or the few days around then…

Goals and ambitions, whether personal or work related, keep us moving forward from day to day. And we all love making ourselves feel better by honoring a time-old tradition of setting ourselves some New Years Resolutions…

Before I get to a point of sounding sarcastic, I will get to THE POINT!

As far as New Years Resolutions are concerned we fall into one of 3 groups:

Group 1 – The ones that have all the dreams. They get motivated for “big things” in the coming year. They plan – all in their head – of how great things will be, how much more money they’ll make, and how far up the corp. ladder they’ll climb…

How do you spot Group 1 types:
They are dreamers. They have all the best intentions in the world. Some even have all the right skills to achieve what their dreams hold, but they never take action.

They don’t even go as far as writing down their goals and dreams. By the end of January on the following year, Group 1 types have all but forgotten they even had New Year Resolutions…

What’s wrong with that?
It’s obvious, if you never even write things in black and white, how do you hope to remember them, or take active action towards making them true?

Group 2 – The typical groupie here will do all of the dreaming of Group 1 types, but they will also go as far as writing it all down. Often on a piece of paper. Sometimes in a specially designated area on their hard drive. They would even know that they’re supposed to categorize their resolutions…

How do you spot Group 2 types:
They talk a lot about their New Year Resolutions. They have big ambitions, and they will most likely tell everyone about them (not to boast, but because they really have good intentions). They write it all down, and they swear they’ll work on the goals…

What’s wrong with that?
Most of the time, these people never go far enough to educate themselves about how to set goals that you end up achieving. Had they gone one step further to read up about it, they would have known that just writing down what you want out of life without ever looking back at that list, will not make it happen…

Group 3 – Now these guys have it all sassed out. They do all of the above. They do it not just every year (around New Year’s Day), but in 3 month increments. What sets them apart is that they go a step further. A step that makes all the difference between success and failure…

THEY TAKE ACTION on at least one of their goals!!!

What to do; A.K.A. the right way to set your New Year Resolutions.
I’ll keep this as short as possible.

New Year Resolutions are an excellent way to ‘take stock’ of how productive your past year has been. You can assess all sorts of areas in your life. Personal ambitions, professional goals, physical targets, or mental development achievements…

The problem most people meet is that they don’t know how to set those resolutions and how to effectively follow through. So here are a few points to help you along:

10 Ways to Set Effective Goals & to Actually Achieve Them

1. On a piece of paper, write down the headings: Personal Goals, Work-Related Goals. Write your goals under each of those headings.
2. Dig deep, but be selective. Only list the most important goals.
3. Make the goals as specific as possible. Say “I want to earn $100,000 per month by July 2009.” Even if you don’t know how the heck you’d do it – be specific. Also, by being specific, you are making your goals measurable, i.e. at the end of the year, you can tell if you have achieved something or not.
4. Set achievement deadlines – or you’ll have nothing to work towards.
5. Set achievable/realistic goals. Think of it like this, if you set impossible goals, it would be impossible to achieve them…
6. Make it public. Tell your friends and family that these are your goals. If you make things public, you will feel accountable and are hence more likely to act on and achieve your goals…
7. Take action. Yes, don’t just talk about it, but actually DO!
8. Small steps count. You don’t have to do everything at once, and you don’t have to have the full plan in front of you before you can start. Get from A to B, then from B to C, and so on. You’ll gain clarity with every step…
9. Review your list often. Yes, review your list at least once a month. I print mine and keep it with me all the time. By reviewing your goals often, you help your mind keep on track. And if your mind knows the path, it will start seeing opportunities to take you in the right direction… Thing for a second, if you’ve just decided you want an iPhone, have you noticed how all you seem to see around you is iPhones everywhere?
10. Be flexible, fast and be excited. You need to be flexible, to change course when necessary. In this day and age, nothing stands still anymore, so to succeed you need to move fast, and to be open minded.

Be excited – because if you don’t carry the ‘spark’ for your goal, you’ll never create a ‘fire’. Or for those of you who don’t like my analogy – if you’re not passionate about what you’re doing, you are unlikely to carry through with it to achieve the end goal!!!

The Challenge – or what’s the point of this post?

Most of us reading this post, will fall regularly in Groups 1 or 2.

I’m not saying this to offend anyone – heck, I’ve been in those groups for most of my adult life.

But because I know the value of being in Group 3, I decided to write this post.

New Year’s Eve 2008 is creeping in – and before we know it, we’ll be celebrating the coming of 2009. We have just over 2 months to get better at goal setting, and give ourselves the chance to get a better start on 2009.

I hope the points I made above will make you think. But better yet, I hope you will find the “10 Ways Set Effective Goals & to Actually Achieve Them” list inspirational enough to take my challenge.

The Challenge:

Set up your New Year (2009) Resolutions, by following the list above. Now I know you can’t share all that’s on your list, but to be in the challenge, you need to share at least one of your goals for 2009.

You decide which one to share with us, and post it as a comment below. By making it known to all of us, you’re making a public commitment to do something about it! Don’t forget to include a timeframe for your goal.

Go on, start thinking…
At the end of December 2008 (Dec 31st), we will close this post for further comments, and will review it periodically from then on to see who is meeting their deadlines…

The Prize!!!
The only prize you get is the satisfaction of actually achieving at least one of your New Year Resolutions.

I’m in…

P.S. If you have a tip to add to the 10 tips above, please feel free to comment – it will help us all…

A few weeks back, I spoke at a small conference in Las Vegas for the Forex market called the Forex Affiliate Conference, which is run by the guys from the Casino Affiliate Conference. It was the smallest conference I ever spoke at (about 20 people) but it ended up being one of the most productive. I made some really great connections and was able to target my presentation to what information would be most useful for the attendees. From speaking there, I came up with some conference tips that are appropriate for any upcoming event you may be attending.

Lucky 7 Conference Tips

1. Reserve judgment for the end. Just because a conference has 5,000 attendees doesn’t mean that you will get anything out of it.  A conference is about who you meet and what you learn and if it is too crowded and overwhelming for you to meet anyone or learn anything, than it was probably a waste of money. On the other hand, just because there are only 20 people there, doesn’t that these aren’t the right 20 people and best leads you can find.

2. Network regardless of your mood. Just because the conference isn’t exactly what you expected is not an excuse to sit in your hotel room or bail on your presentation. Talk to other attendees or presenters, don’t be shy just strike up a conversation over a beer.

3. If nothing is planned, plan it yourself. If there are not parties, dinners or events planned for that night, get everyone together and plan and time and meeting location yourself. DK planned the Pubcon Poker Tournament, the least you can do is plan dinner.

4. If you are presenting, gear your presentation to your audience. A smaller conference gives you the benefit of meeting everyone and asking them what they want to learn. It also leads to more audience participation. If you are in the audience, ask questions and participate.

5. There is always something you can learn, so sit in on a couple of sessions. No one knows everything, so sitting in on a couple of sessions can be really beneficial.  I don’t do a lot of affiliate marketing, so the nuggets of information that I gathered will definitely be helpful for my own sites.

6. Don’t tell people overly specific information. Just because someone asks you a direct question face to face about one of your clients site doesn’t mean you have to tell them your clients best keyword/conversion tactic/seo tactic etc.

7. Don’t stick to just hanging out with people you know. I am sure your coworkers are great people, but this is your chance to broaden your horizons and meet new people.  Go up to someone you don’t know and just start a conversation. The vast majority of the time, people at your conference will be very friendly and responsive.

I read an interesting article the other day which discussed the importance of targeting and bounce rates and it got me to thinking about the clients that I have had, past and present and the buckets of money I have seen thrown away. So, I decided to put a list together of 10 ways you or your client may be wasting money they could be paying you:

1. Stop sending paid traffic to your home!
   1. Your homepage is rarely the page your potential customers are looking for. If I am searching for �buy sony flatscreen 1080p� PLEASE send me to a page with sony flat screen tv�s on it!
   2. Check your homepage�s bounce rate. It is 60% than you should only be sending people searching for �sitename.com� to that page otherwise, you are throwing at least 60% of your money away. Why do I say at least? Because if you are sending all your paid traffic to your homepage than you probably haven�t optimized your paid search ads and are just looking for a high click through rate.
2. Stop duplicating terms in your paid search accounts
   1. It never ceases to amaze me when clients are using the same keyword in multiple ad groups with the same geo-targeting and timing. Don�t do this
3. Have goals for your website
   1. Set goals for your website. �I want to make money.� Isn�t a sufficient goal. Come up with trackable metrics to get you there so you can optimize your website to eventually make you some more money.
   2. Publishing sites – # of page views, repeat visitors, high CPM.
   3. Ecommerce � lifetime value
   4. Lead-gen sites are a monster in and of themselves. If you generate leads so that they become sales then focusing on the lead only is going to inhibit you from making money. Remember, unless you are selling leads, they don� t make you any money until they become a sale.
4. Don�t cut the long-tail
   1. If you aren�t tracking performance over-time, you are probably missing all of your long-tail terms. Don�t cut terms that are attracting people in the educational phase of the sales-cycle. If you market to them differently you can increase your conversion rate over time. Don�t cut them just because these phrases take a little longer to convert - MARKET TO THEM DIFFERENTLY. These are long sales cycle leads
5. Use negative keywords in your paid search campaigns
   1. This may sound basic, but if you aren�t using negative keywords than you are paying for traffic that will NEVER make you a dollar, pound or euro. If you have paid-search clients or use paid search and using mostly broad match than you really need to spend some time investigating exactly what terms are being clicked on.
6. Learn what terms lead to conversion and optimize your site accordingly
   1. Welcome to the beauty of the internet and web analytics. You can actually tell how people get to your site, what they do there and if they are making you money. It�s brilliant. So why are you optimizing your site based on what you think will work well?
7. Stop making creative decisions based on what your boss thinks is a good idea.
   1. See point 6. We have the ability to test and optimize, which means we can run multiple ad creatives (banner and search) and see what drives the greatest revenue rather than based on the CxO�s affinity to the color blue. Back your decisions with data
8. Test, test, test and SPLIT TEST!
   1. See point 7. Products like Google website optimizer and Omniture�s Test and Target (formerly Offermatica) can optimize your landing pages based on conversions. There is no excuse for not testing your landing pages and assuming that your designers first try is always correct. In all likelihood it is not optimal and assuming it is will make an ass out you but not me because I�m split testing
9. Track how changes to your website affect your bottom line
   1. If designers, programmers, your kids or whomever are making website changes that affect your business� especially your homepage � you should be recording that this is being done and how this is affecting organic placement and conversions. If there is no tracking there is no accountability.
10. Know what your users are clicking on
    1. Heatmaps and click analysis tools, like Crazy Egg are great at letting you know what your users are clicking on and responding to. Using this information to optimize page layout should help you to make the most of the traffic that you have.

I am a bit of a geek girl. I’m good with computers, the Internet and various other pieces of technology. However, since getting into the tech world and especially since developing a nasty Twitter habit, I’ve noticed a new breed of annoying female that I’d never come across before. If you live out in the real world, you may have seen them on occasion, but they’re everywhere on the web. Outside, where flesh replaces pixels, they’re harder to spot. Enhanced with Ruby on Rails, these women have become the sorority girls of the Internet. Get mad at me for being hypocritical if you like; I’ve probably done some of these things. However, if you must become famous on the Internet, here’s what you have to do:

1. Relate oneself to frosting, icing, cupcakes, muffins or any other variety of sweet confection which one does not actually consume on a regular basis but which is often pink.
2. Pick a blog handle, Twitter name or general online pen-name with care. Is your name Nicole Kent? (I made that name up, in case you’re wondering.) “NicoleKent” won’t do. “jnikkicakecat” would be a far better choice, but for God’s sake, avoid using numbers. No one’s done that since 2001’s Yahoo! chat rooms and you don’t even have Yahoo! saved in your browser’s history.
3. Pretend to be retarded.
4. Talk a lot about Apple products, even if you secretly use a Dell Inspiron 6000 that’s running XP, weighs more than a year’s pile of college text books and is missing its down arrow and F5 keys.
5. Attend a lot of tech-related events to give off the impression that every day of your life is SXSW. Twitter at Michael Arrington and make it seem like he replies.
6. Blog about your diet, which consists solely of tea, sushi and oddities only found at strange markets in Austin and Providence, RI.
7. Reclaim MySpace; Abandon Facebook. If in United Kingdom, flirt with Bebo.
8. Actually change your name. If people find out you’re really called Nicole Kent, things could get ugly. Hint that your name is actually Fairess Sweetakins.
9. Own a regular pet but make sure to point out that it’s not a German Shepherd, it’s a Belgian Malinois. What? I said I was a hypocrite.
10. Practice yoga and meditation in order to forget that 9,280 of your 9,302 Twitter followers are pony-tailed software developers from Omaha.
11. An oldie but a goodie: take pictures and video of yourself from strange angles. It worked on Friendster, it ruled MySpace, it’ll work in the odd life you lead that can only be dubbed Blogtter.
12. Stay the fuck out of politics, unless you’re expressing sexual fantasies about Barak Obama. You risk alienating at least half of your audience no matter what you say, and it’s way more interesting to talk about Wii Sports. The Barak stuff is fine: pony-tailed software developers don’t care if you’re fantasising about Margaret bloody Thatcher, so long as they get to think about you and sex.
13. OMG Digg.
14. Stay the fuck out of coffee politics. Claim that the people at Starbucks have your idiotic drink ready for you before you get there.
15. Choose a yummy sample of generic pop culture phenomena, such as cartoons or musicians, and obsess over them. There’s nothing better than claiming a pop culture mainstay as your own and subtly indicating that it’s far more deep and meaningful than everyone else understands it to be.
16. Learn at least some real computer skills so that you can Twitter about your server from time to time.
17. Write blog posts that consist of less than one-hundred words. In the Twitter culture, no one has time to read 900 – 1,000 word entries.
18. Have an offline friend who is very cool. Talk about the friend a lot online. “Stacey” did this. “Stacey” did that. Elevate “Stacey” to a god-like level for no particular reason at all. Don’t let “Stacey” know.
19. Refrain from talking about “Web 2.0.” It makes you look like a dick. Instead, talk about digital media.
20. Write for a blog called “(Technology-related Subject) Chicks” and wear little shirts with name of said blog emblazened across them, atop the boobs. And be a fuck ton better than the “(Technology-related Subject) Blokes” blog while you’re at it.

Okay, so it has been a little more than a week since Part I, but SES NY takes a long time to recover from.

There are a ton of keyword research tools and tool lists out there, but it is still incredibly important to have all of your tools in one place. There are a lot of familiar tools in here, but there should also be a some lesser known ones here as well.

Let’s start this off with an SEO snack provided to you by one of my newest friends, Gareth

Free Tools

SEObook�s ultimate keyword research tool is a great place to start. Another tool on the site, is the Google Scraper tool

We can�t forget everyone�s old favorites, the Adwords Keyword Tool or Overtures Keyword Selector (although it doesn�t always work)

Quintura shows keyword maps to help you to generate more keywords!

Track keyword trends with Blogpulse.

If anything, Kartoo is a lot of fun. It provides keyword maps of who is ranking for what terms. Results could be a little bette

Find your competitors Keyword!

Start off with figuring out how competitive a keyword is

Long tail keyword discovery shows you the 3, 4 and 5 term keywords for your (or a competitors) site.

SEO Digger is pretty awesome tool. Find out what keywords your site ranks in Google�s top 20 for, or use this to spy on the competition

Shoemoney review

Keyword Spy is great at finding what your competitors are bidding on and ranking for and you test it out for free right on their homepage. The free version only lets you see 10 results, but the paid version for $90/month lets you see a lot more.

Digitalpoints Keyword suggestion tool is another good free option. It also lets you specify what country you are looking for data for. They also have a free keyword position tracking tool.

Paid

Wordtracker has a 7 day free trial for their tool, otherwise, it is paid for at $329 a year. They also have very good free version of their keyword research tool.

Trellian�s keyword discovery is another fantastic tool. It draws info from over 180 search engines around the world and has keyword brainstorming tools as well as the ability to import import keyword lists and add descriptors. This is paid for with prices varying, but a 1 year standard subscription will run you about $600.

Keyword Discovery also won Best Keyword Research Tool in 2007 on www.toprankblog.com

Wordze has gotten a bit of a following with tools that let you perform keyword research, get historical keyword data, perform competitive research, and download top searches. They cost $45/month

Wordze also had a great deal of praise TopRank Blog

Wordze review on copyblogger.

AdGooroo, which also deserves a mention in Yoda�s Ultimate Competitive Research Tools Post is also a great keyword research tool. It allows you see what terms your competition is bidding on so you can make sure you don�t miss any opportunities. Prices range from $89/month to $399/month depending on what you need.

Spyfu also let�s you see what your competitors rank for as well as help you find new keywords to use fro your own site. They let you perform some research for free, but if you want to dig deep, it will cost you $308/year or $6.75 for 3 days

Miscellaneous

Shimon Sandler listed some keyword stemming tools on his site a while back that are very useful. Basically, they help you to take the stem of a word and build out additional keywords by adding in the variations of that term. Here are a few good ones:

http://www.usingenglish.com/resources/wordcheck/index.php?word=work

http://www.related-pages.com/adWordsKeywords.aspx

Other Great Keyword Research Lists

The other Loren (Baker that is) recently wrote a post at Search Engine Journal asking what keyword tools his readers liked � WordTracker, SEOBook, and Keyword Discovery seemed to make it out on top.

Mona Elesseily also put together a great list about spying on your competitors including Compete and Spyfu (mentioned above).

SEOBooks keyword research tool list is another great one.

Anne Smarty�s list on SEOMOZ is also very comprehensive

Coming soon . . . Must have Firefox Plugins

An SEO�s best friend (other than a stiff drink) is a good tool. Tools save us time and energy and streamline the process so we can get to making money instead of researching. They provide the information you need when you need it. But it is important to remember that knowing when to use a particular tool and how to use it is more important than any list.

This is why I�ve created Yoda�s ultimate tool to put all the tools one would need in 1 place. Since this list is too massive to fit in one post, it will be a multi-part list that will cover: Competitive Research, Keyword Research, Must have Firefox plug-ins, Reputation Management tools, PPC Tools, Domainer tools and my favorite non-conformist miscellaneous tools

So here we go: Part 1 � Competitive Research

Step 1: Who is your competitor and where have they been?
Competition Finder
A great tool, this shows you how many pages are indexed in google competing for your key terms. This will let you size up the competition and market saturation.

Archive.org will show you what their website looked like the past as well as give you the age of the site

Whois.sc
By adding this bookmarklet to your firefox browser you can find out the whois information for the site you are viewing simply by clicking on it.

Step 2: What kind of marketshare and traffic do they have?
Compete.com is one of my FAVORITE sites. They have a lot of great free tools (and some really cool paid for ones). You can compare sites, get traffic information and get an idea of how much your competitors are spending.

Index Rank
The first time I saw this was on SEOBook, (Aaron has some amazing tool�s listed there as well, so you should definitely check out that list too). Index Rank is incredible useful in showing you how many times Google is indexing your site compared to competitors sites.

SEO Quake is a pretty cool tool that shows you PR, # of pages indexed, Links, Alexa ratings, Age, whois info and density of every site you open in Firefox.

Who is linking to your competitors?

The Tattler
Originally posted by Todd, this is a great tool to scrape who is linking to your competitors

Backlink and Keyword Tracker
Totally free tool can be used to check search engines for the number of back links to any specific URL over time

Link Diagnosis is a is a great link hunting tool especially if you want to see what kind of anchor text your competitors are using.

Another great one, from a fellow chicklet�s site, is SEOmoz�s Backlink Analyzer. This shows the backlinks to a competitor�s website and the common anchor text. In general the SEOmoz tools section is a must read

What keywords are your competitors buying?
There are a several different tools that do this that vary in prices. Spyfu is a good option, that is not too expensive ($300 a year or about $40/month). It lets you see what keywords your competitors are buying up as well as see what they optimizing their site for.

Have they made any changes?
WatchThatPage will email you with any changes made to a competitor�s site or your site (although you probably should know that already)

Search for Broken Links
Xenu�s Link Sleuth will search for broken links on sire

Great Overall Site Analysis Tools
Last but not least, LinkVendor. This is a site filled with awesome research and site analysis tools.

. . . . . Next Week Part II: Keyword Research

Firstly, let me say, I�m excited to be here with a group of such talented women. Secondly, the the two sentence intro on me is that I�ve been doing SEO, ppc and analytics in the forex industry and for myself at lvlogic for a little over 3 years. I can often be found hanging out at the bar with several of the guys from IM-NY talking shop over a ketel one on the rocks or a nice glass of wine. The bar is also where I met Lisa (running theme possibly) and after several drinks, a few games of craps and some tequila and eggs, she asked me to be a chicklet. So, here is everything you ever wanted to know about how to build a brand in 5 easy steps (more or less).

As a new business starting out, getting market share can be an overwhelming task. You need more than just an out of the box website and big dreams. You need a game plan.

How to make one is what we are going to discuss through research and development of a story that sells, how to rank for your brand name and what to do next.

Remember, you may not be Coca-Cola, but that doesn�t mean you shouldn�t think about branding your product from the start.

1. Competitive Research

I know what you are thinking � why am I doing competitive research? I am branding my product not trying to get links. Competitive research is one of the most, if not ‘the’ most important (and often overlooked) steps when you start any online project.

Figure out who the competition is and what they are doing. Learn the key terms for your niche and make a list of who is ranking for them. Once you discover who your key competitors are, figure out what terms they are ranking for (I recommend using www.compete.com) and what you can do better.

The keywords give you direction and online are an important ingredient in branding. Knowing where your competitors are getting their traffic shows you what is in the mind of potential visitors. Gear your site to these queries and you position yourself, over time, in the minds of your potential customers. If they always see you everytime they search for what you offer you become associated with the terms and all they suggest to the searchers.

2. What is your story?

Now that you have completed Step 1 and found out who your competition is and what your future clients think about when looking for your niche, you should have an idea of what stories the competition is telling and to a degree what your clients are looking for. Remember consumers buy the stories behind the product, not the product itself. You as a new brand are at a clear advantage here. You have a bird�s eye view of your competition and where they are succeeding and where they are faltering. Now figure out what your story is and how to sell it better than anyone else.

3. Create your content

As we all know, in the online world content is king (and Google is the emperor, but that�s another article). Build content based around the key terms in your niche and become an authority. This will take time, work and resources, but it will pay off. Do not try and make one page that adddresses all the keywords. Make individual pages for each keyword (or at most three keywords a page). This gives you more pages – which adds to the size of the site and the impact it will have in Google, as well as possibly pushing you up in search results for many keywords – thus grabbing clients who are looking for your products through different perspectives.

It is good to remember that people rarely share how they get information, but they do share the information.

4. Rank for your brand name

Make sure you rank highly for your brand name. If your name is something generic that will be near impossible to rank for, change it. No, seriously, change your company�s name now. It will be cheaper to re-file some paperwork than it will be to lose out on all those sales because no one can find your site.

Whether you are a small company (and even if you are a large company) you should also be taking advantage of social media and using it to help dominate the SERPs for your brand name and brand specific products. Create and interlink various social media profiles like linkedin, naymz, squidoo, and myspace.

When choosing a name remember to consider something easy to remember and that Google likes domain names that are a reflection of the search term. In other words, you can rank well with a domain that is the same as a search term (try doing searches and see the domain name there should be a listing that matches keyword and domain).

5. Promote brand loyalists

Create frequent visitor/buyer discounts and rewards programs. This is where the cell phone companies have it backwards. They offer all kinds of promotions to new customers to try to entice them to make the switch over rather than creating customer loyalty programs to keep clients. This is why most people have no brand loyalty when it comes to cell phones and they often leave when their contract is up because another brand is offering them the best new phones free if the jump ship. Don�t let this happen to your brand. Keep customers happy.

This all seems fairly straight forward and it is. It just takes time and commitment, which if you have, it will pay off.

As universal search begins to dominate results and previous above-the-fold results get pushed below the fold, leveraging all channels possible is becoming essential.   Image search optimization offers several advantages not just limited to simple rankings or just image search.

One definite benefit for anyone involved in e-commerce is the possibility of free product promotion within organic results without looking spammy. Product images in search results can seriously boost click-throughs and conversions.

With image search, you’ve got more optimisation opportunities than organic search alone.   The name of the image, along with the tag and associated words will all factor in to ranking an image.  This gives you opportunities to optimise differently or capture searchers where organic is not doing as well.

At the moment, for those involved in e-commerce, not as many retailers are paying attention to the possibilities of image search and universal search when compared to PPC or SEO.  This means as Universal search becomes more prevalent, those in early will probably get better rankings.

So, what can you do?  Lots!  And most of it can also be done through many CMS systems so never say can’t, never say die, never say never… blah blah blah.

Why not try a bit of alt tag (attribute – I know!) text optimization? When I add an image to a page, I can ad descriptive words for the image.

Make these descriptions specific and include the keyword that you want the image found for.  Don’t be spammy – by being focused you’ll get more relevant traffic.

How about putting the images in separate HTML files named after the keyword (linking to the image with your keyword, using ‘keyword.html’ as the file name)?  Try putting the keyword in the title as well as in your H1 tags on the keyword-named page where the image appears.  Again, keep it specific and focused and remember semantically related text and ‘buy me’ button!

Give your image the name of the keyword you want it to be found for.   So if it is a picture of a box of Chocolate Society champagne truffles, call the image ‘champagne-chocolate-truffles’ and not ‘1276394′.  Remember that alt tag text of ‘Chocolate Champagne Truffles’!

Never forget that semantic relativity!  Ensure you are keeping a careful eye on the on-page text.  An image of chocolate covered almonds on a page about white chocolate with strawberries won’t do as well as an image of coca dusted almonds (with the right name) on a page talking about chocolate and almonds.

Remember that to optimize your images for more than a single word, you should use dashes and not underscore.  Matt Cutts has an old but brilliant blog post about how Google sees a dash and why.

Finally, quality is king.  Have high quality images with sharp, clear contrast showing the product with little clutter.  As Google does shrink the image in the results, you will need to ensure you capture interest with not just words but pictures.

Search is changing and we all need to change with it.  It isn’t just text SEO that needs changing though – all elements of our pages can be optimised for search.

Always remember – just say no to spam.

Well it looks like I’ve managed to put in a post today before any of my other lady Chicks – which I started thinking of as almost impossible – LOL…

So I’ve been thinking a lot about systematising lately and how important it is to do that for your business – regardless of where you are in the pecking order (SEO Chicks… pecking order….. I sense a pun alert…).

Converting as many processes of your job into easy to follow, consistently performing systems is not that easy to do, but it is soo worth it when done and done properly. I’ve experienced the full benefits of documentation in a big way in my previous job, so when I started setting up Reviewlicious.com I made sure systems and process simplification was in the core of the whole thing.

Not easy to do from the start, because while there are set ways for some of the things that happen in an online business, some factors are a partial unknown until the business is up and running… Anyway, enough theory, I decided to put together a quick list of how to go about systematising your processes.

BTW: We would really appreciate any input you can give – especially if it is to suggest things that have worked for you in the past, that I haven’t mentioned below.

One last thing before I get on to the list ). It helps if you think of this formula:

YOUR BUSINESS = Bunch of PROCESSES = A Whole Lot of TASKS

So in essence you have to break down your business into a bunch of tasks to be able to re-construct them as processes and build this entire system – your business.

• First you need to identify the areas that need systematizing:
  
  
  • Look at areas where people make mistakes often.

  
  

  • Places where the results are not only inconsistent but also disappointing to you.

  
  

  • Activities on which you’re spending too much time.

  
  

  • Activities that you’re avoiding like the plague ’cause you don’t like them – systematising those and putting them on a process map gives you a chance to outsource them easily and never have to do them again – *wink*

  
  

  • Or activities that don’t usually run smoothly, but if they do you can gain extra profits.




• Make a list of those areas and prioritise them in terms of their impact on your business. Naturally, you can’t do everything at once so prioritising will help you make the quickest changes in the areas that matter the most.




• Tackle the ones that are the most important first.




• Write down how the process is working at the moment. I sketch that on paper in a visual way – like a process map.




• Mark down what parts are working effectively at the moment.




• List who’s involved in the process and what’s their significance to the process – this will clear your head in terms of – “Do I really need this extra person’s input?”.




• Then identify gaps, mistakes and areas where things can be shortened, improved, or outsourced.




• Now write down how you think the process should work, incorporating all your findings and also getting input from the people involved in the process.




• Next, you get yourself in front of your computer and in front of a process mapping tool. What you use is entirely up to you to be honest as long as it does the job and is easy to manipulate and update. In the old days we’d do all that on paper, but I don’t need to tell you how “easy” that is to change and improve… The tool I use now that I’m on Mac is OmniGraffle – it’s an awesome little tool that is an absolute pleasure to use. If you’re on PC, then the market leader (and a tool I’ve used extensively) is SmartDraw. Not cheap but if your business depended on it – it’s worth it right.

  There are also a few free tools around the internet, but I’ve not used any of them so I can’t recommend anything – please feel free fill me in if you have a recommendation.




• So this next step is very logical – start putting your paper thoughts on to your process mapping tool. Once you have the basic layout, you can stand back and look at each component separately.




• Have a look and decide if anything needs shifting. Make sure you use the correct components and shapes for your actions. This helps with your map’s readability. Let’s say you mapped a process and then decided to outsource that process, the process map you have should be able to be read by anyone…




• I love Wikipedia and once more they provide a very good explanation of the shapes and components of a Process Map or a Flowchart.




• Here are a few things that you need to look for in terms of spotting areas where things can be improved:
  • Can it be simplified?
  • Can some steps be combined?
  • What steps can be outsourced?
  • Are there any bottlenecks?
  • Can some steps be automated – either by a piece of existing software or perhaps a piece of code you can implement?
  • Can you do without any of the steps you’ve listed – like cut out a middleman and go straight to a supplier?
  • Get the help of a person that really knows this process subject and ask for their opinion too – if you’re not sure if everything is looked at?




• Save your document – )




• Distribute it to everyone involved in the process, and consider sending it to the people who are affected by the actual process. Awareness breeds support… well most of the time anyway. Often, in bigger organisations, you may have to get people involved to ‘buy into’ the new process, but the outcomes and improvements are so worth the trouble.

So now you have the process all mapped, you need to do the same for the other processes you identified.

This is all an ongoing thing. It will take a while to put your entire business into processes, but even when they are all done – your job isn’t. Things just get a lot easier.

You may find that some of the processes eventually become obsolete, and that you develop the need for new processes, so the whole thing never really goes away – how ominous…

The ‘upside’ is that you get to streamline your business by making every part of it fully visible. If your businesses’ “cogs” are visible you’ve got more of a chance in optimising critical areas and making everything work even better. All in all process maps ensure consistency of results and protects you from costly mistakes and doing tasks you don’t necessarily want to do yourself )

I�m one of those rare creatures � an In-House SEM who is allowed to blog, speak at conferences, write articles and play with other companies websites. It was while engaging in one of these activities that I came across someone�s attempt at keyword research.

Now, I�ve been around online since high school and since I�m in the 30+ crowd, that means I was one of those freakish early adopters/geeky developers. Yes, I was a programmer but I escaped and am now living out my life in a former-programmer protection program.

My early years online and involvement ever since also means I�m am aware that I am _not_ a typical web user and so when confronted with doing SEM for any site, I do my research. Research includes keyword research which includes researching the competition and looking at keyword research result tools.

The other day I was given some preliminary work which I am sure must have taken the person ages to complete. They had obviously seen my conference talk and gone hell-for-leather in to getting their keyword research done. I can�t help but think that they were snoozing during the tools section though. The research done basically gave derivations of on-page words and nothing from any competitive analysis or any keyword tools.

Had this gung-ho person done even one keyword search using a free tool (any free tool), they would have seen they were targeting the wrong phrase. That cascaded through a complex set of combinations based on this original phrase and continued through other poorly targeted phrases.

The point here is that keyword research is about THEM and not YOU. That means you do your research for what people are _actually_ searching for and not what you think they should be looking for. Optimise your page for searchers and how they search � not your internal company jargon.

Do your research on who your competition is, what they optimise for and then start using those free keyword tools (maybe even buy one) and get that research going. Identify what makes your page unique and target those phrases.

Keyword optimisation is different for each page because each page (should be) is different. Don�t cannibalise your keywords across various pages � make each page focused and on topic and do your research for that page. Don�t dilute the power of those keywords by stuffing them on every page � make them stronger by keeping them on the relevant pages.

Search engines aren�t fooled by keyword stuffing anymore. Gone are the days when a change was seen instantly on AltaVista. These days search engines are savvy and combine over 200 factors including related terms on page, links in, header, footer, density, and more to determine rank.

Keyword research is the first step in optimisation. Get it done right and the rest will follow. Get it wrong and you�ll languish in the also-rans of the SERPs.

Some free keyword tools:

- SEO Book keyword suggestion tool
- Wordtracker free trial
- Google keyword tool

These keyword tools require payment:

- Trellian Keyword Discovery
- Wordtracker Keywords
- SoloSEO (includes keyword section)