LinkedIn is a professional social networking site and has just surpassed 100 million users.

Nearly 60% of LinkedIn users hold executive-level or consultant positions therefore it has the highest percentage of decision-makers than any other social network. LinkedIn is growing at roughly one million new members every week, the equivalent of one joining every second.

As with all social media you should use the white hat approach and attempt to interact, engage and help the people rather than blatantly advertising your services or asking for work. Your goal with LinkedIn should be to establish yourself in your industry or niche. Make connections with customers and colleagues that you already have a relationship with and build from there.

One of the best ways of doing this is with LinkedIn Groups.

Posting links to multiple LinkedIn Groups

Here is my video on how to post links to multiple LinkedIn Groups to drive traffic and reach thousands of targeted professionals with one click.

There are over 870,000 groups on LinkedIn whose membership varies from 1 to 377,000. The majority of groups are business related, although there are currently 128,000 groups for both academic and corporate alumni.

One of my favourite groups on LinkedIn is the WordPress group. They are a lively and knowledgable crowd and have answered and commented on every question I’ve put.

Every sort of job you can do or application you use will be represented by LinkedIn Groups. I have joined groups for Illustrator users, Photoshop users, Mac users as well as some general design and marketing groups.

Are you on LinkedIn?

If you aren’t on LinkedIn I strongly suggest you join. As mentioned earlier, the people on LinkedIn aren’t there to browse through their friend’s photos, they’re there for business and networking. It’s a fantastic place to make connections, do business and learn.

Spend a bit of time updating your profile so it explains exactly what you’re about and what you’ve done. Make sure you get a few recommendations. The best way is to offer to write a recommendation for somebody you know and get them to do the same for you.

And hook up with friends and colleagues and don’t forget to connect with me on LinkedIn!

Other LinkedIn ideas

We are only really scratching the surface of what you can do at LinkedIn. You can use LinkedIn as a one stop shop for growing an audience and getting business. Here are some more fantastic things you can do on LinkedIn including optimising for SEO, adding video and running surveys.

• Run a survey to find out exactly what leading professionals are thinking with LinkedIn Polls
• Set up a company profile on LinkedIn
• Optimise your LinkedIn profile for search engines by customising the URL
• Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn to Find a Job by Guy Kawasaki
• Add video to your profile

Let me know

Are you on LinkedIn? What is your experience there? Do you have any other tips on how to best use LinkedIn?

Photo credit: Ravages

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

So what is keyword research?

“Keyword research is a practice used by Search Engine Optimization professionals to find and research actual search terms people enter into search engines when conducting a search”. Good old Wikipedia!

But, I used to think, what has that got to do with me? I’m a graphic designer. People who want to find graphic designers are going to Google “graphic designer” – (note to Googlebot: I’m not keyword stuffing, honest!). So I’d ignored keyword research for years, thinking I knew better than the 1.5 billion people who make internet searches. All this changed after I heard this excellent interview with Google’s Matt Cutts.

How do you keyword research?

Google “keyword research”, click on Google Adwords Keyword Tool which will be the first result, then enter the keyword(s) you are currently optimizing your site for. When you see the results, click the top of either the Global Monthly Searches or the Local Monthly Searches column. Now you will see the most popular keywords which are being used together with the one(s) you entered. After entering “graphic design”, the following searches caught my eye:

• Creative design – Immediately I saw that I have underused the word “creative” in this site as “creative services”, “creative designers”, “freelance creatives”, etc., are popular searches. Maybe I won’t change the title of the homepage to include the word “creative”. But I can use it in a few blog post titles as it will draw in a bit more traffic.
• Design jobs – Jobs, huh? How’s that going to help me, I thought? These aren’t searches from people looking for graphic designers. These are searches from graphic designers looking for jobs. Yes, but hold on! There’s loads of these searches a month. All I’ve got to do it write some blog posts about design jobs and I’ll get some of that traffic. I immediately thought of some great post ideas about getting design jobs!
• Graphic art – Art is another word that I’d not targeted as I wouldn’t describe myself as a graphic artist. But I can certainly write tutorials about creating graphic art.
• Brochure design – I found it amazing that this was such a popular search. Not as popular as “web design” or “logo design”. But more popular than say, “business card design”, “flyer design” or “leaflet design”. I’ve done plenty of brochures and ebrochures. I should write a blog post or two about that.

In five minutes I had several blog post ideas!

The constant challenge of blogging is having to come up with interesting things to write about every week. More importantly, you have to think of subjects that are interesting to everybody else as well! With keyword research, some of the guesswork is taken out of the equation. You can find out what people are searching for. By writing about what people want to read, you can increase your organic traffic, which can lead to more links, which can lead to more traffic, which can lead to … you get the idea!

Why do keyword research?

The words that are in the title of your website’s pages and in the anchor text of links to your website determine how you will be found through search engines. It’s quite possible that you are targeting the wrong keywords. You may have your website title as “exercise routines” when “fitness training” gets millions more searches, for example.

What about you?

Do you use keyword research? Or have you never done it before, like me? If so, try the above, it’ll only take 2 seconds and tell me what you discover!

Photo credit: Chris John Beckett

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Constantly updated quality content is the mainstay of any website or blog. I have already described how to set up a WordPress.org blog and what to write about when you have one. Here’s the “how to” for those new-ish to WordPress…

There are three things to remember when you are writing:

1. Make your text scannable! That means, by what ever means – using bold text, titles, italics, bullets, links, etc – break up otherwise dull looking text. Remember your visitors will typically spend a few seconds on your website so it is necessary to entrap them. These words and phrases that jump out may interest the reader. It also looks nicer.
2. SEO. Include your keywords in the title of your post or page, in the <h3> tags or subtitles or in bold. Keywords are descriptors of the page or the site. But you may want to emphasize the ones with which you want to be found by search engine. So I may want to put graphic designer in my headings more often than not as I mainly want to be found on Google for people searching for graphic designers. However, only include words that are relevant to the article.
3. Save. As soon as you start writing click the “Save Draft” button. And click this intermittently through the writing process. Also, click the “Preview” button (you can do this straight after even if it hasn’t finished saving the draft) from time to time and see how your post looks. This opens it in a different window of your browser (or tab if you are using them) and if you keep this window open it will update every time you hit “Preview”. Don’t worry, the unfinished post or page is invisible to your website’s visitors until you click the “Publish” button! WordPress does have an autosave function but I find this the best method.

Getting started: What is the difference between a WordPress page and a WordPress post?

Both WordPress pages and posts create webpages! However a WordPress page is for static content (typically the “About Us” or “Contact” page) and a WordPress post is for adding content to your blog, something that is dated and belongs to a certain category.

The process of writing a new post or page in WordPress 2.7 and above starts in the dashboard (the dashboard is the welcome screen which displays when you add “wp-admin” after your blog’s URL in the browser’s address bar). Look for where it says Post or Page in the left hand column. Under these headings, click “Add New” (you may need to click the small arrow when you hover the mouse over to the right of where it says Post or Page).

Adding the title of your post or page

OK, this may be pretty obvious. The box at the top of the “Add New Post” or “Add New Page” screen (just below where it says “Add New Post” or “Add New Page”) is for the title. Remember this title is very important for SEO terms so cram it full of keywords.

If you have your permalinks set to %postname% (as is highly recommended) the permalink will be displayed beneath the post title. WordPress is quite good at generating these pretty permalinks. However, if you’ve taken a while to write the title you may find that not all of the words are in the permalink. In this case you can type in all the words you want, separated by hyphens.

Writing – what all those buttons mean above your WordPress text editor?

Writing a WordPress post can be like writing in a word processing package. Well, nearly, but not quite…

There are two tabs above the text editor – Visual and HTML. If you are a beginner with HTML I would advise you to start to flick between the two. If you know about HTML you’ll probably stay on the HTML tab all the time.

The following bulleted list is my explanation of the buttons along the top of the Visual editor and their results in HTML.

• Bold: Fairly simple one to start with. It emboldens the text in Visual mode and wraps <strong> tags around it in HTML mode.
• Italic: You guessed it. This italicizes the text in Visual mode and wraps <em> tags around it in HTML mode.
• Strikethrough: This strikesthrough the text in Visual mode and wraps <del> tags around it in HTML mode, it usually means that the word was in the original version of the text but is to be discounted now. (No, I’ve never used it before.)
• Unordered list or bullet points: Click to add a bullet and then hit return for subsequent bullets. Hit return twice to end bullets. In HTML mode, click <li> when each individual bullet point is highlighted, then select all bullets plus <li> tags and click <ul>.
• Ordered list or numbered points: Much like above. Click to add number 1 and then hit return for the following numbers. Hit return twice to finish the numbered list. In HTML mode, click <li> when each individual numbered phrase is highlighted, then select all phrases plus <li> tags and click <ol>.
• Blockquote: This defines the selected text as a block quotation. It is indented and most themes will put in a colored background. It is a very good way of breaking up text and I must confess I don’t always use it for a quotation but also as a method of differentiating a block of text from the main article.
• Align left, center and right: Pretty obvious really. Adds style="text-align: left;", style="text-align: center;" or style="text-align: right;" into whatever element the cursor is blinking in.
• Insert link: This is very useful in both modes. Once the text you want to anchor the hyperlink is selected and this button is clicked a window will pop up with a handy (or not so handy) http:// already there. Put the whole link into this box (for example http://www.google.com/) and in the HTML mode you will see <a href="http://www.google.com/"> at the beginning of the anchor text and </a> at the end.
• Unlink: Select the colored underlined text in Visual mode and click this and it’ll get rid of the link.
• More: This breaks a post into “teaser” and content sections. Insert this tag after a few sentences of your post and on your blog’s home page you’ll see only those first few sentences followed by a hyperlink (more...), which when clicked displays the rest of the post’s content.
• Spellcheck: I tend to rely on Firefox’s spellchecker so I don’t know how good this one is.
• Fullscreen mode: Does what it says on the tin.
• Kitchensink: When clicked this will bring a whole second line of formatting options. Click here for further explanation of the kitchensink.

This is only a brief description of using the text editor in Visual mode. Remember to constantly flick between Visual and HTML tabs and you will learn a bit about HTML. One thing you will see is that most HTML tags consist of two tags – a start tag and an end tag. The end tag is identified by a forward slash (/) before the tag name (look out for this in your HTML editor).

Indeed, instead of selecting the text and clicking the button to apply whatever text style you want, you can position your cursor before the text, click the style button once, then move it to the end of the text that you want styling and click the same button again and the end result will be the same. It’s a case of opening and closing a tag.

Insertion of the <p> tag

If you hit the return key on your keyboard in the Visual text editor you will get a new paragraph. So it will wrap the previous text in <p> tags.

In the HTML editor, one hit of the return key will give you a line break or <br/> tag. (A slightly different type of tag, it stands on it’s own, is “self-closing” and therefore requires no start or end tag). Two hits of the return key in the HTML text editor will give you the new paragraph <p> tags just like one hit does in the Visual editor.

Any more hits of the return key won’t give you any more line breaks so don’t try it!

Insertion of the <h3> tag

Remember our important points to think of while writing a WordPress page or post? Breaking text up and SEO? The <h3> tag encompasses both of these in a big way.

In most WordPress themes, the title of your post is wrapped within <h2> tags which conveys to search engines that it is important text. Similarly, you can break up your text with subheadings or <h3> tags which conveys to search engines that it isn’t as important as <h2> text but is important nonetheless.

So I find these tags very important. But they don’t exist in the Visual editor so you’ll have to use the HTML editor to insert a subheading in your post or page!

Insertion of code into the HTML text editor

You can add any HTML code you like into the HTML text editor which is very useful. I’ve often added tables and divs. One word of warning when doing this: remember the <p> tags!

Say you want to put ordinary text inside a <td> tag. You will have to hit your carriage return twice to get the <p> tags to appear. In this case it is probably easier to add the <p> tags in the editor.

How to insert images manually into a WordPress post or page

OK. WordPress has great new options for inserting images, audio and video into your post. But I’m old-school and I want to show you how to do it the HTML way.

There are two main ways to put an image into a post. One way (see above) is to make the image straddle the whole width of the text. To be able to get the image to fit snuggly into the box you are writing you need to know the width in pixels of the <div> that contains the post text. Go to Appearance > Editor in the WordPress dashboard and click on <style.css> to find this out. In my theme the <div> that contains the text and headlines is called “entry”.

Once you have done this you need to re-size your image to that pixel width using photo editing software such as Photoshop and upload it using an FTP client to your website, preferably into a directory called “images”. Once that is done you can enter this code into the HTML text editor:

<img src="http://your-site.com/images/image.jpg" alt=""/>

Remember to add two returns above and below it in the HTML text editor. Also, don’t forget to write good keyword rich and descriptive file names and alt text for the image.

The other method is to add a less wide image to the left or the right of the main body of text and have the text wrap around it. In this case you don’t want to add any returns after the code as you want the text to run adjacent to it. Simply insert this into the beginning of a paragraph to insert an image on the left hand side of the text:

<img src="http://your-site.com/images/image.jpg" style="float: left; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px;" alt=""/>

And here is the code for inserting an image on the right hand side of the text:

<img src="http://your-site.com/images/image.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px;" alt=""/>

Conclusion – OMG this post has been so long and you’ve got to the end of it!

I’m sorry that went on for a bit longer than I thought it would. Just goes to show you there’s more to writing a WordPress page or post than just … writing!

If anyone has anything to add to this, as always, please do so in the comments below. I’m bound to have left some important things out and probably made a mistake or two – intentional, of course!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

There are two sides of a coin when considering how to market your site on the internet. Firstly, concentrate on the site itself: write regularly updated quality content and optimize the site for search engines. Secondly, by concentrating off the site: getting quality sites to link to yours.

Introduction

As I’ve said before in this series, there is no way to cheat the system. Employ these link building methods in an honest and respectful way. There is no quick and easy solution to link building and SEO. It takes time to do and time to see the results.

Why get links? Simply, more links = more traffic.

But also, Google (and other search engines) counts a link as a “vote” for your site. The more votes for your site, the higher your site will feature in their search results. But it is important what sort of page is linking to your site.

Here is what Google says about links:

Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google combines PageRank (our view of a page’s importance) with sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google counts the number of votes a page receives as part of its PageRank assessment, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Download the Google toolbar for Firefox and it will show you the PageRank of every page in the internet. If you get links to your site from pages that have a PR of 7 or more you’re laughing!

But the relevance of the inbound link is also important. Get links from sites that are in a similar area of business to yours.

Here’s a great little trick of doing this. Find a site of a company or individual who does what you do but is more established, has a higher PageRank – basically find a website that you want to emulate. Check out the links to their site. Google “links:www.their-site.com” and you will see who links to them. Try to get these sites to link to you!

Here are some tried and tested ways of getting good relevant inbound links to your site. (Apart from having quality content!!!)

Write articles for other sites

I would advise writing original material for other websites, blogs, articles site and industry news sites that are relevant to your field. Duplicated content that already exists on your site might be counted against you by Google. Of course, sometimes you will write an article for someone else and then think to yourself “oh that’s quite good, I should use that on my own site!”

Here are some general articles sites but you should also look for articles sites and blogs that deal with your area of expertise.

• EzineArticles
• GoArticles
• iSnare

Write a press release about developments in your business or site. Take the time to make it a compelling and newsworthy release. Submit it to PRWeb or PRLeap.

Your article or press release will sit on these sites for months and years to come with a link back to your site.

Comment on other blogs

If you read a good article on a blog, why not spend a few minutes writing to say what you liked about the post and see if you can add anything to the discussion? People may follow the link from the comment to your site.

These comment links back to your site may not provide you with any link juice.

The thorny nofollow/dofollow issue and an explanation of “Link Juice”

Link Juice is the name given to the PageRank (and other things) passed from one page to another via a link. Because a lot of blogs, forums, social bookmarking sites and even some directories are “nofollow” you will not get any link juice from links from these sites.

What is a “nofollow” link? rel="nofollow" is a piece of HTML that is used to instruct search engines that the link should not influence the target’s ranking. In other words, a nofollow link sends traffic but not PageRank.

Some webmasters and blog owners actually want to reward commenters with a bit of link juice and remove the rel=”nofollow” tag. So if you comment on these blogs your PageRank and, ultimately, your place in the search engine rankings will improve. Lists of “dofollow” or “nonofollow” blogs do exist but I would exercise caution here.

Commenting on these blogs with a few words such as “nice post, dude” and entering your keywords instead of your name will not help you. Comments such as these will be deleted immediately (they may not even make it on to the page) and will serve only to make you unpopular with the very people you need to get on with. As always with SEO, act honestly.

I used to be a “dofollow” blog but I stopped because of too much comment spam.

Social bookmarking sites

People submit links of content they like on the web to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Technorati (more of a blog search engine) and, new-ish kid on the block, Twitter.

You can create a page of your own favorite links and include a few back to your site. If your links are considered a good resource by others they will follow them, including the ones to your site, and you may get more links from them.

Social bookmarking is a great way to promote your site, network with other people in your area of expertise and find new ideas and information to help you develop your site. But don’t over-submit your own content or you will be penalized. As always with SEO adopt the “white hat” approach. If you’re offering something valuable you will reap rewards. If you don’t, you won’t!

Link to other sites

Link to sites as you would like sites to link to you.

If you find some valuable information or resource related to your field then link to it from your site. But do this in the correct way. Write good anchor text for the link. The anchor text or link label is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. The words contained in the anchor text is weighted highly by search engines. So when you are linking to some other page say what it is (and maybe something nice!).

So do this:

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page">Wikipedia</a>

or this:

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page">Wikipedia, is amazing multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia </a>

but not this:

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page">Click here</a> for Wikipedia

The webmaster or blog owner will see this lovely inbound link with good anchor text and may return the favor one day.

Also certain blogs will automatically publish a trackback to your site when you link to it. These trackbacks can produce traffic and, in a minority of cases, link juice – but, again, don’t abuse!

Submit to directories

It’s tedious and depressing and should only be done for 10-15 minutes at a time with some musical accompaniment but here’s a list of 50 free directories with good Google PageRank with no reciprocal link needed.

Reciprocal links and three way link exchanges

Reciprocal links are the “I’ll scratch your back” method of SEO. You link to them if they link to you. The benefit of doing this is considered to be extremely limited.

What may be slightly better is a three way link exchange where site A links to site B and site C links to site A. This creates the illusion of a one way link in the eyes of the search engines. When partaking in this form of linking I would be cautious of link building companies. Regularly check to see if their link to you stays there as many will delete these links a few weeks after they are set up. And try keep them relevant to your site’s subject matter. Here is my links page if you want to do a three way link exchange get in touch.

Conclusion

Question: So, what’s the best method of ensuring good in-bound links from sites of high Google PageRank?

Answer: content. If you haven’t got anything anybody wants, not many people will link to you. But you knew that, didn’t you.

Another interesting point is that the two reasons for linking – traffic and link juice – usually go hand in hand: my best links in terms of PageRank are actually the best links in terms of traffic.

Go about the above techniques with respect for other sites and for the subject matter – keep it real and honest. And, in my opinion, limit these link building activities to less than an hour a week. You’ll go mad otherwise and it’ll make sure you’re not diverted from the main goal – quality content!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

This is the fifth in the series where I explain how an individual or small or medium sized organization can get themselves noticed in the big bad world.

Other installments explained how to set up a web site from scratch, how to install WordPress and what to write on your site.

Before we commence a couple of definitions – SEO or Search Engine Optimization: is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via organic search results. Keywords: (1) descriptors that capture the essence of a topic or (2) the words you type into a search engine in order to find stuff.

WordPress is pretty well structured for SEO anyway but there are a number of things you can do to improve it’s performance thus winning you more visitors, collaborators and clients.

Get the right URLs

By default WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them (for example: http://www.your-site.com/?p=N). It’s not good and it’s not pretty. In the WordPress admin panel go Settings > Permalinks. What format is the best to choose? I would go for /%postname%/. This is best because the URLs to articles should never change and it gets keyword rich page titles in there separated by hyphens (for example: http://www.your-site.com/keyword-rich-post/). But, remember, don’t stuff any area with your keywords. Just use them naturally.

Title tags

The most important part of a web page in terms of SEO is the title. Optimize what goes in between and on the top of your browser window. So the name of your WordPress blog to include the keywords that you want people to find you with when they enter them into a search engine. Do this in Settings > General > Blog Title in WordPress’s administration panel. My title is Freelance Graphic Designer London. That’s sort of what I am and I want to attract people who type those words into a search engine to me.

Search engines put more weight on the early words so it is better to have your page title (and then category) to come before your site title. There are many ways of doing this. I would recommend that you use the HeadSpace plugin to do this. Mac users beware that HeadSpace does not work correctly with Firefox, so try Safari.

Categories

WordPress offers excellent categorization of your content. Make sure the category titles are keyword-rich. Write enticing descriptions of your categories in Posts > Categories. Use HeadSpace to add that description to the meta description, by adding %%category_description%% in the Description field.

Heading tags

Generally keywords are better off appearing within <h1>, <h2> and <h3> tags than within <p> tags. The <h2> tags are the title of your post or page so put keywords in there. Within your posts and pages you can add subheadings (<h3> tags) which can also contain keywords.

Images

When including an image in the content of your website be sure to name it correctly. So make it “computer-screen.jpg” rather than “image01.jpg”. Also always put an <alt> tag description of about four words explaining what the image looks like. By all means put keywords in there if they are relevant but (as always with keywords) don’t force it. I get about as much traffic from Google image search as I do from ordinary organic Google search just from doing this.

Sitemap and robots.txt

Creating an XML sitemap is often considered a boost to your SEO. It is a widely adopted search engine standard that helps search engine robots crawl your site. It was created by Google and adopted by Yahoo!, Microsoft and others in the search engine industry. You can do this very easily with the Google sitemap generator plugin for WordPress.

So you’ve created an XML sitemap so now what do you do? If you haven’t already, log on to Google Webmaster Tools add your site and submit your sitemap.

You need to add a reference to it in your robots.txt so robots other than Googlebot will know of its presence.

Search engines will look in your root domain for a special file named “robots.txt” (http://www.mydomain.com/robots.txt). The file tells the robot (spider) which files it may spider and where your sitemap is. Here is mine:

User-agent: * Sitemap: http://robcubbon.com/sitemap.xml
Disallow: /wp-


I have disallowed the robots from directories that have either no relevant content or duplicate content.

Embolden words

Words within <strong> tags carry more weight in SEO terms (as well as visually) than words within <p> tags.

Meta tags

The meta tags provide structured metadata about a web page and exist in the <head> section. They are generally considered to be obsolete but the description tag does appear on the SERPS and therefore should be generated separately for each page. Keyword tags maybe totally ignored but HeadSpace makes creating them very easy so you may as well.

Write your .htaccess

You can choose whether your site should be a www or non-www site. Your site with and without a www could appear to be two sites with the exact same content. Search engines don’t like seeing content copied. You can divert your www url to your non-www url or vice versa by entering a small bit of code into the .htaccess document on the root of your server.

Follow standards

Make sure HTML and CSS code is standards compliant.

Further reading

Here are a couple of pages I have found to be very useful for SEO and WordPress:

• SEO for WordPress – The Complete Guide by Jim Westergren
• WordPress SEO by Joost de Valk

These are only a few things I can think of in order to make a WordPress site optimized for search engines. If anyone knows anymore white hat techniques for SEO – let me know.

Apologies to my English brethren, forefathers and Shakespeare, I’m using American spellings from now on. Most of my visitors are American and with the pound down so low I’d be especially pleased to attract American clients! (As I am pleased to attract a client from anywhere!)

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

So you’ve got your WordPress blog set up and you are just starting to write – what you do?

Words are, in my opinion, the most important thing on a website. This is because the search engine robots that crawl the web every day can pretty much “read” what you’ve written, but they can’t look at your website and think “mmm, nice graphics!”

For me, there’s two things to think about when writing. One is keywords; the other is making sure you’re writing stuff that people are going to want to read.

Keywords in your content

Keywords are what people type into a search engine (Google, for example) in order to find websites. Now there are good and bad ways to introduce keywords into your website text for SEO purposes, but I’ll come to that in my next post. For the time being, if you are a designer for example, you should write about – guess what? – design.

But it’s not as simple as that. It’s virtually impossible to be found on the internet with just one keyword so you should think of your second most important keyword; for me it’s probably “graphic”. Your third most important keyword; for me, “freelance”. The fourth; “London”. And so on. Don’t sweat about choosing these you can always change them.

Use these keywords in the title and body of your articles with the most important being the most frequent. But, there is only one way to do this – naturally.

Write about the subject as you would normally, don’t struggle to add the keywords as many times as possible or even once more than is necessary. For one thing, search engines will penalise you for keyword repetition; for another, it will make your site very unpleasant reading for your visitors.

How would you rather read about a subject you’re interested in – in an ad or an article? It’s so much better to read the considered thoughts of an expert in a field rather than the hurried ramblings of someone who just wants to make money.

Here’s how you make money:

Write content that people will want to read

Write intelligently and lucidly about what you know most about.

Remember, you are an expert, we all are. You’ve spent your life doing something – it doesn’t matter what it is – that something is useful to somebody. This to me is the crux of what internet marketing is all about.

When you write about your specialities you will naturally attract to your website those who are your best customers. Let me explain, I do graphic design and marketing, now graphic design and marketing are huge fields, it would be nuts for me to market myself in this area and leave it at that. So I specialise – every organisation does. Web information about a niche area will draw in like-minded people and perfect clients through Long Tail keywords.

So I’ve written tutorials for Photoshop and Illustrator, blog posts about delivering advertising messages with graphics, articles about web and print production. Other articles have been solely responsible for melanding certain jobs. The subjects of these have been: interactive and rich media PDFs; pop art; creating countries’ map outlines and flags; WordPress for website creation. Quite a mixed bag. But if someone wants to ask me to do something I’m always grateful for the work!

When you are writing about what you know best, keep checking your facts. Constantly ask yourself when you write something if you really are sure about it. Very often in our professional careers it’s easy to believe certain things by hearsay or rumour. Use the internet and any other resource to back up your assertions thoroughly before you publish your post.

So when writing about your specialities, do you spill the beans and reveal all your trade secrets or do you hold back on certain information hoping to retain the power of knowledge from your competitors? I would always favour the former rather than the latter.

I would encourage anyone to put as much detail into their descriptive articles as possible. I’m sure it won’t harm your business to reveal the correct and best practices that you use. Transparency in governments is considered to be ethical so I would encourage anyone to be open as possible in their own organisation.

Your potential clients won’t have the time or the inclination to use this information to do the job themselves and this priceless insight will win you kudos for your generosity. (And, of course, valuable information on the internet will be linked to raising the profile of your site and have it appear higher in search engines’ results, more to come on SEO in the next post.)

I have benefited immeasurably for the community of designers and marketers who have explained techniques and solved problems in websites, blogs and forums. It’s only fair that I give back to the community.

For me this is kind of business karma. Take Matt Mullenweg, for example, the founding developer of WordPress – the most popular and best blogging software that has empowered millions of ordinary people to publish in a beautiful way for free. Matt is listed in Business Week’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web, is in Inc.com’s 30 under 30 – America’s Coolest Young Entrepreneurs and his company Automattic Inc is 123rd in TechCrunch.com’s list of Startups Best Positioned To Weather A Downturn. My point is that Matt’s initial and ongoing commitment to open source software – giving out good stuff for free – has helped him in his brilliant career.

So I would advise virtually anyone to get a WordPress site and start writing on the cutting edge of what they know best. The advantages you will see in your community, your networking and your client list will far outweigh the effort.

And in the area of the style of writing, here are ten tips for writing a blog post.

Some say write for a month when starting and then publish for the first time. Some say write every week once you’ve got going. Some say make every post no longer than 350 words.

I say … write!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

This is the second post in my How to market yourself series, a personal account of the best marketing techniques you can employ for yourself or your business. Read my introduction to this self-marketing series here.

There are three things you need to do when setting up your website.

1. Decide on your website address (URL)
2. Register it
3. Find a web host

How to decide on your web address

Many people spend hours thinking up a catchy URL (Uniform Resource Locator) or website address. The most important SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) point is to include some keywords (separated by hyphens). Your URL doesn’t have to be your name or your company name so why not increase your chances of being found in searches before you’ve even written a web page? So, if you are a web designer, why not try web-designer dot com? (OK, it’s already gone, but you know what I mean).

You can test out domain names at any domain name registrar. Which brings me on to the next thing you have to do.

Register your website’s address

Once you have decided on the name of your website it is necessary to register it. I use GoDaddy. There doesn’t seem to be a much cheaper option and GoDaddy are the market leaders. You can also try 123-Reg, particularly if you’re based in the UK and want a .co.uk domain.

One thing I would suggest is not to use your domain name registrar as your host. I like to keep the two operations separate because if you have a problem with one it is easier to move.

Cost: You’re looking at around $10 a year. When you register a domain name, your contact details are included in a publicly available database known as the Whois database which can lead to spamming. You can spend slightly more to hide these details.

An important SEO point: Search engines prefer if the domain is registered for a longer time into the future so that you don’t look like a fly-by-night website. For this reason, it’s better to register for five years rather than the minimum one year.

How to choose a web host?

The web hosting industry is highly competitive with seemingly hundreds of companies offering similar packages. Here are some of the things you need to take into account.

A great way to market yourself and get search engines to include you in their search results is to blog. The blogging software I’ll be recommending in this series of articles is WordPress.

The minimum specifications for the hosting of a WordPress blog are PHP 4.3 or greater, MySQL 4.0 or greater and the mod_rewrite Apache module. PHP is scripting language; MySQL is a database server. These are fairly standard specifications and will be offered by most quality web hosts but make sure you check! WordPress recommends a few hosts here.

Other than that here are some more important points to look out for:

1. Disk space. Once you have a host you will find it useful for a number of things not just your website. It is another bit of computer space to use. You can use it as your own personal FTP site for storing information. If you think you need this facility go for a web host that’s offering tons of disk space.
2. Monthly transfer / Bandwidth. This refers to how much your website is accessed. For example, if your website consists of one page of 1MB (very unlikely) and is visited by ten people a month, you would need more than 10MB of monthly transfer to facilitate this. Of course most website pages are less than 100K so, unless you are expecting huge amounts of visitors, 10GB/month will be enough at first and your web host will be able to offer you more as your website increases in popularity. Keep your eye on it though. How?
3. A control panel. cPanel is the most advanced web hosting control panel in the industry, designed to simplify administration of a website and I would recommend choosing a host that offers it. Through the cPanel you can set up and read email, manage and edit your website’s files, monitor your website’s traffic (making sure you don’t exceed any bandwidth or space restrictions), and loads of other things including backing up a MySQL database which is essential for good WordPress maintenance. cPanel sometimes comes bundled with Fantastico which is a set of scripts which automate the installation of, but not always the update of, CMSs such as SMF, phpBB, Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress and over 50 others, although I would not install WordPress this way.
4. The validity of your web host. I would only choose a web host that had a professional looking website. Also, I would definitely insist on 24/7 email support, personally I wouldn’t mind if it didn’t have phone support.

Cost: You’re looking at around 8$/month for a decent shared hosting package. Shared hosting is fine if you are only going to have one website and you’re just starting out.

An important SEO point: The most important point for search engine marketing is the location of your website. If, for example, you are interested in the UK market you should use a UK based web host. However, if for example, you are a UK company wanting to market your services internationally, then I would choose a US host.

Recommended web hosts for WordPress users

I’ve researched this by asking WordPress professionals in forums and LinkedIn groups about the most reliable shared hosting and the following three companies came up with the most votes:

• Justhost
• Bluehost
• Hostgator

So, I’ve got a web address and a host, now what do I do?

Your new host should give you 4 useful pieces of information so that you can set up a website.

1. IP address. An IP address is a unique number that every computer connected to the internet is assigned. It consists of 4 numbers separated by dots. This is the IP address of your server’s computer, not your personal computer.
2. Your username.
3. A password. These first 3 are necessary for uploading files to the server.
4. Domain Name Servers/System/Service (DNS). A very important link between your domain name and IP address.

If, as I suggest, you register your domain name with a company other than your host you will need to return to your domain name registrar’s website and and fill in the name servers (usually one primary and one secondary) you got from your host.

That done, wait 24 hours (usually much less) and you can create your new website.

Next, use your favourite FTP client (eg. Cyberduck for Mac; Filezilla for PC) and, with the IP address, username and password, you can log on to your host. You may find quite a few directories. Look for one called “public_html” or similar. This is where your website should go.

Use your favourite text editor (eg. TextEdit for Mac; Notepad for PC) and make a new plain text document, write a message in it and save it as “index.html”. Upload the “index.html” file. Now if you type in your domain name in a browser it will display your message.

Congratulations, you have just created a website!

As always, I welcome comments, especially to notify me of anything I’ve missed!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

I have successfully been on the first page in Google for freelance graphic designer for a few months now and I’m quite pleased with this.

Marketing yourself is one of the most important things any professional or company will do. For this reason I’m going to write a number of articles about self-marketing, what I mean by it and how I do it.

I’m not going to go on about crafting a mission statement, identifying expertise and clients and creating a robust consistent identity. I’m sure everyone spends a lot of time on that and it’s specific to each organisation. What I wish to tell you about the details of how I think you can run a successful website and company in these challenging times.

Search Engine Optimisation

The first thing to remember with SEO is that you can’t cheat the system. What I mean is that there is no easy course of action that will make your website first on Google after having entered certain keywords.

However, if you have content specific to those keywords and it is proven to be, so other websites link to you in a certain way, then quality targetted traffic will come your way from the search engines.

A WordPress blog is well designed and structured already for search engine optimisation and this is my preferred method of creating and updating content for visitors, clients and search engines alike.

But SEO doesn’t start and finish with a blog. There are many things you can do before, during and after creating your blog that will mean success or failure with the search engines.

General Marketing

Once that is all explained I will go on to other things you can do to promote yourself and your organisation. By general marketing I mean promotion. I’ll leave the price, place, product, process and physical evidence to you!

I will explain how to design and produce HTML emails, flyers, business stationery, etc.

How do I get on the first page of Google’s search results?

I’d guess that there’s probably a million pages on the internet dedicated to answering this question. Come to think of it, there’s probably more than a million people in the world working in this area (SEO). I’m prepared to admit I’m prone to exaggeration but if someone would like to put me right on this then I’ll stand corrected!

It’s the 64 million dollar question but it has a simple answer although it’s a solution that involves hard work and eats up time.

Here is my answer: create a website with lots of constantly updated, quality, relevant content with lots of inbound links from other quality, relevant websites.

Now, this needs further explanation (for example, you my well ask: how many is “lots”?) and people may disagree with the “constantly updated” bit, but that is essentially it – as far as I’m concerned.

What now?

So, I will try to post the next installment in this series of How to market yourself soon where I will explain what to do in order to set up your website or WordPress blog.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

The primary objective of this website is to attract clients to my design business. The two ways I try to achieve this are:

1. Get other good websites to link to me with my desired keywords as the anchor text. For example, freelance graphic designer, designer in London, UK design services, are good phrases to explain what I do and I try to get these words a published as a hyperlink to my site on as many sites as possible.
2. Write regularly updated content with my keywords scattered around the site, particularly within title tags and headline tags. So I try to write an article a week about artworking, designing, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Quark, logos, packaging, marketing, advertising … the list goes on and on!

This strategy has reaped rewards as I have been employed by some great clients this year (Accenture and MasterCard, for example) who have asked me to help them on a variety of interesting projects. All because they found me on Google, or some similar search engine.

The nature of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is unpredictable. It’s not an exact science as it takes a bit of luck to second guess Google’s secret algorithm – the mathematical equation that uses certain information from a website in order to define its rankings – and get on the first page of search results.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

If you now type “freelance graphic designer and artworker in London” into Yahoo! I’m number one. In Google I’m hundred and fifty something!

I’m trying to do reciprocal links to get my PageRank up. I’m a massive 1 out of 10 at the moment. If anybody is interested in trading reciprocal links with me then get in touch. Have a look at the links.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.