Stealth Marketing Solutions Blog

On 10 November 2009, which is the US Marine Corps’ birthday, I attended a Personal Branding workshop put together by Chad Rothschild.  The workshop was about how to become a thought leader in your industry or niche using social media and blogs.  However, the foremost info touched upon was conquering the “internal game.”

The internal game is the self doubt and thoughts, that we all have, that sometimes stop us in our tracks.  One can know all the technical aspects of blogging, social media, and creating buzz about you, your company, or products.  But, if you can’t get past the mind chatter, it does no good.

So, back to why you need a blog and some basic SEO knowledge to build your personal brand.  You’re probably thinking that it makes sense to use a blog to make this happen, but where does SEO come into play?  I’m glad you asked!

Most people probably do not think  this way, but I consider SEO to encompass pretty much the whole of online marketing.  Why?  Well, let’s break it down a bit.  Whatever means you use online to “get the word out” either about your product or service or yourself, since we are talking about personal branding, must be promoted.  I believe, in essence, you are optimizing those means on the search engines.

In other words you are optimizing “yourself” through the use of social media, video, podcasts, syndication, press releases, etc.  It does make sense to break it down so that people know which piece you’re talking about.  But, on the grand scheme or things, you’re search engine optimizing yourself–your brand–through those avenues.

Some things you can do to ensure your information is optimized is to have a title tag and meta tag description for your posts.  Lucky for you, wordpress has plugins that can be installed to ensure those things are done.  If you’re not using wordpress, I’m sure there are plugins for the platform you’re using as well.  If you are using wordpress and have not upgraded to the latest version, I suggest you do so as soon as possible.  This will give your blog a better chance of getting some new traffic because of the new version is more optimized.

Performing keyword research for your business to display either in a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, article marketing, SEO, or social bookmarking is by far one of the most important things you can do to gain traffic to your website.  A lot of businesses do this poorly or do not do it at all.

For example, let’s say you own an SEO company in Atlanta, GA, which is where I live, and you’re putting together a website and planning your onsite and offsite marketing campaign. ..you need to choose the “golden” keyword for which you will fight to associate with your website.  That “golden” keyword must not be too broad because it if is, it will require a lot of work, either on your part or the company you outsource to, to rank for.  Very broad keywords like “real estate” or “mortgage” are very competitive as there are sites with hundreds of thousands of backlinks.  It could take years of link building to get to page 1 for such keywords.

Back to the example – The first sets of keywords that would come to mind are “Atlanta SEO company“, or “search engine optimization Atlanta” or a derivative thereof.  Someone not familiar with keyword research would probably may just decide to use “SEO” instead.  The competition for that keyword is huge because it is too broad.

What you want to focus on are the longtail-keywords, keywords that are more than one or two words longs.  Longtail keywords provide you with longevity because you have to put thought into them and can quickly achieve #1, #2, or #3 rankings on Google for them.

What are “golden” keywords that you are trying to rank for?

I thought I would start off this blog and the first post by describing what the term SEO means.

SEO or search engine optimization is the process of improving the natural ranking and traffic volume to a web site from the search engines via natural or organic results.  Unlike SEM or search engine marketing, there’s no paid inclusion needed in SEO.

Ranking for specific terms within niches that are heavily searched on the search engines, should be the goal of every site.  Being on the first page of Google and in the top three positions or even owning the whole first page for your keyword, will ensure a site receives the majority of the traffic for that keyword.

Optimizing a site involves more than just editing content, keywords repetition, and removing barriers to search engine inclusion.  The biggest part of SEO, from my point of view, is link building via anchor text for the main website or other pages within the site.

What keywords are you trying to get your site ranked for?  How many incoming links or anchor texts do you have coming into your site?  These are some of the questions we’ll cover in the next post.