Our friend Joe has a personal website (www.joemillman.com) and blog (http://blog.joemillman.com).  Here’s our free advice to him and anyone with a personal website who wants to get high on Google — our tips for personal promotion with SEO. 

1. Get a Google Webmaster Account

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Add the following as “sites”:

• www.joemillman.com
• http://joemillman.com
• http://blog.joemillman.com

a. Verify your website(s) according to the instructions. Under settings, make www.joemillman.com the preferred domain for all your personal websites. This will make sure Google doesn’t treat http://joemillman.com and www.joemillman.com as different sites. You’re telling Google they’re the same site.

b. Check on who’s linking to you. In the world of personal promotion, a link is like a vote. A link from a industry-relevant, a trustworthy or a popular partner will be worth more than some guy blogging in his underwear.

c. The Google webmaster tool will also tell you if Google’s having trouble indexing your site.

d. With this same login info, Create a local business listing on Google Maps:

http://www.google.com/local/add

The terms you put in the site title and description should be your best search terms, as the search engines will pick up the terms in these fields when displaying local search results. In other words, use your search keywords IN your title and description.

How do you know the “best” keywords for personal promotion?

Good question, I’m glad you asked…

2. Understand the keyword terms that you want to go after.

When promoting personal and small websites, remember that when you’re starting out, people search on the services they’re after, not your brand or name.

This is the number one personal promotion tip, EVER…

Place yourself in front of people by understanding the terms that they use to describe your services, NOT the terms you think describe your services.

a. Where are you already doing well? Login to the webmaster tool above and go to “Top Search Queries” > More. The “Impressions” column will tell you what terms you rank in the top 30. “Queries” will tell you which terms people are clicking on.

b. What terms do you want to go after? Find your target keywords with this tool:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Because you shouldn’t be competing with the big boys in your industry, you should identify “long tail” keywords with search volumes less than 3,000 per month.

This is the best SEO strategy for personal websites. Go after low volume (but not too low) terms first with new content (explained next) and links (also explained below). Then, once you’ve ranked on some of the three and four keyword terms, go after ones with higher search volume.

3. Write your blog posts and pages to target those terms.

a. Use one target term in the post or page header and content.

b. Make a spreadsheet, which you can use as a tracking tool to remember which terms you target.

4. Add Google Analytics to both your site and blog. Analyze your stats monthly. Get to know your users and traffic.

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Be sure to set up goals, to track the number of conversions.

5. Set up Yahoo Explorer for your personal website and blog

• http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

a. Verify the sites.

b. Check the inbound links from elsewhere on the web to your sites.

6. Submit your personal website and blog to Bing.

http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx

7. Get a Bing Webmaster Account and verify both your personal site and blog.

http://www.bing.com/webmaster

8. Submit your site and blog to the DMOZ.

Go to www.dmoz.org and find the right category and top right, click on “Suggest URL.”

Many websites and search engines get their info from this grandaddy of all directories.

9. Find other relevant directories to place your listing.

Start here: http://www.directorycritic.com

Pay only for links that have a Page Rank of 3 or better, and have high traffic volume (compared to others you find in your industry).

• Check Page Rank here
• Check traffic volume here

10. Get some link love.

Find other bloggers, trade publications, and related websites and ask them to link to you. Request that the link text be your target keywords (call me if you don’t understand this). Go after only sites with higher relative traffic and Page Rank using the tools above.

a. When requesting a link, offer to link to them in your blog or on your site. Keep a tracking sheet. Here’s a huge secret to optimizing links. If you can get the text of the link to be the term you’re going after. Great! If you can get that link to go deep into your site, directly to the page that is optimized for that term. Even better.

Here’s an example of a great link: Finding the right blog keyword. (The text is my target keyword and it links deep into the site to a page that targets that keyword).

b. Join forums or social sites in your niche and post thoughtful comments. Add links back to your sites.

That’s it for personal promotion with SEO. Go Joe and get high on Google!

If you want some help implementing some of these suggestions, contact us and ask about our personal promotion SEO services.

How do we chose a keyword for our blog posts?

If you want people to read your blogs, you need a strategy for every blog post to get found in search engines. In other words, you should SEO your individual blog posts. This starts, like any SEO project, with good keyword research.

Our approach is to fish where the big fish are. We’ll chose a blog post topic AFTER THE KEYWORD RESEARCH! This post for example, started as an idea about Blog SEO, but after researching what people are searching on, we decided there was too much competition on the term “Blog SEO”  (40,500 searches last month) and narrowed the scope to “blog keyword” (2,400 searches last month) as part of our long tail strategy. And hey, you found us!

Tip: A search on the plural of a word or phrase is not the same as a search on the singular. In the above example, there were only 1,000 searches last month for “blog keywords” so we went with “blog keyword” which had 2,400.

So how do I chose the right blog keyword?

At periscopeUP, we use the same three factors we would for finding the right keyword for a web page:

• Search volume
• Competition
• Return on Investment (ROI)

We don’t have a formula to weigh the three factors, but try to find a balance. For example, the higher search volume or competition, the tougher it will be to rank on page one, but if from our analytics we know a certain keyword will provide a better ROI, we may want to go after it anyway, even if it will take us several months to rank well. For this post, our goal was page one quickly, not high search traffic.

Determining Blog Keyword Search Volume

We like the old standby, the Google External Keyword Tool. It will give you both global search and local search volume.

Be careful here, because the use of the word “local” is misleading. According to Google, it means search volume “specific to your targeted country” as opposed to global search volume which “includes traffic in all countries and languages.” We’ve suggested to Google that they make local search volume available as a radius from your city or town. To us, this would be more valuable “local” information.

Determining Competition

There are a few ways we determine competition for a keyword. The first is the number of results for a specific search. Search Google, and on the top right, you’ll see the number of results returned for that term, or the number of pages that are “competing” for this term.

Here’s what it looks like:

Blog Keyword Selection

The other way we judge competition is by spying. Use a site like compete.com (paid) or spyfu.com (free) to see what you’re competition is up to.

Tip: log into your Adwords account when you research search volume, and you’ll get the Cost Per Click of what people are paying to bid on terms. This will also give you an indication of competition in the marketplace.

Determining ROI

You can only determine if a keyword phrase will provide a good return on investment if conversion tracking set up on your analytics tool. It’s best to have several months of data, but the idea is to determine which keywords lead to the most cost effective leads, your cost per conversion. This is an involved topic, subject to another post, but if you setup Google Analytics, for example, to track conversion goals, you should be able to run reports and determine which terms produce and which do not, and at what cost.

Conclusion

The fastest way to get a blog post high on search is to select your topic and write your post AFTER you select your keyword term(s).

Your next step after selecting your blog keyword would be to write the post and optimize it for that keyword. Don’t forget to track your SERPs and build optimized links directly to your posts to push your blog post up the search engine results.

There are 35.3 million moms online with children under the age of 18 — a number projected to reach 36.9 million by 2012.

• There are only about 40 million moms, total, with children that age, across the U.S.

• Of the 36.2 million women actively participating in the blogosphere weekly as either publishers or readers, 46% — or just over 16.5 million — have children at home.

• 67% of moms online look for help making a purchasing decision.

• 78% of moms who blog review products.

Here’s the article on mommy bloggers.

I interpret this move as Google’s way of making sure bloggers are open about what links and content (for things like product reviews) they were paid to include.

This will surely have wide ranging implications on the SEO of blogs and how marketing agencies will use bloggers to promote their clients’ products and services.

My only hope is that Google will clearly clarify what they define as a paid link. For example, if a blogger recieves a tee-shirt for blogging about a product, are links they include considered “paid” ?

I also wonder how will Google determine if a link was paid?