Adventures In Visibility | Online Marketing for Small and Solo Businesses | Denise Wakeman
How to Get Better Visibility on the Web
No surprise here…the most clicked link was… The Astonishing Difference a Smile Can Make. Even though we cannot see your smile under a mask, your eyes reveal your smile. It’s known as the Duchenne smile.
“A Duchenne smile is the one that reaches your eyes, making the corners wrinkle up with crow’s feet. It’s the smile most of us recognize as the most authentic expression of happiness.” Source
On this episode of Adventures in Visibility, I had the pleasure of hosting Rich Brooks, founder of flyte new media. Our conversation (more like a crash course) was about how to boost your visibility with SEO and get better conversion on your blog/website.
Rich Brooks is founder and president of flyte new media, a web design and marketing firm in Portland, Maine. He is a nationally recognized speaker on entrepreneurship, Internet marketing and social media.
Rich is currently an Expert Blogger at FastCompany.com and a regular contributor at SocialMediaExaminer.com. Rich is a founder of The Agents of Change Digital Marketing Conference, an annual conference on search, social and mobile marketing.
He runs The Marketing Agents Podcast, where he interviews marketing experts from around the world on search, social and mobile marketing.
This is a guest post by Matthew Hooper of MatthewHooper.com.
Keyword research is a great way for you to discover potential content ideas for your website. Very often, blog owners either don't know the right phrases to be targeting or they target the wrong keyword. Great headlines, great content and a great message all sound, well, great but if nobody is finding your blog then you're talking to yourself. Furthermore, your efforts are all going out the window. This is where doing a bit of research can go a long way. Search traffic will keep coming long after you had published the post.
In order to demonstrate, below is a short screencast on how to search for targetable keywords. The focus of this video is to identify keyword phrases using Google's free keyword search tool and then hone down the phrases in order to end up with a phrase that is less competitive.
(Can't see the video? To watch on YouTube, click here.)
Are you strategically using keywords in your blog posts? Do you know the words you use most on your blog?
In a cool tool called Wordle, you can find out exactly what words you emphasize in your content by creating a word cloud. This can be revealing and enlightening to demonstrate the keywords that you are actually using and for which you might show up in search engine results.
Here's the Wordle for this site:
Even though I write about "visibility" a lot, it's interesting to see that it's not a dominant word.
Here's how Wordle describes their "toy":
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
Creating a Wordle is super easy. Paste your blog URL into the correct field and click "Submit." A cool alterntive is creating a Wordle from a specific set of words. I can see doing this to create an image to promote a product, book, services and featuring words that convey the emotions, benefits and features.
Regardless of how you use it, Wordle is a fun tool to play with (you can tweak the colors, fonts, and layout) to discover the primary words you use on your blog or to create a specific message.
If you create a Wordle, post a link in the comments so we can check it out!
Recently I had the pleasure of chatting with Karon Thackston, a copywriting and SEO (search engine optimization) expert. After attending her presentations on keyword research at a Niche Affiliate Marketing System Workshop (NAMS), I wanted to get share some of her expertise with my community. Karon is straight-forward, down to earth and has very deep knowledge about how to write for the web – and that includes blog posts. You can listen to the 23 minute audio interview and read the complete transcript below. Please post your questions for Karon in the comments and I'll invite her to swing by and respond.
