Shane Strong » SEO

Traffic Isn’t Everything

James Wilson — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 21:14:53 +0000

Imagine for a moment that you own a brick and mortar store somewhere. You’ve worked hard to bring visibility to your store, hired a friendly and helpful staff, and perfected your products. All day, every day, customers file through the stuffed aisles of your store, but something puzzling is happening… they’re not buying anything. You did everything necessary to get those customers to you, but your business seems destined to fail. Suddenly, you come face to face with a harsh reality – traffic isn’t everything.

While it’s often less costly, this same scenario in the online business world happens far too often. Web developers optimize tirelessly to build high traffic volume only to find their bounce rates soaring. If you’re 100% convinced that people are genuinely interested in your product or service (they should be if you’re getting that much traffic), the hard part is over. Making the most of your traffic is not difficult, but it does take a bit of patience and a whole lot of testing.

Give the Readers What They Want

Let’s get something out of the way first: in this post-panda world, spamming still kind of works, and that’s part of the problem. Google has yet to really nail down a lot of the keyword stuffing and content mills that they targeted with Panda, and some web developers are still using the same old SEO content tricks to build traffic. Sure, things are looking much better. When’s the last time you saw a webpage on the front of Google’s SERPs that had nothing but a single keyword repeated over and over again? But the new world of Internet marketing still has the same basic principle it’s always had – create value.

Valuable content (not just words, but images, videos, widgets, etc.) creates trust, which in turn inspires conversions and begins to build a brand. It’s easy to say that web developers need to be focusing on valuable content more than SEO content. But what is valuable content, really? Google’s Amit Singhal published a blog post on May 6th, 2011 discussing what webmasters should be doing to create a high quality site. Among his most important points were:

Content should feel like it was written by an expert or an enthusiast who knows the topic inside and out.
Content should be free of errors (grammatical and factual) and make sense stylistically.
All website content has to be original (Google is also expecting original research, not the same studies cited over and over again).
A website as a whole should offer substantially more value than its competition.
Could the content be published in a print magazine or book?

Once you have created unique and valuable content packed full of information, remember that bad monetization can do more harm than good. Website visitors are simply turned off by websites that are loaded with advertisements. If your website looks like it was built purely to get sales, your traffic will be less likely to trust you. So, instead of aggressively putting ads on every page of your site, chose the ads that make the most sense in context of the page.

Choosing the Right Products

Far too many web developers tend to grasp at advertisers. This is especially true with blog owners that simply sell their ad space to the highest bidder (especially with text links). But ask yourself one simple question – does the ad I’m putting in front of the reader make sense?

You would probably be surprised to walk into your local McDonald’s to buy a cheeseburger, only to find out that this particular location specializes only in fine Turkish rugs at discount prices. Why should this be any different online? If you have a page on your website that discusses the advantages of Clear 4G internet, how well do you think an ad for dog food is going to do? Furthermore, aim to keep advertisements in line with your content itself. Insert ads within the content where they make sense, not just in the sidebar. But if your ads are working just fine in the sidebar, don’t just move them right away. We’ll get to split testing next.

If you’re in a niche that has some tough sell products, or you’re having trouble finding the right product to fit your content, you have a few options.

Split Testing and CTAs

Split testing is the process of literally splitting different advertising techniques onto different pages and checking the click rates after a testing period. The length of the testing period depends on the amount of traffic you get on those pages. With a few hundred visitors a day, you’ll have enough data in a few days. Sites with less traffic might take a week or two. Google offers a great website optimizer for split testing.

Another good testing product is the CrazyEgg CTA heatmap. This tool shows you where your visitors are clicking on your web page. I’ve used this tool many times to test my own sites. One interesting thing I found was the amount of clicks I got on the header “About Us” link. You have no idea how tempting it was to redirect that link to an affiliate site, by the way… but something tells me that wouldn’t have turned out very well for me in the end. It’s not a free tool, but the basic plan doesn’t cost any more than your average hosting plan.

Open Up to Your Readers

It doesn’t hurt to ask your audience what they would like to see. If you’ve built a trusting relationship with your audience, they probably won’t mind if you ask them what products and services they would buy on your site. It’s certainly better to ask them than to suddenly see your inbox fill up with complaints about your new pop-ups and peel-aways that you thought they would love.

Most website visitors understand that you can’t offer a quality product for free. More often than not, ads that ask readers to personally try a product tend to do much better than a random advertisement on your sidebar. Try using anchor text like “click here to test the product yourself” to engage your visitors. It’s a pretty good feeling being asked how you feel about a change to a website as a reader, and then seeing the change happen.

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Link Building 101 – Blog Commenting Part 2

marketermatt — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 03:38:58 +0000

Our last post in the Link Building series covered the technique of commenting on blogs in order to get relevant links back to your website. This post will cover more tips for commenting on blogs that will help you get even better results!

Government and Educational Blogs. It is well known that Google tends to favor links that link out from .gov and .edu websites. This means that any links that you can score from government, university, or k-12 school blogs will most likely make your blog commenting campaigns even more effective. It may be tough to find relevant blogs with a .gov or .edu extension but the power of these links will likely offset the fact that they aren’t relevant.
Deep Linking with TypePad. Most people build links to their home page. However, best practice dictates that you have lots of links pointed to your interior pages (pages that are not your home page) as well. So how do you get these? Well some blogs will let you put in a URL that points to one of your interior pages (ex. http://www.yoursite.com/interior-page/). TypePad is one of the only blogging platforms that allows you to post these types of URLs in comments but fortunately, lots of people use both the TypePad website itself as well as installing in on their own domain. To find these types of blogs, type in something like this into Google: “[your key word here]” “blog” “typepad” – “comments off”. This will return results that have your keyword mentioned which also have the terms “blog” and “typepad” on the page or in the URLs while also removing any websites that have “comments off” so that you don’t have to filter through as many blogs to find good ones to post on. This is a fabulous way to get interior links!
Ask Questions. As we mentioned in the last post, you should be submitting comments that aren’t spammy. You should be adding comments that actually add value to the blog site and to the blog post. One of the best ways to do this is by asking questions within your comments. Often times on blogs, there is a check box that you can click which will cause the blog site to automatically send you an email whenever someone responds to your comment. If you are finding blogs relevant to your niche, this is a great way to start a conversation which can result in multiple links to your site and could even create a relationship with other readers or with the blog owner. These relationships can result in other link building opportunities such as getting placed on others’ blog rolls or working on guest posting arrangements.
Very Your Input in the “Name” Field. You don’t want every single link coming to your website to have the exact same anchor text. To avoid this, you should vary the words that you type into the name field. Here are a few examples
- Doug @ Best Pet Supplies
- Doug – Pet Supplies Store
- Doug Brown ~ Pet Supplies
I recommend coming up with 5 to 10 of these names that include the keyword terms that you want to get ranked for and then rotating them.
Save Time By Copying and Pasting. It may seem simple but if you create a document with your 5-10 lines that you want to use in the Name field and the URLs of your website and of the interior pages you want to point links at, you can just copy and paste the text into the appropriate fields. It’ll make the process faster and you’ll get more links!

And there you have it! A few of my best tips for making blog commenting an efficient and effective process. Stay tuned for the next installation of the Link Building 101 series.

- Marketer Matt – King of the Internet

This post was written by internet marketing expert Matt Hall of Scepter Marketing. Scepter Marketing is an online marketing agency which helps small businesses skyrocket their business via the internet through services such as local email marketing and social media management as well as their ever growing proprietary network of local consumers.

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Link Building 101 – Blog Commenting Part 1

marketermatt — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 04:09:45 +0000

Blog commenting is one of the quickest most effective ways of building links to your website. Anyone can set up a blog these days and many people do! Companies have blogs, individuals have blogs, informational websites have blogs, government websites have blogs, any pretty much everyone else. Blogs exist for pretty much every conceivable niche from aliens to dog walking to leadership to religion.

So how can blogs help you get your site ranked higher in Google? Well, most blogs allow people to comment on their blogs. A comment is just that, a comment. They generally appear below a blog post and give the readers of the blog an opportunity to voice their thoughts and opinions. And many blogs automatically create a link that links back to the website or blog of the one who is commenting (that means you!) You just write up your comment on the blog, punch in your name and website URL and submit!

Here are a few quick guidelines that you should keep in mind when commenting on blogs.

Make sure the blog links out. Not every blog allows readers to comment. Of the ones that do allow comments, not all of them allow you to enter your website or blog to get a link. Before you bother reading a whole blog post, scroll to the bottom of the post to make sure that the blog allows comments and that it includes a field for you to enter in your URL. If not, don’t waste your time.
Comment on blogs that are relevant to your niche. It is reported that Google uses relevancy as a factor in its algorithm. Simply put, if your website is about dog training, links from dog training blogs would probably be the most relevant links to get followed by other dog related blogs. Non-relevant links are still good to get of course, and you should work to get some of these linking to you as well. Just keep the 80/20 rule in mind and get most of your links from blogs related to your niche.
Actually write a comment. Yes, you may get away with a comment that says, “great post!” or “good information, I like much” but would you want those types of comments on your blog? Didn’t think so. When you are commenting on blogs it’s best to at least skim the blog post you will be commenting on. Once you are finished skimming, write a brief 2-3 sentence comment that praises the blog. Many blogs are moderated so writing non-spammy comments will keep your comments from getting deleted as often. Also, you may even spark a conversation on the blog that could results to more traffic to your site, partnerships with bloggers, or other great benefits.
Put your keywords in the “Name” field. While some people frown on this, it still works. As we’ve learned already, anchor text is important when building links to your site. So when you type in your name you may want to try something like: Doug @ [your non-spammy sounding keywords or your website/company name]. Doug @ Best Pet Supplies sounds fine and will make sense if you are posting on some type of pet related site. Doug – Bird Feeder Cat Food is a little more obvious and makes a blog look spammy which bloggers (including me) don’t really care for.

With these brief tips you should be able to create hoards of links linking back to your site from other relevant sites with relevant anchor text! What more could you ask for in a link? I recommend taking 10-20 minutes a day and getting 5-10 links from blog comments. Over the course of a year you’ll have upwards of 1500 links or more from blog commenting alone!

Stay tuned for Part 2 of Blog Commenting in this series on Link Building!

- Marketer Matt – King of the Internet

This post was written by internet marketing expert Matt Hall of Scepter Marketing. Scepter Marketing is an internet marketing company which helps small businesses skyrocket their business via the internet through services such as local email marketing and social media management as well as their ever growing proprietary network of local consumers.

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Link Building 101 – Social Bookmarking

marketermatt — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 04:54:43 +0000

Bookmarking is the process of saving web pages that you like or want to remember so that you can come back and view them later. If you are an avid internet user, you probably already have several web pages bookmarked using your internet browser. Bookmarking is great because it allows you to keep and organize all the information on the web that is relevant to you.

Social bookmarking is essentially the same things as bookmarking web pages using your browser with a few exceptions. Social bookmarking sites allow you to save your favorite bookmarked web pages online so that you can access them from anywhere. They are called “social” bookmarking sites because they also allow you to share the web pages you’ve uploaded with your friends or followers.

Okay that’s great, but how do they help you? Well, because these bookmarking sites are online rather than just on your internet browser, they provide links back to your website! Each site is slightly different but here’s a quick list of a few sites to get you started: Diigo, Reddit, Mixx, JumpTags and Delicious. You can find a more comprehensive list here: 125 Social Bookmarking Sites

To start getting your links from these sites simply sign up for their free accounts and start bookmarking your web pages! When prompted, enter in tags for your various bookmarks to help other people find your information. The more other people who bookmark your website, the more links you’ll get so don’t skip this step! (But don’t over-tag your pages either!)

Note: These websites were NOT created for you to just bookmark your own stuff. They are are meant to be places where users share interesting, fun, and valuable information with each other. Because of this, you should seriously consider bookmarking lots of other web pages in addition to your own. The best practice is to bookmark other valuable web pages that are along the same topic or theme of your own web pages so you aren’t just being a self-promoter. This also has the added benefit of increasing the relevancy of the page your link is on which is more of a Link building 200 concept.

Bookmarking your web pages is an easy way to generate links to your website. It is generally a great idea to bookmark every new blog post you make or any other new content that you make on your website. Not only will this get you a few links, it will also help the search engines to quickly find and index your website!

As you’ll quickly find out, bookmarking each page that you have on each of dozens of social bookmarking sites is very tedious and gets old fast. To help you move through the process more quickly, consider using a website like Social Marker to help automate the process.

Stay tuned for Part 3 on Blog Commenting!

- Marketer Matt – King of the Internet

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Link Building 101 – Directories

marketermatt — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 23:28:50 +0000

Link Building 101

The million dollar question for many businesses today is the question, “How do I get my site to show up on Google?” The simple answer is to first optimize your website and secondly to build links to it. If you haven’t done so yet read Shane’s post on SEO 101, go do that first! His post will show you the major adjustments that you need to make on your website itself to help boost your rankings in Google and the other search engines. Often times the biggest increases to your rankings in the SERPs (search engine results pages) will be gotten through doing on page SEO so do not skip this step!

Next to optimizing your website, the most important factor to increasing your rankings in the SERPs is the quantity and quality of other websites that link to yours. There are numerous ways to get other sites linking back to yours which is a process aptly named “link building” or “building back links”. This Link Building 101 series will cover the most basic ways that you can start building links back to your site starting today. Today we’ll start with directories.

Directories are websites whose job it is to link to other websites! This makes them a great starting place to get links from. Usually, all you need to do is just to submit your website to a directory and you’re done. Occasionally, you’ll have to verify your e-mail address so I recommend not using your primary e-mail address when you sign up so that you don’t have less junk coming into your e-mail inbox.

The Top Three Directories:

Some of the best directories include the Yahoo! Business directory, Best of the Web Directory, and the DMOZ directory. The first two cost about $300 to get a listing but the last one is free (however it can take months for your listing to show up) If you have the cash, these are worth investing in as they provide solid backlinks to your website that will help your rankings in the SERPs. You should take a little bit of extra time when submitting your website to these three directories to ensure that you have the best chance of getting a listing for your site.

Niche Directories:

You should also do a search for directories within your niche and submit your website to them as well. For example, if you are in the lawn care business, do a Google search for “lawn care directories” and submit your website to the sites that come up on the first page or two of results. This is a great place to start your link building because it gets you links from websites that are relevant to your niche which will help you climb the search engine rankings faster.

Paid Directories / Reciprocal Link Directories:

Other than the big directories that I mentioned earlier, I don’t submit any sites to directories that require me to pay for a listing or any directories that require a reciprocal link (a link on your website linking to the directory). If you come across directories that want money or a reciprocal link before you can get a link to your website, you’re probably best just moving on. For every directory trying to charge you money, there are another five that don’t so just move on.

I recommend that you get started link building TODAY by finding some good directories to submit your site to. Do a Google search for “top directories in [your niche name here]” or “[your niche] directories]” or even “Top online directories” to find directories that you can submit your site too.

As a final thought, please, please, please stay away from offers to submit your website to 100s or 1000s of directories. It’s tempting to try to shortcut the process but it’s rarely worth it and could actually hurt your rankings rather than help them!

Stay tuned for Part 2 on Social Bookmarking!

- Marketer Matt – King of the Internet

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WordPress SEO Plugins

Shane — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 06:51:31 +0000

WordPress is the greatest blogging platform on the web right now. With more and more website leaning to having a blog for SEO purposes, there is a big demand for the best SEO plugins. Luckily with as big as WordPress is there is a huge amount of developers more than willing to build a good SEO Plugin. Most web pages that talk about WordPress plugins give there top 10 or 20 plugins. Well I am not going to do that. I am going to give you a list of plugins that I use on Shane Strong and other client websites. Then I will give you a list of other popular SEO plugins. As a Search Engine Optimizer I look for the new and best ways to do optimization. My list of plugins I have found to work great and have worked with for a while now.

Shane’s SEO Plugin List

My list consists of 3 amazing plugins. The first is All-In-One SEO, second is Google XML Sitemap, and third is SEO Smart Links. These three are great and are always kept up to date. Below is a image and small description or each.

1) All-In-One SEO

All In One SEO is by far the most used SEO plugin that WordPress offers. It is really great and simple to use. You have a tab on the left of the dashboard. This is where you can do everything you need for the home page. It lets you do everything from keywords, description, title, canonical urls, title formats, additional headers for post/pages, and much more. The really great thing is that you can do SEO for each individual page and post right inside the pages or post you are working on. You can also set it up so that it takes your tags as keywords. This is by far the best SEO plugin WordPress has to offer. You can find All-In-One SEO on WordPress.org or go to the creators website at Semper Fi Web Design

2) Google XML Sitemap

As my second pick I feel this is just as important as my first pick. This creates a XML sitemap that is browser friendly. Now just because it says Google in the title I dont want you to think it just is for Google. Nope this plugin creates a sitemap that will work for most search engines and it also submits to the major search engines for you. It also lets you set a priority on stuff like posts, pages, homepage, and others. Besides doing that it lets you exclude certain categories, individual posts, and lets you select the frequency of change to your content. This lets search engines know how often they need to crawl your site. You can download this plugin on wordpress.org or go to the creators site at Arne Brachhold

3) SEO Smart Links

My third pick is not necessarily the most needed but it comes in real handy if you want to inter link word to pages or want to do external links every time a word is used. It makes it really easy to build links between friends and/or sites you own. This plugin is pretty cool it basically lets you choose words that you want to link to urls. It also automatically makes inter links to all words that are pages and posts. So for instance if you post something that has contact and that is the name of your contact page it will make a inter link. This plugin be downloaded at wordpress.org or you can get it at the creators site at Vladimir Prelovac.

Other SEO Plugins

Here are some other great SEO plugins for WordPress. These are not bad plugins by no means, they just did not make my personal best list. All of these plugin can be found on wordpress.org and below they all link to their creators website.

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Tools For Finding Keywords

Shane — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 05:08:58 +0000

In Search Engine Optimization there are many different things that you have to do to be successful. First off you have to know what you are doing. That is a given, but the most important thing that sets Optimizers apart is how well they find keywords/niches. As a web developer it is sometimes hard to do SEO for some sites. A lot of the time you really don’t have a clue what you are doing the SEO for and the time that it would take you to look into it cost money. So instead of taking the time to figure out what was written you really just skin through the article to find the major words. Most of the time they are part of the title or are words that you might not have a clue what they mean. I personally try to get a list of around 10-15 words from each article that I am doing the SEO for and then I do research on those words. My research is to find my keywords from those 10-15 words. This can sometimes be easy and all that you have to do is combine a few of them to make what you would think would be the best combination. you can do this and be successful most of the time. The rest of the time you really need to look into the vast amount of tools that there is out there to use. Some of the tools out there are good and some are not so good. What I have done for you is made a list of a couple of what I find to be the good ones.

Shane’s Keyword Tool List

1) Google Keyword Tool
Well to start the best tool hands down has to be Google’s Keyword Tool. Not only is this tool free but it give you a good ideas of the amount of people that are using certain keywords based on your page or word that you input.

2) Google Trends
Google Trends really isn’t a keyword tool to say but can be used the same way. Really in order to get traffic to a article, you need to find out what is getting talked about. So I personally use >a href=”http://www.google.com/trends”>Google Trends to find keywords about topics that are popular at the time.

3) Word Stream
What can I say about Word Stream. I personally don’t use it that much because of Google’s wonderful system but if I am in need of a second opinion, so to say, I go here.

4) Word Tracker
Let alone Word Tracker has a great keyword system, it has other tools that are also useful. Word Tracker is not free but they do offer a free trial.

I know that my list is not the biggest but I don’t believe in using a ton of different systems that might work. I aim to get a few system that work for me and keep using what works. If you might have any suggestions to what I should add to the list or even what I should try out please comment with your suggestions.

Website Design , Development, and SEO Marketing

If by chance you are in need of any web design, web development, search engine optimization, or marketing done to one of your sites you can get in contact with me or you can contact Chosen. Chosen is a Lansing based Web Development, Web Design, Web Hosting, and Web Marketing firm. We are a small business but are growing in the Lansing Area for our Web Design and Development skills. We have done work for clients and companies. We prefer client work but we also take contract work. We have worked with the biggest web companies in the Lansing Area and some all the way out to California. We would love to hear from you.

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Search Engine Optimization 101

Shane — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 18:02:11 +0000

Some of the best sites optimization is done with the most basic amount of SEO. What do I mean by basic well I am talking title tags, meta tags, and alt and title attributes. These four tags/attributes are really important in SEO. A lot of people say that search engines (GOOGLE) don’t use the keywords meta tag anymore for positioning. Well if they don’t then why use them? The reason that I still use keyword is because even if GOOGLE doesn’t use them for positioning it still uses them as a reference point. Keywords are pretty much used to help search engines with what you want them to crawl. Your description meta tag is a really important on because search engines search it and compare it to the content of your page. If things match up like say you are writing about the NBA Finals. In your description you better have a part that says NBA Finals. As for your title tag, it is by far weighed the most in search engines. So when you are thinking about writing a article make sure to make the title really juice so to say. You want it to be something that you would search for. There is also a title attribute that you add to links and images. This is really important for the person that you are linking to. For instance if I was to link to a page about SEO. I would want to make the title attribute have the website name and maybe the article I am talking about. That way it gives the writers proper credit for there article and will help them in the long run with SEO. The last one for the 101 session is the alt attribute. This is used in images and is really important in a couple different ways. It is defiantly important in SEO because the alt attribute tells search engines what the image is about. Also it is important for handicapped people. With the handicapped the alt attribute lets them know what the image is about.

Placing The Tags and Attributes

Well lets start with our main title tag and meta tags. These tags go in the head area of your web page. This is located at pretty much the top of your page. Example:


This is your title tag

With these tags there aren’t really limitations to them. But most search engines have limitations to them. For instance your description should be no more then 120 characters because most search engines only use 120 characters. With your keywords really you should have between 8-12. With your title tag it should be at least 60 characters.

On to the other tags/attributes. Your alt and title attribute for images and links. The alt and title attribute can be used for the image but only the title attribute can be used for the link. These are pretty simple but sometimes easy to forget to do. Example:

for a link

Website Design , Development, and SEO Marketing

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Breaking Alexa 500000 Rank

Shane — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 04:33:24 +0000

In order to make money off a website, what is the most important aspect that advertisers look for? It is your traffic rank. Most advertisers look at sites to see what there Google PageRank and there Alexa rank are. Well the Alexa Rank weighs more heavily on the money aspect. If you have a site that is in the top 100000 in the Alexa Rank that means you have a well trafficked site. The hardest part about building your Alexa Rank is trying to find ways to get people to your site and continue coming to your site. A really great way is to give away free stuff. Everyone loves free things. But in order to get people to find these free things you have to write about them and/or market them. Learning the basics or SEO and SEM is a great way to get your site going and start getting continuous people to your site. There are a ton of websites out there each one can become the biggest site in the world and have the most traffic. It only take some well planning and a great strategy.

How To Break The Top 500000

Really to be honest breaking the top 500000 is not as hard as it might seems. I am going to give you a 5 step way to get your site closer breaking the top 500000 in Alexa. This will start you on your way to getting closer to the harder mark of 200000.

Step One – Content Is King

The biggest way to get more people to your site is to make it bigger. Now I don’t mean go out and find the biggest image you can and put it on your site. I mean make more articles, more posts, more pages, and more places for people to interact. A great way to start this is to build a blog. Most people hear blog and think well am I going to have to post daily. NO, you could post one article a month and it would be good enough. The worst part about blogs is getting a blog that is hosted by another site. For instance Blogspot. Getting a Blogspot account is not a bad thing but it will not help your site much. You need a blog that is built into your website like WordPress.

Step Two – Sitemap Submission

What is a sitemap? It is a easy xml template of your site. It makes it easy for search engines to crawl your site. You can make one of these really simply by just going to Google and type in Free Sitemap Builder. Once you have your sitemap you will need to put it somewhere on your server. Most of the time it is in the root directory of your website. After that you can submit it to all different search engines and then they will know what is on your website.

Step Three – Meta Tags

Your meta information is not the easiest thing to do because you have to get creative and it takes time. But, if you just put up the mere basics, like title, keywords, and descriptions. Your site will start to grow rapidly. A really good place to start with meta tags is Search Engine Watch.

Step Four – Social Media

One of the easiest and fastest ways to get traffic to your site is with Social Media. Everyone knows that Social Networks are the big thing. I really only know a few people who don’t have a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on. The easiest way to get peopel to your site. Submit each page that you want people to find to StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Technorati, Reddit, and many more. This is simple and takes but 30secs per submittion.

Step Five – Content Content Content

I know I mentioned this already and it is the number one way. But it is also the number 5 way because it is the best way to get people to your site. Really SEO, SEM, Submitting, and Social Media cant come close to a site that has a ton of content. If you don’t have content then you will not get many people.

Website Design , Development, and SEO Marketing

If by chance you are in need of any web design, web development, search engine optimization, or marketing done to one of your sites you can get in contact with me, or, you can contact Chosen. Chosen is a Lansing based Web Development, Web Design, Web Hosting, and Web Marketing firm. We are a small business but are gaining popularity in the Lansing Area for our Web Design and Development skills. We have done work for individual/private clients and companies. We prefer client work but we also take contract work. We have worked with most of the biggest web companies in the Lansing Area and all the way out to California. We would love to hear from you.

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Figuring Out What To Blog About

Shane — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 04:47:48 +0000

Figuring out what to blog about. That is one of the hardest questions most bloggers have to think about. The best thing to do is work on writing a couple posts in a series. Or you could write about a specific topic. Some blogs are easy because they have a very specific thing that they post about. For instance sports blogs, they are probably one of the easiest to post on. That is because there is always different changes happening in the sports world. Another easy one is celebrity gossip. What I am trying to get at with this post isn’t to tell you what to blog about. By no means you should blog about one thing. The best way to blog is try out many different thing to blog about until you find what you like to blog about. Also if you are into SEO or any other marketing strategies. What you blog about can determine how much your site changes in the amount of visitors. For example I primarily blog about SEO, SEM, WordPress, jQuery, and other web stuff. This is some information that I enjoy to blog about and like to share my opinions and experiences with my readers. The reason that you pick things to blog about is so that you site will gain visitors from what you blog about. But if you choose to blog about anything and everything. Then you will not find yourself gaining visitors and consistent followers.

Shane’s Opinions

I personally think that every person should have a blog or a place where they write about what they like. With this it should be a place that anyone can read and comment on. This is a great way to share your opinions about what you blog. This can create conversations that can lead to friendships and even job opportunities. Business owners don’t normally have a lot of time to read different sites but you will find that once they find a site they like. They will keep coming back. Let alone everyone should have there own blog. I feel that with everyone having a blog it will let them share everything they want with the world. If you are looking to get a blog or start a blog. There are a ton of different free sites out there that you can start blogging (blogspot, wordpress, and more). I think the best thing is to not only have a blog but have a website that houses your blog. This should be a personal site that is just about you. What I would recommend if you are in need of a website is to contact chosen. Chosen is a small company that looks to grow individuals and companies.

Website Design , Development, and SEO Marketing

If by chance you are in need of any web design, web development, search engine optimization, or marketing done to one of your sites you can get in contact with me or you can contact Chosen. Chosen is a Lansing based Web Development, Web Design, Web Hosting, and Web Marketing firm. We are a small business but are growing in the Lansing Area for our Web Design and Development skills. We have done work for clients and companies. We prefer client work but we also take contract work. We have worked with most of the biggest web companies in the Lansing Area and all the way out to California. We would love to hear from you.

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Marketing Your Business Online

Shane — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 22:09:23 +0000

There are many different ways to market your newly-created start up business. You could go house to house handing out discounts to people. You could place ads in the local newspapers, or put up signs all over your drivable area and the list goes on. The difficulty is with those suggestions is that you can only really reach out to your local area. Now if you are a small business, and you want to stay small and live off your local area, then cool.

However if you are looking to make more money and grow to a national level you need to do something bigger. There are some great ways to market yourself on a national or even a global level. Probably the best way is to build yourself a website. With a website you can reach out to everyone that has a computer. So you are looking at almost every household in the US and a lot in other countries.

Building A Website

Almost anyone can build a website. You could just ask your neighbor if they know anyone who builds a website. More times than not, they do, but very rarely can that person build you a professional one. But, if you are really serious about making yourself and your website known you need to find a professional. A company that I work for is Chosen. We are not just a business but we are a small business of experts. We do not charge high prices that you would get at a bigger company or even with a bigger name. Our prices are inexpensive, but our work is of high quality.

We also develop all our customer sites. So you are not getting something from someone halfway around the world. We pride ourselves in helping to build small to mid businesses not just with their website, but with business development altogether. We don’t just build you something and then walk away. We make sure that you are happy with what you get and periodically do checkups with our clients to see if there is anything that needs changing or updated.

Marketing Your Site

Once you have yourself a website you need to market it. Now some people wonder what this means and ask “isn’t getting a website marketing.” Well yes but if you don’t market your site then no one is going to see it. This is where SEO, SEM, sitemap building, PPC and other means of trafficking come into play. I will offer brief descriptions on each.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your site more visible by search engines. This is done with keywords, title tags, alt tags, heading, and other web elements. SEM or Search Engine Marketing is the process of marketing your site with the many different search engines. This takes place by letting these search engine know that you exist. Sitemap Building is the process of creating a sitemap for search engines. A sitemap is a easier and quicker way of showing search engines your site. So the faster they see your site the faster they bring people to your site. Probably the fastest way to build traffic to your site is with PPC or Pay Per Click campaigns. What these are, are the little ads that you see all over sites now. Most of the time they are Google Ads solicited through Google Adsense accounts. The process by you submitting your site with whatever company you are using. Most of the time Google. It also involves you select catchy keywords that best describes your site, and applying them to the account, and in time these words show up in engines, and lead visitors to your site. If someone clicks your ad, you pay for that click, but this can get expensive with the more keywords that you have or can be really cheap.

Probably the next most notable way of marketing your site is through Social Media network sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and others. There are many more ways to market your site and thus ensure it gets seen.

Summary

So if you are a company that would like to become a global company all you have to so is get on the web. Once you apply some of the above measures, talked about and you will see your sales climb. Who knows maybe they will climb enough that you can retire and have others run the business.

Website Design , Development, and SEO Marketing

Please check out Chosen. If by chance you are in need of any web design, web development, search engine optimization, editing, content creation or marketing done to one of your sites please feel free to contact me or Chosen. Chosen is a small, but growing national-based firm offering Web Development, Web Design, Web Hosting, Web Editing, and Web Marketing skills. We have done work for clients and companies, by preference, but we also take contract work. We have worked with most of the biggest web companies in the Lansing Area and all the way out to California. We would love to hear from you. Please mention that you came from shanestrong.com.

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Website Value Boost

Shane — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 20:05:55 +0000

There are a ton of ways to get more traffic to your site but really there are only a couple ways to build your sites value. How is your site measured by the amount of traffic it gets, how much it makes in profit in a given month, what its PageRank is. There is a lot of different ways to make your site valuable. I prefer to do the easy way by how much your site makes in a given month. The reason that I consider this easy is because you have so many different ways to go about doing this. Most of these ways depend on how much traffic/popularity your site has. One of the easiest ways is to put ads on your site. You can choose from many different advertising companies. This is where it gets hard because if your site does not have the traffic/popularity then most of these companies will not accept you.

Google Ads

Google everyone knows them and probably everyone has seen multiple ads by them. They will accept every site. Not just because they have the money to do so but they can measure where the person who clicked on the ad came from. For instance If you put ads up on your site by Google. You have to register where you live with them. Now not saying that you should but yeah you could go to a neighboring town and click on your ads and yes you will probably get money for it. But, Google is smart if it finds a pattern in clicks and area of the clicks then it will suspect something and you can get prosecuted for it. What does this mean you will loose your ability to use Google ads and could be fined and possible jail time. In order to setup Google ads on your site all that you have to do is register with Google Adsence it is really easy to find just go to Google and search for Google ads or ads. You do not have to have a Google email to register. Once you setup your account then all you have to do is go through the tutorials inside Google Adsence to get the feel for how to go about making money. The really tough part about making money with Google is where to put the ads. For instance you want the ads in places that people are going to click them and they dont look like ads. There are different kinds of ads and ad sizes that you can choose from. I am using there rss feed ads and there regular ads.

Other Ad Companies

There are a ton of other really good ad companies but the two that I like the most is Chitika Ads and Text Link Ads. Both of these ad companies pay pretty good especially Text Link Ads. The only problem with these ad companies is you have to have a high amount of traffic to your site before they will accept you. A really good way to increase your traffic to your site is with Optimization. This can be done in many different ways the best is to get everything optimized. This includes SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEM (Search Engine Marketing), Title and Alt Tags, Content Emphasis, Creating Ads For Your Self, and much more. The best is to do all of them but if you are looking for some quick traffic. Then you best bet is to create a ad with a high end company (Google). Google is extremely cheap for creating ads it would only cost you around $50-$100 a month for good ads and it goes up from there. Now even with creating ads for yourself this doesn’t mean that your site is going to get enough of a boost that it needs. That is why I said that it is best to get everything done. That way you are building traffic from multiple areas. Whether it be Search Engines, Advertising, or Keywords.

SEO Packages

If you are in need of any Search Engine Optimization I do have packages and I can teach people how to do SEO. My monthly packages for SEO all depend on how much you want done. I charge $25US an hour. With that my recommended package would be 20 hours a month this will give you the best outcome. Of course the more hours you do the better outcome you will get but at 20 hours a month I can really get enough done to your site that it will show improvement a lot quicker and will make you more money faster. I also have a bunch more different packages and prices for web based projects, you can go to Work Prices.

Website Design , Development, and SEO Marketing

If by chance you are in need of any web design, web development, search engine optimization, editing, content creation or marketing done to one of your sites please feel free to contact me or Chosen. Chosen is a small, but growing Lansing-based firm offering Web Development, Web Design, Web Hosting, Web Editing, and Web Marketing skills. We have done work for clients and companies, by preference, but we also take contract work. We have worked with most of the biggest web companies in the Lansing Area and all the way out to California. We would love to hear from you.

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Google PageRank Counts

Shane — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 01:58:49 +0000

As a Web Developer, Search Engine Optimizer and Search Engine Marketer, I go crazy when one of my sites gets a better Google PageRank. Now the real question is how powerful is your Google PageRank?

Google has stopped using PageRank in there webmasters tools. Google feels that PageRank is not something that is of much importance. I am here to tell you that is not the case. If you are a Search Engine Optimizer or a Search Engine Marketer then you will know that a high PageRank means that you are doing a good job.

Let’s take into consideration if your site has a PageRank of 0 or 1, with 0 being the lowest on the PageRank scale. That means your site probably isn’t getting but maybe 30 hits a day and most of the time those are all bots. This means your site is making no money. In order to raise your PageRank you will need to either pay someone to get your site SEO and SEM ready. If you can get your site SEO or SEM ready then your page rank could jump up to say 2 or 3 and maybe even 4. Now if you have a PageRank of 3 or 4 you are probably getting around 80-250 hits a day to your site. Now, I dont know about you but I would much rather have 80-250 hits a day over the 0 or 1 page rank. Just think what your site would be making you if your PageRank was up to say 6 or 7. Well it would be a ton more than a PageRank of 1 or 2.

High PR Sites

If you can achieve a PageRank of a higher number you will get more and more people consistently coming to your site. Look at any of the high PageRank sites out there. For example let see who has a PageRank of 10. Well we all know Google is going to be at the top of the list. But some of the others are adobe.com, cisco.com, apache.org, apple.com, nasa.gov, microsoft.com, and many more. Can you make a guess on how many times a day these sites are getting hits? Well the answer is millions-billions a day. That means their sites are probably making millions of dollars every day . If you look at a list of sites that have a PageRank from 7 to 10 you will see that of all these sites you have probably been to each one multiple times. Now multiply your multiple times of going there times billions of people and you will get a really big number with a bigger money value behind it.

PageRank Overview

So lets see a higher PageRank brings in more income to your site. Which in turn means a bigger site and bigger bank account. In order to get your PageRank higher what do you need to do? Spend the money and get someone to do some basic SEO and SEM to your site. This way you will get found and your traffic will start to rise and your Page Rank will start to rise. Which means you income will start to rise. So to everyone who is wondering if PageRank really matters yes it does. It matters in many different ways most of all money profit.
For a list of some high page rank sites go to http://www.doheth.co.uk/info/list-of-web-sites-with-high-page-rank.php

Website Design , Development, and SEO Marketing

If you need assistance with web design, web development, search engine optimization, editing, content creation or marketing done to one of your sites please feel free to contact me or Chosen. Chosen is a small, but growing Lansing-based firm offering Web Development, Web Design, Web Hosting, Web Editing, and Web Marketing skills. We have done work for clients and companies, by preference, but we also take contract work. We have worked with most of the biggest web companies in the Lansing Area and all the way out to California. We would love to hear from you.

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Top 10 SEO Tools

Shane — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 20:52:48 +0000

What do you use for SEO? What do you consider the best tools? I have a list of SEO tools that I use daily. My list is a little more than 10 but I figured for simplicity I will give you the top 10 SEO tools that I use. The reason I am putting together a list of my top ten is because I see a trend from other SEO experts bot saying that I am a expert but I would like to be. There are a ton of SEO tools out there that are free of charge and these tools are evolving at a rapid speed. My big question with SEO is where will it go next. Well what everyone really wants is the list so here it is.

Top Ten SEO Tool List

What The SEO Tool Does

Search Engine Genie – This site is not well known but it has quite a few really nice SEO tools that are free to use and they have a ton of really helpful articles.
Website Grader by HubSpot – I use this site to get a good idea of where a site is and where it might need to be and get to. HubSpot has a paid version of this that has a ton of really great SEO tools. They have a free week trial of the system if I were you I would jump at the trial and see if you like it.
Google Adwords – This is a great way to find out how heavily a keyword is being targeted. I use this when ever i am looking for the really good keyword to get a site going.
Google Analytics – Great tool if you are not using it you are loosing out. My main use for this is to see what is bringing traffic into my site or my client sites. With the name Google behind this you know that you are going to 1 get it for free and 2 get something that is great.
SEO Quake – This is a plugin for Firefox that gives you a ton of really useful info that you need for SEO. I know a few different people that this is the only tool that they use for SEO.
Site Explorer by Yahoo – This is a useful tool for the yahoo search engine. I prefer Google’s Analytics over this because it has more to it.
Google Trand – Great tool by Google this lets you find the trends of the time so that you can find the really good keywords and SEO articles to write for traffic purposes.
Search Status – I really enjoy using Search Status because of its simplicity. I am a Firefox user and this is a Firefox plugin.
seomoz.org – These people really know what they are doing with SEO. They have a ton of free tools and they also have some really great paid tools.
Word tracker – I personally have not used this service but i have heard from a ton of people that they are great. It is a paid service but they do have a free trial.

SEO Packages

Website Design , Development, and SEO Marketing

If you by change need web design, web development, search engine optimization, or marketing done to one of your sites you can get in contact with me or you can contact Chosen. Chosen is a Lansing based Web Development, Web Design, Web Hosting, and Web Marketing firm. We are a small business but are growing in the Lansing Area for our Web Design and Development skills. We have done work for clients and companies. We prefer client work but we also take contract work. We have worked with most of the biggest web companies in the Lansing Area and all the way out to California. We would love to hear from you.

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SEO Optimization

Shane — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 18:47:06 +0000

What is SEO and how can it help me? That is the question you should be asking your self if you have a web site. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. How do you get your site to the top of search engines? Well this is a really great place to start. SEO optimization can improve the traffic of your site and the sales of your site. Basically SEO is what happens when you tell search engines what exactly you want people to search and find you as. Well some people say that this can be hard because there are so many sites out there that it is almost impossible to get to the top. Well those people are wrong. With some great planning and strategy any site can make it to the top of any search engine. For a example if you search the word Chosen in Google you will get 169,000,000 hits for just the word Chosen. Well one of the companies that I own is Chosen LLC. One of our sites is chosendevelopment.com you will find it at around 7 or 8 and rising. Now we just started doing SEO on our Chosen Development site about 3 months ago. Yes we spent a lot of time and planing in order to get to where we are now.

Practical

Now for a little practical look at SEO. If someone came to me and said I want to be number one for the word Google I would look at you and tell you to talk to this company called Google. Some things are not able to happen. One of the biggest things with SEO is that it takes time. Look at my site for instance I live in Michigan around the Lansing Area. Now I am trying to get to the top for Lansing Web Design, Lansing Web Development, Michigan Web Design, Michigan Web Development, and a ton of other Michigan and Lansing combination’s. Well I am finally getting there after 5 months of hard work. One thing that most people don’t understand is that in order to get to the top for a certain word or phrase you have to beat out the competition. That means you have to do research on what other people do, how they do it, where there flaws are, and how can you beat them.

SEO Consists

SEO and SEM are two totally different things people think that one goes with the other. Well they are kind of right in the fact that they both assist each other. SEM is Search Engine Marketing, this consists of stuff like Google Adsence, Post Writing, Building Backlinks, and a bunch of other things. SEO is mainly focused around Meta tags and search engine submissions. Meta tags are not a really big thing for SEO. That is what people say. Well I feel that they are still a very big thing. Meta tags direct search engines on what to index on your site. There are a ton’s of different Meta tag that you can use in SEO but the most important ones are Keywords, Descriptions, and Titles. The last thing that I will leave you with is that everyone can do SEO and SEM. SEM is a little easier for people because of all the social media places out there. SEO is really hard and takes a lot of planning. I would recommend everyone to leave SEO to the people that consider them self experts. I am not saying don’t try to learn SEO or teach your self SEO because you could become one of those experts.

SEO Packages

Website Design , Development, and SEO Marketing

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