So how do you choose the right keywords for your enterprise’s website? Depending on whom you ask, there are many ways to go about it, many online tools—Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery—that you can use, and a number of places to get started. But the important thing to remember is that no online tool or SEO expert knows your business as well as you do.

That’s why a brainstorming session should be a part of beginning an SEO or PPC campaign. Bring in everyone who’s important to your business and start talking; write down as many phrases as you can and don’t worry about repeating yourself or weeding things out just yet. Make a big, long list of all the ways people might try to find your site online.

Now you’re ready to turn to the tools, the online wizards, the keyword experts. They’ll help you figure out which keywords are most natural, most relevant, most specific, and most often searched. From there, you really can begin to realize the extent of keyword power.

These hints (with some liberties taken, of course) are excerpted from our white paper, Keyword Power: Optimize with Attention-Grabbing Keywords. To download this and other whitepapers, stop here and drop us a line.

But there’s a giant upside, probably accounting for all those folks taking that 25^th hour to learn more and do more to market online. All of that sweat equity can deliver sharper focus and more success.

Take social media marketing.

There’s a learning curve when you begin blogging, Facebooking, Twittering, etc., and it takes time to get started. But these venues are designed for the average time-challenged human being. They’re forgiving, a necessity for busy entrepreneurs, right? You can dip a toe into social media marketing any time, day or night, and then build on it at a pace you can handle.

Who has time to Facebook? Why Twitter? The answer to these questions may be a few other questions: Who are my customers? What are my customers looking for? What are my peers in my industry thinking about and what are they saying?

So maybe you can’t afford a PR firm to answer these questions for you, but you sure can Tweet, Facebook, blog and, generally, jump in on the conversation. You can get some answers.

There are guides to social media marketing out there for sure, written by enthusiasts eager to share their struggles and successes. Consider us one of them, because we are sold on the marketing power of social media. Here’s a white paper to help you get started on getting social: “Using Social Media Marketing to Drive Traffic to Your Website” (more)

Follow-up reading: Wondering how social media marketing helps with SEO? Steve Fisher addresses the effect social media is having on search engine listings.

Three Ways Social Media Helps SEO

Search Engine Land has three ways Social Media helps SEO and they are:

1) Getting quality, relevant inbound links – The best thing about this is that the majority (if not all) of the links that come from a social media marketing campaign are natural links; they’re not reciprocated, bought, or solicited

2) Using social media websites for reputation management – Lots of social media sites, especially the more popular ones, rank very well within the search engines. This can be both a positive and negative thing when it comes to managing your reputation.

3) Ranking pages on social media websites – If you’re launching a brand new site and you know it’s going to be awhile before it ranks, you might want to consider uploading some videos to YouTube or creating a MySpace profile and building a few good links to it. I’m not saying it’s better to have these pages rank than your own site, but it’s definitely better than not having anything ranked.

Social Media and SEO from Mashable

A few months ago there was a great article from Mashable on “Social Media and SEO“. Below is a partial exceprt:

From a marketing standpoint, you can look at the benefits of SEO and social media two different ways:

First, implementing a social media marketing program without optimizing content is leaving money on the table. Useful social content (blog, video, images, audio) that cannot be discovered via search is a lost opportunity to reach an audience that is looking.

For example, the popular blog about student loans and college financing from Wells Fargo identifies 29 keywords in its Keyword Meta Tag and doesn’t rank in Google’s first page for 26 of them. Those that do rank are variations of the blog’s name.

While there is a generous amount of cross linking within posts, a basic blog template optimization effort leveraging keywords and other minor adjustments could improve search traffic for this site substantially – without any compromise in content quality or user experience.

Social interactions and media sharing amongst social network participants create the kind of content that can improve a brand’s visibility within search results through profiles, videos, blog posts, or other media. A good example is Stormhoek wines’ first page Google rankings including blogs, Facebook and Twitter.

On the flip side, implementing SEO programs without leveraging the content distribution and linking benefits of social web participation makes link building for SEO an uphill battle. The nature of the social web encourages participation: sharing, voting, commenting & linking. Popular social content gets exposure, traffic and can result in a substantial number of relevant inbound links.

Bottom line? Content + Links = Search Engine Success!

Some Final Thoughts on Proper Use of Social Media on Your SEO Strategy

Remember, putting in various keywords in your social media profiles and other content won’t really help you reach your goals. To get the best results you should research the best practices of social media campaigns are being done today. Here are the things that other smart companies are doing these days in their Social Media and SEO activities:

1. Identify the specific audience you are trying to reach
2. Set specific goals and objectives that can be measured
3. Plan a strategy for reaching those goals with the intended audience
4. Decide on the mix of tactics that will support and execute the game plan
5. Measure and identify what events and outcomes from your activites

When visiting the nsMarketing section of the new storefront, note that the products and services can no longer be purchased through the website. However, you will see an online marketing calculator that can give you a general idea of how best to spend the budget you have allotted to online marketing (also covered in this newsletter), a toll free number to speak to a specialist, or a form to submit to be contacted by a specialist at a later time.

If you have purchased online marketing products—a press release, perhaps—on the storefront before, this may come as a bit of a surprise. You might ask yourself, “Why can’t I purchase products for myself anymore?”

A New Approach to Serving Our Clients

In the past, Network Solutions took a more product-based approach to online marketing. While individual products relating to organic search engine optimization and paid search marketing had their benefits for clients (and still do), we have moved towards a service-based approach. Clients have one point of contact for all of their online marketing services, ensuring that campaigns including organic search engine optimization, paid search marketing, and online optimized press releases use complementary keywords and research and provide a unified effort to maximize the benefit to you, the client.

In the end, you are not looking for a specific product or service. You are looking for a solution—an answer to the question, “How can I get my website found on the Internet by the people I want to find it?” The new storefront approach—working with a specialist from the beginning, before specific products or services are purchased—ensures that we can help you develop a road map that will maximize benefit at a budget you can afford.

Contacting a Consultant

While our new online marketing calculator can give you a general idea of the best ways to allocate your online marketing budget, speaking with a specialist is the best solution. Our consultants understand working with many different budget levels and are well versed in search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, and the benefits of online press releases. Contact us today at 1-866-376-1531 or visit the main nsMarketing page to learn more.

Determine the Best Keywords

We start by determining the best ones and go from there. To do this, RemarkaBlogger put together this list, initially for Wordpress SEO, but it applies to almost every web site:

1. Use the Google suggest box. When you search on Google, a drop-down appears that contains suggestions. These suggestions are aggregated from the millions of searches people do on Google every day. What you’re seeing there is a “best of” list of the most frequently searched keywords.
2. Use the Free Wordtracker Keyword tool. Wordtracker has a free and a paid version of their service. The free version is perfectly adequate for most people.
3. Use Google’s Free Keyword Tool for AdWords. Even if you’re not going to run a Google AdWords campaign, you can still use the free keyword tool to get an overview of the market around a keyword in terms of searches, ad spend, and clicks. If you make money from your blog by running Google AdSense, this tool can help you target keywords for post topics that will create a more profitable context for AdSense ads.
4. Analyze the top sites for your keywords. To be blunt, you can simply copy the successful tactics of other sites. Look at how a site writes its title tags and meta descriptions. Observe how its content is written and how keywords are used in it. Observe the site’s architecture and file-naming. Synthesize how the top sites do it into your own keyword/content/navigation strategy.

Tuning and Improving Your Keyword Rankings

Once you are out there and the site has been running for a few weeks, it will be time to tune to improve your search engine rankings. For some quick tips, I came across this great list from Kherize5 Marketing on six steps to improve keyword rankings:

1. Modify Site. Evaluate the page that is ranking for the core keyword and determine what changes can be made.

2. Search Keywords. Perform a search for the core keyword as well as yourlongtail keywords to spark some content ideas as well as areas where you can get inbound links.  Inbound links from sites that are already ranking are best as they have a high traffic volume which will click through to your site.

3. Research & Review Content.  While searching keywords take a look at the content on the pages to see how you can differentiate yourself while still focusing on the needs/wants of your target market.

4. Create a Call to Action Around the Keyword.  Creating a call to action around the keyword is far better than saying “Click here.” You do not want to rank for click here. Ultimately you want convert readers into buyers and this is another way to increase rankings and traffic. Also, a call to action that does not convert readers into buyers is pointless.

5. Measure Results.  Track the number of inbound links after modifications have been made.  Measure the number of visitors, leads and conversion rate to customers.  Have you moved up in keyword rankings?  Converted to customers?

6. Repeat and Tune. Repeat the entire process for other keywords that are close to a page 1 ranking and then once again in a few months to further search engine optimization efforts to achieve a page 1 ranking for a highly searched term with a high difficulty.

Best thing you can do is to just get started and experiment with things and as the last recommendation said “Repeat and Tune”. This is an ongoing process and one which your efforts will pay off with increased traffic and if you have the right promotions/take actions on your web site, new sales leads.

What is a Sitemap?

WebUpon describes it as “A Sitemap is a graphical representation of the architecture of a website. There are two kinds of site maps. The first is used to assist visitors to a site to navigate the site and the second is done in XML. XML Sitemaps, usually called Sitemap with a capital “S”, are used by Goggle to gather information about the site.”

Sitemap is especially important if your site:

Option #1 – Create it manually or use

Create a Web Page with the Text Link on the front page to “Site Map” and have that page detail out the site is the simplest way to do it but it doesn’t do things like exclude private pages or talk in the language search engine prefer. You can use Google’s Webmaster Tools to generate the sitemap in this format and create a file called “Sitemap.XML”.

The only caveat with this tool is that it is a static version of the sitemap so if your site is updated frequently with content (e.g. blog) you might want to look at option #2 and use a plug-in.

Option #2 – Use a plug-in on your Content Management System (CMS)

Many content management systems have this basic functionality built in or offer plug-ins to help you do this quickly. These usually are very flexible and their management screens allow you to specify which pages for Google or other search engines to index. To show you something like this works, here is a great video using the Wordpress CMS and Google Webmaster Tools:

Resources Mentioned in This Post:

Sitemap Generator Tools for Google and Many CMS Programs

Google Webmaster Guidelines

Google Sitemaps In-Depth

Why a Sitemap is Important

Luckily, SEO is not medicine, music or law but it takes dedication every day to keep up with trends and changes to the search market landscape to keep your business relevant to search engines. We are talking 30 minutes a day here. One sitcom or half a step aerobics class. Not alot but it is something you can schedule into your day if you are serious.

It took me about two minutes to get the concept ofSearch Engine Optimization, but 18 months to really understand it and implement it effectively.

So where do You Start?

Start with 3 Minutes to SEO Mastery – My blog summary

Move on to the 7 Minute SEO Guide from Marketing Pilgrim

This is a great site that covers the basics – structure, content and links are the keywords here

Read SEOMoz and the Beginners Guide to SEO (30 minutes a day for about a month)

This is the table of contents for the upcoming revision to the Beginner’s Guide to SEO. (Note the ‘Parts’ are links to full articles.) I recommend this version over its predecessor because its material is more focused on today’s SEO landscape.

Subscribe to some great SEO blogs and read at least one post a day. It is funny because if you search on “great SEO blogs” you will find those that actually do SEO well in their own right because this a topic with a constant battle to be on the first page of Google results. Here are a few:

Search Engine Land

SEOBook

SEO Moz

Matt Cutts

Search Engine Watch

Search Engine Roundtable

Search Engine Journal

Online Marketing Blog

Pronet Advertising

Marketing Pilgrim

Implement One Technique a Week

This is where theory meets practice. You can read all you want but if you never put it into practice you won’t know if it actually works.

I bring you the top 10 Killer SEO Tricks to Wordpress (so far…) – from the Moonlight Blog:

1. Optimize WordPress Permalinks

The most search-engine friendly permalink MUST includes the post title (%postname%) in the link,having keywords in your URL is an absolute must, In your WP admin panel, click on the “Options” tab, then the “Permalinks” sub-tab, and choose the option just below the “Default” permalink option. My suggest permalink structure is /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ or /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html .

2. Optimize WordPress Post Titles

The post title is the most important part of the blog post for many reasons. From your reader’s perspective, a descriptive and compelling title helps them decide if your post is worth reading or not. From an SEO perspective, think about the keywords or phrases people might type into a search box to find your post, and use those words or phrases in your post title.

3. Optimize WordPress Page Titles

According to most SEO experts, the page title tag is one of the most important tags on your page. In most WP themes, you’ll find the page title tag in the Header Template, and the default version ususally looks very poor SEO. I suggest you to use a WordPress plugin so call “All in One SEO Pack” to fix that problem.

4. Optimize WordPress robots.txt

The robots.txt file is used to instruct search engine robots about what pages on your website should be crawled and consequently indexed. Most websites have files and folders that are not relevant for search engines (like images or admin files) therefore creating a robots.txt file can actually improve your website indexation. Here is an SEO optimized WordPress robots.txt file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /comments/feed
Disallow: /trackback/

5. Use Google Sitemaps Plugin

Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. WordPress user Arne Brachold has made the sitemap creation and submission process fairly simple with his Google Sitemap plugin. This plugin will create a sitemap for you and submit it to Google.

6. Use Wordpress Anti-SPAM Plugin

Akismet is the best automated spam killer that actually gets better as it learns from the whole community marking new spam comments as spam.

7. Use Related Posts

Amaury BALMER’s Simple Tags plugin is a perfect tool to manage perfeclty your WP 2.3 tags, which can show related posts on your post and rss feed. Not only does it enhance your blog’s usability, but it also helps create a dense link structure throughout your site, which makes it easier for the search engine spiders to find and index older blog posts.

8. Use Ping services

Use the Update service function, to inform tracking services that you have updated your weblog. By default, Wordpress pings rpc.pingomatic.com, which is good (if you don’t want to change this, you don’t have to).

9. Make your content searchable

Make sure your navigation bar is present on all pages of your blog. Your previous posts or atleast the popular ones should be linked to all pages so they get spidered easily.

10. Update your blog frequently

Update your blog frequently using all the rules mentioned above and your blog will surely get top rankings in a short time.

Do you have any tips you care to share? Have these worked for you?

These are some great tips and if you did a simple web search you would find alot more. What has worked for you? Have any of these? Leave a comment and let’s hear from you.

On July 16th the award winning Network Solutions brings its well received SEO seminar to the Cumming-Forsyth County Chamber of Commerce.

In addition, to the industries best practices on SEO they will also share the Search Engine Marketing techniques used by Network Solutions professionals to generate more leads through their clients’ websites. Including, but not limited to Pay Per Click(PPC) tools available by plan. Normally $129, Network Solutions has agreed to offer the seminar and workshop for free, in conjunction with their partnership with the chamber.

What happens after the seminar? A limited number of participants will receive a free 30 minute, one on one, evaluation of their business website.

Preregistration is recommended.

Seminar Information
Date: Thursday July 16, 2009
Time: 8:00 am, Registration & Continental Breakfast
8:30 am – 11:30 pm, Program
Location: Cumming-Forsyth County Chamber of Commerce
212 Kelly Mill Rd,
Cumming, GA 30040-2317

Presenter: Randy Windsor, Director of Search Marketing, Network Solutions

Cost: FREE for Chamber Members!

Registration/Contacts: Seating is limited. Call Jennifer Shipp at the chamber to register 770-887-6461 / Tony Casteel 770-309-4154

OR you can go to this site to get registered.

Course Information

• Date: Wednesday, June 24, 2009
• Time: 8:45 am, Registration & Continental Breakfast
  9:15 am – 12:15 pm, Program
• Location: Atlanta REALTORS® Center
  5784 Lake Forrest Drive, Atlanta 30328
• Presenter: Randy Windsor, Director of Search Marketing
  Network Solutions
• Cost: FREE for ABR Members!

You will learn:

• How to develop your Web site’s marketing strategy
• What to look for on search-engine friendly Web pages
• How to boost your rankings on Google® and Yahoo®!
• How to budget your marketing dollars and maximize your return
• The pros and cons of outsourcing SEO and PPC

TWO OTHER AWESOME REASONS TO ATTEND:

1.) FREE One-on-one Website Consultations
After the Course, Network Solutions is offering FREE, 30 minute evaluations of your business Web site. A Network Solutions marketing expert will review your site and provide recommendations about how to best use your marketing dollars for SEO and PPC.
Time slots are limited and reserved on a first come, first served basis, so register for one now!

2.) 3 Hours of CE Credit Certified by the Georgia Institute of Real Estate

Registration

• Register online today!

AND in case you want to do some homework for the session:

You can check out the following videos:

Hope to see you this Wednesday in Atlanta!