Great SEO Example of Well Optimized Blog Post for High Ranking in Google

This blog post, a review on Ultimate Van Lines has been written so well, that one week after the author wrote it, she moved from #10 in Google to #2 (well, #2, but #1 is getting two search results as of this post) for the company's name,"ultimate van lines". And this is without any links pointing to it (remember, links are super important in SEO)! And what is #1? The moving company's website. Keep in mind, that the Skimbaco blog is an already established blog, so it has search engine strength behind it. But how did Skimbaco increase her rankings with just her wits and the time spent writing the post?

1. She included the keyword "Ultimate Van Lines" in her post title.

2. She included "Ultimate Van Lines" in her second paragraph, and linked it to their home page.
a. She could have kicked off the article with a linked "Ultimate Van Lines" in order to get these important keywords closer to the beginning of the article, but she didn't. Her intro was more important, which is fine.

b. This particular review is negative. The moving van never showed, and then got canceled in the system because the rep they were working with was accused by higher authority as having quoted them too low. So Ultimate Van Lines just canceled the order with no warning. Skimbaco later discovered that Ultimate Van Lines has a bad habit of stealing people's household belongings and holding them hostage for money, so it's for the best the order got canceled. That said, normally you would not want to link to the company's home page, since that is a form of Link Love. However, Google just wants to know that you are covering every angle of what you're posting about, so Google will consider this link helpful. Therefore, it is good to include it in this type of review.

3. She has repeated "Ultimate Van Lines" many times in the article, but not in an annoying, keyword stuffed way. She has written it in a useful way.

4. She has included links to other websites and reviews for Ultimate Van Lines. It might help her to move these links up higher in the post, but she's doing just fine for now. If her rankings drop for this term, this could be an option.

Can she get even more traffic from this post? Yes. She wrote a review, and people often tack on "review" to whatever they are searching for. This was how I doubled traffic for my series of laser hair removal from American Laser Center. I worked in "review" into the hotspots of the highest ranking post in that series.

To get more traffic, she can insert "review" into her blog title (remember the SEO value of the blog title). Skimbaco is currently ranking 4th in Google for "ultimate van lines review", getting beat by a usual heavy hitter, My3cents.com. but if she keeps this up, she could outrank it! Not to mention if more websites link to this post. Like mine has done. :)

Summize Replaces Need to Hit Twitter's Replies Tab

Just in case you haven't tried it yet, Summize.com just saved you tons of time and frustration for when Twitter Replies stresses out. Summize somehow tracks all of the tweets from Twitter, and is a big search bank for words that you need to know have been mentioned.

If you aren't in the habit of clicking that Replies tab in your Twitter profile, you should start. It's a great way to know if someone tweeted back to you, or randomly to you. You can't be on Twitter all day long, so if you tweeted in the morning, and then are checking in at night, you can see if anyone responded to you, or randomly tweeted you, by going to Summize.com and entering in your Twitter name into the search tab.

Or, if you are checking on what's being said about your company, your competition, or a product you're wondering about, just put it in quotations (if it's longer than one word) to get an exact match from Summize.com. Just like you would do an exact match search in Google.

Fun, huh?

First SEO Class Success! Takeaway: Record your Movements

The first SEO class of Katie James Pixelated was a success! Fifteen women with companies or working for companies attended, and it was held at the boardroom in the lovely In Good Company (with use of their super fun projector to project my laptop).

We covered everything from the 5 top areas of each web page that you must pay attention to if you want effective SEO, to why the 1 random search term that someone used can be your next big traffic hit, and should not be ignored. My trusty strategy partner Melissa took notes on our official dry erase board so that we can design more and better classes. Here's who was there: Sara from PopJudaica (hip Jewish t-shirts and gifts), Robyn from ChiqueLife (women's plus size clothing), Nicole from Lucky for Baby (cute baby cloths boutique), Kathleen from Kathlin Argiro (fab bridal designer), Betty from Betty Newman's Trendspotting (blog of amazing and unique product finds), Judith from ReelInvitations (dvd wedding invitations), Renee, an Intellectual Property Attorney, Kim Do, the New York based wedding and makeup artist, and Jill from Fretzels (chocolate covered pretzels) (who brought us some of her chocolate covered fretzles!! yumm!!)

What I wanted everyone to know about SEO, so that you can get control of it and feel like you are confidently steering a ship in sea of swelling competition, is to keep track of what you do. This can be done in the simplest of Excel documents. This way, when you are looking in your Google Analytics, or some other stat program, you can know what happened at the same time of a spike in traffic earlier in the month, or why your traffic for a certain keyword has started to decline (goodness forbid).

Here are the columns that I use to keep dated track of things:
Date , Detail of Change, Page Changed, Notes ,Results

When you put this in Excel, you can look down the list to easily find the date, then quickly see what you did. Here are some sample data entries I entered that have helped explain traffic spikes:

ThatITGirl
6/21/08 | Emailed Katja at @skimbaco that I posted about her shirt
6/22/08 | @skimbaco tweeted "don't bug me" post | Got X number of hits

www.katie-james.com
8/24/06 | Posted 1st desktop art design to Sumbleupon at night | Got 200 hits
4/9/08 | Put up newsletter signup in side column. | No signups. Still dry. :(
4/20/08 | Put up new design of newsletter signup. | Signups!! Dryspell over!
5/08/08 | Sent Mothers Day email to newsletter subscribers. Subject line had "shipping coupon" in it. | No sales. However, higher open rate than usual. ChicagoTribune.com featured dog treat bag with mysteriously same copy I wrote in the newsletter. Hmm...Must have a subscriber at Tribune!

Because I do this for my own sites (shopping cart site + 2 blogs), as well as those of clients, I keep these changes on Worksheets on the same Excel document. That way, I don't have tons of documents floating around. But this is my personal organization style that might not work for you.

Just remember: Be mindful of changes you make to your website, so that if you do something good, you can repeat it, and if you do something bad, you can try to revert back to how it was and stop the bleeding!

Geek Blogger Gear: Don't Bug Me or I'll Blog About It!

Katja over at the Skimbaco.com blog released these t-shirts, and they are like a gift from the blogging goddesses! What a perfect statement: "Don't bug me, or I'll blog about it". That's right! That said, we all need to be careful, political, and stragical about what we blog about and the type of language we use, but there is reassurance that there is power in the people via online outlets, including blogs, Facebook status, Twitter feeds, and more and more and more. Still - I maintain - we who create content like this post, and we who comment or react to created content, must do so with dignity and from the high road.

But I still LOVE this t-shirt and bought one and a pack of postcards to send my friends who know of my blogging obsession, including my mother who fears the blog for stalkers. My own dad now knows, so when he tells me something important, he says: "Now DON'T put this on your blog. If I find out..." Or my boyfriend. He knows when to say "Don't put this on your blog."

Here are some examples of why not to ruffle the feathers of a blogger:

• I have a health insurance company who I like a lot. They went through some changes, and changed who the health insurance provider was. This was a bumpy process. When came time to choose a new policy in December, their phones were flooded, website rejected some signups for new policy, and they were overwhelmed with emails. All of this understandable for me. I followed up a few times via email. They told me to hold tight. Two months later, when I still didn't have a new insurance card, I emailed again. They told me that I had in fact terminated my coverage January 2nd, and that I would have to reapply. Luckily for me, they said, we were were still in the 'late registration' period, and sent me a PDF to fill out. I hate PDFs. I called them. I asked to not have to pay 2 months of insurance for which I wasn't covered. When they denied me that request, and insisted I fill out the PDF, I got grumpy asked to speak to their manager. I left a message on the manager's voicemail: "I don't want to pay for 2 months of coverage I didn't have! This is so dangerous! It's not like my cable ran out for 2 months! Or a phone bill! This is health insurance! If you don't put back my health insurance right now I will blog about it and put it on my Facebook!" They had my insurance back on that afternoon. No PDF required. I still had to pay the 2 months though, which is good, since if anything happened to me during that time, there would be no excuse not to cover it.
  
• My boyfriend works in film, and he got a "wrap" gift from one of the celebrities. This is a gift to thank you for your hard work. You just never know what to expect from these people with gobs of money. Tom Selleck, when Magnum PI ended, gave his people cars, or Rolexes or something. Last year, one film crew got iPhones when they came out. My boyfriend's wrap gift that he gave to his department crew was cool monogrammed zip-up black sweatshirts, from a little t-shirt shop he likes to give the business to. He tells me I'm not aloud to say what this certain big-time celebrity got for the crew, but lets just say he or his assistant (probably male) went to Staples, picked something up from one of those bins where they sell weird calculators and pencils, had it monogrammed with a message from the celeb, and called it a gift. Dang if I can't blog that, with picture! ;)
  

Here is my new flag for my office:

Are You Neglecting Your Blog for Twitter or Facebook?

I mean really!?! FashionMista.com is sorely neglected, all because I seem to spend extra energy in Twitter or Facebook. The Tweets just don't stop coming - be it the desire to create a Tweet or to read them. What will we do? The blog is so much more powerful, right? Long term links, photos, design, Comments with more links, and more conversations that just stay preserved in the Comment box.

Over at the Home Office Collectives group in Facebook, Carla of the blog RockStarLifeLessons.com pointed out that she too has been neglecting her blog for Twitter, saying: "I am LOVING twitter...to the point that I've been neglecting my blog...I suppose I'll eventually add a widget to my blog so my readers know that I'm still online ;-)"

So this is what it's come to. Widgets. A friend passed me a link once, to a video. Once again, I've sadly misplaced this link, but the guy, who you social techies out there probably know of, was discussing the then new technology to search for feelings on the web. Somehow, I think, this website conjured up lots of words from websites, and put them into one, live space. At the end of the video, he announced that the web page is dead. Not his web page, but the "web page", as in the form.

However, I still have my shopping cart, I still have this blog, people still visit it, link to it, link from it, Retweet it, etc. I still manage pages of other websites and track their traffic patterns. But I need to spend a little more time here, I believe.

Thoughts? Please chime in! ThatITGirl as a blog (not me as a person), is lonely with the neglect of its author! And FashionMista.com - don't get her started. She sees more mobile Flickr photo uploads that she knows what to do with.

Thank You Notes and Social Networking

Let me tell you, if you get involved with this social networking, don't think you're going to have friends and followers pouring in if you just sit there and watch the computer screen. Social networking requires a reach back into any kind of manners class your mom made you attend. Or maybe that was just my mom, pushing me to learn which fork to use at Manners Class one Saturday at the Stouffer's hotel in downtown Cleveland, back when there were Stouffer hotels :sniff:.

What my mom is a stickler about, however, are thank you notes. After each birthday party, the next day started with: "Did you write your thank you notes?" And who wants to hear that while they are still eating left over birthday cake? Same thing with Christmas. Speaking of Christmas, my Nana usually comes over to spend it with us, and brings bags of presents that she received from friends. Regardless if she liked them or not (usually it's a guaranteed "not" as she wonders why on earth someone would get her a chunky silver bracelet with onyx set in it, which I happily unburdened her from), she is more stressed about who gave her which present, and writes everything down immediately on a pad of paper that she brings from home.

The art of the thank you note. From a recommendation to a job, to a birthday wish on Facebook. Notes to people are usually always appreciated. I was quite bad at sending thank you notes. I may have failed to send my aunt a thank you note 3 years in a row. And then I noticed that I might not have gotten presents as frequently on my birthday, or at Christmas. I clued into this in college, and went on the offense by sending her Christmas cards (as a college student, just something non-family), or just made sure not to forget sending her a note when she did send something. What resulted was increased communication and presents to each other, and overall, a closer relationship.

This is not a ploy to get presents. This is an understanding of what acknowledgment of someone's effort can yield - both for you and the giver or well wisher. Each social network - Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, MySpace, Ladies Who Launch - has its own conversation style. For example, Facebook lets you know when it's a friend's birthday. You can sit idly by, making a mental note of the special day, or you can write on that person's Wall and wish them happy birthday. Or the reverse - your friends notice its your birthday, and send you well wishes, cards, virtual balloons and cakes. You can take it all in, feeling good, or you can go the extra mile and thank them on their Wall with a personal little note. As a birthday wisher, I am always happy to get some form of a "thank you!' from a friend, as I know we have thought of each other, and that's the whole point.

Are there times when you can thank too much? Perhaps. One Stumbler at StumbleUpon wrote a post encouraging website owners to thank random Stumblers who had bookmarked a page on their website (I can't find the link at the moment). I thought this a nice thought and good social strategy, but many Stumblers commented negatively on her blog and gave her a thumbs down in StumbleUpon, stating that they do get thanked, are overwhelmed with the notes, and hate it - with a passion! Yikes. Maybe those people should adjust their settings in StumbleUpon so that Stumble emails don't make it all the way to their gmail or yahoo accounts, and everything can be contained.

Before I digress any further, just know, that in order for social networking to work (ie make new friends, promote website pages, products, blog posts, other people's sales, etc.), you've got to participate and reciprocate. It's just the polite thing to do, and it will be remembered and appreciated.

Tweetworking (Twitter Networking) and Can Be Good for Business

"Twitter twitter, twitter, twitter twitter."
2:31 PM May 07, 2008 from web

That was my first entry into my Twitter.com account, @ktjames. When I logged in for the first time, I was met with a wall of words, individual conversations between people who referred to themselves with @ in the beginning of their names. Was I, a social networking addict, overwhelmed? Yes! I had been resisting Twitter, despite friends asking to become Twitter friends, because I knew it was such a ... busy place. So I became a fly on the wall, studied everyone's 140 character mini-mini-conversations, and started to converse with them slowly, until I realized that no one was talking back, and I was all alone. It prompted my next entry of brutal honesty:

"Feeling like I have no Twitter friends...talking to no one...can anyone hear me??"
12:53 PM May 09, 2008 from web

Feeling like an avatar lost at sea, I bobbed in an ocean of silence in my home office, waiting, then moved onto other projects. Suddenly, a little email landed in my gmail. It was a private, "DM" (aka Direct Message) from a Twitter friend who I didn't realize was "following" me (aka keeps tabs on all of my tweets). She said that sometimes no one replies, and that it can be lonely. Quite a humble statement from a woman who has plenty of followers herself, and has a big Twitter Star with over 800 followers visiting her, in person, with kids and husband. We are watching/reading the whole road trip on Twitter as the Twitter Star drives with her family and sends Twitters mobile updates from her cell phone.

Then I got another response:
ManicTrout @ktjames I hear ya! 01:56 PM May 09, 2008 from web

and then:

DeAnnaCochran @ktjames I hear ya. Sendin the luv your way :)
01:04 PM May 09, 2008 from web in reply to ktjames

And that's when I realized we were all like truckers on the information super highway, talking on our CBs. Many of us work from home. Many of us have children and work from home. What was once a very solitary place physically, has become a mentally cluttered, clucking place of, in my case, women talking to each other about life, dinner, ever expanding to-do lists, SEO articles, and more.

Is this Twitter a waste of time? It really is IMing on hyperspeed and can rob a lot of your time. Can it help your business? Well, if you look at it from the networking perspective, you are networking with people in other ways than job fairs or trade shows or meetup events. You are networking through your computer in condensed forms, which makes you be direct, to the point, a little witty, and a little honest. Women are very active in social networks, as these demographics from RapLeaf show. In an interview for Ladies Who Launch, Patricia Handschiegel, founder of StyleDaily.com (which she sold to Styehive.com), may have said it best: "The best thing women can do is network. Women entrepreneurs are different. There’s a loyalty between us … an honest bond."

Since then, I have seen my Twitter friends promote each other in wonderful and unexpected ways. They:

• Publicly welcome each other (goal: get more Twitter followers)
• Tinyurl each other, which condenses a long link into a very short link (goal: get traffic to website)
• Visit each other in person (goal: friendship)
• Share quick dinner ideas (goal: eating good food and providing for family)
• Identify with each other over kids or admin requirements (goal: feeling normal)

So should you do it for your business? Sure. How to do it for your business is a whole other article that would talk about finesse and genuine interest in others. It requires creativity in how and what you express to your online friends.

But for now, this business owner is hooked. When did I know I was hooked? When I twittered this:

"Goodnight Twitter! Have a good Midnight Maintenance!"
11:06 PM May 19, 2008 from web