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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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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I love antiques. I really love them a lot. I love the smell of an antique shop and letting my mind wander to where some of the objects may have come from.

A couple of weeks ago my husband and I were driving along and passed a shop I wanted to check out to see if there was anything interesting inside (I have been there before and always find something cool).

Problem was, we couldn’t tell if it was open. (If you’re reading this in a reader, you might want to check out the actual blog to see the picture and get the full meaning here!)

Now…I don’t claim to be some marketing genius (okay sometimes I do) but this is clearly not a good move.

We stopped to take a picture and once we got closer we could see a dimmed out “Open” sign so we assumed they weren’t operating that day.

I’m not going to pick on this place too much. Obviously someone forgot to take down the open sign – or the closed sign – but we all do the same thing in our businesses in one way or another. It’s just not as obvious.

When you operate a business in this day and age, your website has a major role to play. Like it or not, people are looking for you online and unless you want your competitors to do better in your market than you, you have to cater to web surfers.

Website visitors have no attention span and they have a million options thanks to Google.com to find a better site than yours to get what they need. If you’re lucky enough to get them to your site in the first place, that’s great but you have to keep them there.

That means you have to:

• Have content optimized so web surfers can find you.
• Have content written in a “web-friendly” manner (with headings and  easily scannable copy)
• Keep your online information current, compelling and engaging.
• Narrow in on their pain points as much as possible.
• Make no assumptions.
• Tell them what to do.

See, you never know which page of your website a visitor is going to land on, so you have to give a piece of your story on every page, and make it clear what you want them to do. Should they contact you for more information? Should they visit your blog? Peruse your services?

You have to make it easy for people to do business with you because a web visitor’s attention span is not long enough for them to bother with you if they don’t have to. Lay out your information concisely and clearly because unlike a retail store where you can be assisting customers, your website content and navigation has to do it all.

Imagine how you would have felt if you were me, standing in front of a shop you wanted to visit but there was an open and closed sign in the window at the same time.

Now imagine someone visiting your website for the first time. They look at the “Welcome to our website” headline, the standard “hope you enjoy our website” content and are bored to death. You don’t stand out, they don’t know if you can solve their problem and the information you do provide doesn’t have any logical sequence to it.

Be engaging, be compelling and be clear and concise with your message. If you can’t do those things, hire a copywriter to do it for you

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I put a lot of brain power into creativity. I live, breathe, eat and sleep creative ideas. So much of my heart and soul is poured into developing intelligent, snappy, fresh and creative ideas that it truly enrages me when I see someone ripping off someone else’s creative idea and passing it off as their own.

Plagiarism is low, people. I know for a fact that nobody would stand up and argue that fact and I bet I’d have a hard time finding someone who would admit to being a plagiarizer. That’s because they would not be popular.

Dictionary.com defines plagiarism as:

“the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work.”

You caught that, right? Plagiarism does not just apply to content, but taking someone else’s idea and passing it off as yours also counts. And do you know what plagiarism is?

Blatant theft.

When someone takes someone else’s idea and claims to have been the one who thought it up, well…that person doesn’t realize how small this world really is. That person is also not flattering the original concept creator. I can assure you that the person who had the idea in the first place is pissed off.

People. Stop taking other people’s ideas. It isn’t cool and you will be caught and your reputation will be in the toilet. Trust me. Karma is real and what goes around comes around.

If you can’t come up with a creative idea, nobody is going to fault you for that. Seek help. Call me! I help entrepreneurs with their creative brainstorming and I have enough creativity for both of us and some to spare.

It’s way more satisfying to come up with something on your own than it is to steal someone else’s intellectual property. Plus it’s way more legal.

If you contract me as your creative consultant and you pay me to come up with your ideas, I won’t tell anyone. We can pretend those ideas are yours. Part of your payment goes towards keeping my mouth shut.

So there you have it. You know how I (and anyone else who invests time and energy into creative thought) feel about plagiarism. People who do it suck. Don’t go there. Any money you invest in hiring someone to help with your creative needs will cost less than the damage done to your reputation in the long run when you’re caught.

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I got a new blender yesterday. A totally excellent blender with a special dispensing spout for a less messy smoothie experience in the morning.

This morning I was really looking forward to treating my family to some yummy fruit & yogurt smoothies, but I was having technical difficulties.

I had washed the glass jug and the blade and had it all together, but I was getting nowhere trying to attach the spout. I was turning clockwise just like the instructions told me to but it would not lock in to place. I tried pushing harder cause that always works, right? I even thought the problem must have been the person who assembled it screwed the piece on wrong so I was rooting around to find a screwdriver to try it a different way. Believe it or not, didn’t work. (Sorry for doubting you, assembly person.)

I was getting hungry and frustrated so I decided to just put the optional little attachment thingy on and forgo the cool spout pouring option this time. I was pretty sure I’d have to call the Black and Decker people later and take it up with someone there.

When husband came into the kitchen and saw the spout sitting beside the blender, of course, he had to try to fix it for me. And, annoyingly enough, he did.

He told me that our first instinct, to turn it harder, was wrong. He said you have to barely touch it and it locks into place.

I was happy, even though smoothies had already been poured. We’ll have more tomorrow afterall. But I was thinking about how much energy I exerted over that stupid spout this morning and how if I just went against my instinct to push it harder that I would have been able to enjoy the full spout-poured smoothie experience.

Are you pushing harder in your business and still not getting anywhere? Have you taken it apart and tried to put it back together to no avail? If you were to talk to my husband today, he might suggest you just ease off and try something else. No matter how little you think it would actually help.

We tend to underestimate the power of good content as a sales vehicle.

What good is a fantabulous promotion if it leads your customers back to the same non-compelling, ineffective web content every time?

Instead of pushing harder, what if you tried calling a copywriter to review your existing content and propose if and how they might make it better?

I’ll tell you, the harder you push, the more frustrated you’re going to get when you don’t see results. Plus there’s always the chance that the whole thing will go to pieces under the strain.

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