My last posts talked a little bit about what SEO is and why you need to care. Hopefully you’ve read those and are going to try to beef up your website by having it optimized.

Today we’ll talk about what keywords you should use.

Rule #1. Forget about trying to optimize on your name or business name.

If you come up on the top of Google’s list of results when your own name or business name is searched, that doesn’t mean you’re doing okay. The exception to this rule is if you’re an established brand (think Coca Cola or Lego) or a celebrity.

For the rest of us, we want people to find us because we’re not yet household names.

Start making a list of things you think people are searching for to find you. Let’s say you make organic candles in your candle shop in Maine. Your list might look like:

• where can I find candles in Maine
• homemade candles in Maine
• natural and organic candles
• Maine organic candles

And so on and so forth.

You take your list and you go to Google’s fun keyword tool. (There are more scientific ways to do this but this method will do if you’re the DIY type.)

Start to enter your phrases and see which ones are actually being searched. (You’ll be surprised to see that what you think people are searching for is likely different than what they actually are searching for.)

You’re looking for a high number here but keep an eye on the advertiser competition. There’s no point trying to optimize on a phrase that gets 10,000 searches a month if there are a gazillion other sites already optimized for that phrase.

For example, in the case of our candle maker, he needn’t bother trying to optimize on the phrase “candles” because there would be hundreds of thousands of websites out there already trying to get traffic on that phrase. The age of a domain counts in search too, so sites that have been in existence for years are likely not going to budge much from their position in Google’s search results.

You want to find the sweet spot. The phrase that gets lots of searches…that’s targeted…that doesn’t have a lot of competition. That’s why I would recommend our candle maker use his location or his niche (the fact that his candles are natural and organic) when searching for keywords to optimize on.

Makes sense, right? Any questions?

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A young man approaches you for advice, distressed because he’s in love with a girl and he can’t get her attention.

You ask him if he’s ever spoken to her. “Gawd, no. She doesn’t even know I exist.”

You ask how he knows that. “Because we have no common friends, no common interests and she lives in another city.”

You ask him if he has tried to get him to notice her. “No, I don’t know how to do that.”

What would your advice be? To keep doing what he’s doing and hope for the best?

I’m betting not. (Unless you’re really bad with women.) I’m guessing you would suggest that this young man try to show up somewhere that this girl will be -a hockey game, a shopping mall, etc. In other words, he has to put himself in a situation where this girl will find him when she is most likely looking for a fella.

And this is the purpose of search engine optimization.

When you optimize your site for a targeted list of keyword phrases, you’re putting your site where your customers are looking for you. If you have a site thrown up there with no thoughts of how people will find it…you’re that young man in a different city than the object of his affection doing nothing and wishing for her to find him.

Let me explain how this works in search.

When you type a phrase into the Google search bar, in the seconds it takes for a list of results to appear in front of you, Google has scoured the Internet for the pages most relevant to the phrase you’re looking for.

Google uses a top secret algorithm to determine what page is most relevant (it remains secret so it’s fair for everyone to try to get to the top of the results) but we do know certain things:

• One way Google determines a page’s relevancy is by checking to see if your keyword phrase is in the title tag and meta description of the page
• It’s also looking at whether or not your keyword is in your domain
• Keyword density of the content among your pages is being weighed

See, if someone has searched for “maple tree seedlings” then Google figures a website page that is titled “Maple Tree Seedlings” is pretty relevant. If that page also has the phrase “maple tree seedlings” sprinkled through the content then it’s likely even more relevant. If it has a meta description that says, “Maple tree seedlings are not a sturdy plant. Find tips for protecting maple tree seedlings” and a domain like mapletreeseedlings (dot) com it would be that much better.

There is more that goes into it but that’s a basic explanation that should show you why this SEO thing is pretty important. It will help your website get a position in the top ten results for a Google search and you really should care about that. Because if you don’t appear there then you don’t exist.

Next time I’ll help you determine what your keyword phrases should be.

Any questions? Fire away!

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My youngest child is a real handful. She’s 30 pounds of attitude, this one, and she doesn’t seem to like her father as much as she likes me. She has this thing when our family goes on a drive. Her car seat is on the driver’s side of the van and her older sister’s car seat is on the other side. My husband likes to drive when we go somewhere together and when he opens her door she throws a hissy fit because she wants Mommy to let her out.

So when we get out of the van, my husband walks around to my side to let out our five-year-old and I walk around to his side to let out the little monster. We’ve been doing this for a year now.

Last weekend we were doing a bit of traveling around and the little one starts shrieking because she’s sitting behind Daddy and she wants to sit behind a girl. The sound of the screaming is like knives going through your skull so I had the big idea to let the girls swap seats.

When we stopped to get out at our destination (post-car seat swap), I just opened the door on my side to let the diva out and Jason opened the door on his side to let our other child out.

No walking around the van like morons.

Sometimes a problem doesn’t seem like a problem until you find a solution.

How many website owners out there complain that they invested hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars into their web presence only to have no traffic? A lot.

If your website isn’t working for you, there are a gazillion things that could potentially be causing the problem but here’s the thing. If you’re not getting traffic, I’m willing to bet that nobody along the way has asked you about keywords. And that is a huge problem.

It doesn’t matter how pretty the site looks (unless you’re a big brand or already have a following and people know to search you by your brand name) or how many fancy bells and whistles you have on there (a.k.a flash animation, disco ball, talking heads, etc.) if you haven’t optimized your content with an eye towards SEO then you’re not going to be getting any drop in traffic.

Now, I’m not some self-proclaimed SEO hero/guru/aficionado. But I do know quite a bit about it and I am a website copywriter who applies it everyday.

I also know how to explain this stuff in simple language so that when people hear me talk about it, they start to understand why they should be optimizing their content. Some get panicky wondering why they hadn’t done it sooner.

So I’m going to finish this post here. I’ll be back later this week with a more extensive (yet basic) explanation of search and how to figure out what keywords you should use in your website content.

Do you have questions about optimizing your website content? Ask away and I’ll try to address them later in this series of posts.

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On my daughter’s last day of preschool we asked her where she’d like to go for supper to celebrate. She wasn’t sure, but she knew she wanted garlic fingers.

There’s a spot within 20 minutes of where we live that my husband and I really enjoy. I actually wanted to go there on Mother’s Day but the website told us they were closed on Sundays and Mondays. I was impressed that the restaurant had a website because many small local business in my province don’t.

Anyway, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to go. They have an outdoor patio overlooking the water, it was a weekday evening so they’d be open and probably not overly busy.

So I pulled up the website to check out the menu (it’s been awhile since we’ve been there…I’m talking years!) to see what price range we were looking at. There was a special that looked very good – a 16″ pizza, 12″ garlic fingers and donair sauce for $24.99. You don’t get much better than that so off we went.

When we got there, a large sign read, “Now open 7 days per week!” Hmm. I couldn’t help but wonder when that took effect. I didn’t think much of it until we went to order and I asked for the special I saw on the website.

The server laughed and said, “We haven’t had that special in forever but it was a great deal.”

A lot of good that does me, I think.

Anyway, we are very easy going people and we ordered a different special. The food was amazingly delicious. Among the best pizza I’ve ever had. Service was great, atmosphere can’t be beat.

But the website. If you have a website and it’s never updated, it’s worse than having no website at all.

See, for Mother’s Day, if there wasn’t a website for this place I would have had to call to make a reservation or to find out what their hours were. Maybe it was open and we could have gone there. We would have enjoyed it and we likely would have been back sooner. Instead, I got information on the website that may or may not have been accurate but I took it as current and believed it. Much like I believed the special on a restaurant’s website would probably be something we could order at said restaurant.

If you have a “local” business with an out of date website…why? I can only assume that it’s because you either don’t think anyone is looking at it or because you can’t maintain it yourself and it’s too expensive to hire a web developer to do it for you.

If that’s the case, I urge you to go and find someone who can set you up with a website you can maintain yourself. Or hire a virtual assistant who can make the updates at a lower cost than your web guy probably charges.

Your website is your most important marketing piece. Please treat it with respect. Load it with good, search engine-friendly content, current information and details someone planning a visit/purchase needs to know.

Anyone else feel like pizza all of a sudden?

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I knew my husband was a keeper back when I was waiting tables and he noticed one evening that I didn’t have any clean work shirts hanging in the closet for my shift the next morning so he did a load of laundry for me. He thought it was funny that I found so much meaning in that simple little act, but it did mean a lot. It showed me he was thinking about me when I wasn’t there and that he did something to make my life a little bit easier.

In any relationship it isn’t the grand gestures that makes a bond stronger, it’s the little details woven in between that really matter and hold it all together.

I found a gorgeous pair of earrings on etsy (etsy is a commercial site for homemade and vintage-y stuff as well as arts and crafts supplies, etc.) a couple weeks ago. I have no idea how I ended up there and I didn’t know the seller from Adam but the earrings were pretty and sparkly and I could picture myself wearing them on a date with my husband with the candlelight dancing off of them. So I bought them.

I immediately received a standard, automated response from the system, thanking me for my order, but I also received a personal message from the seller, Laura, who owns the shop I bought my earrings from, Vintage Valise, personally thanking me for my order and telling me she’d ship it out that afternoon.

Then I promptly forgot about the earrings until I received them in the mail. They were wrapped in a lovely little box, tied with a ribbon, and this postcard was tucked inside the envelope they were mailed in:

Talk about a warm fuzzy feeling! I’ve been buying stuff online for a long time and very rarely do items come with a handwritten note, but when they do…wow! You really appreciate someone taking the time to do something like that.

I wouldn’t have remembered the name of the shop where I bought those earrings if I didn’t receive this card with my purchase even though I had received that email earlier in the transaction.

We get emails ALL the time. We never get a handwritten note.

They say that it takes 7-11 “touches” before someone buys from you. I don’t necessarily think that’s always true. When some of the touches are unexpected and delightfully personal, I think it can take less.

I think Laura is going to have a successful shop if she can convert every buyer into a repeat buyer like she did with me. All it took to make me love her was taking the time to write a thank you note that was personalized for me (noting my purchase and even spelling my name right).

The worst thing a small business owner can do is make his or her customers feel invisible. We all love those little details so why don’t we see more of them?

Do you do something personal like this in your interactions? Has it become part of your brand? Please tell me about it!

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