Tips on Creating Keywords

Before you start working on SEO, you need to identify your keywords. Keywords are essentially phrases that you’re hoping people will search for on Google and find your business. If you own a sporting goods store in Colorado, your keywords are “sporting goods Colorado.” Companies can have many keywords at once, but it’s best to try to narrow it down. The same sporting goods store can use “rock climbing Colorado” or “camping equipment Colorado,” but remember that the more you have, the more your resources will be stretched thin. I’ll explain that further down. The reason why I included the location in the keywords is because local businesses are targeting a local audience. If you are targeting a national or online audience, your location will not be a keyword.

A good place to research keywords is Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends/, When you type a search phrase into Google Trend’s query box, it will tell you how popular that search currently is on Google. It looks like this:

When a number is at 100 on the line graph, this means it is at it’s highest point of popularity. Often times, that means it’s also at its peak, but not always. Your keywords are generally pretty successful if they are at a high number and have a recent trend going only up. Going down isn’t the worst, as you never know when something will revive its popularity. For example, “Tiger Woods” was probably a popular search term during his last scandal a few years ago. If Tiger Woods does something to end up in the news again, the search term will most likely go up in popularity. If you do choose keywords that are heading downwards, you need to predict that, in the future, they will regain popularity.

Keep in mind that the “Region interest” section is a great one for helping you identify your audience.

After you’ve picked some keywords, try to put them into your domain name. This helps with SEO. Even if you don’t put them in your domain name, you want to have them in your website a lot. This includes lots of blog posts, tags on pictures, interspersed throughout your content, etc. Be careful though – too much is overkill. The rule of thumb is to use a keyword specific to one blog post only 3 times, including once in the title. Use the same keywords as tags on your blog posts and when you share your content on social media platforms.

The desired result is that your name will be at the top of the page when someone searches for those keywords. This is why I said you don’t want too many – for all of your keywords, you have to do a lot of work to optimize your website. However, you don’t want to go the opposite way and have too few either, otherwise you’ll only dominate one search phrase. How many you have will depend on your business, how many products/services you provide, and what you think your customers will search for.

And that’s pretty much it for keywords for now. Comments, questions, concerns, and anecdotes are welcome below.

How to Use Twitter Analytics

In the last post we talked about Facebook analytics. I discussed how valuable a tool analytics is, and how it can really help guide your posts to a more successful place. This time, I want to talk more about Twitter analytics.

Just like Facebook analytics, Twitter analytics will give you data on how many people viewed your post, how many times your post was retweeted/shared/replied to, and how many times your links were clicked on. This is important for businesses that are trying to generate traffic to their website.

For Twitter analytics, go to ads.twitter.com. This is the website where companies can buy promotions for their posts as a form of advertising. However, you do not need to pay any money or buy any promoted posts in order to view your analytics. Just enter your account information, and wonderful data should appear in the “Analytics” section on the top right of the page. (Data should appear. Of the 3 Twitter business accounts I manage, on one of them the “Analytics” tab does not show up. I don’t know why that is yet. If you know why, please comment below and let me know!)

The “Analytics” section gives you information about your posts and your followers. If this isn’t working, Simply Measured will give you a free report on your Twitter followers here: http://simplymeasured.com/free-social-media-tools#report-20. I have yet to see any other Twitter analytics tools that are free, but I also haven’t looked very hard.

It should look something like this:

Twitter analytics is a useful tool because it can tell you optimal times to post and hashtags that generate a lot of interaction. Without this tool, trying to create successful tweets is a shot in the dark. This removes much of the guesswork. You can also find out which posts work well and which ones don’t. It might be a harsh reality for those who think that they are funny, but actually aren’t. But it will help your business.

Your followers data will look like this:

Knowing who your followers are will help you create better content. In this picture, most of the followers are interest in technology and tech news. From that you can gather that tweets about technology generate the most interest. The “Your followers also follow” allows you to check out your competition. Research them a little and copy their successful methods.

So I hope that helps! Good luck with your tweeting. And please comment with questions, suggestions, corrections, success stories, or jokes about Twitter below!

A Guide to Facebook Analytics

Analytics are the tools you use to determine your effect on social media platforms. It will give you invaluable insights, such as how many people clicked on your link, when your fans are online, who shared your content, and more. Analytics can help you determine the optimal timing, content, and angle of your posts on social networks.

So where do you find analytics? Each social media platform has their own. Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google, and even Instagram all have different methods (though they will give you roughly the same information). A lot of the access to analytics depends on whether or not you have a business account, instead of a personal account, on each of these platforms. So first things first – make sure your account is strictly for business! For the social media platforms that need you to have a business account, they also have specific instructions on how to convert your current account into a business account.

 

Let’s start with Facebook. Business on Facebook have converted into “pages.” Instructions on how to create a Facebook page are here: https://www.facebook.com/business/build. Once you are the admin of a Facebook business page, you will be able to see lots of information at the top of your page that no one else can see (unless they too are an admin). This section includes post information, messages from other Facebook users, a place to invite friends to like your page, and “Get More Likes.”

 

Facebook has added a new feature, a section labeled “Insights.” The “Insights” section is your Facebook analytics. (It’s the one in the middle of the bottom row.)

Your insights will have a lot of graphs like this one. The sections are “Overview,” “Page,” “Posts,” and “People.”

Information under “Posts,” will tell you which type of content has done the best. Note that sometimes the number in people “reached” versus “engagement” can differ. If your business’s goal is to get more visitors to your Facebook page, then “reached,” is the important data. If your goal is people following links back to your business’s website, then “engagement” is what’s important for you.

Also under “Posts” is the subheader “When Your Fans Are Online.” This is great information. Knowing when your fans are active on Facebook will help guide you to the ideal time to post new statuses.

The “People” section will also help you determine the type of content to post. It can tell you the age ranges, genders, languages, and country of your fans. This can be really helpful as you can adjust how you gear your information. For instance, younger people will most likely respond better to memes and pop culture references.

So hopefully this will help you understand analytics better and you can begin the process of using analytics. Let us know if you have any thoughts, comments, or questions!

Guest Posting for SEO

Many bloggers today use guest posting to promote their blog. This is a great strategy because both the original blog owner and the guest poster are sharing their audiences with each other.

This is also great for SEO purposes. Having more links to your blog will help get you to the top of Google’s search results. But how do you even begin a guest post strategy?

If you don’t already interact with other blogs, start now. If you have favorite blogs, definitely comment on them often (but be honest and sincere – not a spammer with constant comments!). If you find blogs that are similar to yours, especially in the topics, also establish a relationship with them.

If your friends have blogs, arrange some post trading. While re-blogging content is okay, it’s better for both of you if you share original content.

Once you have established relationships with other bloggers, first ask them to be a guest poster on your blog. Send them a quick email or comment. You can tell them that you really liked their thoughts on a certain topic, and ask them to write a post for you expounding on that original post. Or maybe they could write a similar post, but from a different angle. For example, if one person has some really good thoughts on fishing, ask them to write about fishing specifically in your area. If someone writes about living on an extreme budget, ask them how they plan birthday parties with very few expenses. There’s lots of ways they can repurpose content for you. Or, they could write something completely brand new!

After they have successfully written a post for you, tell them that you would love to return the favor sometime. Even if a blogger doesn’t yet want a guest post from you, it is important to maintain any good relationships you’ve created. Remember how hard it was to get to this point?

When you’ve finally been asked to write a guest post to publish on someone else’s blog, make sure you do your best work. You definitely don’t want this debut to be a throwaway piece. Try to write about something similar to the topics you’ve written about before. This will not only give new reader’s a taste of what your blog is generally like, but will also create tons of backlink opportunities for you. Not know what “backlinking” is? Check out this very post. I’ve already inserted 3 different backlinks into the text. Can you find them? Look at the hyperlinks – the words underlined and turned blue. Now click on them. Did they take you to another website? If you mention another blog post in your guest post, make sure to include a hyperlink to it. This will increase traffic to your website, as well as help your SEO rankings.

If you don’t want to use your relationships to create guest posting opportunities, try a few different websites that will allow you to post your guest post to a directory. Then blog owners will be able to find your post and publish it to their website. This will draw in random viewers that would not normally be able to obtain. One such website is http://myblogguest.com/, but there are many others!

So good luck with your guest posting strategy!