SEO | I'm Just Sharing

SEO & Social Media Is A Process

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jan 31, 2011

“Digital marketing is not a one night stand.” – Mitch Joel, Six Pixels of Separation

I have talked about both SEO and social media on this blog. I believe both are important for one’s online presence. After all, if you have a business website or any type of blog and you’re hoping people will find you, having your blog optimized properly gives you the opportunity to compete with the masses that might do what you do. And social media gives you the opportunity to continually drive people to your site by helping you to keep the masses informed in some fashion.

by Emanuele Tolomei

In Joel’s book, he mentions that it’s easier to connect with people online than it’s ever been before. He also says that it’s a process; very few people are going to reach everyone the first time out. That’s absolutely true. Most of us have been to blogs that talk about the same issues I mentioned above, as well as many other things. Sometimes these concepts sound so easy that they seem to lead people into believing that if they do any or all of these things that almost immediately people will be flocking to their websites and they’re going to make tons of money.

Life doesn’t work like that. Even if late night TV commercials promise you the moon, think about how long it’s been since a human has been to the moon again. Goodness, the first trip to the moon took 8 years, and landing on the moon took almost 10 years. If the analogy were taken to its next step then you realize that the moon might be attainable, but it’s not easy and it’s definitely time consuming.

I was talking to someone about this subject last week. The conversation got to how long it would take before her site really started seeing visitors and taking off. I answered that it was an unknown; it’s a question that is impossible to answer for almost everyone. There are so many factors involved that if anyone ever gives a blanket response to this one they’re lying and are going to take your money, then give you excuses later on.

This is just a quick cautionary tale. Any advice you get as far as driving traffic to your site or blog, take it for what it’s worth and just realize that it’s all going to take time, and that you’re going to have to continually work on the process. It’s definitely not a one night stand.

SEO, Social Media | 25 Comments

Synergy Of Business And Blogging

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jan 10, 2011

Well now, this is something a little different. Michele Welch of New Biz Blogger has put together a free ebook for everyone to enjoy that contains articles from 31 bloggers on the general subject of blogging for business.

The name of the ebook is The Synergy of Business and Blogging, and it’s around 100 pages of tips that anyone might enjoy reading. I’ve already read it (y’all know I’m like that) and I think you’ll find it pretty good overall. Michele put it together very well indeed, and there are specific topics so you can decide if you want to jump to something you’re most interested in. The general topics are:

First Steps

Search Engine Optimization

Tools & Tips

Traffic Generation

Blogging

Social Media

Technology

So, this is a very good deal. A free ebook, about 7MB so if you have slow download speed it could take a bit, and if you happen to download it from the link above or here, and you happen to get to page 67, you’ll see yours truly with a feature article as well. I’m really honored to have been selected to be a part of this collection of folks, which includes our buddy Sire (whose article is just before mine; how’d that happen?), Jimi Jones, Kristi Hines, DiTesco, and Dennis Edell, folks who have commented on this blog.

And a short post at that; y’all have made out for a Monday!

Blogging | 12 Comments

Simply Hide Pages Plugin

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Dec 1, 2010

You see all those things along the top of this blog? All of those are pages that I’ve created to share stuff with y’all. Anyone with a WordPress blog at least has an About tab up there, though some have even more pages than what I’m showing above.

Hide and Seek
by Dar’ya Sipyeykina

Here’s the thing. Sometimes you want to be able to write a page, yet not have it cluttering your list at the top. Actually, you don’t want it showing at all because you have a different idea you want to use it for. Yet, you still have to have pages, and you’d like some flexibility in what you want to show or not show.

The Simply Hide Pages plugin is one way you can go. I’m part of a health care group that’s kind of a consortium of people with different skills that they can offer to providers. I’m pretty much the website guy, even though I have other skills as well. I created their website, and I created their blog. One thing they wanted the ability to do was get articles up on one of their pages. But they were going to be tasked with sending me the entire article and having me create a new page each time.

With the above plugin, I told each of them to go to the blog, paste their article into the box, and save it as a draft post. What I then do is go to the post, go down to the area below that says “custom fields”, type “hide” in the first box, then where it says “value” type the number “1″. That’s it. When you then publish the article it’s there, but it won’t show up above.

What that allows me to do is only have to add a link to the articles page instead of adding lots of individual pages. Now, there’s a benefit and a negative to that. For SEO purposes, one negative could be that a site could lose a bit of the benefit of having an extra page if the blog isn’t hosted on the same site, which in this case it is so they don’t lose anything.

A benefit is if you wanted to create a membership site, or at least a membership area of your site, because you can have pages with your content, make it hidden, and feel confident that it’s not at the top of your blog. Yeah, some people might think to use their posts area for that type of thing, but I’m someone who believes there’s a major difference between what I’d put up as a post and what I’d put up as an article.

Anyway, there’s the plugin, and if you want to use it for any other reason that I haven’t mentioned at least now you know it’s there.

Blogging | 20 Comments

Social Media, SEO And Your Business in 90 Minutes

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 27, 2010

I close this week of advertising my products with the one that probably ends up having the stupidest name of all, yet was probably the most fun.

The title of this one, Social Media, SEO And Your Business in 90 Minutes, was also the title of the webinar I did in June 2009 along with Renée Scherer of Presentations Plus! In case you’re wondering about the exclamation point, that’s part of her business name so it has to go there. She’s also going to hate that I used this picture of her. lol

It’s strange how I met Renée. I met her at a sales presentation that this other guy was giving, where I was actually asked to do a 15 minute presentation on leadership. In retrospect it was kind of goofy because it had nothing to do with anything that the guy giving his presentation was talking about, but I got free food and a chance to talk in front of people so I have nothing to complain about. A couple of months later Renée actually called me out of the blue, and for the life of me I can’t remember what we talked about at that time, but we decided to meet. During our conversation she happened to mention that she had paid for a program that allowed her to do webinars, but that she had yet to do one and want to know if I wanted to do one together.

I decided that talking about social media, which is a new direction I wanted to go in, would be somewhat interesting to do. In the course of my putting the outline together, something told me that I needed to talk about the SEO prospects of doing social media, and thus it became a big part of the presentation. If we had ended there, the title might have been kind of cool. But for some reason we added the “90 minutes” part to it, and in my mind that makes it sort of goofy. But the presentation went 84 minutes, including a few questions, and overall it was fun to do. We actually had people who signed up and showed up and participated, and as part of my 2011 goals I’m going to be planning more webinars because they are really neat to do.

At the end of the presentation, Renée indicated that she was going to have her friend put it together as a file so we could look at it to see what we thought. Once we had a chance to review it, after he cleaned it up, I thought it would be a great product for us to sell, and as you can see it’s up there in the second spot at the top left. We actually just made our first sale of that product at the end of October, and it’s pretty neat. We put a great price on that because if you ask me it’s worth a lot more.

Why would I say that? I actually showed a lot of things in that webinar, and I gave real information. The people who participated in the webinar said that they got a lot out of it, and that’s always important for me. I’ve written on this blog before about spending my time listening to things that never told me anything and basically started trying to pitch another product before it ended. Of course those things are always free, and you tend to get what you pay for.

This is it for all the products I have at the present time. Every single one of them has been created as a digital file, so if they’re purchased people just have to download them when they get sent to the URL attached to each product. My book is the only product that you have an option of getting a physical copy of at this point, and one of these years I’m either going to sit down and recorded myself so it can be an audio book or I’m going to pay someone to do it.

I thank all of you for indulging me this past week in promoting my products with a second daily post. These probably won’t get a lot of response, and I may not make any sales out of them, but at least no one can say I didn’t try and that they didn’t know I had products.

Product | 12 Comments

SEO Is A “Practice” Like Medicine, Not A Science

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 1, 2010

Every Wednesday on Twitter there’s something that goes on that originated here in the Syracuse area. It’s called Community Manager Chat, and it’s actually geared towards people who handle the social media processes at their particular companies, or for someone else. I get to be a part of it because social media is my thing, or at least a big part of my thing. If you ever decide to participate it’s at 2PM Eastern time, and you use the hashtag #cmgrchat to follow along.

Searching by Josh Heilaman

Last Wednesday the topic of discussion was blogging, which y’all know I thrive on. It was actually the second week on the topic because it seemed like it was very popular and there were so many questions being asked. I answered a bunch of questions, and on that day and the day after I got a bunch of new followers; I could see that a lot of people were interested in what I had to share.

Anyway, what happens is that one of the moderators throws out a question every 15 minutes or so, then the responses fly out. One of the questions asked what people did for SEO (search engine optimization) on their blogs. I stated that my SEO strategies are to write as much content as I can and to, for the most part, write about certain types of topics more often than going off the grid. I actually do that if you check my centennial stat posts from time to time.

As normal, there were a few people who went into the direction of having to not only write niche blogs, but to make sure to stuff your posts with keywords and keyword phrases so they could be found easier on the search engines. I read that stuff all the time and for the most part I think it’s garbage. After all, if I write 100 posts on roses and suddenly decide to stuff a post with the phrase “brown picture frames”, it’s not really going to mean anything to anyone, including the search engines. Those 100 posts on roses are going to fare way better.

After seeing some of those posts, I wrote the line that this post is based on: SEO is a “practice” like medicine, not a science. It got retweeted a bunch of times; I think people liked that phrase a lot.

And of course I believe it’s true. There are a lot of great SEO practices, which I’ve even talked about on this blog, but the truth is that not every website is going to end up on the first page of Google or any other search engine just because one’s site is optimized well. If you decided today that your goal was to be in the top 10 for the term “shoes” you probably won’t have a chance unless you can produce close to 900 pages of blog posts in a year or so. That’s because there are so many people already writing on that same topic that have beaten you to the punch. You can get creative to find your little niche in that group and that might put you on the first page; otherwise, you just need to be the best you can be and hope to compete in another way.

SEO is like medicine because it’s really a guessing game after a certain point. Doctors guess all the time as to what’s wrong with us. I bet every person who reads this post knows someone who had a doctor tell them “I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” or something to that effect. I’ve heard it myself. And these people go to school for 8 years, then do 2 or 4 years of clinical before they’re allowed to be out on their own; I don’t know anyone who’s truly been doing SEO for more than 7 years or so.

Does this mean one shouldn’t try to be as effective as possible in trying to get their blogs to perform well on the search engines? Absolutely not. What it does mean is that one shouldn’t kill themselves trying to write the perfectly optimized post every time out. To me, based on history, one gets way more juice by trying to put out as much good content as they can. That’s always my goal when I decide to write a post, no matter what the topic is on.

Trust me, there’s really nothing wrong with practicing; you might not end up being a concert pianist like Andre Watts, but you could be Liberace, and he made a lot of money in his lifetime.