Receiving the Somerset County Business Partnership’s Young Entrepreneur Award for 2011, as well as the Rotary Club of Somerville and Bridgewater’s Anthony S. Picheca, Sr. Entrepreneurial Award and Scholarship was an amazing honor for so many reasons. I would be remiss if I didn’t offer thanks to so many different people who gave me awards, congratulations, help, and well wishes.

First and foremost, I have to thank the Somerset County Business Partnership, the Rotary Club of Somerville and Bridgewater, and the selection panel who chose me to win this year’s award. Again, it’s an incredible honor, and means so much to me.

A special thank you to the Honorable Anthony F. Picheca Jr. for presenting me with the plaque and scholarship named for his father. It was very humbling, and I will strive to continue “exemplifying the ideals of Rotary and the Entrepreneurial Spirit”.

Thank you…

To Frank Veronsky and Jennifer Pierce of Jersey Fresh Photos for the great portraits that accompanied the press release.

To Diana Sieberg, who was my official contact at the SCBP, made sure everything got done, and kept me in the loop.

To the Princeton Packet, Montgomery News, YourSomerset, and Courier News  (and their respective writers) for publishing great articles about me, my business, and the award.

To Gov. Chris Christie for his letter of congratulations.

To Representative Frank Pallone Jr. for his Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition.

To Representative Rodney P. Frelinghuysen for his House of Representatives Citation.

To Senator Bateman, Assemblywoman Coyle, and the late Assemblyman Biondi (RIP) for their State Legislature Resolution.

To Senator Smith and Assemblymen Egan and Chivukula for their State Legislature Resolution.

To the Somerset County Board of Chosen Freeholders for their Citation.

To Mayor Mark Caliguire, Deputy Mayor Kacey Dyer, and the entire Montgomery Township Committee for their Resolution.

To Frank Veronsky and Jennifer Pierce (Jersey Fresh Photos), Cindy Mangel and Brenda Fallon (Mary Jacobs Memorial Library), and George Jarvis (Montgomery Fireworks) for taking some last minute pictures with me for the luncheon’s slide show.

To all the advertisers in the Annual Meeting Report who congratulated me, especially Somerset County VoTech and Verizon.

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And finally, a big congratulations to all the other Young Entrepreneurs who applied for the award and were also recognized at the luncheon. Keep it up!

If you’re using WordPress for your blog or company website (or anything else for that matter), congratulations! I absolutely love WordPress because it’s easy to set up and update regularly, and also because it’s optimized for the search engines right out of the box (and I don’t get paid by anybody to say that).

That’s right- without touching a thing, WordPress automatically implements some of the best practices for website structure, keyword insertion, and formatting a website. But, as with any other task in life, you can always go the extra mile. In the ultra-competitive internet world these days, it’s more important than ever that you do go that extra mile and take the steps to max out your on-page search engine optimization inside your blog or website.

The following 6 steps are designed to very quickly do a complete, site-wide optimization of any WordPress installation. The first three are based on the built-in settings, and the second three utilize free plugins that you can easily install with a few mouseclicks. I’m also including a video here that will walk you through everything step-by-step, should you so desire.

The Front Three: Settings Configurations

1. Allow Search Engines! This sounds like a real “duh”, but can actually get messed up sometimes. Ensure that search engines are actually allowed to view your site by checking the following setting. Log into your backend with your administrator username and password (this is located at /wp-admin), and click on “Privacy”, which is located under Settings. (Again, there’s a video if you need help). Ensure that the “Allow Search Engines to View This Page” option is selected, and save.

2. Put Keywords in your Site Title and Description. This is another basic step, but also extremely important- in fact, it carries a lot of weight when it comes to on-page optimization! Under Settings, choose General. Then, find appropriate (and readable) ways to add a keyword phrase you want to optimize for in your Title and Description.

3. Change your Permalinks to become Search Engine Attractive. Permalinks literally just means “permanent links”. When you make a post to your blog, will the address be website.com/June112010, or will it be website.com/keywordphrasehere ? Obviously the second one will help you out more when it comes to onpage SEO. Under Settings, choose Permalinks, and select the “Custom” option, typing in /%postname%/ . Hit save.

The Back Three: Utilizing Plugins for Easy Sitewide Changes

For simplicity’s sake, I will take it that you can install a WordPress plugin. If you’ve never done that before, it’s really quite simple, and the software will walk you through it all. It’s just a few clicks! If you need help, there IS a video for you to watch.

4. All-in-One SEO. Install the “All-in-One SEO Pack” plugin. You can literally just activate this plugin, and not need to touch many of the settings at all, but I recommend accessing the configuration page (It’ll be under Settings once you install it), and changing the Site Title and Description to something that describes your website, but also works in a keyword phrase or two.

5. XML Sitemaps. Another set and forget deal. Install the “Google XML Sitemaps” plugin, and activate it. Without touching a single setting, the plugin will build a new sitemap for you every time you update your site, and submit it to all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask).

6. Robots Meta. This one is a little complicated to explain without diving into the “duplicate content” penalty/myth debate, so that’s a story for another time. For now, here’s how to set this up the way we want it: install the “Robots Meta” plugin. Once there, check the boxes that ask you to nofollow/noindex all of your Archives pages. This will clean up your site in the Search Engine Results and make sure you don’t pass link juice to unimportant pages.

With those 6 steps, you should be all set and ready for the search engines on your WordPress site! If you need help with setting up a wordpress site, or on-page SEO, send me an email at ryan@ryanluchtmarketing.com

The Young Entrepreneur Award recognizes achievement, encourages the development of business skills, and salutes the entrepreneurial spirit and the ideal of community service. To be eligible, the nominee must be a full-time student in public or private high school located in Somerset County during the 2011-2012 school year and a resident of Somerset County.

Ryan Lucht is a senior at Montgomery High School. Ryan Lucht Marketing began in early 2010 with a re-launch in May of 2011 following a year of self-directed training in search engine optimization and online marketing. Serving clients as an online marketing consultant, Lucht provides an initial free consultation to evaluate client goals before engaging in services including organic search engine optimization, social media marketing, and email marketing.

In addition to his for-profit clients, Lucht has volunteered his expertise for the Mary Jacobs Memorial Library and the Montgomery Township Fireworks Committee, establishing an effective online presence for each organization.

Ryan Lucht Marketing is served by one full–time employee and 4 freelance subcontractors. Gross income for the company since it’s re-launch is $5,650. According to Lucht, “I am not selling services. I am partnering with my clients and delivering a return on investment for the money they are paying me to market their site online.”

Future plans include continued growth, attracting small business clients while launching new services including digital and physical training products that will compliment the marketing consultancy.

At the Annual Meeting on December 1, Lucht will receive a certificate, public recognition for his accomplishments, and the Anthony F. Picheca, Sr. Entrepreneur Award of $1000 from the Somerville and Bridgewater Rotary.

Reservations for the Annual Meeting may be made by calling the Somerset County Business Partnership at 908-218-4300 or online at http://events.scbp.org.

However, that doesn’t mean you have to go out and get your website totally redone. There is still some (but not much) hope for image-based websites in the SEO world. Here are some clever tricks you can try to get Google to like you.

1. Add keyword-rich articles to your site as text, using an image border or layout. Link to the article pages with plain text on your site homepage so that they’re findable by Google.

2. Use “alt” tags with your images, and have keywords in there.

3. Rename your images keywords/descriptions, and then reupload to the site.

4. Avoid using images for your main site navigation.

5. Properly use meta tags in your website’s HEAD section.

6. Make your site load as quickly as possible. That’s a new factor in Google’s ranking algorithm. Compress your images or make them preload with a javascript.

Then you’ll want to heavily focus your SEO efforts on Off-Page optimization, including Social Bookmarking and increasing your Alexa rank. You’ll want to hire a professional SEO (like myself) to help you out with that kind of stuff. And just like that, voila! You have saved an image-based website from Google hell.

BONUS TIP: Using WordPress? Install the “SEO Friendly Images” plugin that will automatically add “alt” tags to your pictures! See my Basic WordPress SEO tutorial for more info.

First off, pick a good web design group when you first start. Don’t pick the first one that contacts you or the one that is the cheapest. Ask them if they will be designing your website in images or in flash or in something better like WordPress. Websites that are comprised of image files or Flash animations often look corny and Google hates them. Ask them if your website will have something called a “content management system”, meaning a way for you to easily update what the website says.

This is one reason why WordPress is so great. It’s free, totally customizable, Google loves it, and it’s VERY easy to use and install. I use WordPress for almost all of my clients websites.

Other things you can do include making sure that your pages have titles. A page title is what is displayed at the top of your web browser on a certain page. If yours look like “page1″, “page2″, etc., it means that your web designer was obviously in a rush or just doesn’t know anything about marketing online. You want a short title that tells the visitor what’s on the page and tells Google what your site is about. If you know some simple HTML, the title is inside of the <head> </head> tags, and is denoted by <title> ENTER TITLE HERE </title> .

The last thing that I recommend that businesses do by themselves is to keep updating their website with new content. Articles or pieces of news (like this blog post) that are between 300-400 words are best. Make it relevant to your business. Write about your clients, or a new change or employee. By having a corporate blog on your website, you encourage visitor participation, promote your business, and improve your ranking on Google.

Some of this stuff may sound confusing to business men and women. You guys are busy running a business- you don’t have time to learn what all this is! If you ever need any help, give me a call or email, and I’d be glad to help you out. Remember that when you’re ready to start building your business online, choose Ryan Lucht Marketing for the best quality service in Central Jersey.

This isn’t atypical either. Research by the Kelsey Group shows that 70% of online searchers are looking for offline businesses, and use the internet when searching locally for products and services. According to Google, Over 1.6 BILLION local searches are done each month.

Out of all those searches for local, offline products and services, 70% of searchers will click on an organic result, not a paid advertisement like Google AdWords. Competition gets even stiffer- 60% of all search engine traffic goes to the first 3 results on a page. (Source: Marketingsherpa February 2007 Report).

So where are you on Google? Does Google even know that you exist? Are you listed in the web results AND the local results? How’s your social media campaign going? If Person A searches for “Princeton NJ Real Estate” and Person B searches “Princeton NJ home for sale“, will they both find you, and will you rank in the Top 3 for each?

Those questions are probably overwhelming to most business owners. You may have no idea what the answers are, or what they’re even asking you!

The fact of the matter is, however, that if you don’t face those questions and make sure you are THE authority online in your field and locale, you’re losing valuable market share. Not only are you losing market share, you’re just giving it away to your competitors! Most business owners don’t have the time, experience, or know-how to manage internet campaigns, and as a result the one or two businesses that do put effort into their online campaign are stealing hundreds of customers.

The good news is that there’s a way to stop the bleeding. Ryan Lucht Marketing is here to help your Central Jersey business both reach the top page of Google for any search term, and also establish and manage your presence online to not only build your profits and customer base, but your brand as well. We’re so convinced that you’ll see results that we don’t force clients into long-term contracts- new clients are free to set any length for a trial run before signing on long-term.

If you’re not looking for a long-term relationship, we also offer “a la carte” services to give your business and its website the boost it’s been needing.

For more information, look at the top of the page for links to information regarding myself, our services, and whether or not we’re right for you. When you’re ready for a free consultation, or need to contact me for any other reason, click here. If you have any questions, don’t hestitate to ask. We’re here to help.

Regards,

Ryan Lucht