The Entrepreneur Diva with a Business Attitude » SEO

Focusing Too Much on SEO is Holding You Back!

Latoya Hackett — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 18:31:08 +0000

If you are a blogger then you have more than likely read tons of articles that will drive into your mind that SEO is the strong point of any blog. Although SEO is important, I don’t agree with it being the strong point of your blog. See, search engine optimization is only for the SEARCH ENGINES. It optimizes the pages of your blog so that they will rank better and of course that can mean more traffic for your blog.

But here’s the thing – SEO has nothing in the world to do with loyal readership. I find that so many people are worried about SEO that they fail to write for their readers. Your focus should be on writing content that your readers are looking for, making your post interesting so they will come back to read more, and providing resources that your readers can use. This is what is going to build up your readership loyalty and SEO can’t do that.

You should always write for your reader’s first and then worry about SEO after that. I have actually seen people come up with awesome blog topics and titles that would grab your attention right off the bat and then they destroy the content trying to apply SEO techniques get better rankings. In a lot of cases they would have gotten more traffic by just writing for the readers.

Now I am not saying that SEO is not important and not use the techniques, but make sure that your reader’s come first. Grab their attention and keep them entertained, because those are the people that are going to help to build your blog’s reputation as an authority. And while you are writing for your readers you can learn a little bit here and there about SEO and how to infuse it into your content properly.

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SEO Help for the Newbies

Latoya Hackett — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:10:22 +0000

If your blogs or websites are not doing well in the search engines it could partly be because your SEO is lacking in some areas. Most people are now finding out, if they already haven’t, how important SEO is to building a web presence as well as traffic. I know this can be frustrating especially if you don’t know the first thing about SEO or how it works. But it is something that you need to learn how to work with sot I have found the perfect solution for you.

There is a website called webconfs.com and it will not only increase your SEO knowledge, but there are also a lot of free tools that you can use as well. I would suggest that you spend some time learning these important techniques because they can definitely help you out with the search engines.

See, I’m no SEO guru or anything remotely close to that.I know a little here and there, but there is a lot for me to learn. So being that there are some areas of SEO that I know nothing about I figured I would give you a rock solid resource. I found this website to be very easy to navigate and the information is easy to digest. So try it out and let me know what you think.

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Blog SEO – 5 Essential Tips for Getting Fast Traffic

Latoya Hackett — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:46:51 +0000

Tip #1 – Add Some Type of Content to Your Blog Everyday

Now I know that this is something that a lot of people have been stressing to you, but some of you are not listening out there, so I will reiterate.

A little trick that I use to publish content everyday is I will spend some time on a Saturday or Sunday where I will sit down, brainstorm ideas, and create a few blog posts. Now how long this takes you will depend on what writing level you are on and how freely your ideas come to you. I can usually write about 7 articles in about 3-4 hours. So I will divide my time up – 2 hours on Saturday and 2 hours on Sunday.

If you are a WordPress user, then you can either save these articles as drafts and publish them whenever you want to, or better yet you can schedule your articles to publish on a certain date or time. That way, not having time for blog during the work week will not be an excuse for you.

Tip #2 – Valuable Incoming Links

You need to work on building links and making sure that you are getting valuable links into your websites. In order to do this make sure that you are getting valuable links back from blogs or websites in your niche about an hour doing this.

I like to use a little tool called the Fast Blog Finder every now and then. It will pull up related blogs based on the keywords you put in, show you the blog’s such as ranking, links, etc., and then I will comment on the blogs that are more valuable. My Alexa ranking went from 578,471 to 504, 779. Now I know that alexa is not 100% reliable but it does give you a guideline of your progress.

Tip #3 – Make Sure You Are Making Good Use of Meta Tags

Title Tags – are where you place your keyword or keyword phrases. This is the most important tag in SEO and you will want to make sure you are not leaving this blank and you are using good keywords.

Meta Tags – are used to provide a a description for your blog, but make sure that you make it brief

Alt Tags – are use to provide a description for your images. You should always include an alt tag with keywords because search engines will look at theses as well.

For best results, make sure that you are using these tags properly.

Tip #4 – Be a Social Butterfly

You definitely have to learn how to be social because that is the key to building relationships whether it is with your readers or it is with other people you connect with in your niche. And while you are out being social on social networks you have to promote your blog. If you don’t, then who will?

Tip #5 – Advertise

Most people don’t like doing this, but you have to do some type of advertising. Now I would suggest you do a little PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising but it is totally up to you. Whatever you decide to do just get out there and do it!

These are some tips that will not only help you with traffic, but will also help you out with SEO.

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Link Building – 3 Link Types You Need to Know

Latoya Hackett — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:11:32 +0000

Did you know that there are a lot of people that don’t know that there are different types of links? Heck most think that anything that is just a regular link and there is not type of specification for it. Well here are 3 link types that you absolutely need to know:

Direct Link – is a link that will direct a person directly to a home page of a website. It will normally show up in the format of www.websitename.com

Deep Link – is a link that will direct a person to an internal page of a website. It will normally be in a format similar to www.websitename.com/page/

Text Link – is a link that is embedded in text. Once the text is clicked the person will be directed to the link location.

The reason it is important to know the difference between these link types is because they are not created equally among the search engines. Links that come from credible website that have to do with your blog’s topic have more leverage to work with.

There are a lot of techniques that I use to encourage linking and they include article marketing, social networking (especially Twitter), participating in forums, blogging communities, etc. There are a lot of things that you can do to have other websites linking back to your blog but you have to make sure that they are valuable links.

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SEO – Search Engine Rankings Simplified

Latoya Hackett — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:30:52 +0000

Ranking well within the search engines is very important because that is what is going to drive more traffic to your websites, blogs, and online content. In my opinion, SEO should become a habit for you because if your content is not in the search engines then your content’s reputation is not going to get past the family and friends that you tell about it. And your goal should be to get as much exposure as you possibly can.

Most people are curious how SEO actually work to improve their content’s ranking so I will go into that a little bit. Search engines have these robots that work as their personal spies that will go out and find the content that the search engines and then report it back to the search engines. Here’s the thing, you have to make it easy for these little spies because they have limits to the information that they can process and if they are denied then your content doesn’t get any exposure, therefore no traffic.

When I think of SEO, I like to think of search engine robots like that pesky neighbor you have that doesn’t know how to mind her business. She goes out and gets the neighbor hood gossip and comes back to share it with her best friend, who is like the search engine. And keep in mind we are not talking about any old gossip we are talking about that hot juicy gossip that just can’t be resisted.

Well the robots work the same way. There is only certain pieces of information that they are interested in and they go after it in order to report it back to the search engines. Now before I go any further, I want to express that this is a good thing. SEO is not to be condemned, but embraced. This is the one tattle tail that we do like.

Now when this information is reported to the search engines, it is stored in the database. The information they like they like the most is stored higher in the database (higher rank) and the information that they don’t like as much get’s toss at the bottom of the database (lower rank).

So in a nutshell SEO is very important, so take the time to learn it. You want to make it easy for the robots to gather your content’s information so that you can achieve higher ranks in the search engines.

By the way, you gotta love that picture at the top. It is so darn funny hahah!

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Article SEO – You Gotta Learn It

Latoya Hackett — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:41:00 +0000

If you plan on being a successful online article writer then you have to learn to optimize your articles for the search engines. And it doesn’t matter if you are writing articles for the Internet or you are selling PLR articles, because even the people buying the PLR articles want to make sure that they are optimized for the search engines.

Article SEO will improve your rankings within the search engines so this is an absolute must learn. Here are some tips for optimizing your articles:

Make sure you thoroughly research keywords for your articles.
Use your keywords in your article titles.
Spread your keywords throughout your articles, and don’t let them clump up in one spot.
For best results keep your articles between 300-500 words.
Make sure your sentences flow instead of displaying forced keywords.
After you choose your keywords, try using the synonyms of those words because they can make you rank higher as well.
Make sure your keyword density is about 1.5%-2%. Meaning if your article is 300 words then you should use your keywords about 6 times in the article.

And there you have it, some simple tips but they will get you started.

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