If you’re the kind of person that wants to know what their market is talking about on Twitter then this quick tip might interest you!

I see many articles talking about so many tools that can track keywords on Twitter and send you e-mails with the specified tweets but I’m the kind that wants to keep it simple. I don’t like to use many tools: I already have to use many tools in order to provide my SEO services and I just want to limit it.

So, here is a quick tip to stay in touch with your market on Twitter. Go on search.twitter.com and search for the keywords you’re interested in. Then, on the right side of the screen you’ll see a link called “Feed to this query”.

Right click it and Copy Link Location. Then, log in into your Google Reader account and add a subscription with that feed. As a good practice create a Folder in Google Reader called Twitter and place your Twitter feeds there. This way you don’t have to think about which tool did you used, or to receive to many e-mails.

What you think of it? Share your ideas in comments bellow!

Every business has a start. It’s so obvious when we talk about brick and mortar businesses but many people see it differently when it comes about a web-based-business. In fact, when it comes to a web business I think it’s even harder. In real life you’ll open a business in a place where there are already shops and other businesses.

Starting a business on the web can be like opening a shop in the middle of nowhere: there are no roads to you, no buses, nobody knows you exist. SEO and Internet Marketing have to be your main tools: you either pay for ads to drive traffic or you pay for SEO and build optimized content for organic searches.

Don’t Do This Mistake

One of the biggest mistakes that you could do, when you are just starting, is invest time and money to rank well on organic searches for really competitive terms or keywords that are dominated on the first page by high-authority websites.

Some would argue that you should aim high from the first day and go for the big keywords because it will get you big traffic. I don’t want to get me wrong: the final goal will be to get traffic from big terms but, in my opinion, you have to start at the bottom in order to get to the top.

If you open a clothing business, do you think you can do it right next door from (or compete with) Armani, from the first day? Why is it so obvious in real life and people act so blindly when it comes to the web?

Planning and Goals

If you decide to invest in SEO you should think about two main things:

1. Optimizing the content that already exists
2. Building new optimized content

It doesn’t matter if you are just starting your business or not: having a plan and establishing some goals it’s common sense. So, when you start an SEO campaign you should think of some things that you want to improve: metrics like bounce rate, traffic, rankings, returning visitors.

If you want to build new content don’t just go and assume you know what people are searching just because you use those keywords to search for your business. Build a keyword list that has information on the volume of monthly searches, competition, main keywords and related long tail keywords, areas where those searches are being made and so on.

A keyword list should also come with a plan on how to use it: how to target keywords in content, how to link articles, what long tail keywords are related to what main keywords and so on. If you go and skip this step it’s like walking blind on the street: you can bang your head on a wall or you can safely get home – you never know what the next step will bring you.

What Do You Think?

How important is SEO for your business? Are you willing to invest in a keyword list before you start building new content? Do you know what your market is searching for, what are the rising trends and how to properly target the keywords in content? Share your ideas and thoughts in comments bellow.

If you find this article useful, please consider subscribing to this blog and receive my content directly in your e-mail.

I think that keeping it real is a common sense in any business, especially in web-based businesses. This is the big advantage of the web: you can’t fake it. You either have visitors to your website or not; you either get comments or not; you either sell or not – you can’t hide. As a result, you need to stay with your feet on the ground and keep in touch with what your market is doing and searching.

There are lots of ways and tools to keep in touch to what your market is doing: you can listen to social networks, blogs, the web, tweets and so on. There are so many ways that you could get lost. That is why I prefer to use two tools from Google: Google Alerts and iGoogle.

How I use Google Alerts

The process is simple. Create a Gmail account, then search for Google Alerts and set your alerts. My advice would be not to rush into it and create too many alerts. Every day millions of articles are being published, so keep it real. Focus on your top main keywords and some important long tail keywords.

This is not only a way to see what others are publishing related to your keywords in your market but also a way to see how the competition is using the keywords you are trying to rank for. It will also offer you an indicator of how crowded the market is: see how many articles appear in a day, week, month.

You can also use it as a source of inspiration for your own content. I don’t read all the articles I’m receiving but I do a quick scan for interesting ideas and how the keywords are used on the page.

How I use iGoogle

I’m using iGoogle because I can incorporate tables from other Google tools. The most important one for me is Google Insights for Search. What I do is basically incorporate tables to see rising trends in search for different related terms. Why is this so important: many times website owners pay money to have their websites optimized for keywords that no one searches for or have low search volumes.

Knowing what’s hot and what people are searching for and from what location can have a great impact on how you plan your business: content, products, geo-targeting and so on.

How do you stay in touch with your market?

What do you think of all this? Share your way to keep in touch with your market, rising trends in searches, problems people might encounter and so on. If you find this article useful please consider subscribing and receive my blog directly in your e-mail.

These are my thoughts on the relation between the winter holydays and business. I’m not talking about the thing that this is a period of time when you should sell a lot: this is not about that relation. It’s about using Christmas as a moment when you take a deep breath and you think about what you did and what you’ll do.

Without thinking about what you did and what you have to do in order to further develop your business I think you’ll not go to far in terms of business. So, use Christmas as a moment to think:

1. Are you happy with your financial results?
2. What do you think was the most important thing you’ve done this year for your business?
3. What methods you used to market your business on the web?
4. Are you using any social network to help spread your message?
5. How many of your goals did you achieved, this year?
6. How many people did you helped?

Evaluate you and your business and also think about the future:

1. Establish goals for the next year and think about the ways of achieving it
2. Plan your SEO
3. Think about your social media activity
4. Think about the kind of content you’re going to produce
5. Think about how you’re going to help people
6. Don’t set goals that are directly connected to money; things like: increase sells. Consider additional things that in time might get more indirect value/money back; things like increasing the number of subscribers

My 10 ideas for 2010:

1. By the end of January I want to launch my Compete Guide to Keywords (for only $10)
2. Increase the number of my subscribers
3. Increase the number of Fans on my Facebook page
4. Continue helping people with problems related to SEO and Blogging, on my Facebook page
5. Produce new content every day
6. Increase the number of requests for my services and also the number of closed deals
7. Increase the conversion of my Work With Me page from my blog
8. Create a small free guide on general SEO issues that will be offered for free to anyone that subscribes to my newsletter
9. Maintain and develop my current relations on Twitter
10. Stay focused and work hard

What is your take on all this? How do you plan your next moves for the next year? Share your ideas, opinions, experience and don’t forget to subscribe to my blog and you’ll receive my daily articles in your e-mail.

Some of you may recall my other article about “10 SEO Tips for Wordpress – the Basics” which I highly recommend you to read if you’re interested in the basic operations that will improve the SEO performance of your Wordpress website/blog. This article deals with another important aspect of your web activity and that is building content.

Everyone knows that content is what will get you traffic, rankings, conversions, clients, awareness, brand and so on. Without content you are nothing on the web. And the sooner you realize this you’ll be able to benefit from understanding how to plan your content and how to implement a good SEO strategy for content development.

The Plan

Every Wordpress blog starts with an idea that will lead to a plan and in the end to a blog. Doing SEO for your Wordpress blog is pretty much the same thing you do for any website but there are some particular aspects that make the task a little more interesting.

A blog means new content on a regular basis. New content means new ideas about how to describe your products, how to answer to people’s problems, how to present your business as a problem solver and so on. Building new content it’s not easy, if you try to always offer some kind of benefit to your reader.

Without a plan your SEO efforts to have a well optimized Wordpress blog will be governed by chance. If you don’t have a plan on what to write about and how to do it then it’s like building a house without knowing if you want a first floor or not.

The Beginning

There is a strong connection between content and keywords. Identify the problems your product solves, identify the keywords people search to find solutions to these problems, group the keywords in pyramid structures and plan your content for each pyramid.

A pyramid structure means that you have a main keyword at the top and more levels with long tail keywords that are related to each other and to the top keyword. The foundation of each pyramid will be formed by synonyms and related single words that you’ll use in your articles and in some in anchor texts.

Another important element of the pyramid structure is the fact that there is a link between each level and between elements. This will have to be reflected in your articles: plan a linking structure that will help all the articles in the pyramid. A good thing to remember is not to link all your articles to the main one.

Building articles in groups that are connected will have a great effect on your Wordpress blog. It will help your SEO and user functionality because of the fact that this way you can cover multiple aspects of the same problem and you can also deal with more particular issues.

The Opinion

Now, it’s your turn to tell me what you think of this pyramid method. How do you create your content? How do you plan it? How do you try to stay on top? Share your experience in comments bellow.

I decided to create my own Facebook page because I consider it to be a much more productive way to share my knowledge and interact with people that need help when it comes to SEO and Blogging. I would like to use this article in order to share my ideas about what I want to discuss on this page.

SEO Tips

The discussions about SEO will include tips, ideas and suggestions on how to solve different SEO problems. Here are some of topics that I’ll try to cover.

1. Website analysis
2. Content analysis
3. Keyword planning
4. Competition analysis
5. How to read and interpret Google Analytics results
6. How to improve different metrics: traffic, rankings, bounce rates

Another goal of the page will be to also promote my services and informational products related to SEO. I also have a discussion opened where you can pose your questions related to .

Blogging Tips

These discussions and posts will be about blogs in general. Here are some of the topics I’ll try to cover:

1. Setup and Configuration
2. Content Planning
3. How to write quality copy
4. What to write about
5. How to use keywords in Content

I have a discussion opened where you can pose your questions about blogging related issues.

The address of my Facebook page is: http://www.facebook.com/pages/OptimizingTheWeb-SEO-Tips-and-Blogging/234377996616 I really hope to see you there, to interact and share our ideas.

This is a common mistake especially for bloggers: many blogs don’t have a unified RSS Subscription. Here is what I mean by that: all blog themes have an RSS icon, usually on top of the blog and another one at the bottom of the blog.

Additionally bloggers subscribe to feedburner in order to create an easy newsletter that contains their content. Everyone that likes the content on the blog but doesn’t want to visit it every day can simply enter his/hers e-mail address and receive the blog in their inbox.

The problem is that after people burned their feedburner feed and place the subscription form on their blog they leave the other RSS feeds set up to the blog’s feed. The result is that some of your subscribers will subscribe via e-mail, others will choose to read your feed. The issue is that you don’t know how many subscribers you really have.

My advice is to redirect all your feeds to feedburner so that you have a unified feed. Here is how you can simply do it:

Usually the RSS link is placed in the header or footer. So you need to do a small tweak. The feedburner feeds have a link structure like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Your-Feed-Name. So whatever your feed name is place it at the end of the link and that is your feed link. Use this link to replace the old ones that are just pointing to your blog’s feed.

Wordpress additional feed placement suggestions

You can also implement an additional feature: every article can have such a subscription link at the beginning or the end. To do this, place the link along with some text in the singlepost.php file in your Wordpress theme:

1. Here is a simple example of code that will show the link surrounded by a dotted line:
   <div align=”center” style=”border: 1px dashed #3333FF;font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 15px; padding-top: 3px;padding-bottom: 3px;font-style: italic;text-decoration: none;”>Hi and thanks for the visit. If you’re new here you may want to <a href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOUR_FEED_NAME” title=”Subscribe to my feed” rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml”>subscribe to my feed</a></div>
2. The code can be placed at the beginning of the article or the end:
   1. The Beginning of each article: open your theme editor in Wordpress, select the file singlepost.php to edit and place the link before <div class=”postContent”>. Usually all themes have this class
   2. The End of the article: you can have multiple choices here, right when the article ends, or when the comments begin. So you can post the link right before <div class=”postTags”> or right before <p class=”comments”>

Let me know what you think about this article and if you like it don’t forget to subscribe

Writing articles/content on your website/blog has become a very powerful action in marketing your business. The thing is that sometimes people forget why they’ve started a website or better said they forget how to use their website to draw attention to their business. It’s very easy to get lost in the wave and write articles that will not bring anything in return.

In a brick and mortar business you never do things without thinking about what impact will have on your business. When it comes to real businesses people always ask themselves “how is this going to improve my business?”

This is the model every web-based business should follow. So, every time you want to write a new article ask yourself this question: “How it will help/improve my business?”. If you can’t answer this question you better drop that article and find another topic to write about.

Here are some 3 simple/basic things to help you establish a connection between an article and a real benefit for your business:

1. In most cases articles should target keywords. I say in most cases because there are some times when you just want to develop a really interesting title and present an interesting idea without thinking about keywords and search engines. But if your website is in its initial state when it was just launched you should create articles that target keywords with the goal of improving rankings for your website
2. Some articles are meant to get more business/clients while others are created to increase the subscribers number, for example, or to improve website functionality, or to be a feeder to other articles on your website and the list can go on
3. Goals are something that has to be in your mind all the time. Always set a goal for a certain article, page or set of articles. See if you manage to achieve that goal, measure the success and try to adjust it

The presence of keywords in your articles is crucial to the success of your website. The reason is because the highest amount of traffic should come from search engines. That is why having a keyword list for your website where you have a main keyword list with your most competitive keywords and some additional secondary lists for long tail keywords is very important.

A secondary thing related to keywords in your articles is that you also need a plan of how to use long tail keywords and how to link the articles to really help your website rank well on the competitive keyword.

What do you say?

What goals are you following with your articles? Do you think about getting something in return when writing every article? Share your ideas and opinions with us.

In this article I have to answer to three questions: Why to use Twitter for business purposes? then How do you know how crowded is your  market on Twitter? and finally How to attack this market?

Let’s get started with the first question, and that is why to use Twitter for business purposes. I think that everyone that is using Twitter and have his/hers updates publically has an objective. Twitter is a different social network than others. The stream is live and real-time. The level of connection is deep. The feel of an actual meeting is present. Twitter it’s easy to use and configure. If you know what you’re doing you can attract very quickly many eyes on you. The pitfall of Twitter is to have many spammers as followers and thus you may have the impression of an audience which in reality doesn’t exist – or to have as followers people that have few tweets but follow thousands of people. Tweets are shown in Google searches and also the Twitter username so you can use it for SEO purposes.
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How many people do you know that have a business or are planning to start one because they want to make money? This is wrong – this is bad thinking – it’s not healthy for you or your business. I just want to say it clear right from the start of this article: starting a business with the goal to make money will not get you anywhere. The reason behind this judgment is because you’re starting a business that will produce nothing. If your goal is to make money then your product doesn’t exist.

Take a look at Walt Disney. His big goal was to create a company that will put a smile on everyone’s faces. This is what made him do Snow white (his first animated movie that also was a big success). He didn’t thought to make money but still he made millions. Because he always placed people first and he always thought to a product that will entertain. read more