All I can say is, whatever floats your boat.

This post is loosely in response to Jamie Harrop’s comment on my guest post over at his blog. Jamie disagrees with me, so no offense at what follows Jamie.

There’s always more than one way to do anything. When you get advice, the person giving it can only tell you what they think is best from their perspective.

The <title></title> tags for your web pages are of supreme importance to your ranking and which searches you come up for. You need well-thought-out tags that are different for every page in order to get the best results–which is more traffic to your website. If you get it wrong you might even be penalized (like having the same title tag for every page of your website).

From an SEO point of view it makes a lot more sense to put the phrase or search term that your potential visitors are going to type into a search box when they’re looking for whatever it is that you’re selling. Quite simply, names, or your ‘brand,’ while they are important, will not figure into the equation at the search stage. Of course, once a visitor lands on your website you want to do everything you can to get them to remember your name or your brand. But that’s once they’ve arrived. Would you lure a fish onto your line by tying a frying pan onto your rod? Using your name to get new visitors is about as effective.

So, if you’re still determined to put your name in your title tags, without a search term before it, go ahead, Your competitor who listens to their SEO will most likely get more visitors than you do.

We’re still seeing a great deal of heated discussion online about what makes for good web content so I thought the subject is worth revisiting.

It’s all very simple really. Websites need words, whatever their reason for existing, they need words.

Each and every website is created to attract visitors–that goes without saying. But in order for people to see it, that website has to first impress the search engines because if it doesn’t, the search engines will never throw it up in a search. So unless you’re doing an obscene amount of Pay Per Click or you have other concrete sources of traffic, the search engines need to love you, and most important of all the search engines is Google because they have the lion’s share of the search industry. Period.

So let’s look at what the search engines look for first:

1. The title of your page needs to clearly define what the page is about. If you’re wondering what I mean by that, take a quick look at the top left-hand corner of this page. See what I mean? Lay out for your visitor exactly what the page is about in a way that will make them want to know more.
2. The main heading of your page also needs to contain your major search terms. This is different from the title as it’s seen actually on the page. To pick the right search terms, or keywords, make sure you do adequate keyword research using a reliable keyword tool.
3. The first paragraph should talk about your main focus (major search terms). Your most important content is what comes above the fold (what’s seen on your page without someone having to scroll down). It’s rather like writing for newspapers: you have to grab your audience in the first paragraph (in this case digital and human visitors) and then add the less-important facts lower down.
4. Sprinkle well-chosen sub headings throughout your text and link out to relevant content using your keywords in the anchor text (the words you click on in a link). Simple but effective.
5. Arrange for links from other pages of your website using those relevant keywords as anchor text.
6. Arrange for links from other websites, again using your chosen keywords as anchor text.
7. Don’t make the huge mistake of trying to target too many keywords. Just pick four-six really good ones and leave the rest for another page. There’s no limit to the number of pages you can create and doing it this way is a powerful way of making your website into a valuable resource for your target market.

Even if you don’t want the search engines to love you for some strange reason, you still need to get your human visitors to love you. Quality web content is the only way to do it.

Some kind of content management or content development strategy should therefore be high up on any webmaster’s list of priorities. If you can’t do it yourself, good content is well worth paying for even if it’s not on a regular basis. A decent SEO copywriter can put your website on the map.

Would you Like Your Website to be as Popular Online as Sarah Palin?

Notice how Sarah Palin is showing up again and again in the search results all over the web, and mainly because of her choice of words? Good SEO copywriting can get your web pages exactly the same sort of results.

What Google Loves about Keywords

Google loves skillfully-written SEO copy that feeds the bot lots of good, juicy, related and popular keywords. And it can make a huge difference to your popularity in search. The reason is not hard to find: the more accurately you target your article with keywords, the happier visitors will be. This makes Google, or any other search engine, look good with their customers.

Not just anyone can be a good copywriter, never mind an SEO copywriter. It takes skill. OK, well we won’t draw any more comparisons with Sarah Palin there.

An article on Webpro News the other day caught my attention. What? After all this negativity we’re being told that Content IS King again? Amazing. Don’t let me say ‘I told you so!’ For some time now we’ve been reading mistaken claims that it doesn’t make any difference what kind of copy you write.

My theory, as one of the first-ever SEO copywriters, is that rumors were put about deliberately. Makes sense if you don’t care about ethics, to clear the way so your own sites rule the roost. Wouldn’t it be nice if your competitors didn’t believe that the strategies you use work? And who’s to know if you mislead them? Hmm. You could call that a political policy I suppose. But probably not one that Sarah Palin would use according to John Cleese.

You Can’t Learn SEO in 48 Hours!

As far as SEO advice online is concerned, it’s definitely a case of take everything you read with a pinch of salt. Especially concerning SEO copywriting. If you doubt the usefulness of SEO, just hire someone to write one page of good copy for you and see what kind of difference it makes. The more pages you have with good copy, the better your SE results will be.

I was reading somewhere that all online business owners should arm themselves with SEO knowledge so they’d know if they were hiring a good SEO or not. This advice is good up to a point. But a little knowledge can be a very dangerous thing, and it takes a long time to accrue significant SEO knowledge. Ultimately you should hire an SEO who you trust. How can you tell? Recommendations! Do they run a successful blog? Do they have a thundering presence online, especially in Social Media circles? Can you find online rants from customers complaining about their failure to deliver?

It’s not necessary to hire the most expensive SEO out there. But you do need to hire someone who clearly knows what they’re doing. No go and have another look at Cleese’s video, lol.

Nearly everyone who reads my blog has a goal. That goal, in its simplest form, is to make money online. It’s why I’m here and it’s why you’re here. Without that goal there’s no point in SEO or anthing else for that matter. Trouble is many of us go from year to year not even achieving a fraction of what we’re capable of.

There are lots of reasons for this failure, but the depressing statistics are that out of all online startups a massive 95 percent will fail at some point.

We’re all aware that the #1 reason for this statistic is simply failure to plan a strategy. Many of us go on wasting time online day after day. I fall into this category myself. For months now life’s interruptions have prevented me from taking simple steps towards making my dream come true: I plan to sell information products online.

Ages ago I realized that if I wanted to change all this I needed to get myself organized. A coach won’t work for me because I’m hugely independent, and I am also highly visual. I respond to visual cues far more readily than to verbal cues. I suspect that many of us who work online fall into this category.

So what I’m saying in my roundabout way is that for some time now I’ve been looking for project management software or really any kind of software to get me organized and get my business started. I wanted to be able to list my goals, dreams, to-dos and plain have-tos without a huge hassle and without someone else poking their oar in. I’ve tried several programs which I won’t be naming hear and they left me totally uninspired.

Then today, when I was least expecting it, I saw a Tweet from Scott Allen. Of course you know he co-wrote the book The Virtual Handshake. That book by itself is a superb business/networking tool–but I’ll be talking more about it in a subsequent post.

Back to the Tweet. Scott was tweeting about new project management software from Nozbe.com. I thought it’d probably be another uninspiring flop, but my curiosity got the better of me so I wandered over for a look. Ten minutes later I was signing up.

No word of a lie folks, it took me less than an hour to enter my present projects, add some tasks (a total of about forty urgent ones), and list my dreams too. Now it’s several hours later, and the great, wonderful, superb news is that I actually got down to it and tackled three tasks that I’ve been putting off for around six months. To me that is an outstanding success. To say I’m thrilled is a piddling understatement. Getting myself motivated in this way is simply huge. I am around 50 percent closer to realizing my dream of launching my first information product and it’s all thanks to Nozbe.

If you need to get organized and systematically work through your tasks, you need to give this a try right away.

One of the tasks I was putting off was downloading Magento. Magento is a full-featured, open source ecommerce platform. Yes, this is what you need if you want to add a shopping cart and sell products on your website. The most amazing thing about it is that not only is it better than some very expensive ecommerce applications out there, it’s absolutely free. Word is catching on fast because it really is a great application, and I researched it months ago. If you need any more encouragement, you might find it impressive that a whopping 10,000 people downloaded it in the first two weeks after release. All that was left was for me to upload it to my server. I’ll admit I haven’t got it configured yet, but I’m a lot further on than I was this morning.

Finally, I took the bull by the horns and decided to sign up for an email marketing and list-creation service. You really can’t run any kind of  online business without this. I let my last email service subscription lapse because I didn’t like the program. Again I made my choice a while back. I’ve noticed that a lot of marketing professionals are using Constant Contact so I’d better see what that’s about. I haven’t had time to evaluate it yet, but I love the interface. It’s cheerful, easy-to-use, and what’s more you can get a 60-day trial without giving your credit card information. What more could you possibly ask?

So if like me you’ve been wasting a lot of time recently, and if you desperately need to see yourself making progress, check these three programs out. You can get started for free in all three so there’s really no excuse for procrastination.

If you’d like more motivation, great tips and information, and the occasional bawling out from me, be sure to sign up for my tips in the box you can see at the top of the sidebar.

Overwhelmingly, and tragically, online businesses approach the subject of reputation management entirely from the wrong angle. That is to say they don’t manage their reputation at all until disaster strikes.

Without any doubt Proactive Reputation Management is the way to go.

If you lay the groundwork your reputation is going to be a lot easier to protect. In fact, if you’re truly proactive in your approach, you should end up in a position where no one single miscreant could possibly affect the way your audience or client-base sees you. The stronger your online network, and the wider your reputation, the more difficult it would be for any entity to affect your status online.

So how do expert reputation management gurus go about protecting themselves? Most professionals talk about ‘strengthening your brand,’ but give very little concrete advice on how you should go about doing this.

Strategies like providing a great product or service are common sense, but it’s not always enough. There’s always going to be the odd person who doesn’t see your product for what it is and raises the roof because he or she feels they have been sold short.

It all starts with a rock-solid network. If you have good connections online, you will have an approachable group of supportive friends and associates who will be happy to help you out with some social media voting-up, and who may even bring along the strength of their networks too.

Creating an interactive blog or website can be a vital tool, as reputation management expert Andy Beal, owner of Trackur mentions in his interview with Martijn Ros.

When a company creates an interactive online profile, it’s effectively telling its stakeholders -customers, investors, employees, etc- that it cares about the community and wants to be a part of the conversation. When an online reputation crisis hits, companies that have an social media profile are more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt and more likely to be able to respond quickly, within that channel.

I advise my clients to look for the “centres of influence.” Where are their stakeholders hanging-out online? When you understand the types of social media your stakeholders are using -maybe they prefer blogs over forums -you’ll increase your chances of successfully engaging them.

Social media channels that you may find useful for establishing a thriving social network, depending on your market and your niche, include:

FaceBook
MySpace
Twitter
Plurk
FriendFeed

Next, consider a creating a large amount of press release activity. Certainly you can do some of it yourself, but if you could be mentioned in press releases issued by other companies that’s a whole lot better. If you have been generous with mentions for members of your own network, this shouldn’t be at all difficult to arrange.

Great places to post online press releases are PRLeap and PRWebDirect.

Many social media channels also have associated tools that will help you to monitor your reputation free of charge. Take Cherpa for example. This application allows you to type in a keyword or phrase and you’ll immediately see where the buzz is across Twitter. It’s amazing. Of course it has many other uses, but reputation management is a major one. Personally, I see it as such a useful tool it’s almost worth joining Twitter just for the reputation management possibilities alone.

Another free tool to see where you’re mentioned online is Google Alerts. It has its uses but I find it quite limited, especially when you compare it with a comprehensive tracking tool.

Trackur is not free, but it’s the best reputation tracking software out there. If you have had problems in the past, or if you are expecting reputation management crises, then this would be a modest investment that could really pay off in a big way.

There is a class of social networking sites that is not so much ‘social’ as professional, and while these won’t do you much good if you have a lot of negative stuff directed at you on the Internet, they are still powerful resources for getting the word out about you positively.

LinkedIn
Xing
Ecademy
Ryze
Yorze

LinkedIn has a facility for having your professional associates leave feedback about you. While the system can be abused, it still has it’s uses and the person leaving feedback has to have a LinkedIn account and cannot comment anonymously.
To get the maximum benefit from this kind of site, you need to take a different approach to that you’re used to on FaceBook or Twitter. To get an idea of what’s acceptable and what’s not, you might find these tips for using professional networking sites over at the Washington Post quite useful.

Increasingly the Internet is being seen as the global village predicted by Marshall McLuhan. Our networks extend over continents, professional domains, social milieus, generations and just about every other demographic you can think of. So whenever we want to achieve anything we automatically have access to a wide selection of people whose input can be highly valuable to us and dramatically impact our level of success.

Over the past week I’ve called on some of my Internet friends for their wisdom and expertise, while I was setting up this blog. As usual, they were unstinting in their generosity, both with time and nuggets of hard-won (and when you pay for it, expensive) specialized consulting knowledge.

Twitter is fabulous and it’s my networking tool of choice. Leaves most of the others standing–including FaceBook for me. But I digress as usual.

I’ve asked my Twitter network for advice on my design and color scheme, how to import the posts from my old blog, help with troubleshooting feed problems (Feedburner was jettisoned as a result) and a host of other stuff. I’m sure I’ve driven them nuts–I’m thoroughly sick of the subject myself at the moment–but they were all patient. So they deserve a big mention.

Top of the list is Mich D, who is quietly brilliant, working away in the shadows. He wrote a guest post for me on Blackhat SMO tricks. I think you’ll agree there’s lots of valuable information here as well as some fresh and unique perspectives. He said he loved the design, and that while it was pink, it wasn’t “fluffy.” I took that as an approval. Mich gave me the most fundamental help when I told him I was having trouble importing posts from one MySQL database to another. Why bother? He asked. You can import blog posts, even across platforms, through your WordPress Admin interface, and I did, and it worked beautifully. Thanks Mich!

In case you’re having he same problem, in the WordPress Admin panel for your old blog, select Manage Posts and click on Export from the options on the dashboard. Save the resulting WordPress file to your hard drive. Then go to the WordPress Admin for your new site, select Manage Posts and then select Import. Browse for and upload your saved file, and voila, you’re done. But don’t forget to do 301 redirects for your posts or you’ll have duplicate content issues big-time.

Kimberley Bock made me feel more comfortable with my choice of color scheme. I say ‘more comfortable’ not because I had doubts about what I like but because a couple of my other friends had mentioned that they weren’t 100 percent comfortable with my choice. You could say I was suffering a confidence crisis.

In particular, Richard Dewick, AKA Makaman, had strong reservations about my choice of color. He also reminded me to follow my own advice and make the font a readable size, which I did. He also reminded me about posting my Twitter feed to my blog, which I haven’t had time for yet. But I will. Richard also hated my logo. I don’t think he’ll like the new version either, but it’s the best I can do for now. Whaddya say Richard?

Ultimately I felt my choice of WordPress theme was totally vindicated by Chris Garrett who said:

You have to connect “you” to your target audience, if pink fits both, forget what random internet folks say

I totally agree with this. A small thing like your color scheme could put off a small minority of visitors, but overall I think it’s true to say that if a reader senses that you’re not holding back, and that you’re communicating who you are at a basic level, with no artificially-set parameters, they’ll respect you more for it. And I’ve never been one to try and impress, so this concept suits me fine. It’s not that I take a devil-may-care attitude. More that I like to communicate honestly, including who i really am.

But Chris got me thinking about how to really connect with your audience. What’s the secret? Obviously your theme and choice of colors is going to be a superficial first-glance thing. But there has to be more to it than that. What are blog readers really looking for?

In the end I came to the following conclusions:

Connecting with your audience is all about being who you really are. It’s about being willing to take the risks associated with sharing your innermost thoughts about what you do and how you think. You may leave yourself vulnerable to the piranhas that live online, but you’ll also make contact with a solid readership base who are looking for authenticity. You’ll also make genuine friends. The Real Thing is impossible to fake and it’s priceless.

So in the coming months you can look forward to some hard-hitting opinion, state-of-the-art SEO information, and tips on how to get your blog or website off the ground. Most of all though, you can look forward to my blog as an honest expression of who I am.

“Search engine optimizers’ Backhat social media optimization tricks can hurt you without you doing it yourself? Yes, it’s true, and here’s why.”

Today’s search engine optimization or SEO is rapidly changing to meet the New World Wide Web order of things. SMM (social media marketing) SMO (social media optimizing) SSM (social search marketing) and ‘personalized search’ are not only the catch-all SEO phrases or marketing fads of the moment: Search and social marketing now go hand in hand. Both social media and search optimization can work beautifully in tandem when used properly as a combined marketing strategy. Social media is here to stay, but Web 2.0 is old. Personalized Active Semantic Grid 3.0 is going to be the next Big Thing.

All in all, while technically things are different, nothing has really changed for SEO. What’s different to the Web as it was a short while ago is that Blackhats, marketers and Whitehats alike now use social media as part of their daily routine. The core principles of optimization have maintained identical faces in both worlds. Good gets good results and bad gets bad results. So most likely SEO professionals will continue to develop their talents and meet a demand through to the next phase of the Internet.

Why ramble on about what we already know? For some reason no SEO has yet broached the subject of the real issues with Blackhat optimizers. Once, link farms and mass directory submissions were just about standard practice, and when a Blackhat got started on your site, all that would be left was a disreputable, hollow husk. Even then, using these shady methods would hurt your ranking far more than they would help, and the same is true today. But what so many online business owners don’t realize is that when you have a Blackhat inside your social circle operating in stealth mode, you will unknowingly be ruining you own social search rankings just by associating with them.

“HOW in the WORLD could that possibly EVER happen?”

If you’re a quietly-observant person who is active on the internet, you may have already asked yourself this question. It may also be that you have already noticed the very thing I am about to unveil.

To make my point I can give some simple examples any social media user would have seen recently.

Blogs: Have you ever heard of Akismet? How about these spine-chilling terms: comment spam, feed scrapers, hacked blogs, hidden links, pingback spam, trackback spam, XSS injection? These are Blackhat tools and blog-abusing tricks. Every single one of these can destroy a site’s authority, ranking and traffic.

Take Delicious: Once a quality indicator for websites across the internet, now the most overcrowded, insanely dense sea of innumerable tags, more an exercise in pointlessness than anything at this point. What does that mean for you? Your bookmarks may or may not get credited, listed or scanned. Why? Because of the flood of spam, Delicious is now filtered to protect the site itself. Poisoned links can seep into your pool, fed by mass shares, bot armies and forced homepage listings that only seem interesting at first glance.

Digg: Wow this one is Easy. Digg.com has virtually ground to a halt in the last few weeks. Reports of hundreds, if not over a thousand diggers banned for unwittingly aiding technical social Blackhats. It’s a story that has played out many times, but perhaps not on so large a scale.

As the redirected sites and obviously ad-fueled ADVERTISEMENT INCORPORATED sites flooded the Digg gates, scores of unwittingly complicit users then vanished. A new community of new and old faces replaced them. Now those users are mingling in a social site permeated with fear. Yes, it could and probably will happen again.

StumbleUpon: This is by far the most dangerous target for users. Blackhats can send you direct pages, often in a friendly way that will leave you unsuspecting. Yet according to the terms of StumbleUpon, no click should be asked for or suggested. Users guilty of asking for Stumbles can be banned, no questions asked. So next time you get a Stumble request, ” blah blah … stumble and review plz” read “make me money … get banned dummy”.

Twitter: Twitter oh our cruel mistress of dread. It’s addictive once you get started, yet staring you in the face is the Blackhat core from the dark depths of the Internet. Everything from adult and hijack redirects to mass-Google blacklisting has befallen Twitter users. Again as a Twitter user you may not be doing anything you would think could harm you, but you can get tagged as a spammer by association, and this can be visible to everyone and totally out of your control on ratings sites all over the Web. Talk about a reputation management nightmare.

As you now may see, the Internet as we know it has changed, in many ways for the better, but in some ways for the worse. Facets and faces of marketing will always be part of any product or consumer driven society, therefore greed or need will always drive some to choose the darker path.The bright side for all of us is that as technology changes, new and better is always just ahead. Test it, try it, explore the possibility of the Web. Go search and be thoughtful, be vigilant while you’re being social. Consider your actions and your associates carefully, and all will be well.

Another ridiculous yet interesting searchable socialized rant-ramble by: Mich D … yeah the very same dude [ @MichDdot 4D twest U pleepz N tweepz ]

UPDATE: I have changed the theme several times since this–I’m now using Streamline by StudioPress (link in footer). Still love to know what you think.

It has been a hectic few days. However, I finally decided to go with the theme you now see. It’s called Optimism and it’s by–well they already have a link at the bottom!

I’ve also got my contact form up-and-running and I’ve written a cursory About page. For sure there is a lot left to do but I am functional.

I’m still working on importing the posts from my other blog so that I can setup the redirects. Haven’t had time to look into that properly yet. Comments and suggestions are always welcome. Meanwhile enjoy this music that I feel goes with the theme. 03-enchantment