SEOI decided to post some helpful information to other small business owners about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). I'm NOT an SEO expert obviously. Although there are many that have jumped on this band wagon  of a "hot" business and say they are but aren't and they are farming this out to India (or doing a POOR job themselves) and hurting vs. helping a business. If it's not done correctly you can get dropped off being ranked by search engines or end up being put on a "black list" Oh my gosh, can you imagine you've paid someone really good money (like $300 to $1,200 a month) only to find out they've harmed you vs. helped you?

Knowing what I know now about SEO and landing pages I wanted to share. It still doesn't feel like much in this "techie world" but I know it's more than I knew when those funny "landing pages" were typed up on my behalf (OMG...weren't they funny?!). I still have 3-4 more to post. Besides by writing about it...it helps ME optimize MY site.

One of the things that surprised me the most when I was working on implementing SEO was the lack of knowledge of web-designers. And web designers that are VERY expensive. I know someone very well that charges a minimum of $10,000 for a site and she knows NOTHING about SEO (to her defense nor do most designers). So #1. Lesson: Make sure if you're going to pay someone they understand building in your SEO. It's like building a car without the engine in it! Do you know those "cute, nice, fun sites" that have a "flash" picture come up, maybe play music or have some cool photo's on opening? Those rank THE WORST, as a matter a fact Google wasn't ranking them at all a few years ago. I'm not sure about now.

SEO is something done on the INSIDE or "backend" of your website. You optimize your site with keywords, in my case it's words like:

•    Running errands
•    help with running errands
•    assistance with running errands
•    local help running errands

Think of it like this. What do you type in the Google URL when you're looking for something? You type what comes to mind. So the businesses that fit that "index" need those phrases and words IN their website. On their front page. They need LINKS from those words to those pages in their website. You want to be sure and LINK your pages back and forth to each other, or "keywords" within one page to another.

For instance on the Extra You home page you'll see the words Property Management and a link to that page within my site and on the Property Management page...same thing. THAT is optimizing my site. That's optimizing those "keywords"  Then they need to get "tagged" properly when you blog. As you know if you're blogging there is a place to put those "tags" if you don't have that you have the WRONG kind of blog.

One of the things I thought (okay, still think) about blogging is; "Who is reading all this stuff?" and who wants a bunch of WORDS on your site that no one will read anyway? What I learned was you aren't writing it for "people to read" your writing it for Google...indexing, "crawlers" -- to optimize and rank your site. So the more words, the merrier. Words are "golden"

A blog post ideally should be 500-850 words.  At this point right now I have 571 words, 2514 Characters (no space) and 3084 with spaces. Word Count sees it as 11 paragraphs and 41 lines. What does that mean to me? NOTHING...frankly I could care less. Who I need it to mean something to is "Google" the God of the Cyberspace World. It's all about pleases "him"

On that note, I'm done ... that's my 631 words for the day. More practical tips later...