Click Here
For The ''walton.com''
Facebook Fan Page!

I listened to a seminar recently about the advantages of having a Facebook fan page for your business. It’s a place to interact with people and allow them to interact with each other. You can build your own little community around your business.

It allows you to update every one who “likes” you. You can send messages to everyone, which you cannot do as with a personal profile. Because it’s based on your business, people who join it have essentially raised their hand and said “I’m interested in your business. Tell me more.”, so you don’t have to feel funny about trying to sell stuff to your friends.

It should be a party, not an Amway meeting. People should feel free to hang out and talk to each other. You should have chips out and some music playing to make it more comfortable for everyone. Be a good host.

That’s what I am trying to do.

Please check out out my Fan Page for “walton.com” at www.facebook.com/waltoncom. I have a bunch of my personal friends there now, but if more SEO, small business, and Etsy people show up, that will make things more interesting for all of us.

If you’re not sure about Facebook fan pages, or how they could help your business, you can play with this one and see what they do.

I hope that by seeing there are other people just like you, dealing with the same questions and issues, that we can work together to help make us all more successful. If you feel like you’re out in the cold, all alone, come on in and meet some interesting people.

I’d love for you to stop by and see what’s happening. Leave a comment. Meet a new friend. Hang out.

Please click here or on the icon, then click the “like” button when you get there.

I’ll see you there! Thanks for stopping by.

Etsy published the “Etsy Guide to SEO”.

SEO is generally divided into “on site” factors and “off site” factors. In their book, they detail the things that you can do to your Etsy shop and products pages, all of them “on site”.

What they don’t tell you about are the “off site” techniques. “Off site” is everything that is not on your site. It generally refers to building links from other sites to your site, which is the biggest factor in SEO.

They only devote one page to link building ideas and only one paragraph to any task that is not on the Etsy site. They want to keep all of your attention focused on their Etsy site and not necessarily the absolute best ways to get traffic.

Let’s gaze off into the distance and see if we can build some inbound links another way, without anything to do with Etsy.

Before you do anything else, you need to define your keywords. I’ve written a few posts about that and cover it in the SEO book.

• Before You Do ANYTHING Else…
• Small Business SEO – Sea Glass Jewelry- Keywords and Competition
• Sell Handmade Stuff On The Internet – SEO, Part One

When you have your keywords picked, we’re going to create a new website, for FREE, and build a bunch of links ourselves. It’s way easier than you think. Really. Watch closely.

Pick your top 3 keywords.

You’re going to create a new web site for FREE. It will have some limitations, so you can’t do everything that you might want to do, but it will do enough to make this technique work and it’s free.

Go to http://www.wordpress.com and follow their instructions, using the top three keywords as your user ID. If your keywords are “handmade glass jewelry”, then create the site as “handmadeglassjewelry”.

That will give you a site with a domain name of “handmadeglassjewelry.wordpress.com”. You get SEO value for having the keywords in the domain name, even if it’s got the “wordpress.com” in there too.

They have some instructions there about how to create posts and pages, so when you figure out how to write a new post, write a new post about one of your products. Use all of the keywords that you can think of when describing it. Put in a photo. Write naturally, like you were writing so that I could read it. I have some WordPress Tutorial Videos that might be helpful.

Put in a link to your product page on Etsy. In the “edit” page, put in the name of your product and select that text. There’s a “link” button at the top. Click that. Copy and paste in the URL to your product page. Insert that into the copy on the page. You’ve just created a link to your product page.

Write a new post for every one of your products. Write naturally, but use your keywords. Put a link, or maybe two, from each post to each product page.

When you are done, you’ll have a web site, with your main keywords in the domain name, and links to every one of your product pages.

As you publish new products on Etsy, write a new post for each one on your web site. As your products sell, leave the posts and links. The search traffic will build up over time.

If you start to love this stuff, write other posts about the subject of your products, and not your products specifically. Your site will get some SEO just from the related content. Your site gives your Etsy shop a bunch of SEO.

As your SEO rankings start to build and you start see some results, consider creating your very own site that you fully control, instead of the wordpress.com free version. You’ll be able to do more things with it and you will have complete control over it.

**cough** I can build one for you… **cough**.

The more pages you have on a site, the more links you have, and the more links you can point at your Etsy shop, and the more search traffic you’ll get from the search engines.

There are many other SEO things that you can do, but this is free, easy, and effective. Call it the “low hanging fruit”.

Feel the power.

Why Do They Rank So High?

Why are these ranked so high? Let’s use Yahoo’s Site Explorer to investigate them. We want to know how many pages and internal links they have on their site and how many people link to them externally, from other sites. These two factors are huge in determining search engine rankings.

westcoastseaglass.net
westcoastseaglass.net has 773 pages, more than I expected. It looks like every product has a page, using the same template, so they all link to each other. 773 pages is more than we can generate quickly.They have 2,149 total links, including internal links and 1,774 external links. That’s a lot. This will not be easy. Where do they get these links from? Browsing through their links quickly, it looks like they got picked up by 3 or 4 prolific blogs and put in their blogrolls. That means that there’s a link to their site from every page on these blogs. Every post on a blog can mean a lot of links quickly and easily. We’ll have to use the same strategy and maybe even target the same blogs. This looks like the top site to target.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.waltonwebdesigner.com/2009/06/06/small-business-seo-%e2%80%93-sea-glass-jewelry-keywords-and-competition-part-2.html

Please take a minute and look around. Most of the site has been aimed at small businesses, but lately I’ve focused on the needs of crafters.

Regular readers of my blog know that I built a site for my wife’s friend, Deborah at www.mermaidspurseseaglass.com which opened my eyes to the needs of the whole crafting community.

I think there are some posts here that will be valuable for a crafter. I plan on writing more with crafters in mind. It seems like there’s a huge need for Internet marketing information here.

I see a lot of pleas for more traffic to your Etsy shops. I think I can take my experience and knowledge of small business (and large business, for that matter – read my “about me” page), and apply it to crafters.

I do plan on more good things for crafters, so please stick around. If you have a specific question, drop by the forum and ask it there. I’ll answer it as soon as possible.

Heartfelt Mouse

I want to especially thank Etsy seller Warmth for her kind review of my SEO book. That was beyond gracious. It means a lot to me to see someone say, “I am no longer feeling stupid and helpless regarding SEO.” Warmth warmed my heart with that.

If anyone wants a really cute mouse, you know where to go!

Stay tuned!

Comments are nice, but a forum allows you to ask me anything and get an answer, as well as asking each other and building off everyone’s knowledge and experience.

The Forum is OPEN!

When the training site is complete and launched, the forum will be part of it, and as such, it will cost to be a member.

Right now, before everything is complete, we’re trying to build up the membership, so it is FREE.

If you join right now, it will be free forever. You will have a free lifetime subscription. Even after the training site goes up and it costs other people money to join, you will still have your free subscription to the forum.

You will also get a discount in the price of the training, when that’s offered as well.

There are not a lot of members yet, so there’s not a lot of conversation yet. Please jump on in and get things started. You can tell all your friends that you were there when it started.

If you have a question, I’ll be eager to answer it. Ask me anything about Internet Marketing, WordPress, Web Development, or Small Business. Ask whatever pops into your head.

Check out the Untangling the Web Forum.

They wanted to open with this verse. I thought it was appropriate for anyone with a small business, regardless of your religious beliefs (and yes, I know you have them.)

“God has given each of you some special abilities; be sure to use them to help each other, passing on to others God’s many kinds of blessing.”
1 Peter 4:10 (LB)

Long tail
In SEO terms, the ‘long tail’ refers to the less obvious, more specific (and therefore less competitive) but still relevant keywords and phrases you can optimize your site for. So instead of trying to optimize for very general and competitive phrases such as “coffee”, a long tail phrase might be “buy Costa Rican coffee.” For a very competitive field such as coffee, you might have to think of even more specific and niche phrases than that in order to find the ones you can rank highly for.

Why You Should Care:
If you are a small business, or just starting out, the long tail will help you find free & targeted (there’s that phrase again!) traffic. You will be able to rank more quickly for long-tail phrases instead of wasting your time trying to compete for very general terms that have established competition.

SERPs
This simply stands for Search Engine Results Page – i.e. the list of results that comes up when you perform a web search.

Why You Should Care:
That’s where you want your site to be!

Read the entire article at:
http://www.webtrainingwheels.com/2009/11/online-marketing-terms-seo-edition/

I want to train people who are not experts

The first step in that quest is the new design of the site. The blog is now on the home page, where you can see that I’m writing about good stuff, so people will be more likely to stay around and read more. That’s the plan, anyway.

I wrote a page describing the concept. I put on my sales copy hat and wrote what I thought was a pretty good page, describing what to expect and how it will benefit you. Here’s a quote and a link. Go read the rest of it and subscribe to the newsletter.

Untangling The Web – Training

With every new change in technology, comes the rise and fall of businesses as they try to adapt, from railroads to airplanes, from buggies to cars.

The world has changed. The Internet is becoming a normal part of everyday life for a majority of people. With every new change in technology, comes the rise and fall of businesses as they try to adapt, from railroads to airplanes, from buggies to cars, from radio to TV, from vinyl records to CDs to MP3s.

Today is no different. It’s adapt or die.

Many people who own a small business know that they should “do something” about the Internet, that there is a huge opportunity out there somewhere, but they are not quite sure how to do it, much less do it efficiently, and if that they miss that opportunity, it might mean the end of their business.

The biggest issue that we heard from small business owners, and everyone else, for that matter, is that they don’t understand this stuff. No one has the time to find and distill all of the information. They do research and the technical information that they find is too complex, too difficult to understand. They are afraid and overwhelmed by it all. It’s frustrating.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.waltonwebdesigner.com/untangling-the-web-training

I did some research to know what to talk to her about when we meet. I wanted to know what the best keywords should be and I wanted to know about her competition for those keywords. The first thing you should ever do when you are trying to SEO your site is to determine the correct keywords to target. Without that, you will never know if you succeeded or failed.

What Keywords Should We Target?

Starting with “sea glass”, I used Google’s keyword tool and found that “sea glass” had 2,433 searches a day. I assume that people were looking for all kinds of sea glass, where to buy bulk sea glass, methods for finding it or cleaning it or whatever else. It’s not that targeted at jewelry.

Next came “beach glass”. I’ve never heard to it referred to this way, but Google has. 1,332 people search for “beach glass” every day. We also have “seaglass” at 398 searches, “sea glass jewelry” at 325 and “beach glass jewelry” at 95. From there, we have all sorts of other keywords with less than 100 per day, including “sea glass jewellry” at 24, so make sure to check those misspellings.

These are the keywords we’ll concentrate on; sea glass, beach glass, seaglass, sea glass jewelry, and beach glass jewelry. Next we’ll look at who else ranks for those keywords.

Who is the Competition?

We’ll do a search for each phrase or search term and see who comes up in what order.

When we search for Sea Glass: Wikipedia comes first. I don’t think we’ll beat them, but they aren’t selling jewelry, so I don’t think we have to. The seaglassassociation.org comes next. Again, not sure we need to beat them, but it would be nice if we could. The next two are westcoastseaglass.net and naturalseaglass.com. These look like they might be our biggest contenders.

Let’s look at “beach glass” next. Wikipedia is first. The next two are relishinc.com and bytheseajewelry.com. These are the ones to beat here.

Seaglass returns Wikipedia and the association, followed by westcoastseaglass.net, followed by someone I’ve not seen before, then bytheseajewelry.com.

Sea glass jewelry gets us naturalseaglass.com again. They are followed by bytheseajewelry.com and westcoastseaglass.net. They are definitely on my radar now. jewelrybydaniellerenee.com looks easy to beat, but there’s relishinc.com again after danielle.

Beach glass jewelry gives us bytheseajewelry.com and relishinc.com first and second. Fourth is naturalseaglass.com. Our old friend westcoastseaglass.net is eighth.

It looks like our competition is westcoastseaglass.net, bytheseajewelry.com, naturalseaglass.com, relishinc.com, and if we can crush poor, sweet Danielle at jewelrybydaniellerenee.com, that will be fun too.

Read Part Two: Small Business SEO – Sea Glass Jewelry- Keywords and Competition

Quoting from BuzzMachine The local ad opportunity (and the danger of losing it)

The promise of local ad support for news will come only if a new population of very small businesses can be served in new and effective ways – before Google beats everybody else to it. That’s apparent in the results of Webvisible and Nielsen surveys reported by MediaPost (via Marketeting Pilgrim and Frank Thinking), which show that local marketers are leaving newspapers and the yellow pages but are still dissatisfied with – and don’t pay enough attention to – internet marketing. Factoids:

* 42 percent of small businesses say they use the local paper less and 23 percent use yellow pages less – while 43 percent use search engines more.

* “Though 63% of consumers and small business owners turn to the internet first for information about local companies and 82% use search engines to do so, only 44% of small businesses have a website and half spend less than 10% of their marketing budget online.”

* “Only 9% are satisfied with their online marketing efforts.”

* Mediapost found a disconnect in how small-business owners act as business people and marketers vs. how they act as consumers. That is, as consumers, they use and are satisfied with the internet and search to find other local businesses, but as marketers themselves, they use online less.

In these stats lies a big – but fleeting – opportunity: serving local businesses by helping them use online well. By this, I don’t mean doing what local newspapers have been doing: trying to sell them display or directory ads, just as they did in papers but in a new medium. Instead, I mean redefining what it means to help them succeed online. This might mean helping them place ads smartly on Google with good SEO (see Fred Wilson’s tweet out of our New Business Models for News Summit at CUNY). It might mean finding was to help local businesses interact more meaningfully with their own communities. It might mean enabling armies of citizen sales people – neighbors who really know their local businesses – to serve and sell those advertisers. It might mean providing tools to help local businesses create better (more informative, more SEOed) online presences and providing them data to show them their return on investment. I might mean finding other means to efficiently sell local businesses (can phone rooms ever work?). And so on…..

The assumptions I so often hear about local advertising – it doesn’t work; it doesn’t pay enough; small businesses are ignorant – need to be updated. The assumption that most needs to be updated is that a business needs an ad. It may need other tools to be found in search and to reach the right people and to improve relationships with them. All that may count as marketing, but not necessarily with an old ad in a new medium.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/02/16/the-local-ad-opportunity-and-the-danger-of-losing-it/#comments