SEO For Everyone

begins October 23

If you want more traffic to your website, you need to increase your search engine ranking. According to a 2007 Enquiro survey, 65% of people go first to a search engine to find products and services.

Every business owner needs to know SEO techniques so you can achieve high rankings on search engines.

This class is specially designed for small business owners. I explain SEO in non-techie straight talk so that you can create a plan for your own website — and understand what your website designer can and cannot do with your site.

In this 4-week teleclass, you will learn:

• How search engines rank your site
• What to do to get a higher ranking
• How to choose the absolute BEST keywords for optimum results
• How to figure out what your competition is doing — and how you can beat them at the SEO game
• The secret places on your website where you can optimize for keywords
• How to stay out of trouble with the search engines
• How to optimize your website AND all the places you can optimize online
• Two great (and free) tools you can use to track the results of your SEO campaigns

Class Schedule

Class begins October 23, 2008
Oct 23
Oct 30
Nov 6
Nov 13

All teleclasses are 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM eastern

Classes will be recorded, so if you miss a session, you will be able to download the audio recording of the live class and listen to it at your leisure.

Fee:  $150
Instructor: Karyn Greenstreet

Registration and more information:
http://www.passionforbusinesslearning.com/seo/

The problem seems to come into play with competing values: you value your customers but you also value time with your children; you value creating a great service or product but you also value getting it done and moving onto something new.

I don’t believe multi-tasking is the answer. Instead, study yourself and ask yourself, “What are the things that are the most important to me in my life and business?”

By the way, there is no perfect answer to this question, and the things you value can be a moving target based on goals and events. If your child is in the hospital, then your business may take a back seat for a while. If you’re really excited about a new service or product you’re creating, you may choose to work weekends in order to bring it to fruition. If money is tight you may choose to do some parts of your project or marketing as inexpensively as possible.

Once you consciously decide what’s of most value to you, then go ahead and give it your very, very best. Don’t skimp and cut corners. Push yourself to be excellent in those areas that are important to you. It’s okay to make mistakes in your pursuit of excellence, as long as you attempt to correct them (or at least learn from them!)

As Nora Roberts says, “Flaws are acceptable, even necessary, to make us human and humble. But to serve a guest or a customer less than the best one is capable of, strikes me as arrogant or sloppy. Often both.”

The only trap you need to avoid is the one where you want to give your best to every single person you encounter, to every single task you do. Give yourself a break from perfectionism and make a choice to give your very best only to those things that are high on your “Things I Value” list. Things that are unimportant should be dealt with quickly so that you can focus your time, attention and passion on the things that need your best work.

Your customers deserve your very best efforts and they’ll greatly appreciate it. And when they’re happy, they’re more likely to tell others about your quality products and services.

I figure it this way: a good reputation is something to value highly and work towards. Doing my best brings me joy and satisfaction. Doing better than my best, continually growing and challenging myself, is one of the main reasons I’m self-employed. Is it one of your values, too?

Read the rest of the article.

This Email is from Hotmail Customer Care and we are sending it to every Hotmail Email User Accounts Owner for safety. We are having congestions due to the anonymous registration of hotmail accounts so we are shutting down some hotmail accounts and your account was among those to be deleted.

It goes on from there to ask for all kinds of personal information. In fact, that’s a great test to see whether it’s a scam or not. There’s no reason why Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo or AOL should need your birth date. When people start asking for your password, that’s the time to say to yourself, “Uh oh! This is fishy!”  (Or is it “Phishy”?)

When some electrical items are plugged into a socket, they pull electricity even when they’re not turned on. This wastes electricity and increases your electric bill but doesn’t benefit you at all.

Discovery.com has a great article entitled “Save Energy by Avoiding Phantom Power” that is very helpful and includes links to other Green Living articles. They say that phantom power can account for as much as 10% of the electricity an office or home uses. Wow!

Here’s what we’ve done in our office to reduce the amount of phantom energy drawn:

1. Put all items that draw phantom energy, like our laser printers, computer speakers, and computer monitors on a power strip, which we turn off each night.
2. Unplug items we don’t use every day, like cell phone chargers.
3. Pay attention when recharging items like laptops, and remove them from the charger when the battery is full (instead of leaving it on charge all night).
4. Turn off items when not in use. For instance, I use my laser printer all the time, but only use my color printer occasionally. Why pull power for a color printer that I use once a week?
5. Always look for energy-saving devices when replacing an item.

Here’s the key with running a Green Office: all these little items DO add up to big savings and a decrease on natural resources. It’s worth doing.

But when I flew into Las Vegas airport last week, I was unaware that I’d have the airport customer-centric experience of my life. I’m not naive — I know that airports are all about moving people and luggage as efficiently as possible. But they’ve created a system that works both for the airport as a business AND for the customer.

First thing that happens, as you’re exiting the plane, they display for you which luggage carousel your luggage will arrive at. What a relief! Many airports make you search for this information instead of handing you the information at exactly the logical time you’ll be wanting it.

Next, the bathrooms. If you’ve been in airport bathrooms, you know that they’re not the cleanest or best maintained places on earth. Not true in Las Vegas. The bathroom was sparkling clean and in perfect repair. The faucets work, the soap dispenser works, the towel dispenser works. I’m in bathroom heaven.

Luggage is picked up in a central location for all terminals. The airport has an efficient system for moving lots of people to the luggage area without delay or long walks. (Well, “long walks” in any airport is relative, but you get my point.)

Finally, to my delight, there was an employee at the luggage carousel, lifting up each piece of luggage as it arrived and putting it handle-up so that people could easily grab their suitcase without struggle.

Each step along the way, I was delighted by these simple things. And it reminds me how my customers deserve the same treatment. From the way we answer emails or the phone, to how we invoice customers, every step, every contact matters.

The FreeCycle Network is a group of people assisting each other to give away any item for free (instead of it ending up in a landfill). Here’s the FreeCycle description from their website:

The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,581 groups with 5,690,000 members across the globe. It’s a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It’s all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them’s good people). Membership is free.

Great questions! Here’s how I answered her:

When I teach my 16-hour SEO workshop, we spend about 4 hours on this very topic. It’s an art and a science.

Using some of the SEO tools is helpful, and deeply dissecting your competition’s website is helpful as well (it will tell you whether they’re an “accidental SEO success” or if they’re really skilled at it). Many websites will rank well for a short time, but if they don’t do SEO as a long-term maintenance task, you can jump ahead of them after their rankings start to slip. Learning all the SEO techniques helps you to determine if your arsenal will get you anywhere. Then it’s a stab in the dark. 

I rarely go after “long tail” keywords on my main selling pages. But if the keyword is long tail AND somewhat popular, I’ve been known to write a specific page about that specific topic to draw attention. For instance, if you type in “mastermind group” in Google, my one-page article comes up #1.

But since my main service is small business coaching, I really go after that phrase with wild abandon on my main selling pages. When you type “small business coach” into Google, I come up #1 for that. (I’ve been #1 for that phrase for several years now.)

When we do SEO work for clients, the vast majority of our billable hours is in picking the right keywords. I’d say we typically spend 6-8 hours just picking the correct keywords.

If you ever have a grand passion for learning SEO in a hands-on class, I do teach a 4-week teleclass called SEO For Everyone. You can learn more about it here. The next class begins October 23.

There are so many great SEO techniques, when you use the right combination of them, you can rank high for nearly any keyword except the really, really competitive ones. And even for those, with the right domain name (and other factors that you can’t control…nice to know it’s not 100% in your control, eh?), you can still rank on the first page of results. Part of the problem is knowing whether your competition is beatable or not. Some sites, like the Wall Street Journal, you will never rank above, no matter how hard you try.

Do you use WordTracker or Keyword Discovery (the paid versions) when picking keywords? WT is a dog to use, but both tools can help you wade through a stack of keywords to find out which ones have the best chance of success.

I’d love to tell you there is one, perfect, tried-and-true method for getting it right every single time, but there’s not. There are just a bunch of tools and a bunch of techniques to help sift through the massive information…and then you have to trust your gut instinct, your experience, and your intellect to make final choices and implement them correctly. It’s interesting to note that I find that small business owners usually do quite well in choosing keywords; it’s the implementation part they fail at.

A lot of the skill comes with practice, over and over again, picking keywords. With more experience you get better at the “pattern matching” necessary to make it all work. Consider doing an SEO experiment on a topic that you aren’t emotionally connected with, just to practice without needing to get it perfect. If you like detective work and putting together puzzles, you’ll love SEO!

Suze was a “bright light,” constantly optimistic and smiling. Her huge smile could light up a room and she had a way of encouraging you to follow your dream that left you feeling empowered and supported. I did an interview with Susan several years ago and she said, “The trusting is that, when we are clear, and when we are confident, the resources always manifest.”

She was a consummate coach and her “coaching door” was always open. She loved helping people to create the life of their dreams, and through coaching, she also helped herself. She said, “The beauty of our profession,the coaching profession, is that the same work I do with clients I’ve learned to ask myself the same questions [that I ask my clients]. And that keeps me focused on what I need to do in order to have the things I want.”

She was self-employed for many years and had much wisdom to share with other self-employed people about the lessons she had learned over the years.You can listen to that interview here.

Bon voyage, Susan, safe journeys. We will miss you greatly. You remind us of the true purpose of why we’re here on Earth.

The National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship says this about the article,

The articles note that social networking is the web’s fastest growing application, yet few firms are making money in the process—at least not yet. Even popular sites like Facebook and MySpace continue to lose money….[The article] suggests that social networking sites might capture some of online advertising market but remains somewhat skeptical. In the end, it suggests that leading social networking sites might have a future that looks less like the next Google, and more like struggling or defunct early Internet firms like CompuServe, Netscape or AOL.

This is especially important for small business owners who are trying to use social networking sites to find potential customers and build their reputation as an expert. If these sites are on shaky financial ground, you may find that you have a limited amount of time to use this tool before they simply begin to disappear (or become monetized in such a way to become unpalatable to their users).