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4Networking, Successful Internet Marketing Presentation is a post from: Leon Streete

This was delivered as part of Global Entrepreneurship week 2011 to a room of start up and established business owners at Business Insight Birmingham Central Library.

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For more information on Global Enterprise Week visit: http://www.gew.org.uk/

Global Entrepreneurship Week 2011 is a post from: Leon Streete

One of my own challenges has been around taking on too many things at once with out continual clear priority on what I wish to achieve and what will take me step by step toward my vision. Really committing to understanding where my own values reach the tipping point in terms of where Im willing to compromise on them depending on my situation in order to be successful.

This may all sound like deep stuff, but the reality is that it is, it’s deep routed in me and how my world appears to me – similar to a quote by Shakespeare “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”. The better I know how I handle my interactions with people, situations and the universe, the better I become, keeping this idea simple is the way forward.

My own recent enlightening came as I focus on what my purpose is… Not currently my easiest challenge, but out of my journey for inner knowledge I have found the answers come to me… Eric Thomas thank you for your video on Secrets to Success. From watching his video I have found something that struck a cord with me.

“When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, you will be successful”.

For me it is plain to understand, see and feel. When I put my goals, dreams and purpose into this perspective how do I measure up? Well from that statement I feel the perspective it creates within me, leaving me with a telling question “Am I on track?” I now use this to really focus on my own drive to be successful and how committed I am to it.

What I have found from my own experience is the power of having the right people around me, mixing with the right people – positive. Growing my own knowledge from reading various books by respected people on mental, spiritual, physical, relationships and financial subjects that help me to sharpen my proverbial saw. Focusing on a common goal and making people around me aware of my dreams and aspirations and finally reminding and living the ever evolving philosophy of becoming the success of who I choose to be at the cost of who I am now.

My aim to with this article is to offer a glimpse of my own experience as a resource to assist and help others achieve their full and successful potential. I would love to hear what helps you stay on track and achieve and exceed your goals and dreams.

Stay on track, be and do success.

Leon.

Some useful books to get you started:

1. Think and Grow Rich
2. Seven Strategies for Wealth and Happiness
3. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
4. Rich Dad, Poor Dad

Staying on track – Personal Power is a post from: Leon Streete

My life up until now has been filled with many happy and great times and what I have come to realise is that when I have spent time understanding who I am, what I believe in and what I need to work on to become a better me, life succumbs to my desire, my energy and my actions.

Life, whilst it involves so much emotion and soul searching offers you, every day, the ability to work toward your goals and to make every day great. My own times spent with communicating with my wife, son and people in my life have given me so much back in terms of understanding what I choose to take, create and act on in life.

1. By understanding who you are emotionally and spiritually, knowing your patterns
2. planning and setting massive goals towards the things you want out of life and
3. acting on those desires – will set you on the right course in your life.

The path to these goals is never straight forward nor easy, but what I have experienced is that continual focus and having others hold you accountable so that you truly live your life to the fullest is a great way to look back on those days of achievement and see, hear and feel the sense of fulfilment, both shared or as an individual.

Start by looking at the people you consider to be successes in your desired area of life, then plan and work hard to understand how they became successful, learn from those who have gone before because they can speed up your journey. Seriously… go out and find them, then speak with them – after all the worst they can do is to say no, so stay strong move on to the next person and keep driving and living your life to fullest.

My own challenge is now working on achieving my new goals in life at home and in business, continually becoming a better me, leaving behind the legacy of who I chose to be, whilst I am living in this moment.

I hope these few words offer you a moment to stop, think and act on living your life to the fullest.

“Push yourself beyond what you thought possible, you can achieve many great things, choose to step out of your comfort zone and live”.

Thanks for reading.

Leon.

Live your life to the fullest! …or is living comfortable working for you..? is a post from: Leon Streete

Most of the networking events such as BNI, 4 Networking and various breakfast clubs give you the chance to present information about your business or industry and I find the best way to deliver a presentation whether in PowerPoint format, via flip chart or use of a prop is to do a key number of things.

7 Steps:

1 – Intro: Give the audience a little background of you, your company to affirm who you are and your competence.

[Typical time frame: 1 minute]

2 – Summary: Give a brief overview of what you will be covering, whether it’s a story on a particular subject or experience you’ve had. Remember as humans we generally communicate in 3 ways using Visual (See) Auditory (Hearing and listening) and Kinaesthetic (Touch and feel) – VAK. With this in mind make sure everyone is included.

[Typical time frame: 1 minute]

3 – Body: Talk about some of the key parts of your subject, whether it’s a product, service, product or experience you’ve had.

[Typical time frame: 4 minutes]

4 – Result: Here you can present and talk about the results (and benefits) you achieved, the results a customer achieved or on a particular case study (Portfolio item). Remember results can be numbers and also things which mattered most to people.

E.g. Being able to gain more time because of your service, or being better off from increased sales which mean your customer can now employ an extra person or even go on holiday as a reward for the great work you did.

[Typical time frame: 2 minutes]

5 – Conclusion:  Wrap up the presentation and leave the audience wanting to know more about you, your company or your service etc. Remember its only 10 minutes so get them wanting more.

[Typical time frame: 1 minute]

6 – Questions: Ask the audience if they have any questions. The important thing here is to take questions for up to 5 minutes. Any longer than that and you may start to over step the time allowed for your presentation, but generally 5 minutes is almost acceptable, for any further questions, simply ask people to speak to you after the meeting and write their names down so you can approach them. You never know they may be your next sales lead.

[Typical time frame: 1 – 5 minutes]

7 – Thank You: Thank your audience for their participation in being present and listening.

Engage your audience.

Remember to use your voice and keep it at a good level for people at the back, there’s nothing more annoying that not being able to hear a presenter, which you have agreed to give 10 minutes of your precious time.

Give good eye contact – talk from memory or bullet points on your presentation. I’m assuming you’ve practiced your presentation, scan around the room and give everyone the opportunity to feel included, if it’s a big audience focus on sections of the audience as your present to them. This will help to prevent you from reading from a notes page which doesn’t work well with an audience.

Use your visual aids, presentation projector, and flip chart or prop etc. We’re not all hooked by the same things, which is why if you use a mix of techniques to communicate to your audience – on the whole you will engage with most.

Presentations can seem scary to some and second nature to others, my advice is to take your time, …breath, present at a good steady speed and allow time for people to take your information in, its not a 100m sprint like a 60 second pitch, its more of a steady mile, you are in control.

Wrapping this up.

Now the points mentioned above are a generalisation of my experiences, which have been good over the years, the more you present the better you will become – after all repetition is the mother of all skill.

Use the timings above to suit you, your audience and your industry. They are not fixed in stone, so test what works for you and run with it.

Feedback

I like it when people give me constructive feedback after a presentation, generally it helps you to get a firm understanding of what worked and what didn’t, and this will help you to sharpen your proverbial presentation saw, so that next time your presentation is even better.

If you have any tips for me please leave them in a comment below. Thanks for reading.

Leon.

Networking: Delivering Your 10 Minute Presentation is a post from: Leon Streete

How to get more customers from your website? Conversion Rate is a post from: Leon Streete

New developments will see a new format to my own blog and the launch of my business owner website, Internet Marketing Profit – Focused on increasing profit from Internet Marketing strategies for all subscribers.

There will be some new videos coming up from myself covering some great techniques to help you with SEO, Social Media, Online Marketing Strategy and more.

Thanks for your time and look out for the new goodies coming soon.

Leon.

Keep the torch burning is a post from: Leon Streete

Most companies start out with Online Marketing or the creating of a new website to serve some form of purpose, most tend to have an outdated website or hear they should be trying some form of new marketing technique, from social media to SEO.

My key advice would be to create an internet marketing strategy that focused on a 12- 36 month plan, offering you clear goals to achieve – mapped against your vision for your business online.

With a strategy you have the first steps to achieving success, the second step is to take action, knowing the tactics for each marketing strategy you employ as part of your overall online marketing strategy.

Some of these strategies may include:

• Web Design (Updating or creating a new website)
• Blog’s (Create regular and fresh content)
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Email Marketing
  • Auto Responders
• Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn
• Pay Per Click Advertising
  • Adwords, Facebook
• Social Media Marketing
• Online Video
  • YouTube, Vimeo
• Webinars
• Squeeze Pages
• Article Marketing

Once you’ve made up you mind in terms of what to use, take action and start achieving results.

Once you start to get results, make sure you test and measure using tools like, Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer, Alexa and Google Webmaster tools.

This is a small insight into what LAS Design can do, to find out more get in touch – Web Design.

Thank you for reading.

Internet Marketing Strategy – Starting out is a post from: Leon Streete

SEO is mostly about optimising your website or blog for the Search Engines but through the rise of social media websites these websites have not gone by unmissed by Google, Yahoo and Bing. So to ensure you’re taking advantage of the leverage in people who use these websites I will cover some of the key areas that will point you in the right direction of success online in this growing area.

Social media

As social media grows online and the memberships on websites such as Facebook breakthrough and grow beyond 500 million members, it’s a good time to stop, take note and look at how to leverage the customer base on these sites.

In the name alone “Social” suggests you need to appeal to your target audience socially, you need to look at and cover some core areas of bringing together your Online Marketing strategy to interact in all of the core modalities of how humans communicate, VAK – Visual (What is seen), Auditory (What is heard) and Kinaesthetic (What is felt).

Why Old Marketing is dead

Through the advent of the internet and the advances in web technology allowing us to communicate instantly with one another, pin point our online advertising right down to the locality of a town or city, buy securely online in an instant and test a measure Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) like never before… Its no wonder old marketing is dead – the old way of putting an advert in a paper and waiting, even hoping, for customers to find you and then wishing that they will call or visit your showroom once seeing your advert. Well if that isn’t setting alarm bells ringing for you just reading it, it did me just to type it.

We are at an age where we are talking more online, taking recommendations of friends as apposed to what a company says on its website or its sales literature, we can compare products at the drop of a hat and buy from anywhere in the world and through social media it brings all of these key social activities and many more together.

What’s it all about?

Social Media in itself is as I’ve mentioned a big area and for the purposes of this blog I will only cover the interaction between Social Media and Search Engines as another route to drive your success online.

Most of the social media sites online offer some form of profile facility where by you can either create a profile for an individual or company profile.

Create your profile

Setting up your profile on some of the top social media sites offers may benefits with SEO. Often the profile pages allow you to add your website address, blog address, RSS feeds; offering a valuable back link to your website. Although many of the links come with a “nofollow” attribute added to the link meaning that the search engines will pass no rank onto your site from the social media website. This is ok, because the Search Engines will still do a number of things when they rank / read these pages. Your conversations, updates and news feeds will be absorbed by the search engines adding to there results database. Just look at the following images below to see how the search engines are already reading and ranking social media sites amongst normal web pages.

Social Media on Search Engines:

{gallery}seo-7of-7{/gallery}

Some of the key Social Media Sites I use that offer a profile page for personal and business use are;

• Facebook – Social community and friends
• Twitter – Micro blogging with followers
• Linked In – Professional networking
• You tube – Video sharing
• Digg – Article and Web page bookmarking and following
• Scribd – Document creation, become an author share your articles
• Photobucket – Photo sharing

My advice if you aren’t using social media websites is – start to use them now.

• My Profile on Facebook – Leon Streete
• My Business Profile on Facebook – LAS Design

Think about how you will use them because they are here to stay, just consider this for a moment. Of the 500 million people registered on Facebook there are 24 million plus from the UK alone, and with a population of approx 63 million people in the UK that’s over one third of the population. I may be wrong in thinking – but Im sure some of your customers are in there amongst the 24 million registered UK users?

I actively encourage you to make social media part of your Online Marketing Strategy, I have gained customers through it and so have many others.

Leverage your marketing

The one cool thing about Social Media is that all of these websites are all integrating with one another, creating one of the greatest Marketing tool kits at your disposal. Think about this for a minute – You create a new product, you upload a free PDF to Scribd showing how your product works, you upload a short articles on Ezine Articles covering the new product, you upload a free demo video on You Tube showing some useful tips that your customers find really useful this automatically updates your Facebook page – Followers, customers and friends comment and interact with your updates, this automatically updates your twitter feed, this in turn updates your LinkedIn profile.

Not only are you there in real time with your customers and potential customers, you’re taking your marketing to a whole new level of market penetration.

All of this happening with only having to update a few web sites, moreover whilst all of this social media stuff is happening the search engines are ranking and reading it all (provided permissions have been set to public) – Giving you more from less.

How Search Engines are integrating with Social Media

Google and other search engines are reading and scanning Social Media websites and with more on the rise, it is now possible to develop websites specifically so that Google will read and recognise users pages as profile pages.

This HTML example on Google’s Webmaster tools shows how to do this:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569

For the Social Graph API, we will count the rel=”me” link even when included with a nofollow.

Google Webmaster Tools.

Conclusion:

Social Media is an important part of any Online Marketing Strategy whether it is for business or a personal project. The ability to create a following, interact with customers on a number of different communication modalities and penetrate a target market with such precision is awesome. The fact that search engines have adapted to include social updates in their results shows a big swing in marketing online, and emphasises the importance of having a true marketing mix, working many strategies to achieve your marketing goals online.

SEO and Social Media go hand in hand and it’s through clear focused goals, that will allow you to truly benefit from these marketing tools.

The final bonus blog in this series will cover “Test & Measure”. This important ingredient in the SEO and Online Marketing mix is really the nugget with which you will understand how your marketing can evolve to become a true force and vehicle for Return On Investment (ROI) online.

Next steps:

Read the follow up to this blog: SEO 8 of 7: Test & Measure.

Useful Websites:

Social Community’s

• www.facebook.com
• www.twitter.com
• www.linkedin.com
• www.myspace.com
• www.ning.com

Articles

• www.scribd.com
• www.ezinearticles.com

Blogging

• www.wordpress.com
• www.blogger.com
• www.squidoo.com
• www.hubpages.com
• www.tumblr.com

Micro Blogging

• www.twitter.com
• www.google.com/buzz

Video

• www.youtube.com
• www.viddler.com
• www.metacafe.com
• www.vimeo.com

Photos

• www.flickr.com
• www.photobucket.com
• http://picasaweb.google.com

Social Bookmarking

• www.digg.com
• www.reddit.com
• www.delicious.com
• www.addthis.com

SEO 7 of 7: Social Media – Who likes and follows you? is a post from: Leon Streete

The point of the me telling you this is where the conversation lead us, talking about life and business, how to positively influence your family, friends and team, the lives of people around you and most importantly holding that state internally (VAK) when all is great within you, to the point that your skin tingles with unlimited energy, you feel alive, the world becomes a wonderful place and you have that sensation where there is total harmony – abundance.

Often it can be easy to float by, not hooking your self with the abundance that life offers, clouding things with less important stuff, complicating things and procrastinating. I too procrastinate over things, but the one thing that I have become better at is being aware when I’m doing it and to take action faster when I need to.

Who you want to BE is what will determine where you head, what you have and what you become.

The being part is powerful, choose to be the GREATEST, through techniques like, IVVM – Idealise, Visual, Verbalise and Materialise you can achieve many things in life. Positive affirmations and focusing regularly on guiding your own course will in itself prove to be its own motivator in your life as you head toward the thing you want most “Who you choose to BE”.

Once you understand and decide who you choose to BE, you can then DO the things that will allow you to HAVE the vision and live it.

Some of my positive affirmations;

BE (Idealise):

• I want to positively change peoples live through my teachings and experiences
• I want to be an inspiration to my wife
• I want to be a great teacher to my son

• I choose to be an inspiration to the people around me.
• I am a great husband
• I am a great father
• I choose to have freedom of my time and control of my life through the unlimited options available to me
• I choose to have great customers in my business
• I choose to take great action to be my vehicle for success
• I am committed to continual educational improvement to better myself
• I am powerful beyond measure

DO (Visualise / Verbalise):

• Create a vision for you, with your family and your business
• Create vision boards to see what you really want most
• Educate yourself and always work on being better, not wishing things were easier.
• Work on achieving and hitting your goals, that lead you toward your vision
• Take action and learn from your failings as these will lead you towards success.
  

HAVE (Materialise):

• As my journey unfolds those things I aspire to have and achieve come to me
• Reward yourself
• Pay yourself first

You can use these techniques in life, at home or in business, and once you achieve those things you aspire to and who you choose to become – remember goals are not set in stone, life evolves and grows organically. With time comes experience and wisdom so re-evaluate these affirmations as you grow spiritually and emotionally.

Raise your game and go for everything you want with spirit and passion.

Thanks for reading.

Leon.

Be x Do = Have is a post from: Leon Streete

Links – A.K.A Hyperlinks

The way I describe links from one website to another is to think of the way we vote for MP’s and Politicians. Each link in the eyes of search engines acts as a vote that assists with your website rankings performance – almost like casting enough votes to elect your favoured Politician. The one difference here is that with search engines one websites link can be valued (ranked) higher than another. So it’s not purely a matter of the most links the better, it’s more quality rather than quantity.

Just so you get a good grasp of what links have to offer with your SEO results, read on through these important factors.

1. Internal – Linking to your own web pages
2. Anchor Text – Use a good descriptive phrase
3. Outbound – Who you link to
4. Back links / Inbound – Who links to you
5. How to get links
   1. Exchanging
   2. Submissions
   3. Directories
   4. Authority sites

Internal

Linking to your own pages through use of a good main menu, a site map page, internal content links and footer links are all great ways to ensure your website is well connected. This is important because once search engines begin indexing (listing) your pages, you want them to be able to find all of the pages on your website and associated with the correct anchor text.

Anchor Text

If you’ve not heard of it before, anchor text is very important when linking to another page on your website, an external website or how external websites link to you. You may have seen links on web pages and have an understanding of how they normally look, but just to make anchor text clear here are a few examples.

E.g.

1. This is how you may see a normal link: www.google.co.uk

The link “www.google.co.uk” is classed as anchor text, although the hyperlink that sits behind the anchor text would actually result in your being directed to http://www.google.co.uk.

1. Here is the same link as above pointing to the same place, www.google.co.uk but with anchor text Google Search UK

What you will notice is that the first example uses the web address as the anchor text, where as the second uses a descriptive phrase “Google Search UK”, but still points to the same web address.

Very Important! When it comes to great SEO the second example above, where the descriptive phrase is used for your link anchor text, this is what you should aim for every time you place or receive a link.

Search engines when indexing your pages will read the links on your web pages and where anchor text is used, they will associate the anchor text with the link that it points to, thus placing importance and relevance of anchor text with the underlying link.

When ever you place a link to one of your pages or receive a link from another website to your own, make sure you use anchor text. A good rule is to use a key phrase from your keyword research, see article 1 of 7 from this series, as this will have a positive impact with your search rankings and results.

Outbound links

These are the links you put in place on your website and web pages pointing to other websites.
Linking from your website to others is also important with improving your search engine rankings as who you link to online is in effect who you are voting for.

The negative effects of out bound links:
Unmonitored or user generated links can reduce your websites credibility, especially if the link has no relevance or offends your website readers. Especially for more advanced web savvy users, so try to keep to no more than 100 outbound links per web page, which is generally good practice on the internet.

Back Links

In terms of SEO receiving a hyperlink or link from one web site to your own web site is a highly IMPORTANT factor. External hyper linking can be both good and bad, so to get it right only accept links from web sites who have similar content, or web sites of good quality (E.g. Do NOT have web site links from Casino’s or web sites offering diet pills etc).

How to get links

Exchanging

Exchanging links with other websites is a great way to get back links, some websites may have a submission page whilst others you will need to contact. If you are planning on exchanging links its good practice to exchange links with websites or companies who fit close to your industry and website content as this will emphasise relevance.

Below is an example email that you can use for FREE to exchange links with your website and another:

1. First Get the web address (URL) of the company / website or web page, you wish to exchange links with.
2. Find the company email address so you can contact them later on.
3. Place the link onto your e.g. links page.
4. Now create your email with instructions to exchange links and send to the email address you got at point 2 of this list.
   • Email Subject (Pay a compliment): Your Website is fantastic.
   • Create the email Content:

Hi (If you know the contact name put it here!),
I have been on your website and found the content and what you have to say great. It’s obvious you have put great effort into it. I wish to exchange links with your website as this will be mutually beneficial for both our websites for achieving good rankings with Search Engines (E.g. Google).

I have already placed your link here: (Put the web address of your own links page here)
My Link details for you to place on your links page are:

Title: (Put your website Name OR Your Product Name OR A Key Phrase)
URL: (Your website address OR The page you wish to link to on your website)
Description: Short description of the page they will be linking to.

Please reply to this email to confirm when you have added my link on your web page.
Thank you.
(Put your name here)

To make the exchanging of links an even easier process you could setup a links page on your website ready with the details of how you wish to exchange links, making it easy for people to link to your website with the details you want used. Here is an example of how you may lay this out on your links page, with three key pieces of information, Title – Anchor Text, URL – Web Address, Description – A 25-30 word sentence describing the page to be linked to.

Title: Online Marketing Strategy
URL: http://www.leonstreete.com
Description: Leon Streete is a professional who focuses his experience on Online Marketing Strategies to boost the ROI of his clients online marketing budget.

Submissions –

Article submission websites allow users to submit and post articles on any given subject area and can result in the author becoming known as a professional or export in the area that they write about.

Article submission websites offer some great options for back linking to your website. Most are set up and require you to register with a profile where you enter details as part of your individual biography and come with options to enter your web address, blog web address and more. The great thing with article submission websites is the rankings they hold with search engines because of their age, social use and traffic volumes. Some examples include; www.ezinearticles.com and www.scribd.com

Directory’s –

Directory websites are a great way to get back links. Most will offer a free submission where you can create a profile entry and get a back link to your website, whilst others you may need to pay for, or they offer a paid featured listing which you will need to pay for, for your back link to be visible to search engines. What I will say here is that most of the websites that offer you great rankings from a back link are FREE.

One way to look at search engines is that they in themselves are big directory websites, they list and order web pages by country, topic (page content) relevance and more increasingly locality and socially. In fact the main directory websites that are free are also classed as authority sites.

Authority Sites

Authority sites are normally websites with a mature domain age. Through the age and a mixture of longevity, consistency with content and traffic, they indicate to search engines their importance and long term appeal in their industry as apposed to a website set up with a short term goal.
Quality natural SEO results, back links, outbound links and more recently mass social appeal and usage, demonstrate to Search engines their authority over other websites. These are only a few factors that give authority websites their title, and in terms of SEO if you can gain a back link from one of these websites it will be worth a lot to your rankings. Authority is Trust from Search Engines.

Examples include:

• www.yahoo.com
• www.nasa.gov
• www.facebook.com
• www.msn.com
• www.amazon.com

Conclusion:

Links and Hyperlinks are currently with search engines, one of the most important ranking factors for SEO, don’t get me wrong there are a number of elements to SEO but having great backlinks can have a really positive effect on your rankings (Search Engine Results Pages – SERP).

My advice to you is to go for quality over quantity. I’ve witnessed the power of one good link, on my own website, out do another competitor who has 50 – 100 back links.

When I’m creating links or exchanging I look for rel=”dofollow” in the html source code view, links from authority sites – websites that the search engines rank very highly, and high page rank domains, as the domain PageRank can eventually pass down to lower or non ranked pages. Whilst PageRank is not an indication to how well your website is ranked, I’ve found it does play a part.

Link building must be a continual process that is reviewed as part of your marketing, monthly and quarterly. Why should it, you may ask? Well just think if you’re optimising and link building, are your competitors?

So long as you put the right effort in you’ll get the right results out, don’t leave it to chance or be reactive – your link building should be proactive and work for you, so that you get the right level of Return On Investment (ROI) from your SEO activity.

Next steps:

Read the follow up to this blog: SEO 7 of 7: Social Media – Who likes you, who do you follow?

I want to hear from you and your views on this topic, if you’ve got any great comments, achieved some great SEO results of your own or advice to add to this, please do. Good luck with your online marketing.
Leon.

Useful Websites:

FREE Directories
www.dmoz.org – Get a back link
http://dir.yahoo.com – Get a back link
www.freeindex.com – Get a back link
www.wowdirectory.com – Get a back link

SEO 6 of 7: Back Links – Get your votes in now! is a post from: Leon Streete

Website Structure

Having the correct website structure will ensure search engines can read all of your web pages and record the pages that you need indexed (listed) on the search engines. The following 6 key points cover some of the important parts of your website structure.

1. Sitemap Web Page

A site map is a great way to list all or the main web pages on your website this acts as both a great way to direct browsers of your website to all the pages of your site and offers search engines the ability to follow the links on your sitemap to all of the pages you have listed. A site map is exactly what it sounds like, a map of your website that leads browsers and search engines to all the pages of your website.

1. Sitemap XML file

An XML sitemap is very similar to the normal page site map but with one very significant difference. It is totally aimed at search engines. Search engines read XML sitemaps with ease and this allows them to index all the pages you want listed in an efficient process. Once you have your site map in place it’s a good idea to submit it to Google Webmaster Tools. It normally sits at the root level of your website but is not limited to this location.

An example:
<?xml version=’1.0′ encoding=’UTF-8′?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance”
xsi:schemaLocation=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd”>
<url>
<loc>http://www.leonstreete.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2010-07-10</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
Save the file with the filename sitemap.xml, now upload to your website root folder.

1. Robots.txt

The robots file is a simple text file that Search Engines check when they come to index a website. It sits at the root level of your website and it is good for informing search engines of pages you do not wish to have listed, you can also have it instruct search engines if you do not want them to index your site at all, and also specify the interval time for which they will crawl (scan) your website. The robots file can also be used to reference your website XML sitemap. This also helps to quickly identify to search engines the location of your sitemap.

An example robots.txt file:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /images/

sitemap: http://www.leonstreete.com/sitemap.xml

What Wikipedia says:

“The Robot Exclusion Standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable.”

1. Urllist.txt

Very similar to an XML sitemap but specific to Yahoo’s search engine and some what more simplified, although other search engines can also read this sitemap file.

Create a simple text based sitemap using notepad or other text editor as follows:

Create a new file in notepad. Enter your website addresses (URL’s) I’ve used my own site as an example below:

http://www.leonstreete.com
http://www.leonstreete.com/blog.html
http://www.leonstreete.com/General/my-reading-list.html
http://www.leonstreete.com/General/contact-me.html
Save the file with the filename urllist.txt, now upload to your website root folder.

1. CSS Files

Cascading Style Sheets are a styling language used to visually describe the presentation of a document, mostly used with HTML web pages or XML, they enable the separation of document content from document presentation (the visual look and feel). In terms of SEO the main recommendation I give is to load all CSS code in separate off page CSS files. This will speed up page load time and scanning of web pages.

Through use of well formed HTML pages CSS can enable the priority of your content above that of other less important factors for ranking well with SEO. More over, because Search Engines aren’t intelligent and simply read your pages from the top down, its best to prioritise the structure of web pages to ensure valuable content is scanned as priority.

Example provided by: John Biundo & Eric Enge

Sample HTML
<html>
<body>
<div id=”content”>
<h1>About our products</h1>
<p>Here’s our main content. It appears at the very top of the “body”
section of our file. The search engine will find this text easily
and weight it more importantly, for determining what the page is about,
than text it finds towards the bottom of the file, such as our
navigation menu.</p>
</div>
<div id=”nav-menu”>
<ul>
<li><a href=”http://www.mydomain.com/”>Home</a></li>
<li><a href=”http://www.mydomain.com/products”>Products</a></li>
<li><a href=”http://www.mydomain.com/services”>Services</a></li>
<li><a href=”http://www.mydomain.com/support”>Customer
Support</a></li>
<li><a href=”http://www.mydomain.com/about”>About Us</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</body>

Sample CSS
#content {
margin-top: 20px;
margin-left: 160px;
width: 525px;
}

#nav-menu {
position: absolute;
left: 10px;
top: 20px;
width: 150px;
}

Stone Temple consulting, http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/css-and-seo.shtml

1. JavaScript

“JavaScript is primarily used in the form of client-side JavaScript, implemented as part of a web browser in order to provide enhanced user interfaces and dynamic websites” Wikipedia. If your website uses JavaScript, load all on-page JavaScript code onto separate off page files. This will speed up page load time and scanning of web pages. What it also does is to allow your web page content to be scanned faster by the search engines and puts less priority an focus on the JavaScript code, which is what you want in order to achieve better SEO rankings.

Summary

What you will notice about most of the above mentioned points is that each one should be stored as a separate file normally placed in the root of your website and will act as a sign post for the search engines to find out the right type of information (almost like sign posts) to rank your website with.

If you are about to design and create a new website or you have an existing website you would like to search engine optimise, then you need to ensure the mark-up (the HTML code behind your page) is valid.

1. Ensure correct use of HTML elements with the correct document format
2. Place styles in a separate Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), this helps to keep your HTML page primarily for content only.
3. Place JavaScript in a separate JavaScript file, this helps to keep your HTML page primarily for content only.
4. Use Flash Multimedia at minimums where possible. Flash should only used to help enhance the design of a web site page, an entire website should not be made up of flash as Search Engines cannot currently read flash files the way they do a normal HTML designed website.

Conclusion:

So here we’ve tackled some of the more technical requirements of setting up your website to allow the Search Engines to get a better grasp of your web pages. Through the implementation of the points mentioned above you will set your website off on the right foot in terms of giving yourself a chance of great rankings by presenting to the search engines what they need, your content, and pushing all other website factors into external files.

If the points above seem a little confusing well it’s because they’re the website features not so commonly talked about. The key understanding that I want to give you is the awareness of what you should at least be factoring in to your SEO. So good luck.

Next steps:

Read the follow up to this blog: SEO 6 of 7: Links. – This is the must read!

Useful Websites:

http://www.w3.org/2001/03/webdata/xsv – XML Validator
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ – W3C CSS Validator

SEO 5 of 7: Web Site Structure – Great Search Rankings is a post from: Leon Streete

Web Page Structure

By ensuring that your web page structure is set up correctly this will allow Search Engines to read your web pages and rank them with increased success. Through implimenting a number of key features will enable your website to continue on the firm foundation the previous 3 articles cover.

Below I’ve highlighted six of the key areas I have seen make a huge difference in web pages ranking greatly, for myself and most importantly my customers.

1. Meta Tag – Description

When you’re doing SEO it’s a good idea to bear in mind what Google thinks of meta tags the description tag, based on my own research and what Google specifies in their webmaster tools guidelines all point to the Description tag and having good descriptive tags that help your customers and visitors to find what they’re after rather than mislead them and add to their frustration when searching online.

What Google say’s:

“While accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won’t impact your ranking within search results. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL’s content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics.”

Other useful Meta tags:

• Meta Keywords – The keyword attribute should provide a list of approximately 10-20 key words about a web page’s content. Other search engines still use this tag for ranking websites although its effectiveness and relevance has declined over recent years.
• Meta Robots – The robots attribute is used to control whether search engine spiders are allowed to index a page, or not, and whether they should follow links from a page, or not. If it is not used web pages are simply set as default to allow search engines.
• Meta Author – The author attribute is any person(s) or entity(s) that originates and assumes responsibility for the content creation of the web site or web page.

How to find these meta tags and what they look like:

{gallery}seo-4-of-7-a{/gallery}

1. Title Tag

The Title tag again is very important and helps with both guiding your customers and the search engines as to what each particular page on your website is about, you normally find the title tag appearing in the top left hand side of your browser, a blue bar with white writing on a pc and grey bar with black writing on a Mac.

What Google says:

“Make sure that each page on your site has a useful and descriptive page title (contained within the title tags). If a title tag is missing, or if the same title tag is used for many different pages, Google may use other text we find on the page.”

So by reading what Google state, its good practice to have every web page on your site with its own unique page title, and more importantly it’s a good thing to do as each web page effectively allows you to optimise each web page so that it can perform as a possible landing page for any new visitors to your web site.

My tip: When creating your page titles start with your main Key phrase and seperate any additional phrases with the bar character “|”

What Page titles look like:

{gallery}seo-4-of-7-a{/gallery}

1. Header Tags, H1, H2

Behind your web page content and text, lies HTML, the building blocks of your web page.

All page header titles should use

This identifies the page to the search engines and it is useful putting your key phrase in as part of your page title as Search Engines will use this in their ranking factors of your web page. Header tags work in a hierarchical method, so you would normally start off your page with a single Header tag H1, then any sub titles required you would use H2, H3 and so on, depending on how sectioned your page content needs to be.

1. Emphasising text; Bold and italics

The use of bold on your web pages is not only good to direct your web browsers to the areas of importance when reading your content but they also have a positive effect on search engines. Emphasising certain sentences or phrases highlights to the search engines reading your web pages, the words that you are giving importance. This gives a similar effect as to what a direct mail letter would have on the person reading, where you highlight the words that you want your reader to pick up on most, this is basically the same for search engines when using bold on your web pages.

Use the bold HTML tags on your web pages to emphasise key phrases in your content

• E.g.

1. Search Engine Friendly Page Names (SEF URL’s)

E.g. www.leonstreete.com/blog/diy-seo

Notice the web page file name above, search-engine-friendly.html. Having SEF URL’s in place makes it easy for search engines to read your web page file names and this also makes more sense to users who look at the URL on a SERP. Coupled with the fact that search engines take the web page URL into account when ranking a page indicates the importance of using SEF URL’s

1. Images and pictures – Alt tags, File names

Images should be used in conjunction with ALT tags, and they should also be named using a good descriptive phrase so that this can also be read and analysed by search engines.

The overall impact of using ALT tags, in terms of SEO, is low. As they have become abused by webmasters who fill alt tags with streams of keywords, the major search engines have lowered the importance of ALT tags in their algorithms. However, ALT tags are a required element for standards-based HTML coding. Every image must have an ALT tag, and each ALT tag must be properly implemented.

{gallery}seo-4-of-7-b{/gallery}

Conclusion:

So here we’ve tackled some of the technical requirements of setting up a good web page, from this point on you’re headed in the right direction with getting your web pages ready for good rankings. Not only will this help with your online marketing but this can significantly improve your web page rankings online. Just changing the above points to my own web pages has produced big improvements in my rankings on search engines and has in most cases produced page one rankings along with top 3 positioning.

Next steps:

Read the follow up to this blog: SEO 5 of 7: Your Website Structure.

Useful Websites:

• http://validator.w3.org/ – W3C Web
• http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/url-rewriting/

I would love to hear from you and your views on this topic, if you’ve got any great comments or advice to add to this please do below now. Good luck with your online marketing.

Leon.

SEO 4 of 7: Web Pages – For great SEO results. is a post from: Leon Streete

Content

Your content is as they say “King” in actual fact as John Reese says it’s “Kong”, because it’s actually bigger than king. Your customers will view and read your website content and the search engines will rank your website based on analysing and reading your content. Web site content, in particular the placing of text and labels of media like images and videos, is one of, if not, the most effective areas where you can greatly enhance your websites optimisation efforts.

Creating your web page content and text

Remember each page of your website, home page and your sub pages, are all potential landing pages for search engines and your customers. With this in mind you should then be thinking of your strategy to optimise the content of all pages that will enhance your rankings with Search Engines, but also bring in your customers and increase your chances of converting more web browsers into customers through call to action content and giving them more reason to buy from you rather than your competitor, in essence add more value!

1. It is good practice to focus on one topic per page to keep your content less diluted.
2. Keep your content unique, do not duplicate content from other pages of your web site or from another web site! But by all means use other websites for research.
3. Aim to have between 250-300 words per page. Your page word count should outweigh your web page template word count (E.g. menu items and other text around your main content). There is no harm in having more words but beyond 1000 words may be you should start to think of writing a book? No but in all seriousness your customers may get bored beyond that point, so keep it punchy.
4. Include your key phrases in your content where possible, but do not stuff your web pages with keywords, E.g. repetitive use of key words, as this can have a negative effect, with search engines deciding to black list and remove your web site from their database instead of listing your web site.
5. Keep your content engaging, don’t write it from your point of view unless it is content for your blog, write based on your customers point of view, and what they would expect to read, entice them and use language that creates and invokes emotion, whether that emotion is to get them to buy or to come back for a second, third, forth or multiple visits to your web page.
6. Keep your content fresh, update your web site with new pages regularly. Try adding a News section or a Blog, web users are accustom to these sections on other websites and expect regular content. May be your thinking but there’s not a lot we can put into a news section? Try brainstorming for 10 minutes the latest technology trends, changes in your industry in the past year, or successes you or your customers have had with your service or products, and I’m sure you will start to create some content.

Call to action

It’s all very well driving lots of traffic to your website, but is your website geared up to engage and urge your customers into buying from you? Having read through your content, you should be guiding your potential customer in how to buy from you offering them the next steps to take, whether you sell a service or an actual product (digital or physical). People hate being sold to, but like to buy, so your content should be value adding so that potential customers want to buy from you.

Some great ways to incorporate call to action:

• Display a join our mailing list box to collect a customers name and email address, which you can use to market to.
• Display your telephone number with the words call now.
• Forms on your web pages, don’t ask your customers to fill in a form. Who likes filling in forms? Why not suggest they kindly fill in their details and you will take care of the rest.
• Add video as a free value tool in exchange for a name and email address.
• Add the words FREE where possible, there have been many research studies that show when the words free are used, we, humans, love to take advantage of it, and especially where we see value linked to FREE. The words FREE in itself can set off emotion. Here are a few examples I’ve been enticed by in my time:
  • FREE shipping
  • Buy one get one FREE
  • FREE video reveals secrets simply enter your name and email address
  • FREE paper when you buy this printer
  • FREE £5 shopping voucher when you spend £50 – This one Argos use a lot.
  • FREE, FREE, FREE – you gotta love it

Structure

1. Page Header / Title – Think of your customers and make it engaging, take a news paper article the header is what is used to capture your attention, your web page header should be the same
2. The page intro – Start off how you plan to go on, capture your reader with highlights of your article.
3. Sub heading – Break up your text and make it easy to read by using useful and informative sub headings.
4. The main body – Offer a story, some facts, some benefits, the results and then conclude.
5. Call to action – The article should guide your customer into buying, joining or subscribing to you or you company in some way. This is the result you should be aiming for.

Conclusion:

Now that you’ve created your web page content and included your key words you are starting to build a solid foundation for your website to grow from. Not only will this help with your online marketing on Search Engines and Social media sites, but I’ve even found that good content online helps with your offline marketing material and vice versa, enabling you to ensure one important rule that I have found – Keeping your marketing message the same whether online or offline giving your customers consistency when interacting with your business, like the old saying “everyone singing from the same hymn sheet”.

Next steps:

Read the follow up to this blog: SEO 4 of 7: Your Web Page Structure.

Useful Websites:

• Google Website Optimiser: http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer
• Keyword Density Tool: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/
• John Reese

I would love to hear from you and your views on this topic, if you’ve got any great comments or advice to add to this please do below now. Good luck with your online marketing.

Leon.

SEO 3 of 7: Content – Web pages that sell more for you! is a post from: Leon Streete

Competitors

Knowing who your competitors are online will give you a better understanding of your market position and where your targets and goals need to take you. I find sometimes people get confused with their competitors offline, what I mean by this is the bricks and mortar businesses that you are aware of locally or nationally. When it comes to SEO, online competitors can in actual fact be websites who simply rank well for the key words that you would like to rank well for and probably don’t even have a big setup or any real office as such. The point I’m getting to is that online if you get your SEO and Online Marketing right, the internet can give even start up or micro businesses a level playing field even against big businesses who have big marketing budgets.

1. Search Engines – Google, Yahoo & Bing

Online the main search engines most people will ask about are Google, Yahoo and Bing, and normally in that order of importance. In fact most people only recognise Google, but there are in actual fact may hundreds even thousands of search engines online.

There is of course reason as to why Google is the most talked about, 80% of the UK Population uses it. So when is comes to ranking well on a search engine Google is the focus of many people and businesses. With this kind of usage it’s also a great place to start leveraging this popularity (traffic) by getting some of the users to come to your website. This can only happen if you rank well on the search engine results pages (SERP).

1. Top 10 Competitors

So now you have researched some key phrases that have demand and could possibly be what you want to rank well for. This will depend on a number of important competitor factors.

The first step is to do actual searches for the key phrases you researched in the previous article “SEO 1 of 7: Keywords – Maximise your SEO”, so you will need to type your phrases into Google’s search text box, but using a little extra specific phrase search. By putting double quotes around a set of words, you are telling Google to consider the exact words in that exact order without any change e.g. “Solicitors in Wolverhampton”.

{gallery}seo-2-of-7-a{/gallery}

So now we’ve performed our search and we have some specific Search Engine Results pages, which you can now analyse. What we are looking at here is the list of websites that appear on the first page of results, basically the top 10 websites who rank for our key phrase “Solicitors in Wolverhampton”. You will need to note them down and save them somewhere, in a text file or spreadsheet like Excel so that they can be further analysed a little later in the sixth follow up article to this series “SEO 6 of 7: Links – Hyperlinks”. The other number to bear in mind is the total number of competing web pages found – Results 1 – 10 of about 176,000 for “Solicitors in Wolverhampton”. This shows us that google has found 176,000 web pages that phrase match “Solicitors in Wolverhampton”, this number also allows us to analyse how much competition there is for our key phrase and the potential level market saturation. The less competition the better, but this can also mean that you may be targetting a key phrase that is very niche or not in demand.

If you want to move to the next level and go professional you should use tools like SEO Elite or Web CEO, both generate competitor information direct from the main search engines and put all of this information straight into spreadsheets or text files to make it faster and quicker for you to do. These tools also produce some extra results which are very valuable and useful, we will cover this in the follow up articles to this series.

1. Localised Search

Up until this point we’ve mostly considered natural search engine rankings and SERP’s but we need to be aware of Google’s and the other search engines ability to deliver localised results. This is basically the ability to show SERP’s based on your location.

So to explain this quickly, Google is able to take into account your location by identifying your IP address, it then cross references this against websites and their search phrases related to a geographic location and produce localised SERP’s. So this would mean that if you searched for “Solicitors in Wolverhampton” and you were based in Birmingham you may receive different results than if you did the same search whilst you were based in Wolverhampton.

The images below show you how Google can present differing SERP’s based on localisation and web search history.

{gallery}seo-2-of-7-b{/gallery}

Now this is very interesting as it shows the importance of optimising for a geographic location, especially if this is important for your customers to find your website based on geographic location.

The other area to be aware of is Google Local Business Center, the ability to get a map result above natural (Organic) SERP’s. This can be done for free and requires you to register your business and its multiple branches if you have them and this allows you to appear on SERP’s and on Google maps for any business search related to geographic location. This is a very useful tool and comes equipped with analytical / statistical information on searches performed by people online and indicates the phrases that resulted in people clicking (taking action) on your information in order to get to your website.

Conclusion:

Now that we’ve analysed our competitors for some of our potential key words you are starting to build the basis of online marketing strategy. We can take into consideration natural SERP’s, localised regional based searches and Local Business Listings, maximising three key areas of generating traffic from Google and other search engines.

Next steps:

Read the follow up to this blog: SEO 3 of 7: Your Web Page Content.

Useful Websites:

• https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal – Google’s Keyword Tool
• http://www.google.com/sktool – Google Search Based Keyword Tool
• https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ – Yahoo Site Explorer
• www.google.com/local/add – Google Local Business Center
• SEO Elite
• Web CEO

I would love to hear from you and your views on this topic, if you’ve got any great comments or advice to add to this please do below now. Good luck with your online marketing.

Leon.

SEO 2 of 7: Competitors – Know who they are! is a post from: Leon Streete

Keywords

Keywords if you don’t know, these are the search descriptions that your potential customers will type into search engines to find what they’re looking for. Depending on how well your website is optimised and coupled with the research you undertake to ensure there is demand, this will help to focus the time you invest in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). A keyword can either be a single word or a group of words that create a keyword phrase.

E.g.

A single keyword: “SEO”

A keyword phrase: “Search Engine Optimisation”

1. Research – Is there demand?

Before you start out with SEO and its other components, research is your first step. Without establishing if there is demand for your products or services, or if your products and services match phrases and keywords that already have demand on the major search engines, this should be your priority.

Here’s a story I see all too often.

I can get you to number one for your company name in your town or city. Or I can get you to number one for a specific key phrase in your town or city. How egotistic are those statements?

Note this down!

If there is no actual demand for your company name or a key phrase related to your geo graphic location, why would you want to be number one any way? The best thing to do before any ranking is targeted, is to research based on actual figures from the search engines. One of the first steps to this research can be done through using Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

1. Google Adwords Keyword Tool

See for yourself what Google is recording. Go to this web address: https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal now you can start checking to see if there is demand for the key phrases you wish to target, on yeah almost forgot as well as researching what you think you should be targeting Google will also give you suggestions! Now isn’t that interesting? Yes.

So type in your keywords and not only will you get suggestions but you can see how many searches there are monthly for your key phrase, you can export the key phrases to an excel spread sheet, or text file which is useful for saving to your computer.

So now you have key phrases for which you know there is demand now you can start to think about your competitors and find out who they are.

So you’ve tried and tested Google Adwords Keyword Tool, but there’s actually lots more information available to you when researching your Keywords.

There’s a few tools I really recommend you try, SEO Elite and Web CEO. Both offer further information on key phrase searches along with further information combined to give you some crucial information on your competition at the same time. The one thing with these tools is that they not only pull data from Google searches but they can also retrieve data from other leading search engines which can be of great use to you and your Online Marketing / SEO

{gallery}seo-1-of-7{/gallery}

1. Deciding on your keywords

Now you have your list of possible key phrases that you wish to rank well for, you need to check on a number of factors and not least of all, your competitors.

Next steps:

Read the follow up to this blog: SEO 2 of 7: Your SEO Competitors.

Useful Websites:

• Google’s Keyword Tool
• Google Search Based Keyword Tool
• SEO Elite
• Web CEO

I would love to hear from you and your views on this topic, if you’ve got any great comments or advice to add to this please do below now. Good luck with your online marketing.

Leon.

SEO 1 of 7: Keywords – Maximise your SEO is a post from: Leon Streete

What’s your deepest fear? Is it inner belief? How strong is the belief in what you do, and who you are as a person. For me this is an area that I hold closely to my heart, I’ve always had that feeling of greatness and listening to what Tony’s video covers; “that our deepest fear is that we, all of us as individuals, are powerful beyond measure”, this really does inspire me.The words of Muhammad Ali resounding one of my favourite speeches “I am the greatest”, is simply awesome.
I believe in this, and it all comes down to how much we want to achieve our goals, what we see as our vision and how unmoveable we are in achieving our end result whilst being able to adapt when the environment and circumstances dictate it.

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this. Leave a comment below and i will reply.

To see the Anthony Robbins video visit:
http://training.tonyrobbins.com/437/a-gift-from-tony/

I am the GREATEST is a post from: Leon Streete

View Core influence now.

Check it out and let me know how you get on.

Frank Kern Core Influence is a post from: Leon Streete

I have a client, Steve, who came to me about 5 years ago, wanting to setup an ecommerce website and take his menswear business to the next level, creating a well designed and functioning website was the first step. Attracting customers to the website and increasing sales was the second. For me a well designed, engaging, and search engine optimised website go hand in hand, especially if the end result is an increase in sales and revenue.

At the time when Steve and I first worked together, he hadn’t really had much to do with computers or the internet, in fact he’d never turned a computer on! Fortunately I did and together we were able to build Huckleberry’s Menswear into a leader in his niche market of Mod clothing selling Lambretta clothing, Ben Sherman and much more.

I want to give you some FREE tips that helped Steve to achieve page one rankings on Google for his main key phrases and number one positions for most of his main phrases. Not only can you achieve great results online but these tips can help increase your sales and profitability online.

So here’s 7 FREE SEO tips to boost your website rankings.

Just before we get into the tips… Because each tip can be expanded into more detail, I will take each one into more depth through seven follow-up blogs that you can use to really boost your SEO online. To get started lets look at the main seven tips now.

1. Keywords
Keywords if you don’t know, these are the search descriptions that your potential customers will type into search engines to find what they’re looking for. Depending on how well your website is optimised and coupled with the research you undertake to ensure there is demand, this will help to focus the time you invest in SEO.

1. Research – Is there demand?
2. Google Adwords Keyword Tool – Facts and Figures
3. SEO Elite – Going Pro

2. Competitors
Knowing who your competitors are online will give you a better understanding of your market position and where your targets and goals need to take you. I find sometimes people get confused with their competitors offline, what I mean by this is the bricks and mortar businesses that you are aware of locally or nationally. When it comes to SEO, online competitors can in actual fact be websites who simply rank well for the key words that you would like to rank well for and probably don’t even have a big setup or any real office as such. The point I’m getting to is that online if you get your SEO and Online Marketing right, the internet can give even start up or micro businesses a level playing field, even against big businesses who have big marketing budgets.

1. Search Engines – Google, Yahoo & Bing
2. Localised – UK or International? Make sure your SEO is based on the right version of each search engine.
3. Back link Checkers – Find out who your competitors get links from and do the same but better
   1. Try typing this into any of the above search engines to see who links to your competitors: link: www.yourcompetitor.co.uk

1. Web CEO – Monitor your competitors and your own websites performance.
   

3. Content
Your content is as they say “King” in actual fact as John Reese says it’s “Kong”, because it’s actually bigger than king. The search engines will rank your website based on analysing and reading your content and your customers will view and read your website content and providing that it’s good it will convert potential customers into buying customers. Some of the key components to content are:

1. Structure – Make sure its readable, engaging and aimed with your customer in mind.
2. Word Length 250-300 – The search engines like a good chunk of text to read, so make sure your content also contains your Key phrases.
3. Blog – Add regular, fresh content and when you open up the ability for your customers to leave comments this is great for both search engines and building up rapport with your existing and potential new customers.

4. Web Page Structure
By ensuring your web page structure is set up correctly this will allow the search engines to read your web pages and rank them accordingly. Through having a number of key features in place this will enable your website to start off on a firm foundation to attain great search engine rankings. Some of the key components to Web Page Structure are:

1. Meta Tag – Description tag, the tag that Google likes, place a unique description and your key phrases for each page on your website. If you don’t know what i’m talking about… In your browser top left click on View then go down and click on Page Source you should find something like this:

1. Title Tag – Normally the Blue strip at the top of your web browser, Where your key phrases should appear
2. Header Tags, H1, H2
3. Search Engine Friendly Page Names (SEF URL’s) – www.leonstreete.com/increase-your-sales-online.html
4. Alt Tag – Images, pictures can contain key phrases but make sure they are also true to what the image displays

5. Website Structure
Having the correct website structure will ensure search engines can read all of your web pages and record the pages that you need listed on the search engines. Some of the key components to Website Structure are:

1. Sitemap Web Page – Great internal linking
2. Sitemap XML file – Point Google and other search engines in the right direction, get a free sitemap.
3. Robots.txt – Show the search engines what you want them to see
4. Urllist.txt – Show the search engines what you want them to see
5. CSS Files – Keep your styling off page in separate CSS files.
6. JavaScript – Keep your coding off page in separate JS files.

6. Links – Hyperlinks
To get great rankings on the search engines one of the main influencers is having links to your website and links from your website to other websites. When a search engine reads a website it also scans all of the links placed on that web page. Very Important: In the eyes of search engines a link from one website A to another website B, is classed as a vote. But unlike political voting each vote carries a weight or sometimes called a ranking, so the higher ranking website A has the better it is for website B. So you may be thinking well i need lots of links, this is cool but the better ranking links you get can also mean less is more. Some of the key components to Links are:

1. Inbound – Backlinks
   1. Directory’s; DMOZ, Yahoo, Free Index – Get your website listed on these directory websites, they’re worth their weight in gold!
2. Outbound – Who do you link to? Make sure its quality and a website your okay with.
3. Internal – Linking to your own web pages
4. How to get links – Exchanging and requesting links

7. Social media – Video / Documents
As social media grows online and the memberships on website such as Facebook breakthrough and grow beyond the 350 million members, it’s a good time to stop, take note and look at how to leverage the potential customer base on these sites. Some of the key components to Social Media are:

1. What’s it all about?
   1. Established customer base – Make use of the ready made traffic
   2. Profiles – Create information about you or your business
   3. Backlinks – Use the high ranking social media
2. Facebook – Create a Business page and build a list of fans.
3. You Tube – What’s on your channel…
4. Ezine Articles – Are you an Expert?
5. Scribd – Your documents can add more value online

8. Test and Measure – Okay so I said 7 free tips… I’m feeling generous so here’s an eighth tip.
Without testing and measuring the results of the SEO work that you have done, you would not be in a position to actually determine the effectiveness nor work out what your return on investment should be or what it should be headed towards. Through testing and measuring you can work out what works, what brings in the right type of customer and what gives you the best leverage online. Some of the key components to Test and Measure are:

1. Website Visitors statistics – What should I be looking at and tracking? Unique Visitors, Traffic Sources, Bounce Rate, Top Landing pages…
2. Review your websites performance – Google Analytics, Omniture and others.
3. Split testing – A/B Testing tweak your web pages.
4. Return On Investment (ROI) – Work out your aquisition cost, log the time you invest in marketing online, does it add up? Does it pay for itself? Are you making a profit?

Conclusion:
With these tips in your back pocket you’ll be able to tackle SEO on a whole new level that you can focus the success of your website pages on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP).  The tips above are the first step, reading in further detail on the follow up blogs will be the second step.

I would love to hear from you and your views on this topic, if you’ve got any great comments or advice to add to this please do below now. Good luck with your online marketing.

Leon.

I want to do my own Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) where do I start? is a post from: Leon Streete

Only yesterday I gave a 10 minute presentation on Successful Internet Marketing – Blow your competition out of the water. Quite hard you might be thinking… As how could you possibly cover such a vast subject in ten minutes, it was actually a bug bear of my own when I was preparing the presentation. I was thinking do I go with the emotional side that I have experienced in my own customers or do I go factual and give the audience practical information and DIY tips they could take away..?

It dawned on me that from a first impression point of view it was the DIY tips and facts to support what I know works, what my customers tell me works and a sure way to invest, market and grow your business, would be the best approach.

Whilst running through the presentation and noticing the note taking, it was good to see how much was being absorbed, not only those “ah I should try that” looks on faces, but the fact that there was obviously some cool ideas that could be tried and tested.

More often than not, when starting with Online Marketing, Internet Marketing or Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) I hear and see company’s and individuals where there is no clear strategy or plan in place, remember if you don’t have a goal or target to achieve – really knowing what the end result should look like, then how will you ever get there?

Online marketing is big business, and when done right it delivers big results.
Why and how? Leverage… Doing more with less.

The internet has come on leaps and bounds with Search engines like Google and Social Media, a marketing strategy for many businesses and individuals, its no surprise when you realise the leverage it gives you over traditional marketing.

For example;
If you advertise in a news paper a potential customer may have a number of ways to respond to the advert positively; call in on the telephone number, visit your website or come to your location if you allow public access. You can track each call or if there is a coupon code that must be used, but not the people who respond to the advert indirectly. But this is all dependant on your advert offer being outstanding and you getting it right for your target audience.

Where as if you did the same by creating an advert on Facebook there would also be a number of positive ways that potential customers could respond; Visit your Facebook page, visit your website from a link on your Facebook page, send you an email, leave you a comment on your page asking questions about your product or service. If you have them, a customer could view photos or videos of your products or service. Offering one key difference to traditional marketing, “Interactivity” and direct involvement from your customer at their convenience. Your advertising is real time and can be adjusted as you test and measure instantly, unlike a printed news paper advert where it stays the same as you approved it for print.

Not only will you have interactivity with your customers, offering them the ability to come back on different occasions and build up a great rapport with your company, but through online visitor tracking software, Insights, on Facebook and Website visitor statistic tracking software like Google Analytics you can Test and Measure the effectiveness of your marketing online.

When you understand even some of the basics of what you can track, you soon start to realise the importance of investing in Online Marketing and your website as it gives you hard calculated evidence that you can test and measure against. Some of these measurable statistics include;

• How many people come to your website – Unique Visitors
• How long people spend on your web pages – Average Time
• Demographics including location – What city visitors are from
• What web pages are the most popular – Pages viewed per visit
• Number of ecommerce website sales
• What key phrases people use to find your website – Top search phrases
• How many people spend no time on your website usually 5 seconds or less – Bounce Rate
• Plus much much more.

A Story, Local radio…

One of my customers a restaurant who we have designed and developed their website, came to me seeking my opinion of advertising on a local radio station which was about to cost them £3000 (Approximately $5000). They asked me my thoughts, I simply said ask the radio station how many guaranteed calls they will get or at the very least what would be the minimum number of calls they could expect. Because for one, my clients average sale was about £60 so the radio advert would need to bring in 50 customer bookings just to break even. The answer from the Radio station was not surprising… They replied we cannot guarantee any calls not even one.

For me it was great because my client saved £3000 from my advice and were able to invest it else where in their business. This simply cemented the importance of being able to plan and utilise a marketing strategy that can deliver a positive ROI and can be tested and measured.

Ask your self this question… How often do I test and measure the effectiveness of my Online Marketing and Website? If the answer is well… Erm… not enough or I don’t currently test or measure then that’s cool because now you can start.

Take Action

If you have a website:

1. Sign up for a Google account. www.google.com/accounts
2. Add Google Analytics www.google.com/analytics and integrate this onto your website.
   1. Once it is integrated setup goals on your contact forms
   2. If your website is ecommerce enabled (You have an online shop) turn on the ecommerce tracking and start to track your customer conversion rate, sales and much more.
   3. With Analytics you can also track how many people come to your website from other linking websites like Facebook, Twitter, Linked In etc.
3. Add Google Webmaster Tools www.google.com/webmasters/tools. Webmaster tools allows you to see what key phrases bring in the percentages of clicks from other sites along with searches.

If this is a little beyond your technical capability, speak to your web designer or me now (0845 2609779 or leave a comment on this blog) and I will help you out.

If there is one thing I’ve learnt when it comes to marketing, which is now a rule of mine, this is… If I can’t test and measure it then why am I doing it? This comes back to the point of Return On Investment (ROI), if you can’t test and measure a marketing activity how will you be able to tell what ROI you get out of the marketing strategy?

If you wish yourself or your business to become Great, you must first learn to become the servant of many, from this you will find greatness in yourself, your team and your customers.

I would love to hear from you and your views on this topic, if you’ve got any great comments or advice to add to this please do. Good luck with your online marketing.

Leon.

Why should I even bother investing in a Website and Online Marketing? is a post from: Leon Streete

The day kicked off with reviewing individually our own businesses based on the Action Coach method of looking at Mastery in four defined areas.

1. Money – The ability to manage our finances, cash flow and ensure our businesses run cash rich.
2. Time – The ability to get the most out of what you need to do in a timely manner, what I like to refer to as “Doing what NEEDS to be done” NOT what we would like to do or what we want to do.
3. Delivery – The ability to deliver to customers, each other and within our teams
4. Destination – Knowing where you want your business and personal life to be in the future (Planning with the end in mind)

Plus these other important business areas;

1. USP & Guarantee Niche
2. 5 Way Numbers Niche – Leads x Conversion Rate = Customers x Transactions = Turnover x Margin = Profit
3. Test & Measure Niche – If you aren’t tracking the effectiveness of your business processes, marketing and other key areas how well are you really doing? Is a rough guess good enough for you..? Well its not for me.
4. Systems Leverage – The team should be able to run the systems that run the business.
5. Technology Leverage
6. People Leverage
7. 6 Ways to a Winning Team, and
8. Recruitment Team

After running through an analysis questionnaire covering approximately 5 questions per area it was astounding to then have a far clearer idea than before I started the session on some of the questions I’ve been asking myself on how to pull my business, team and personal goals together in order to move towards my goal of becoming a Great Leader in 2010. What I can say is that I’ve got at least three priorities in each area, so to me that is awesome, things can only get better from here on.

Now having analysed, reviewed and planned for the next 13 weeks on the top 3 priorities in each area, me and my coach have some fantastic areas to tweak and fine tune into a well oiled engine over the coming months and through the year.

What it has also confirmed to me is the awareness and theme we’ve had in my business over the past 3 months “are we adding value to the lives of our customers”. The answer is a strong YES, and through these improvements and goals we need to achieve we will add more value still.

I would whole heartedly recommend planning your business activity over the four 90 day periods (quarters) we have in a year as it will help to break your year up into manageable chunks that you can start to set goals, test and measure and deliver against. Something I like to have as a rule, if you can’t test and measure it should you be doing it?

Our team does this in my company at LAS Design, for our own marketing strategy and Online Marketing services that we offer our customers, but going through a business 90 day planning session has shown me the power in doing this for the business as a whole and for my own personal life.

Some of the Blinding Flashes of the Obvious (BFO’s) that I picked up really struck home with me, so I just want to thank everyone who was there at the event because it was through the responses, comments and thoughts these great people had that lead me to my own “Oh yeah” and “ahhh I get it…” moments.

• See it
  • Idealisation
  • Visualisation
  • Verbalisation
  • Materialisation
• The business is a means to an end – A way to achieve reward in life and business, a cash flow vehicle to deliver the lifestyle you want.
• RICHuals for the team:
  • Ensure your have a regular WIFLE (What I Feel Like Expressing is…) from your individual team members.
  • WOOSH – Get up and move to get rid of the negative stuff
  • Stretch – Stretch to and move to lock in the learning’s

Further Reading:

• Rich Dad, Poor Dad
• E-myth Mastery: The Seven Essential Disciplines for Building a World Class Company
• Instant Systems: Foolproof Strategies That Let Your Business Run Itself (Instant Success Series)
• The 4-hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich

Did I miss anything?
If you would like to find out more I would love to speak to you and hear from you on your own thoughts for business planning.

Thanks for reading, Leon.

90 Day Business Planning – Are you seasonal? is a post from: Leon Streete

Each year millions of pounds (£) in British Sterling has have been poured into the build up of these shows over the course of months, ultimately to create a new money making singer to grow the profits of TV & music companies and executives like Simon Cowell. Now for the first time Social media has shown its true power and a big change has come about.

A group was setup on Face book to fight against the X-factor show in order that a not so typical Christmas number one took the top spot and to some how reflect what society would want – with free will so to speak. The idea personally I think is almost as controlling as X-Factor, and by that I mean it comes down to who has marketed the best and ultimately who achieved a Return On Investment (ROI), in time, people and money.

There were a number of winners here, Face book, Rage Against The Machine, the Group members on Facebook and Business Owners contemplating what marketing strategies they should consider using in 2010. By achieving the UK Music Single chart position one, has shown that through the Time the near 1million group members, People, in the Facebook group spent on getting the single to number one has resulted in £60,000 in Money raised for the charity Shelter.

If you’ve ever wondered what social media is all about now is the time to sit down and find out, or you can talk to us and we’ll guide you on how and where you can use your time effectively online, increase your following of people and earn more profit with the money you can make. Having a clear and focused online marketing strategy can earn you the type of ROI you would normally dream about, in a number of cases you can achieve 15% , which isn’t that bad when you compare that to say a savings account, current rates of around 5% are near top end here in the UK. But there are also many occasions where businesses and individuals have achieved 100% and several hundreds of percent ROI. Just thinking about those numbers can really get your mojo going…

But back to the point, make sure you put together an Online Marketing strategy that you can deliver against on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, as this will help to focus your efforts and ultimately your very own ROI  when you invest in marketing for your own business. More often than not people don’t realise marketing is an investment in your business and a fantastic way of generating cash flow. When done right it will bring in what your company achieves in terms of turnover, so when you think of it in this way, the importance of how you market and your commitment to your strategy becomes even more imperative.

If you need assistance with your own marketing strategy give me a call now on 0845 2609779 or drop me an email: leon@lasdesign.net

Did I miss anything?
Leave a comment or get in touch I would love to hear from you.

Some of the websites that relate to this article:

•    Rage Against the Machine Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2228594104
•    UK Singles Chart: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/chart/singles/
•    X-Factor: http://xfactor.itv.com/2009/
•    Shelter: www.shelter.org.uk

Videos:
Rage Against the Machine:

Joe McElderry Music Video – The Climb:
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How Social Media controlled the music industry in the UK..! is a post from: Leon Streete

Welcome to the start of my journey… is a post from: Leon Streete