LotusJump Blog

A special thanks to BarStoolsandChairs.com for letting us get to know you a little better on this week’s Friday Spotlight.  BarStoolsandChairs.com specializes in custom upholstered commercial furniture - take a look at their site, their stuff is pretty awesome!

1. What was the inspiration behind your company?We come from a background in commercial furniture.  We believe that commercial furniture is far superior to residential furniture.  We decided to team up with manufactures of commercial furniture and sell it online to the general public.  We offer items like custom logo bar stools and floor mounted bar stools that can be hard to find for the typical residential consumer.

2. What company achievement are you most proud of?
We sold 500 logo bar stools to a manufacturer of high end acoustic guitars.  I am really into music so it was a real treat working with one of America’s greatest guitar companies.

3. Why do you think internet marketing for your business is so important?
About 80% of our order come over the Internet.  We don’t believe in waiting for people to come to our website.  We do everything we can to make sure that we are found when people are looking.  Without Intenet maketing, we would have no customers.

4. Would you like to share a creative marketing tip for other small business owners?
I have found that creating blogs and linking blog entries to the products in my retail site really helps my organic rankings.

Thanks BarStoolsandChairs.com for letting us spotlight you this week! Leave a comment if you think you’re worthy of a Friday spotlight, and tell us why!

While there is some controversy over whether Facebook is an effective way to build awareness, market, and interact with your target market, it’s definitely a cost-effective marketing option you may want to consider.  As with any other social media platforms, there are some obvious and some not-so-obvious do’s and don’ts when it comes to having a business on Facebook.  While the following tips won’t apply to everyone, they’re worth considering and, if applicable, applying to your own business practices on Facebook

• Remember, your Facebook page should be reserved for talking about your business, products and services. Avoid mixing your personal life with business on your business Facebook page – it’s just not professional.
• If you’re going to do it, do it right. Your Facebook page should be a way for you to interact with current and potential clients. If you’re not regularly checking and updating your page, you probably shouldn’t have made it to begin with.
• Facebook can be a great way to assist in your company’s online reputation management. Facebook pages and profiles are now indexed and tend to rank highly in the search engines, so the chance of your business’ Facebook page ranking on your business name and keywords are pretty good.
  
• Keep your Facebook page clean. Don’t join irrelevant, potentially offensive, questionably or controversial groups. You never know who many be looking at your profile and you don’t want to run the risk of putting your company in a negative due to a group that you’re associated with.
• Participate in the conversation. Remember, there are a handful of your current and potential customers that spend a good amount of time on Facebook. The fact that you’re there and interacting with them will impress them. Build relationships carefully and strategically and you’ll most likely see these individuals drive new traffic to your actual site.

A special thanks to Qualtrics Online Survey Software for today’s Tuesday Tip!

If you haven’t heard of Squidoo or created your own Squidoo lens, do so today!  For those not familiar with Squidoo, this site is the brainchild of world famous marketer Seth Godin, the father of both Permission and Viral Marketing and former CMO of Coke USA.   Squidoo is a a FREE social networking site that encourages you to market yourself as you build lenses about your business, special interests, etc.  Lenses are interactive, and can contain Flickr photos, Google maps, blogs, Amazon items, eBay auctions, YouTube videos, polls, slideshows, and other links.  If you keep your Squidoo lens updated and and loaded with great content you’ll probably see traffic to your lens increase and maybe even make a few bucks off of the items that you can choose to advertise on your lens.  Over time your Squidoo lens can achieve Page Rank and we’ve even seen some lenses rank on the first page of Google for their keywords.  You can check out our Squidoo lens or make your own Squidoo lens today!

Want to get your brilliant marketing tip published? Leave a comment with your tip and we’ll consider publishing it with a link to your website in future Tuesday Tip editions!

A special thanks to WISEOZ.com for today’s Tuesday Tip.  WISEOZ is a free contest-based social community where people win prizes, collaborate, socialize, and connect through moderated play-as-you-please games called “WiseWits”.

Last week we talked about how social media is for everyone and this week we’d like to highlight how WiseOz has successfully used social media as a way to market their company.

WISEOZ has accounts on several of the big hitting social community sites and we do what we can to push our content out to those sites as frequent as possible. Everytime we release a new clue or award a winner, we Twitter. Everytime we publish a new WiseWit, we blog and bulletin it to MySpace and Facebook and dig it to Digg. Additionally, we have a SHARE feature on our WiseWit pages that easily allows users to do the same. We’ve gotten many new members from this approach and it keeps viral engine running.

Figuring out your own social media schedule may seem like a daunting task, but the benefits will far outweigh the hassle!  Start by joining all of the major social media networks and start building your profiles one by one.  As you familiarize yourself with each one, you feel more comfortable putting yourself out there and getting involved.

Leave a comment with your tip and we’ll consider publishing it with a link to your website in future Tuesday Tip editions!

The following 5 Steps explain how to create your own optimized subpage for a keyword of your choice.

Step 1: Choose your keyword phrase
Determine a keyword phrase that your target audience would consistently search to find the products/services offered on your website.

Step 2: Create a page for your selected keyword phrase
Have your webmaster create a new page with your existing website theme. Make sure it has any necessary calls-to-action.

Step 3: Make sure that it’s optimized for your keyword phrase
To do this, you’ll want to make sure that your keyword phrase is found in most, or all, of the following places:

• In the URL String (i.e. www.yoursite.com/your-keyword-phrase)
• In the Title Tag of the page
• In the Meta Description of the page
• In the Meta Keywords of the page
• In the Copy on the page, multiple times where appropriate
• In Bold, where appropriate
• In the Alt Tag of relevant images on the page

(A more in-depth look at these factors will be treated in next week’s post, “on-page optimization tips“.)

Step 4: Link to the optimized page from your homepage
This will pass some of the existing authority of your homepage to your newly-created, optimized page.

Step 5: Build links to the optimized page
This step is crucial to get maximum results from your efforts. It also happens to be the most difficult. Luckily, this is where the LotusJump SEO Software provides its most significant value. LotusJump simplifies the off-page optimization process by aggregating customized linkbuilding tasks and dropping them directly into your personalized account, complete with tips and instructions. No software makes linkbuilding more effective or efficient than LotusJump.

Want your website to become a top online resource for a certain keyword phrase?

Try building a page on your website specifically for it!

An optimized landing page is a tried and true PPC principle, but not many people have recognized its value for organic SEO as well. If you know that a certain keyword will drive traffic to your site, why not give that keyword its very own page? To illustrate the point, let’s imagine you’re a search engine trying to return the most relevant result for the search term “safe baby crib,” which would you pick–Result A, B or C?

Result A:

URL: www.cribs-r-us.com
Title Tag: Cribs R Us, Online Baby Crib Store, Largest Baby Crib Selection
Meta Description: “Your online resource for the largest selection of baby cribs!”
Opening sentence: “Welcome to Cribs R Us - Browse our huge inventory of different kinds of baby cribs”

Result B:

URL: www.crib-factory.com/baby-cribs
Title Tag: Browse our Cribs - Cute Baby Cribs, Safe Baby Cribs, Sturdy Baby Cribs
Meta Description: “We offer many kinds of cribs–cute baby cribs, safe baby cribs, etc”
Opening sentence: “View the images below to learn about our many types of baby cribs.”

Result C:

URL: www.cribs-r-us.com/safe-baby-crib
Title Tag: Safe Baby Crib, Safety Crib | Cribs R Us
Meta Description: “Consider our safe baby crib product line for your infant’s needs”
Opening sentence: “Sleep well knowing you’ve purchased one of the following safe baby cribs from Cribs-R-Us.com”

If you were picking the result based on on-page SEO factors alone, Option C would be chosen as the most relevant result due to the prominence (not density, mind you) of the keyword phrase on the page. Check back for next week’s post on how to create your own optimized subpage.

Taking Steps 1-5 into consideration, pick your final list of keywords. It’s not always an easy decision, but it’s important to focus your efforts. Don’t worry though, if you find that you’ve made a mistake, it’s never too late to change your targeted keywords.

The next step is optimizing your website for your targeted keywords (on-page optimization) followed by building quality relevant links back to your website (off-page optimization).

Thanks for following our Keyword Series, stay tuned for upcoming weekly segments of On-page optimization help!

Now that you’ve analyzed search volume, check out the competition for your search terms first hand. Type each of your search phrases into Google and look at the first ten results. The following characteristics make your competitors more difficult to unseat:

1) The age of their domain

In other words, how long ago the domain was registered. Find out by typing their domain into a WhoIs search. Older domains are generally more authoritative

2) The number of backlinks they have

Sign up for a Yahoo account and use their Site Explorer tool to check the number of inlinks to the site (inlinks=backlinks). The more inlinks the more competitive.

3) The quality of backlinks they have

When you examine their inlinks in Yahoo’s site explorer tool, look at some of the top ones—are they from authoritative .gov or .edu sites? Are they from other authoritative .com sites? Authoritative backlinks make your competitors more authoritative as well.

4) Their Google PageRank

Download the Google toolbar to see each website’s PageRank. PageRank is a score of 1-10 assigned to each website that has been indexed by Google (1 being the least authoritative, 10 being the most). Higher PageRank = a more competitive site.

Now that you have a good list of potential keywords, run them through a keyword tool (like Google’s free keyword tool) to see how many monthly searches these keywords get per month. You’ll likely see what we learned in Step 3—that your head terms will get high monthly search volume and you tail terms will get low monthly search volume. Remember though, a few qualified searchers might be better for business than hundreds of poorly qualified searchers. The goal is to make sure that your keywords get at least some search volume per month.

In general terms there are two major types of keywords: “Head terms” and “tail terms.” An example of a head term is the keyword “basketball.” An example of a related tail term keyword is “college basketball tshirts.”

Someone that owns a basketball t-shirt store would probably like to rank well on both of those terms, but each has its advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage of head terms is that they will get massive amounts of search volume, so ranking #1 for that head term (“basketball”) would inevitably get many people to your site. The disadvantages are that 1) people search head terms (like “basketball”) for all kinds of reasons, so the chances that they’re looking for your exact product/service are lessened and 2) since it’s such a broad term, it will be very competitive and difficult to rank on.

The disadvantage of tail terms is that they get fewer searches per month. But on the flip side, those individuals that do search for your tail terms pre-qualify themselves (for example, anyone searching for “college basketball tshirts” would certainly be interested in your site). Another advantage to tail terms is that they are less competitive and relatively easier to rank on.

In summary:

A keyword that consists of only one or two words is generally considered a “head term.” The characteristics of a head term are as follows:

1. Head terms typically boast high search volumes (i.e. they get searched a lot)
2. Head terms generally drive less-qualified traffic
3. Head terms are typically more competitive and more difficult to rank well on

A keyword that consists of three or more words is generally considered a “tail term.” The characteristics of a tail term are as follows:

1. Tail terms are typically boast lower search volumes
2. Tail terms generally drive more-qualified traffic
3. Tail terms are typically less competitive, and easier to rank well on.

So when you generate the list of keywords, its recommended that you choose 2/3’s tail terms to 1/3 head terms. This will ensure that you have a strategy that will help you achieve both short term and long terms success from a diverse set of keywords.