Here is a list of 10 Action Steps you can use for your own online business marketing today, post this list near your desk, and check off the items when you do them and at the end of the week, take a moment to reflect on your accomplishments.

1. Blog, plain and simple, it has been shown case study after case study, the more you blog, the more the search engines & visitors love your fresh content. You don’t need to be 100% perfect on all the right plugins, and strategies, just take action and make a point to schedule at least 3 posts per week.

2. Join Twitter, start tweeting and building those relationships. Even if you only have it open for an hour a day while you’re checking email. Visit Summize, also known as Twitter Search, and search for your keyword or niche and start following others with the same interest.

3. Join Facebook and spend a few hours a week networking, joining groups, posting interesting information. Add the Twitter App to pull your feeds into your Facebook profile and add your blog RSS feed into your notes section so all your new friends know what you are up too. I personally have “Share This” installed in my browser to make it fast and easy to share direct to Twitter and Facebook.

4. Add value. Forums, blog posts, free reports, social networking give information to those around you.

5. Participate in Forums. Visit Google and in the search box enter your niche + forum and find the active forums, create an account and make a point to visit an hour or two every week.

6. Be creative and smart but don’t be detrimental. Meaning, we all want to be savvy and smart business owners, but there are very few “new” ideas and for those that are already mult-tasking and it can waste your time and money trying to be creative. Find a model that works, find a mentor that’s been there, and copy the system – I’m not saying rip off someones work, I’m saying copy what is already proven to work just modify to be “you”.

7. Find your target market and get in front of them. They are where the money is, spending hours at your desk trying to understand your html code to change a word for SEO will not bring in sales. Find where your target market hangs out, what they are already buying, where are they shopping, what else are they interested in? Your odds are better to go to the herd then try to slowly drag the herd to you one at a time.

8. Track and Test. Never stop tracking and testing. Each advertisement should be coded so you can track results, drop the low performing ones – create more of the high performers. Link your banner ads to different pages so you can tell from a glace what ones are giving you targeted visitors.

9. Prioritize and outsource what you can. A good Virtual Assistant can improve not only your productivity but also make you money by allowing you to focus on strategy and business builders instead of time eating busy work.

10. Content, Content, Content. Never stop creating your content for your site or blog. If you struggle with content, outsource it or learn how to use PLR – Private Label Rights-you can’t go wrong with good content.

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

10 Action Steps To Your Online Success Today

People often overlook the classic use of images for search engine optimization strategies. How are your images labeled? Do you see that the spider bots are hitting your images in your website stats?

I know it’s important to label your images, but did you know that Google has a spot that you can go and feel like you are playing a game while you help them provide the most accurate labels for the images in their index?

Check out the Google Image Label page and you will be given a page, paired up with another user and given one image at a time while the clock ticks away.

Why? They have you and the partner “compete” against eachother to come up with as many names and labels as you can for the image you they are showing you. If you both choose the same image, you win points! A virtual video game that does Google’s work for them!

While it sounds easy, I have to say, it really is not but it did have an addictive feature to it and I was ashamed that I hit “PASS” more then once. However, it’s a good page to check out and I bet you won’t upload or use another image the same way after you play for 2 minutes!

Now, go check out your site, check your image names and alternate text and titles, be practical please and don’t keyword stuff- be accurate and complete and don’t have images that say image1 that doesn’t say anything.

Do a Google search in Google Images and see if your image even shows up… hmmm is that a watermark with your URL I see on that image?????? Why, isn’t that a clever way to send someone directly to your URL when they are shown a picture of something they were looking for…..

Especially if you go to the Google home page and see the number of images that show up in the actual search results.

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Do You Use Google Images?

“..part of SEO is to attract the spiders.  I know that making changes on your site attracts them to come back and check out the changes.  To what extent do changes need to be made?  In other words, does that mean that full paragraphs of text need to be changed frequently on each page of your site, or is it more behind the scenes, like with titles, keywords, etc?  Common sense is telling me it is the visible text that ‘customers’ may see, but I can’t understand how to continually change all the text on my site.
To sum up…my question is really how much needs to be continually changed in order to attract the google-bots and other spiders?”

Answer:

As with any SEO question you can get as technical as you want, but I like to keep it short and practical, so in a nutshell;  It’s more then just changing text it’s adding content.

Go back to your keyword list and pull out your long tail keywords and add a page of information, like an article, for each of your keywords. Just think of how your site will grow if you add one article a week to your site focused on your keyword or topic. That’s an extra 52 pages that you can have “floating” around the internet and showing up in search engines that people can use as a front door to find you.

Of course, I’m not saying never change your base content, you should always keep testing and tracking and tweaking the content on your base pages for conversion purposes.

However, writing an article that is 400-600 words long should only take you 1/2 hour of work and less then that once you get used to the format.

Add linking to your other pages within the article to help the spiders effectively move around all your pages. An easy swipe line for doing is adding a line such as “As I stated in my earlier article, 5 Tips for SEO, print out your list of keywords and use those for your content base”

Let’s pause for a moment and look at this tactic:

1. I referenced you to an earlier article I wrote- keeping you on my site longer
2. I created an anchor text link that spiders will be attracted to with my keyword in it
3. I created a gateway for spiders to move from one page to another since they will follow the url
4. I added more value to you as a reader by giving you more information you were looking for, understanding SEO.

Blogging As A Free Marketing Tool

Installing a WordPress blog (remember that’s free too) on your host account, attracts spiders to your site because it’s always giving fresh content. Spiders don’t see free WordPress.com or Blogger blogs as adding to YOUR site, but to WORDPRESS.com. Even if you have a link to the free blog site from your website, they live on different IP addresses so the most it will do is follow the URL. For more information on free blogs vs self-hosted blogs you can check out, 5 Reasons You Should Host Your Blog.

The extra benefit of using a self-hosted blog, is the fact you can schedule your post. This cuts your time by allowing you to spend a few hours with your keyword list, create your articles and load them and have them scheduled to go out on certain days automatically. You can do it once a month and not think about it again.

Back to the nutshell, there is your 2 choices, add an article page to your site every week or install the free WordPress.org on your host and post every week and use this tool for passive income in addition to fresh content made easy.

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Quick Question Tuesday- SEO, Spiders, Content

Perform a search on Google for “search engine optimization tips” and you will end up with thousands, even millions of results.  Frankly, the entire process of Search Engine Optimization can be overwhelming for anyone, and more so for those of us that are always trying to balance webmaster role with every other business role.

Search engine optimization is the process of making sure that your website content and information helps you to achieve high ranking on search engines such that you will get traffic directed to your website through these search engines.  There is a science to it, there are many hard and “soft” rules of do’s and don’ts, and there are plenty of people that will pay thousands of dollars to have another company take care of their SEO for them.

Top 5 SEO Tips

1. The very first and important step in search engine optimization (SEO) is to know all your niche keywords and phrases.   If you want to attract some potential customers to your website, you should know the relevant keywords and phrases to use. When people are looking for information online, they type different keywords and phrases on search engines, and you will need to know these keywords and phrases. By having these keywords in your website content, your website will show up on search engines when people look for information that relates to these keywords. I suggest using the Google keyword tool (free), the Free Wordtracker or the paid Keyword Elite.

2. Make maximum use of your keywords and key phrases. In order to make sure that your website is found by search engines, you will need to have your keywords in your web content and on your blog. Make sure that your web content is keyword-rich. Use your keywords in all the articles that you write. It’s easy to print out a list of your keywords that you can quickly refer to and use as your content base.

3. Build your website such that your keywords and phrases are included in the content of your website, including the <title> tag of all your web pages.

4. Expand one way and two way links to your website. Link building is one of the most effective ways to increase the visibility of your website on search engines. Build one way links by submitting articles with your website URL in the resources box, and participate in relevant forums and have your URL in your signature. Write product reviews and post them at other related websites and include your website URL. You can also exchange two way links with other web masters for related web sites. The more websites you have linking back to your website, the better your web site ranking will be on search engines.

5. Submit your website to website directories. This will help to improve your page ranking on search engines and will also drive traffic to your website. If you don’t want to spend the time doing this there are really affordable services that will do it for you. Check out Directory Submitter and they start pricing at $10.00, you can’t beat that!

SEO is very important for the success of your website. Follow the steps outlined above and make your website visible on search engines. If your website ranking is high on search engines, it means that you can be easily found and a lot of traffic will be driven to your website.

For more information and easy to follow steps and SEO Tips then check out Moms Business Coach SEO Simplified Special Report, made just for beginners to SEO and it boils it down into easy to achieve steps that anyone new to the world of online business can put to use today.

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Kick Start Your Search Engine Optimization With 5 Essential Steps

Keywords. Period.

Online business owners know that keywords make your online business rotate. Proper keyword placement and density can mean the difference between money going into your account and money leaving your account.

After all, keywords mean spiders,spiders mean communication, communication leads to traffic, traffic leads to customers, customers lead to money.

I guess I have taken a little bit of a turn toward the “geeky” side since I started my online business and studying e-marketing because when I find new tools for keyword research I actually do get excited!

There are so many wonderful free tools for keyword research like good ole’ Google Adwords Tool, Keyword Discovery and Keyword Spy.

Of course there is the free trial version of WordTracker, however, if you are serious about capturing your online market, I do think the paid version of WordTracker is worth the investment or my personal desktop favorite of Keyword Elite.

When I first started online business marketing I read a couple articles on keyword research and thought I had enough of a handle on it and granted I did ok for being in a competive market BUT then I started to learn how many different ways the RIGHT keyword can help business.

The Right Keywords Can:

• Mean the difference between organic (a.k.a. Free) front page Google rankings
• Lower cost per click cost for paid ppc advertising
• Targeted traffic that converts verses general, breezing through traffic
• Lessons of long tailed keywords
• Get you in front of your search engine competition

What Makes Good Keywords?

Search Results. You must use the tools above to see what people are actually searching for then make another evaluation of competition and know your own strengths and limits to judge if you can achieve the front page success.

I have personally over the last couple months find that I enjoy taking on more challenging keywords because I know that I have finally “cracked the code” while maybe my own “code” but I have a very systematic approach that I will go through to get my information not only on the front page of Google but dominate all the listings on the front page.

Once you enter your starting keywords into your tool of choice above, continue to drill down into the smaller more exact phrases people are searching for. Take your list of results and head to the Google homepage and enter those phrases into the search box.

What do the results look like, millions? Add quote marks around the keyword and search again… ahhh, makes a little bit of a difference? Look at the top ranking sites and make a call if you think your content is better and you can get ahead of it.

If you haven’t seen the Google Cheat Sheet for searching, do a few more queries using some of these cool tricks.

Resources

A free tool that will help you evaluate your keywords can be found from Microsoft. This is a plug-in that operates on Microsoft Excel, if you don’t have Excel, they give you the option of a free trial on the same page.  True Microsoft fashion, free tutorials are also available for you on the page.

Your next step: I only found out about “online commercial intent” a few months ago and I have now added this as an essential part of my checklist for all my keyword research. If you are not familiar, this will actually help you with your keyword choices by advising what keywords are more likely to convert- yes, keywords where people are searching with their wallets in their hand verses the search for free information or “surfing”. Check out this great free tool, book mark it, enter your keywords and see if you are surprised.

Ok, so you have done your keyword research now you are ready to make the leap and try to find a domain name that is keyword rich to help you get a jump start. Try out this free domain keyword tool to help you find a domain by looking at your keywords for you and providing you with automatic options.

Now, you have a summary of

• Where to go to find your keywords
• How to estimate your competition
• Further drill down for those niche long tail keywords
• Where to go to find out what words have the greatest potential to return time investment
• A nifty little tool to help with your domain name choices.

Go Ahead, check it out, play around with your keywords and see what you think.

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Keyword Research Tools