I had a discussion with a friend of mine, Christian Sterner the CEO and founder of Wellcomemat a video portal for videoagraphers, and we were talking about Universal Search and how to best leverage all of wellcomemat.com’s user generated content. I was pushing the commenting, telling him that they need to reward users that ask and answer questions. It was then that he said something that really put the whole thing into perspective: “the best sites online, OWN THE DISCUSSION on their topics”. That really puts the whole thing in a nutshell. I have proven time and time again that sites that push out quality content and that have users that ask question in the form of comments, rule the SERPs for their topics.

How To Own The Discussion

While Google is pushing branding, which I agree with to an extent, I have always pushed content and comments as I have found that WordPress posts historically get into the SERPs quickly, but tend to fade away over time. UNLESS THEY ARE HEAVILY COMMENTED. It was through this information that I found a great WP Plugin that takes the most recent comments and allows you to put them in a sidebar widget. I use that along with another plugin that lists the most popular posts based upon commenting. By putting both of these in the sidebar of the homepage of my client’s blog, I have seen an increase in placement for ALL of the posts that were linked from the home page through BOTH the popular posts and recent comments.

We all hate comment spam, and I am not in any way shape or form suggesting that you spam other peoples sites with comments. I am stating that you need to get comments going on your own site. You need to break the ice and ask and answer your own questions at first so that users see their questions will be answered in a timely manner. If you can get users to ask questions on your posts, you will OWN THE DISCUSSION.

Social Network Marketing at one time was a great source of inbound links, but that has changed since Google strong armed them into nofollowing their outbound links. Now social network marketing is good for exposure and traffic building, and of course branding, but little else except for a couple of document sharing sites. While SMO and social network marketing are still part of the game plan for SEO, we are focused more with on page optimization and commenting to drive discussion. Feel free to give us a call if you want to get started owning the discussion on Google. 727-251-2058

One of the things that we like the most about this system is the easy way the browser based interface is to use. You can create multiple campaigns, set up auto responders as well as advanced drip email campaigns. This email marketing software also complies with anti spamming regulations and rules that deal with spam. This is very important as your domain and IP address can be banned if you don’t use good email marketing solutions that don’t spam.

Email marketing is a great way to create more revenue streams and keep in contact with existing and new customers. With Interspire you will be able to send all types of emails including, but not limited to:

• Newsletters
• Special Offers
• Follow-up Emails
• Member Notices
• Customer Service Announcements
• Affiliate Emails
• Invitations… and much more!

Check out a free no obligation demo of this awesome email marketing software and try it before you buy it!

We always recommend that you check things out fully before you implement them. This bulk email marketing software is no different. With all the support you get on their website, you will have no problems seeing for yourself how powerful this tool can be for your business!

This was a major pain in the butt. I had to go into HTML view to remove the bad code. Fortunately I found the answer. Below is a graphic that shows how to access all writing tools so you can remove the formatting which will get rid of the red and green lines in WordPress:

WordPress Toolbar Remove Formatting

This will work for those of you that have had this problem, but in the future I suggest that you write your article in Text Pad and paste it in when you are done. My wife wrote an article on Content Writing Made Easy Using A Text Documentthat shows how we prepare content. You can also use the WordPress spell check or better yet FireFox. You can add dictionaries to FireFox and add words that it thinks are misspelled by clicking “add to dictionary” when you right click on a misspelled word.

Leave a question below and we will answer it quickly.

If you already have a website, the best game plan is to add a WordPress system as a directory using a quality keyword and having the directory as close to the root as possible. An example would be companyname.com/keyword/. If your domain already has your main keyword in it, don’t make the mistake of using it again as the name of your WordPress directory. In the unlikely event that you don’t already have a website for your business, then WordPress is a great stand-alone system to get going online. If you have a website, but it is under performing, flipping your site to a WordPress system will give you an incredible boost in the SERPS without taking forever for you to see results. Be clear about this one point though, if you choose WordPress as your content management system, you will have to create quality content on a regular basis.

Social Network Marketing as an SEO Tool

The concept of social network marketing as a powerful SEO tool died before it could become a reality when social networks bowed to Google and nofollowed their users outbound links. The fact is social networks that are related to business can still benefit a website through backlinks, but mainstream sites like Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Delicious, etc. do not pass on link juice. This is an attempt by Google and other search engines to weed out spammers who use social networks to raise their inbound links through spam. On one hand I applaud this, but on the other I find it annoying since I have useful content, but can’t promote it on social networks. The bottom line is that the only way to succeed is to create content that your users will link to. You also need to open discussion on your site through comments. We offer plans that kick start commenting. Even though commenting is pretty anonymous, people still feel weird about being the first person to leave a comment or ask what they feel to be a stupid question. Get Found Now researches your content and asks the right questions that you answer promptly. Once the comments start flowing they snowball into a lot of organic activity that will naturally increase your rankings. It’s like your first high school dance,no one wants to be the first one to be on the dance floor. That is why we have come up with a service that gets the discussion going on your WordPress system. Owning The Discussion and Branding Through SEO is an article I wrote a while back that was inspired by Google’s CEO calling the Internet a cesspool. The thing is, he is right, there is so much spam and weak user generated content out there that it is hard for legitimate websites to compete. Again, it is all about content!

If you have any questions about how to go about writing engaging content, getting discussion rolling on your website, WordPress blog design, or social network marketing give me a call at 866-418-3843 or post a comment below.

WordPress comes equipped with a powerful toolset for social network marketing and SEO. By using specific plugins as well as features already inherent to WordPress, you can set your system up to dominate the SERPS. The first place to start is deciding on which content you want to display to the search engines. There are two place to start with that:

1. Robots.txt File for WordPress SEO - the robots.txt file is where you notify the search engines where your sitemaps are as well as which pages, posts or directories that you don’t want the search engines to go. this holds true for all websites, not just WordPress sites. Leave a comment below if you have questions about robots.txt files.
2. On Page Meta Robots Tags- there are meta tags available that will control spiders and how they INDEX and FOLLOW both the content on the page as well as the links that are on the page. The truth is this subject warrants an entire post, but for now I will give you a quick overview. I use a plugin called All In One SEO Pack that will control on page Meta Robots Tags for category page, tag pages, archives and all posts and pages. All of those things lead down a dangerous path of duplicate content. You have to choose which content you are going to show the spiders. I am running 2 tests right now. One that is excluding everything but the original post and tag pages, and another one that is showing just categories and the post. The key here is to limit the amount of content shown on tag pages or category pages to just the tile and the first 300 or so characters. Even though that is not how my site is set up, you can see it in action at dtidata.com/resourcecenter where the category test is taking place. I am launching a new site called seobyyou.com where I will be testing the tag theory. I will keep everyone up to date on how the test goes. The initial results are leaning to the tag pages being opened up because there is more potential for keyword benefits because there are so many more tags.The basic game plan for pages that you don’t want spidered is to use the NOINDEX FOLLOW argument in on page meta tags. All In One SEO Pack does that, but you also have to coordinate that activity with your sitemap tool. In other words you don’t want to put archive and category pages in your sitemap and then tell spiders not to index them. This also holds true for all types of websites, you just have to do it manually. Leave a comment below if you have any questions.

Once you have identified what content you want to show the search engines and you have set up your road maps (sitemaps) and stop signs (robots.txt), you have given Google what it wants, an easy way to spider your site!

The next step is to incorporate into your sidebars links out to your recent comments, most popular posts and latest posts. You will have to tweak your files to insure that WordPress is not nofollowing your links from the sidebars into the recent comments, latest posts and most popular posts. The goal here is to show Google that there is discussion going on within your site. By answering comments quickly and giving good information, you will get inbound links, that is a fact.

If you have any questions or would like to set up a FREE no obligation report on your WordPress SEO, call 866-418-3843 or leave a comment below.

Get Found Now has been working on social network marketing and SEO for years. We hope to share with our visitors our past and present successes and failures. The process of changing GetFoundNow.com from a static html website to a WordPress system was done while the site was live and took place behind the scenes. When we notified Google of the changes through their Webmaster Tools, it took Google less than a week to cache the new site. This is significant in that Google’s response time has quickened over the last couple of months. They are updating and caching sites at a remarkable rate, I have also noted that their Page Rank updates are happening on a page level almost simultaneously to their major index updates. This is also new behavior. My nest article will break down what Google has been saying publicly and how it will effect our placement. Visit our home page for more information on social network marketing. You might also want to take a look at our new SEO Training Portal SEO BY YOU. It will be up and fully functioning in a couple of weeks. Feel free to leave a comment!

Get Found Now is happy to announce it’s new series of WordPress marketing articles written by Victoria Stankard, our content writing expert. Victoria has been writing content and doing SEO since 1998 creating link building strategies for an online shopping center, one of the first of it’s kind! Anyway, Victoria is writing a series on how to best use WordPress from a content and SEO standpoint.

Since we changed our main website to a WordPress system, that gives us two RSS feeds that people can sign up for. This blog, our Internet Marketing blog, will be focused on search engine marketing, website usability, analytics and search engine updates. Our primary website getfoundnow.com, and its feed will be about WordPress, social network marketing, and Web 2.0 strategies. Feel free to subscribe to our RSS feed or sign up for email updates to Get Found Now on our home page.

WordPress Marketing Series

Victoria’s first group of articles are a foundation of WordPress Marketing strategies. I would read them in this order:

• WordPress Marketing and SEO Strategies - this is an overview of topic reputation and how it is the core of content planning and execution.
• WordPress Blog Post Writing For SEO - here you will get some great info on how to optimize WordPress articles, set them up for the search engines, write a series of articles and SEO functions within WordPress.
• Using Tags For WordPress Blog SEO - this article is very important because it tells you how to utilize tags for SEO, not just usability. Victoria also calls attention to the differences of opening up tags or categories to the search engine spiders.

We encourage everyone that reads Victoria’s articles to leave a comment and ask questions or debate our strategies. I hope everyone has a productive 2009!

The fact is, blogs are becoming core components to Internet Presence Management. This is most apparent in the Real Estate industry. All the major real estate informational sites like Inman and RIS Media are pushing blogging as the best means for agents and agencies to not only communicate with their prospective clients, but also as a way to get higher search engine placement. 

If you are interested in either getting started with a blog, or making your existing blog better, than this is a good place to start. There are plenty of blogging systems out there that take care of web hosting, setup and configuration of blogs. Sites like Blogger and WordPress.com allow users to create blogs within minutes and all for free! While there are benefits to sites like Blogger (which is owned by Google), to achieve the best results, you need to have your own domain and control over every aspect of your blogging system.

Get Found Now has performed extensive testing on all the major blog service sites (Blogger, wordpress.com, etc.) as well as stand-alone blogging systems (WordPress, TypePad, etc.) and have found that the stand-alone systems not only rank higher, but get into the search engines much faster. While TypePad is a solid blogging system, we chose WordPress because of the superior support and myriad of plugin and theme options. WordPress has more options and is widely supported. If you are a TypePad user, you will still find these series of articles useful because the theory behind the technology and strategy for blogging can be applied to TypePad, we do have a lot more support for WordPress so if you are making a choice now, stick with WordPress.

WordPress Blog Design Services

When designing a blogging system, there are a lot of options. The most important thing about blogs is the content. The way that WordPress delivers your content is what separates it from other content management systems and gives it the upper hand in the SERP’s.

The actual look and navigation of the blog is handled by the theme. Get Found Now uses custom themes that are the best of both worlds:

1. Website Usability- if users can’t find what they are looking for than your site won’t convert any of its traffic. By using deep link navigation your visitors will always know where they are on your site.
2. SEO Ready - if your site isn’t ranking for your keywords than nobody will be able to find it!

This new series will take a look at every aspect of blog design from install to plugins and theme customization. Please leave questions as comments so I can answer them for everyone. For more information and to see samples of our work visit our WordPress Blog Design page.

If you optimize a page for to many keywords, you end up diluting the focus of that page in respect to those keywords. Each page on your site should be tightly focused to rank very highly for a specific set of terms. If you want to rank for a greater number of keywords, then you should increase the number of pages on your site. This does not mean that your page won’t rank for related terms. Often times, keywords overlap. Ranking highly for one keyword can also help your page rank highly for a whole host of related keywords. For instance, if your page ranks highly for the keywords direct marketing, then it is likely to also rank highly for professional direct marketing or direct marketing services, if you use those phrases somewhere in your<body> text.

Tagging related terms onto your primary keywords like this is a good way to rank highly for the broader range of searches without diluting the focus of your pages. Use the <Images Alt=” ” >Tag Wisely: Turn Images Into AssetsYour company logo may show what you are, who you are, and even state a benefit-but the engines can’t index your image. The search engine’s indexing-bot is oblivious to everything but text. The only indexable aspect of the images is the text content you place within the <image alt=“put text here”>tag.

You can turn all images into assets by placing keyword text within the Alt tags. Here is an example: <img src=“logo.jpg” alt+ “Beachfront Hawaii Vacation Rentals – lodging – villas – homes – accommodations – Oahu –Maui – Kona – Hawaii – Kauai – Big Island” height= “116” width= “537”>

Now you should not expect a big ranking boost from this strategy-in fact you may get none. However, engines have been know to index the content of Alt tags in the past and one never knows when the ranking algorithm will shift back again as it does from time to time. Three more reasons for using for using the alt tag are:

1. The content becomes visible when a mouse passes over the page.

2. The content disappears whenever the image fails to load.

3. The latest HTML specs require that images have an Alt tag. So be sure to use the Alt tag and make it work in your favor.

Check out our posts:

9 Steps to finding the right keywords

SEO Tips: Keyword Density

Enter the .pro domain extension. I haven’t seen as much talk about it as I expected even though it has been out for months. I suppose that professionals online don’t feel it will crack the dominance of traditional .com’s. The fact is .pro will not only rank high, but has the potential to take rankings away from the vaunted .com domain extension.

Why You Shouldn’t Ignore .PRO Domain Extensions

If you are a professional and have a brick and mortar business, you absolutely must grab your .pro domain. I was astonished to see how many important domains were still available. You must have a business license to keep your domain. If you don’t provide them with a business license along with the licensing entity within 44 days you will loose the domain and they won’t refund the money. Since .pro domains are not available through wholesalers like godaddy, you will have to use Network Solutions or another registrar. You can get a list of .pro registrars here.

Fell free to leave a comment if you have any questions about .pro domains. I have 2 sites that have just been released and will keep everyone updated on their progress. Once they are in the SERPS I will put up links to them.

By now just about every business that has an online presence knows what SEO (search engine optimization) is, and that it is critical to their online survival. The goal is to tie social network marketing into traditional SEO practices in the minds of your customers. I have found that a lot of people aren’t totally sure what social network marketing is, especially when it comes to business applications.

We have success with social network marketing because we use it in conjunction with solid SEO tactics. This is the game plan that will get us all through the economic meltdown. It needs to start with WordPress. The only problem I have ever had with WordPress is its moniker - weblog. It is so much more than just another blogging system, it literally is the most powerful SEO tool that has ever been created. It will do the job right out of the box, but with several modifications, WordPress will propel your domain or website into the top of the SERPS and keep it there. You might ask “what’s the hitch”, but there isn’t one as long as you provide quality content on a regular basis.

Adding a WordPress system onto an existing static website is the best SEO solution. If you or your clients are creating a new Internet presence, then WordPress is the SEO / social network marketing one two punch that will allow you to OWN THE DISCUSSION on whatever topics that are in your online marketing strategy. The key to leveraging your existing search engine visibility is all in how dynamic your site is. I am not just talking about dynamic in the sense of database driven web pages, but dynamic in constantly evolving content that is updated by your site’s users through commenting.

Prior to kicking off campaigns on Facebook and MySpace, you must have a platform to deliver the rich media that makes social network marketing work. My next installment will show you what plugins are required for you to Own the Discussion within the search engines.