The Online Sunshine Plan

Simple, basic page construction

The basic things you have to keep in mind are the five on-site items that need to be in every post or page of content you create:

1. Title of page (sits in the header of your browser)

2. Keyword in name of that page (http://myblog.com/about-my-keyword.html)

3. Keyword in your headline, headers, and emphasized text (there are right and wrong ways to do this, as below)

4. Content which defines and is related to the keyword you are using.

5. Alt-tags for images containing that keyword or related terms.

The other key datum besides this is incoming links, which I’ll cover below and later. Right now, we want to concentrate on how to the points you need to build on your page so people will legitimately link to your page and you don’t have to “game” the system.

Silo’s and Theming

This gets a bit thick, so stick with me here: there is a technique called siloing your content. Silos are tall structures with this walls. Corporations like to get their customers (not clients, customers are creatures of habit by definition) locked into product silo’s so that they by the majority of their stuff from them. Microsoft is a famous failed example of this.

In a content silo, you set up your site for a main keyword. In sub-sections of your site, you then set up collections of articles or posts about related keywords. Cats, cat collars. Each collection is a silo. Heflin explains the basics of this on his SEO2020 site. Doing this in WordPress is almost simpler than explaining it. At Dough-Roller, he’s posts a simple explanation with additional links to help you. (Not only that, but Heflin has a forum with this as one subject area.  Knock yourself out.)

Get through those explanations and do your own Googling of that term and all will shine again. It’s an advanced technique, but can be simply implemented once you do your homework on it.

Theming is another technique you need to master. The simple and short explanation is that Google uses the other words on your page to figure out what your keyword is talking about. Tiger in the jungle is different from Tiger on the golf course. But only your content will say exactly what you are talking about.  They also compare the pages coming in which link to yours in order to do that figure-out and assign you space in their rankings.

Now, an old technique (which I recently found the ripoff artists still promoting as law) is to repeat your phrase a certain percentage of times on your page. You can practically ignore this one. Google will dock you if you have more than 5%, but it has to be glaring, even then. Concentrate on the basic places for your keyword above, and then ensure that the content on the page is descriptive and original.

As far as incoming links, only comment on others’ sites which relate to your content. And only approve comments and track-backs which are appropriate to your content – again, this is a WordPress feature.

You can’t stop the world from re-branding you, however. This is pretty much beyond your control. Look up “Google Bomb” for how this was done to both George Bush and John Kerry. That set of Internet rip off artists I’ve talked about was quickly and permanently rebranded for what it was  just because there were more posts that came up with “ripoff” associated with their company name than other posts. Lesson is to always, always provide incredible content 100% of the time (if not 110%.)

Theming is actual and in use daily. Google doesn’t confirm or deny its existence, but the tests have been done over and over. How to find theme words? Easiest is to look up Adwords KeywordExternal Tool and incorporate the word you find there into your articles and posts. This is what Google associates with those keyword terms and phrases. (And this is also a way to reverse-engineer someone else’s site to see what Google thinks they are talking about. One hilarious goof – that ripoff-artist company changed from the phrase “Internet coaching”  to “personal trainer” and now Google thought they were talking about vitamins and exercise…)

Regular, fresh, valuable content

This can’t be overstated. Search engines depend on people providing content. That’s you and me. The search engines maintain their relevancy by continuing to provide content people are looking for.

When you post on social media (or vote there), search engines are currently putting this to the top of their heap. Now, the trick is that they don’t stay there long. Google has an un-official (but highly rumored) sandbox where posts go for a time after being on the front page.

Social media is popular and trendy. And if you want to see how fast trends die, go visit Google Trends. Up quickly and then down and off the page, out of sight. The trick is to have these social media point to a single site – or a page on that site is even better. My experience has shown that the videos and podcasts will show up on the front page of Google quickly and then later the page they all link to. Then, like the Cheshire Cat, they fade until all that’s left is the smiling linked-to site.

However, if you are continually producing and then re-purposing your content to these social media hosts, you can simply and easily maintain several top positions on the SERPs at the same time. This particular phenomenon has been known for years, but it is still not widely applied (much like SEO – there are more amateurs out there than real pro’s.)

WordPress as a site-builder

I’ve been hearing about WordPress being the best platform to build your site on – for years now. When I checked it out, I found it true. Wordpress has a very active development community and there is ample recognition of good coders who supply plug-ins that improve it even more. The best plug-ins have a way of showing up integrated in later WP releases. (Much like Apple in the heady start up days.)

It’s not just a blog, it can be set up for simple and fast page building for any company. But because it’s blog-based by reputation, any new content is quickly snagged and posted into the top SERPs (as we covered earlier.)

It’s easy to set up and you can test-run your concepts on free WP blog-hosts out there. Best is to get your own hosting with cPanel – where WP is a free install. Then you load up some basic plug-in’s (like “All in One SEO Pack”) which automate basics for you.

Again, there are many, many tutorials on WP which I don’t need to repeat here. And lots of video’s on YouTube as well as other places. Seek and ye shall find. Study, compare, analyze – and gain a stable site platform, as well as all that wisdom…

Usability is key

I recommend one individual for his usability studies. He’s been doing it for years. Here’s Jakob Nielsen on Growing a Business Website.

The point, as he covers is to provide value in how your site is designed. Fortunately with WordPress, you can change into thousands of free templates until you find one which is most suitable to what you are trying to present and is easy to find stuff on your site. Tweaking this can be done by yourself (if you have the time to invest) or you can hire someone to do it – or simply buy a professionally designed theme, which will then have support.

Recommended is to get something close to what you want, tweak is if you absolutely have to, but otherwise, get on with building your site with all the stuff I’ve covered above. You’ve got a lot of work to do…

Invite linking and comments

Good comment is conversational in nature, perhaps even controversial – depending. You want to join in on the conversations in progress. In your market research, you’ve already found these conversations, and you’ve set up Google Alerts (and other feeds) to bring you data and information which is being discussed.

When you then create topical posts and pages which address these conversations, you invite people to attend your own site. In these posts, you can link to others’ posts – which empowers their post and moves it up the rankings. Also, you can post comments on applicable blog posts to contribute to the conversation there. Be real, give good value. Treat others as you would like to have show up on your blog/site.

The idea is to again contribute to the community first. And in abundance. Only after that point will you start getting stuff coming back to you.  Note that when you comment on another’s site, you will start getting referrals back to your own. Some people elevate this to a level of marketing all on it’s own – I’ll cover this more in a later chapter.

What you should be doing – other strategies

Your ultimate goal is to gain clients – this means getting subscriptions. And there are lots and lots of different subscriptions. The ones you use are the ones which are best the type of value you are presenting. Social media have many terms for this, followers and friends being the most common. Most of those are free subscriptions and can be terminated on either end. Even blocked.

Subscribers are clients, stakeholders, family.

Up from that would be invitation-only subscriptions, where you have to apply and be approved – which is its own sort of payment.

Further above is to have one or more levels of paid subscriptions, saving your best and most valuable content as your “velvet rope” exclusive area. Often a person will safe only so many spots in this area so he can personally service these subscribers. There are studies around that limit this to around 200 people, but that varies from person to person.

A further subscription would be as an affiliate salesperson – which we’ve covered. You might even get one of  your “inner circle” to take over managing these affiliates for some sort of exchange.

Now, a word of warning: Hide your best content if you choose to build a velvet rope area. This is best explained by  Jakob Nielson – Search Engines as Leeches. No sense researching and getting breakthroughs if the search engines will give that all way for free. I’ve personally found a lot of paid-subscription forums to be wide open for downloads because they were left insecure. All the “paid” part enabled me to do was to post in that forum. But search engines allowed me to get all their downloads I could find. — Oops.

And there is another set of strategies which are entirely offline – and I’ll talk more about this in the next chapter…