Top 10 tips on SEO for your website

#1  Content

As cliché as it sounds this is the number one for any search marketing strategy, it is so important to ensure that you have quality content that is relevant and worth viewing. This is so simple but so crucial, giving a person a reason to visit your site is the keystone to great SEO. There are a lot of great sites with tips on finding inspiration for writing content that works.

#2 Incoming Links

The more links you have the more often you are going to be crawled. The easier it is for a person to find you the easier it is for search engines to crawl your website content. Linking to other sites with good content through anchor text will help both you and the site you link to. It is also important to make sure that you have content that is worth linking to on your site. Another great way to build links is posting your url on credible social media sites. Search engines already trust most of the big social media sites so posting your website url on your profile will really help with getting crawled and make it easier for people to find your site.

#3 Web site title

Making sure that you have effective site titles for your pages is extremely important. The keywords you place in your title are important in order to ensure that your topic is understood by Google. One of the primary factors for ranking is if the title is on-topic with the search results. It is important for robots to index and understand the topic of each page on your site. It is also important for click-through rates in the search results. Pay attention to what you click on when you are searching in Google, I know that I don’t always click the first results. Using great titles and topics on your site will bring you more traffic than a number one listing.

#4 Heading tags

When you are laying out your site’s content you have to be sure that you are creating the content flow in such a way that the heading tags are based on prominence. The most prominent of course being the h1 tag, which says what this block of copy is about. Making sure you understand heading tag structure is very important. You only want to have one (or two) h1 tags per a page that are your main keywords.

#5 Internal Linking

Internal linking helps search engine robots (and visitors!) find the content on your site. Using relevant copy throughout your site will tell visitors more effectively what to expect on the corresponding page.

#6 Keyword Density

Ensure that you have the right keyword density for your page and sites topic. You don’t want to go overboard and use the keyword every 5th word but making sure it appears consistently is going to help you rank better in search engines. The unspoken rule is no more than 5% of the total copy per page. Anymore then this and it can start to look a little spammy. Granted, you aren’t shooting for 5% every time. What is key is context and relevance.

#7 Sitemaps

It is always a good idea to give search engines a helping hand to find the content that is on your site. Making sure that you create and maintain a sitemap for all of the pages on your site will help the search robots to find all of the pages in your site and index them. Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask all support sitemaps and most of them offer a great way to ensure that it is finding your sitemap. Most of the time you can simply name it sitemap.xml and the search robot will find the file effectively.

#8 Meta Tags

Everyone will tell you that meta tags don’t matter, they do. They aid your click-through rate and help images on your website appear in search engines. There will be a lot of times when Google will use your meta description as the copy that gets pulled with your search listing. This can help to attract the visitor to visit your web site if it is related to their search query. Definitely a much overlooked (as of late) ranking factor. Getting indexed by search engines and ranking well is just the first step. The next, and biggest, step is getting that visitor that searched for your keywords to want to click on your search listing.

#9 Update

Regularly update SEO friendly content to your pages often to keep things fresh and relevant.

#10 Domain

It can help to have keywords you are interested in ranking for within your domain, but only as much as the title, heading and content matters. One very important factor that is coming to light is that domain age is important. The older the site or domain, the more likely it is not spam and the better it does in search results. The domain age definitely isn’t a make or break factor but it does help.

FREE TIP!

It can sometimes take Google a month or more to crawl your site so if it is not appearing on search engines that could be why.

Time Management and Setting Priorities

We all struggle with setting our priorities straight and dealing with time management. When planning your next steps for the day or where you want to go strategically over the next year or few years, understanding your priorities is key.

Having worked with many non-profit and small businesses on creating strong strategic plans I discovered this handy tool. 

Give it a shot and tell me what you think!

 

Draw a table with four quadrants, and sort each of your tasks into one. The four quadrants are:

1. Necessity (urgent and important): Emergencies, deadlines, well-prepared meetings. These need to be done first.
2. Quality (important): Planning, implementation, and your own development. Maximize the time spent in this area, because it generates value in the long run.
3. Deception (urgent): emails, paperwork, badly prepared meetings. Try to get rid of as much as possible.
4. Waste (not urgent and not important): Browsing. Reading random posts on Facebook. Junk mails. Waste is toxic. Don't touch it! If you need a break, find yourself a distraction that has nothing to do with computers.

Assigning tasks to the four quadrants is a good way to quickly make a plan for the day - especially the first day after vacations.

Inbound Marketing 101

Inbound Marketing: The Building Blocks

Inbound marketing techniques include content such as blogs, white papers, and articles; search engine optimization (SEO); social networking; and landing page optimization.

People go straight to the internet to avoid those hard sales pitches. You know the ones I am talking about, Mr. Sham-wow. In the new world where buyers are in control of self-educating, your job as a marketer is not to find leads; it is to help leads find you. Outbound marketing has gotten too forceful, annoying and thus less effective for customers.

INBOUND MARKETING DEFINED: The process of helping prospective clients find you - sometime before they are even looking to purchase – turning that preference into brand loyalty and revenue.

It’s about engaging your customer with informative, interesting and even better entertaining content. It is important to optimize content and distribute across the various channels of communication.

Luckily when you have customers actively searching for you on the web their anti-sales shields are down making them far more receptive and trusting of you and your brand. Out with sham-wow and in with the passive peace offering marketer. This creates relationships and engagement that traditional marketing did not allow.

Content: The Keystone to Inbound Marketing

Content engages with prospects, customers and possible gate-keepers which is why it needs to be relative and of the highest quality. Content must inspire, educate, wow and stand out against the bombardment of information. Facebook and other such social media sites have become strict against promotional sales pitchy content as a reflection of how people want to make buying decisions. Prospects “find” you.

Different Types of Content:

      Articles

      Blog Posts

      Books/eBooks

      Brochures

      Case Studies

      Demos

      Email

      Free Trials

      Images

      Information Guides

      Live Streamed Events

      Manuals

      Microsites/Web Pages

      Online Courses

      Podcasts/Videocasts

      Presentations

      Press Releases

      Product Data Sheets

      Reference Guides

      Resource Libraries

      RSS/XML Feeds

      Surveys

      Radio/TV/Web TV

      Videos

      Webinars/Webcasts

      White Papers

      Widgets

        Workbook

Increasing Your Presence on SEO and Social

SEO is about optimizing your online visibility so prospective customers can find you easily before your competitors. It’s about increasing the chances of landing on your site and online content by including keywords that help you rank high in organic search results. The higher the content and site ranks in search engine’s the more likely people will click on the link to your content and start engaging. Continuing with adding new and fresh content will help keep you on first page rankings. With new sites going live every minute each day having fresh relevant content becomes necessary.

Making content worthy of sharing is the gold ticket. Once people share your content via social media connect you exponentially and instantly expand your web reach.

Where People Go Wrong with Inbound Marketing

Even with inbound marketing there needs to be focus. Too often people bombard the internet with tonnes of content to everyone. Even online marketing needs focus and should be specifically targeted to the right people, your ideal customers. Delivering quality content to the correct people in the most engaging way through multiple channels including email, direct mail and phone is integral to creating the right marketing mixed approach. Those in the early stages of buying are looking for content that addresses their problems and educates, rather than promotes. Content needs to be a mix of problems and solutions. Sharing your content where your prospects spend time is crucial. You aren’t reaching the decision makers, the influencers or gate-keepers. There is too much noise so you have to stand out, be creative with your content and be different.

* And remember nurture your current clients because they are all you have. Let them be the source of your new clients.

Stronger than diamonds better than gold

This story has taken me 11 months to finally sit down and tell. How appropriate the number 11. It used to be my favourite number, a number I was always naturally drawn to maybe because it’s parallel well balanced promise of 1 next to 1. Turns out the number 11 would stand for many horrific memories in my years to come. 9/11 marked the day of horrific pain for many of those who lost their families to an ongoing selfish war between the U.S. and the Middle East. For me 31/7/11 all numbers I was always attracted to that I used on lottery tickets for years, would be inverted into numbers that would symbolize terrible loss for me and my family.

No words seem to be the right ones to begin the telling of this story. It was a dreadful fateful awful painful day. Well for starts it started out as a new day of promise for me. I had just started a job in retail hoping to balance my life out while I did some serious soul searching to figure out what career would swallow me whole and hopefully bring me great joy. So in this transitional year I decided to spend my days work as a youth worker at night, which I thoroughly loved and I worked as a fashion advisor during the day. On that day I was in training. I remember sitting in the training early in the morning and feeling sick to my stomach. My gut was restless, sleep was not had the night before, I felt super anxious. All these feelings I assigned to that training day and meeting new people. 

In the midst of my perfectly normal training session was an eerie out of body experience that overwhelms me even to this day. Before I tell I want to make something perfectly straight. I do not go to psychics or mediums, I am a cynic, I do not attend church; believe in greater powers; divine for water; look to the heavens for guidance. 

But on that day I felt a tremendous feeling of loss. I felt something from within me being yanked out and then surrounding me in an embrace. It was as if I was being wrapped in an invisible blanket. That blanket was saying “I love you. Good-bye”. I remember being suddenly overcome with tears, my lower abdomen felt as if a child had been ripped from my body.  In that moment I had no idea what was going on.

Now let me tell you a bit about my sister. She and I had a normal healthy relationship filled with sibling rivalry in our youth, leading to continuous fights in our teenage years, which gave birth to a unique sisterly friendship that went much deeper than blood. I supported and fought for her each and every day, while she taught me how to embrace the moment, accept the unacceptable and let go on my instinctive cynicism. 

Now although our love and friendship was strong she was given the gift of what many psychiatrists have described as an Autism Spectrum Disorder. In other words, she had a really big bubble. Regardless of that big protective bubble she has a heart of gold. Her physical space was important to her, she did not usually understand other people at all, she was unable to imagine how someone else might think or anticipate what they might do unless it came down to numbers and strategy. This gift gave her the passion and mind to play hockey 24/7. She lived, breathed and dreamed of hockey every waking moment. She gave her all to the sport and to its community. As a triumphant fundraiser and someone who really did not care or understand what other people may think she did what she did without every hurting others. She actually did not know how to hurt people emotionally and mentally, she could hardly wrap her brain around her own feelings and inner psyche. So her space was big but her heart reached so far out that you would have never known. 

Children were her soft spot. She gravitated towards them as if they were something so unique, sacred and her idols. She worshipped children and beamed when the little ones were around her.  She trusted them and they trusted her. She hugged them everytime she saw them, held their hand and taught them how to walk. She was dedicated to two things in life hockey and children. 

I remember I used to admire those children. I wanted to be them. She was their big sister. She was the cool grown-up who wanted to teach them everything and loved everything they said and did. I loved watching the interactions she would have with them. It was her bubble would pop and in they went. She was my older sister but I protected her as if she was always my own child.

I was never allowed too close to my sister. She once sat on my feet when I was sleeping in bed and I have always remembered the warmth of her body. For many years when I was as a little one up to 3 years old I made my sister share her double bed because I wanted to be next to her. We were close as sisters but never once did we hug. 

That day, I knew that that was what a hug felt like and my gut screamed that it was a child of mine. When the police officers came into my house a few hours later and confirmed my hysterical thoughts I knew that what happened earlier that day was something I would struggle to accept. I wasn’t ready for good-byes and did not want that to be our first and last hug. 

She was an awful driver. My family had prepared for the day for years. Anything with wheels was not a good choice. 

Her first wheels, roller blades had to fall face first into cement and permanently scar her upper lip. She kept roller blading. I still shake my head at the memory. Her first bike, she rode it everywhere. I remember the day I was called home from school, I was in elementary school, they would not say what was wrong they just said it was a family emergency. The guy who lived across the street from us our whole childhood years drove by me on my race home, rolled down the window and asked what was wrong with my sister, he heard she had gotten into an accident. I was not fit and definitely a chubby little child but I ran like I was the next Donavan Bailey. My sister was in the hospital, by the time I was home my mom said they were releasing her with just some bumps, scrapes, and a bad knee. She limped for the rest of her life after that accident. Some guy did not look right before he turned left and drove almost over my sister. The bike saved her and was demolished under the tires of the car. She kept riding her bike everywhere. 

And then she started to drive, later than most, and oh what fun that was. Car after car she demolished in her own version of monster truck wars. Each accident was worse than the next. She went under a truck once and it peeled off the roof of her car, her quick reflex from years of sports saved her life as she dove down and snuggled up next to her break pads. Year after year she incurred motor vehicle injuries, increased her insurance until I am pretty sure she broke the Guinness book of records for the highest car insurance in Canada. Each car shook when they saw her coming towards them. She had some pretty damn bad luck when she got behind the car. It was terrifying being so protective over her and knowing that accident after accident she continued to drive. I begged her to move to the city where public transportation was readily available and chosen by many as the preferable mode of transportation over driving themselves. She just kept driving.

She was also full of heart on the ice but so small, never anticipated others or could predict what others were about to do. So she was bashed, crashed, mushed and hit against the boards and ice so many times she became an illegal player. She dreamt of the big leagues, but they could not get an insurance policy on her as a player. She had had way too many concussions.

I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine who is a neurologist now for the W.H.O. who insisted I get my sister in contact with her so she might be able to study the amount of grey matter that my sister had accumulated after all her accidents and sports injuries. Surely her brain was a ticking time bomb, with one more blow likely to end her. She was warned by referees, trainers, coaches, my parents, doctors and myself that she needed to move to the bench and dedicate more time to coaching and less to playing. She started refereeing which she loves and all of us loved as well.

So on that day when the police officers said she was gone. We all thought it was her driving. My parents were at the cottage and I was in my apartment. But in union we agreed that her driving and bad luck on wheels was what would win her life over. But it wasn’t a car accident, it wasn’t a blow to the head, it wasn’t a sports injury. It was her heart. That heart of gold ore was not strong enough to protect her against one person her she let into her bubble. A person that invaded it, refused to leave and stopped her heart from beating onwards.

This is a story that took my 11 months to tell. A story that shows how what can kill the most is trust, a big heart and a belief in the good of others. But that is not the moral she would want told. Her big heart was a gift; it changed many people’s lives. Her passion and love was what lives on. Her flag hangs above our heads in the arena where she was a pioneer of women’s hockey. Where she taught some of our Olympic medal female hockey players how to skate and play with your head and heart, to achieve gold. 

Her memorial was on the rink where I last saw her play in the summer of 2011. The line-up was out the recreation centre’s doors. The centre was packed. It was estimated that well over 500 people attended the ceremony in her memory. Afterwards everything was cleaned up and the ball was dropped; a game of ball hockey was played in her honor with a blown up picture of her laughing looking over the game.  Her smile lived on and so too will her generosity and love of the game.