I find my self spending more time analyzing keywords to SEO my blog or one of our friends and clients websites, way more than I ever thought. Is this what my life in 2007 has come to? I do this by visiting adwords.google.com on a weekly or daily basis, way too much. How much time will you spend on analyzing keywords to SEO your favorite blog or website? Well, that depends on your intentions and professional goals of being an Internet Marketing person. The world of SEO has changed a lot, Overture for keywords is dead, it died in 2007, their system showed errors for weeks, it had in accurate data going back to Jan. 07 for months at a time.

No worries, Google is the key and top search rankings, every one knows that. And if you use any keyword SEO tool, please, please, make sure it uses the Google Adwords keyword API’s (tech speak for Google technology and data). It’s free, but it’s not perfect either, you have to use acronyms, thesauruses, and a dictionary for a comprehensive research. If you want to be a smart SEO, you have to look for differences in key word search volumes, and do your home work. The best way to figure out keyword search volume is to compare those bars. What you don’t know about these Google traffic Bars, have you been to adwords.Google.com yet, and done a keyword search yet? Do this first, but to get better results you have to actually buy Google ads for top 10-20 keywords. Why do I limit it to top 10 keywords? As a blogging guru and SEO expert, you have to manage things, and after 20 of any thing, it gets very hard. To start out any project, I actually recommend to go with 5 to 10 keywords tops. Focus is the key to achieving success in top rankings and promoting your business, not just in life.

No blog written on Dec. 31st is complete without mention of a New Year coming upon us. Yes, what a year it has been. We started 2007 with SEO‘ing for keywords “Real Estate IDX”, guess who is #1 on those keywords? Yes it’s us, and our success started with a top 10 result for Seattle real estate website UrbanTango.com back in 2004. That forced me to learn about SEO way back in 2003, because I paid some schmuck $300/month to get my site ranked on search engines, and I couldn’t even find UrbanTango.com, any where in Google. Forget about finding it under any keywords for “Seattle Real Estate“. This actually started my passion for SEO and back in to technology. My passion for marketing and for high rankings on Google drove me to many late nights reading and applying. Finally the day arrived when UrbanTango.com was ranked in the top 10 on Google for “Seattle Real Estate” and “Seattle Real Estate agents“. This feat, was already achieved with MSN and Yahoo months ago, but Google was the goal, and since those days in 2003, I have been following and learning everything I can about SEO and top rankings. This has led me to start promoting our vacation rental software and online booking software site Blog.RentExpert.com and ITEX the Trade Exchange Network and Barter network for small business success.

We actually got out of real estate websites business back in May/June 2007, we were more passionate about blogging and blogcasting (which we called SEO and promoting your brand with Blogs). We are so thank ful, as we had no idea that the Housing bubble was going to pop this big. Thank God we are no longer selling software and services in the Seattle Real Estate or any real estate websites business. We have kept our websites around just for history’s sake, and we never thought we would get in to SEO as a service providers. But now days, we actually have SEO Clients, they are mostly friends who have businesses, we never wanted SEO clients. We have just been trying to promote our own properties, MyTypes.com for blogging, Free Blogs, GreenIsBetter.org for Infrared heaters, and MyTypes.com/Jewelry for our Cross Jewelry. Now I am an SEO for hire I guess, anything to continue our passion for blogging and to create community blogs.

That is why as a serious SEO, I check and recheck keywords, because I have a lot riding on this. Our clients are not just clients, they are our friends and our own small business blogs. I think any internet marketing 2.0 person today, checks and constantly analyzes his/her keywords quite often. Will you do it enough? You should, especially as you get ranked in the top 10 of your choice keywords to grow your business.

As always we thank our friends at ITEX Barter and Trade Exchange Network, LoveRelic.com for Cross Jewelry, and ComfortZone Infrared heaters which are better than any Edenpure Heater. We also have to thank our friends from Blog.RentExpert.com, they provide Vacation rental software that has the most comprehensive features of any online booking software. But this is not just our humble opinion, check them out, thanks for supporting this blog and our financial supporters.

I wanted to promote this Barter blog post on our SEO blog templates blog, I hope you don’t mind. Small business marketing and small business is at the core of my focus and driver. In the next few months we will be focusing with our friends at ITEX to help them enhance their small business barter network, and grow MyTypes.com. I still want to write and promote the Internet marketing 2.0 SEO and SEO blog strategies, but we will be focusing quite a bit on the small business as a core focus on enjoy.

Here is the blog, I wrote, earlier:

Small Business is not the same as a Start Up Technology business

I was reading a not so great article today in the Seattle PI, Seattle’s second best paper, don’t get me started on the lack of quality of it’s journalists.   I would write their editor in large, but why waste my time. I just choose not to buy the paper. Gosh, they erk me, I have been known to mention their biased towards their friends business before to friends, Seattle is a very small town you know, everyone seems to know everyone. But, I do congratulate them for their blogs and forward thinking, not their journalists quality of writing.  The article today in the business section, down right makes me think that they along with most corporate types, simply don’t understand small business.  They think a small business is the same as Start Up, why do we care? We actually care about helping small businesses with their marketing, and helping them to make more money.  We do this through our barter and trade exchange network of ITEX, which has 22,000 small business customers.  This woman writes an article titled “What you need to know to start a small business”. She has investment banking background, not any small business experience.  She wrongfuly talks about selling your company down the road, looking beyond your product, and not being in love with it.  She does not understand small business, but rather does know the Seattle Technology start up scene.  These types of businesses, not a get rich quick scheme, but the greedy high tech entrepreneur types (oh–I am just teasing, I use to be one of them), that want to grow big or have a make a quick buck by selling their hot start up.

Small business people do make more money than the average salaried corporate types, and usually they have 3 times the Networth.  Wow, I did learn something from her article, yippee.  She has good points, but misses the boat completely on small business, which is NOT THE SAME AS STARTUP HIGH-TECH.  Folks we are biased, we actually make money via Bartering and the ITEX Trade Exchange Barter network, and actually helping small businesses have success.

Do follow her advice if you are looking to start an Internet Company.  But if you are a small business owner or want to start a small business, read other sources for more credible business sources.  If you are  one of the 23 million entrepreneurs, that have a solution to a problem and want to start your own business, go to your local SCORE office at the local SBA.gov branch.  There are amazing resources there that would help any small business.   Who is a typical small business person, and how do they get to be worth millions?  First thing, go read “the millionaire next door”, than read “Small Giants”, they will give you the profiles of the best small business people and businesses.   Recently, I started to write about small business marketing, bartering and ITEX barter Trade exchange, why?  To help by sharing my Internet Marketing 2.0, SEO, and blogging experiences and strategies for small business marketing people.

So who comprises of the average small business, and what types of business is an average small business? Folks, I don’t mean to be hard on this Seattle journalist, I think most of us Entrepreneurs do want our high-tech or not, small businesses to be a huge business. We all need to focus on growing a profitable business small or large. Too often greed misguides us all to want to be a billionaire, but a true entrepreneur never looses sight of the problem they are trying to solve.  The problem we are trying to solve is to help 22,000 small business make more money with Barter.   Even though there was no professional barter network thousands of years ago, people have been trading for goods and services for centuries.  Now with the ITEX Barter dollars they can do it with ease, with a large selection of choices, and with ease of a process that works for thousands.

In this series of small business blogs, we will try to uncover what it takes to succeed.   And who the average small business person is, and what does he/she do, and how do they make money and be a success. Most importantly, we will share with you the best strategies for small business marketing. We all know that our local Restaurants, dry cleaners, specialty retailers are a small business. But what about the local accountant, attorney, the real estate agent, and the website developer, they too are small businesses too right?  Our friend’s at ITEX barter Trade exchange have 22,000 small businesses as members, and they know a thing or two about small business marketing and success, and their people will share with us proven strategies for small business success.

In fact, the main charter of the ITEX barter network is to help small businesses succeed, via small business marketing and developing small business networking opportunities. So we will try to profile a few successful small businesses that do that.  We will discuss the most important issues facing a small business, barter or not. We will look at marketing, accounting, sales, operations, and Human Resources and Legal Issues.

Do you run a small business? We want to hear from you.  For our purposes, we want to call a small business a business with less than 200 people, maybe a retaurant that has 50 people or less, not a chain. Any business with revenues of less than $10M, usually 1-7 people, independantly owned and operated by one or two people.

So as we start the new year, do come back and visit this blog back again, we will be discussing “how to start a small business”, and hopefully doing it in a series of blogs. First thing first, call your State Incorporation or small business office and get their incorporation and small business guide.   This is usually the best place to start, along with visiting your local SBA branch or sba.gov website. We of course promote Bartering through our cashless trade exchange network @ ITEX, Bon Voyage!

Posted by Admin in Small Business Marketing

This blog excerpt is from our friends who just launched an online booking software. Do visit their site, and enjoy the blog!

Vacation Homes and Rentals, which cities are hot?

How is the current market for Vacation homes and rentals, and which cities are hot at the moment, past 6 months, past 5 years, and will be in the future? Has the current mortgage market effected the vacation travelers and vacation homes rentals market? We know that in Florida, San Diego, Los Angeles, and some other areas the residential markets were effected. But, did the vacation rentals go down in these markets? Is there a way to find out? Is there an online booking system or a online booking software company that aggregates the industry trends and directions.

Best Small Business Marketing Strategies

For the longest time, I wanted to grow one of my small businesses to be a large company. I never really was satisfied with being small, I think a lot of people and businesses are not. But millions of small business owners are laughing being content and making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. How do they do it, and what is wrong with being small anyway? Nothing at all, and they are small because they choose be best, rather than big.So what does being a small business have to do with best marketing strategies. A ton, I feel that to be competitive, small business marketing is what makes the difference. If you can’t compete on size, you compete with creativity, and creativity is the hidden secret edge of all small business marketing. Creativity just means thinking out of the box, and Small Business Marketing is most often the place I see it. And, the companies that make it, do that well, well some times they Barter too:-). All seriousness aside, companies that are successful from small business to big, usually have creative marketing ideas.

As mentioned before, think of a unique name for your brand, your product or better yet do all of the above and help your customers in a unique and memorable way, and they will come searching for you! How and why? When your brand becomes a house hold name, such as MySpace, people search for you on Google and other places. And, that is the goal of any brand development of small business marketing.

*As mentioned this Free blog is brought to you courtesy of our sponsors: ITEX the Barter Network, and Silver Cross Jewelry by Jill Brahms, and infrared heaters by Greenisbetter.org, better than Edenpure Heaters.  In case you wanted to read my main blog often more personal than just business, but I do cover my various Small Business blogs there @ Mytypes.com/Vipin

How to decide which Keywords to SEO?

Recently I have been trying to write the best SEO blogs content and popsts. I have been trying to think of a topic for days, the standard for my writing has to be getting higher. You have to forgive me, I may not have come up with anything unique or big time insight. But, being one of the worlds best SEO, #29 in Google for the keywords “SEO“, we are busy, and our goal is to give the simplest INSIGHTS. We are doing this to help you Blogcast your Brand, do SEO for your blogs, and grow your sales. We call this process Internet Marketing 2.0.Before we do anything in SEO, we look at Keywords. We look at the SERPS, Search Engine Result Pages of the site within certain keywords of focus. We look at site structure, content and links, all of them with one thing in mind: KEYWORDS.

So how should you pick the most appropriate keywords to SEO for your business? Follow these simple steps:

1. The first thing to do is to go to Adwords.Google.com. Click on the Keyword tool in the middle of the page, and use this and only this for your keyword searches. Everything else is not important, Overture from Yahoo is totally off, we no longer support them, they also have too many technical issues.

2. Search for 1 or two words that desribe your business. For example for our friend/clients ITEX.com, they are in the Barter and Trade Exchange network for small business. But what they really do is help small business marketing for their members. They help small business trade and exchange by buying and selling in a professional barter network. So you want to look at all Barter related keywords, and SEO those words first. But, if ITEX already ranks high in Barter, and wants to expand, they may want to target and do keyword searches around small business marketing, which is the global category where Barter falls in to.

3. Look at Why people will choose your keywords? So for the previous example, look at why people Barter? Do they do it to be altruistic? No silly, they do it to sell their products and services. So they are looking to market their products, right? Right on, also who Barters big companies or small? Small right? So small business marketing becomes a global keyword to SEO for a Barter Network. Does this strategy makes sense, hope so.

4. Find Synonyms or search for ancillary keywords on Adwords.Google.com too. This way you will not only cover your bases, but may find more traffic and more meaningful keywords. These SEO blogs are getting long, and it’s getting late. So we will start with next part and call it the Keywords series.

Do you ever wonder why some sites get ranked #1 and they don’t seem have any content on them? And, than there certain sites that have tons of great content, even good SEO type blog content, and they are not even shown up on the search engines for their keywords?

How can this be? Are Search Engines fair? What is the most important factor in SEO rankings?

We won’t go on and on about how we can help you get ranked #1 on Google with our SEO blogs, or our SEO templates. We can’t, but we can provide the simple answers and some basic SEO Strategies and maybe some SEO Blog templates for your success. Before we start, we do want to mention that Content may not be King for SEO, but great content is important for your readers and long term success. And, great blog content is the #1 ingredient for your SEO rankings, because it controls the key to your #1 SEO ranking strategy.

Ans. #1: Content is not King because, you could have great content and no one could link to your content, and it could be totally devalued by Search Engines. How can this be? Well simple, the search engines such as Google need to have your content be validated by News and blog sites. And if they link to your blog with the proper contextual links, than and only then will your site or blog get ranked in the top search results.

Ans. #2: Search Engines are fair, they need help validating your content, and it’s in this content validation system that makes them fair, the more people link to your content the more fairness is spread through the SEO system.

Ans. #3: The #1 ranking factor in top search engine optimization and ranking factors is contextual links. Especially from great content and the more you get the higher you are ranked. So the #1 SEO ranking factor is the most contextual and highly respected Contextual Links.

For example, if we link “Cross Jewelry” to our site http://mytypes.com/jewelry

Than that has the best SEO valued contextual link, notice how both links go to the same exact spot? But the second Link does not describe the content as well as Cross Jewelry does, does it?

Cross Jewelry, is the proper keyword phrase that will rank high as a result of the above link type. Even experienced SEO consultants make the above mistake. Even plural and singular text keywords make a difference. For Example, Free Blog versus Free Blogs, if your target keyword has both, as most of us do, than you are better off doing plural text keywords, but we will cover the plural keywords link in another blogs post as well as great Link Baiting strategies.

**as always our Free blogs are sponsored by ComfortZone Infrared heaters which are better than Edenpure Heater, and LoveRelic.com by Jill Brahms Cross Jewelry.

I really am sorry for not blogging for days it’s been almost 5 or six days since I posted on this SEO blog. The last blog on Blogcast your brand, took a lot out of me, it took me days to edit, and it ended up being much longer than I expected. So I will try to not be so long this time. By the way, that last blog post took more than 2 days to write, so the date was 2 days later Nov. 28th rather than 26th. Why do I tell you this extra detail of not blogging for days. Some times it’s ok to not write for days, but get use to blogging only your best. You don’t want your readers to wait too long, and forget about you, but nothing is more important than making every word, every photo, every sentence make an impact. It’s better to say little and make a big difference.

I rarely link to other blogs especially other SEO blogging sites, for very selfish reasons, but I have mentioned ProBlogger, SEOMoz, and SEOChat.com are the great resource. For those of you wanting to get more in to SEO blogs and SEO services, and stay on top of every single technical detail, and the nitty gritty technicalities of the SEO business, you definitly have to read MattCutts.com, he leads the Anti-Spam team at Google. He is also some what of a celebrity. This great article covers some of the basics of SEO and why you should SEO your blog, how to SEO your blog, and why you should build your brand first, than SEO. Well, that’s what they say, to read the full article from SEO Chat Click Here.

Here are some insights from the article:

1. By building your brand first, you will get attention and Links which is the best thing for SEO. The key here is to be strategic and learn about SEO first and brand building. This article kind of sells my concept of brand building and SEO go hand in hand. Read my SEO blogs or the quick iSEO Book, read SEO chat, than Blogcast your brand, which is the best way to SEO.

2. You really should SEO your blogs, not just your website, fresh content and content is always king, how the content should have the proper keywords.

3. Search Engine Friendly URL’s, why hyphens are still better than underscore, to SEO your keywords especially for your SEO Blogs.

4. Why should you never do keyword stuffing, just stuff your Turkey’s don’t be one by using too many keywords and trying to hide them.

5. Use Alt Tags, I have been talking about Alt Tags for ever, use them folks, along with Tags to describe your content and categorize them.

That’s all Folks, but do read the above article, it really is pretty good and it’s from the source, which is Google and Matt Cutts. **As always this SEO blog is brought to you by the Designer Silver Jewelry by Jill Brahms and ComfortZone Heaters, Infrared Heaters, which are better than Edenpure Heaters from GreenIsBetter.org.