links to, from and within a web page, both inside the same site, and out into the web. This analysis usually takes more time because it involves more dissection of pages beyond the one you’re trying to optimize.
In this analysis as with Internal Factors, you want to compare and contrast your page versus the top 10 competitors, find similarities and differences. Here is a list of criteria to get you started.
Number of internal (to the same site) on that page
Number of external links
Number of links pointing TO that page* (see below for details)
The link/anchor text- which keywords are used and where
Google Page Rank value of incoming links
Alexa Rank of incoming links
*To get a listing of the links that point to a site, type the following into Google, MSN and Yahoo searches: “link:www.domainname.com”. Google tends to only show a small portion of the links back, but MSN and Yahoo will give you much more pertinent data.
Now you want to compare the content on each of these pages to the one they point to. Is it of similar theme, in what context does the link back appear and where. Subject of much debate, the consensus is that Google Page Rank does not mean what it used to. However, if it is in some fashion a measure of how significant or “important” a site is, it is worth looking more closely at the sites that link back that are of high page rank.
EVEN A SURGEON USES TOOLS
Now, this is definitely a ton of work to do all by hand. There are software programs that can help do some of the digging and mathematical computations for you, figuring out densities and organizing information.
Tools like this are definitely ones a professional SEO will have in their arsenal. But remember, these are tools, not miracle workers. It takes a human being to evaluate and realize connections, similarities, draw conclusions and interpret the data. Then, you have to extrapolate this data.
Remember, you want to do one better than every site you just examined. To do that you have to draw some conclusions and make some educated guesses and link to even better sites.
FINAL THOUGHTS
You have access to the inner workings of every page that you want to beat. Learn from them and do one better. This process is not a one-time shot. It is ongoing. Check your key phrases every week. Do the same people still rank in the top ten?
Some have probably moved. Remember too that they’re going to adapt to maintain their positions too. If you want the ranks, you have to spend the time, and not just once, or pay someone to do it for you.
Don’t ever believe anyone who says they can guarantee any kind of results. And ask them how they will optimize your pages. If they explain to you something like the above, then you’ve probably got yourself someone experienced and honest. Your money will be well spent and you’ll quickly recover it.
A professionally presented business website is a powerful and essential marketing tool: it’s the first thing prospective customers will look at before they decide to contact you. If the copy on your website is not written to an acceptable standard, it may be losing you customers. It’s not enough just to have amazing graphics and imagery: you need the words to make it complete. Is the spelling correct? Are punctuation marks in place? Does the copy make sense? These are questions that website designers should be asking themselves before they upload a new site.
One of the biggest flaws with website copy is inconsistency: for example the word ‘website’. Some sites spell it as one word, some as two words; as far as I am aware both are acceptable, but not both versions on the same site! In my opinion, a lack of consistency will deter a significant amount of would-be customers from using the services of a company that has not taken the trouble to proofread their website.
Poor spelling on a website is another costly but avoidable mistake.
The majority of visitors will leave the site very quickly if they find too many spelling errors. This again will give them the impression that the site owners don’t really care; and they would be right! I am also convinced that copy that has been ‘padded out’ with insignificant trivia is also a big turn-off for visitors – clear, concise and informative is the order of the day.
Anything containing textual content should as a matter of course be proofread: it’s important that not only are mistakes in spelling, punctuation and grammar found and corrected, but that the text flows smoothly for the reader. The copy on a website should not be treated as the ‘poor relation’ of the project. You can have the most up-to-date, eye-catching graphics available but you will still need well-written copy to compliment them.
There are the odd few web design companies around that will happily inform visitors how they can supply them with a state-of-the-art website but then insert second-rate copy, which totally negates any good work they have achieved. This will reduce the initial impact of the site, and more often than not will have an adverse effect on business.
It pays to have the copy checked professionally, whether the design company has written it themselves or had it supplied by the client; it may cost a lot less than you think to have a website proofread – it could cost you considerably more if you don’t!
Remember: if visitors to your site cannot find the information they are looking for because of badly written copy they will simply leave the site. The only people to benefit will be your competitors.
minibuzsolutions 