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Create pages for each keyword phrase.

This is a basic one, but one that is often overlooked.  Let’s say you’re trying to promote your business in Walnut Creek (the city Tactical Execution is based in).  You obviously want your website to rank high for people putting “Walnut Creek” into their search querie.  The first thing you should do is create a page called “Walnut Creek” or better yet “Walnut Creek [business keyword phrase]“.  By doing so, you’ll create a new URL on your website that includes both your city name and your primary business keyword phrase, side by side.

Search engines put a lot of weight on the words included in your URLs.  Check out All American Hauling.  I built this site for a friend and you’ll notice I’ve created individual pages for each city they service and every service they offer.  In addition, I’ve included links to all these individual pages right on the homepage.  Not only does that include all the relevant keywords on the homepage but it also adds keyword-rich URLs pointing to keyword-rich descriptive pages.

Put keywords into image tags.

Every image on your website has a “Title” tag and an “Alt” tag.  Those tags all represent places where you can include more descriptive keywords.  Again, you can look at All American Hauling for an example of this.  It’s a very basic site but the mechanics are very strong and it has a #1 Google ranking for keyword phrases including “hauling Walnut Creek”, “garbage removal Walnut Creek”, “East Bay garbage removal”, “Contra Costa garbage removal” and “Clayton garbage removal”.

Every image on this site has keyword-rich tags.  The search engines know the “Alt” tag shows when someone scrolls over an image.  That means the words you put there are almost always relevant to the topic of the page.  Take advantage of that and put your targeted keywords into your image tags.

Use keyword-rich anchor text.

The words you use for your links play a major role in the ranking of the destination pages.  Again, we can take All American Hauling as a case study.  All the services that All American Hauling offers are described on individual pages.  Those services are also listed on the homepage and each one is a link to the associated page.

The alternative to this approach is to references “the services offered by All American Hauling” and then put the link on “services”.  There’s no value in that.  “Services” says absolutely nothing about what the company does.  Take advantage of the opportunity in your internal link structure.  By putting the links onto your targeted keywords, you increase their importance within your entire site.

These are just three small tips and there are many others.  Get creative when optimizing a website.  Think about all the possible places where you can include more keywords.  If you leverage all the SEO opportunities, you can create an extremely effective website.  The All American Hauling website only has 34 pages but it delivers organic visitors all day long and you can do it too!

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This Tactical Execution website is build on WordPress and there are a number of things you can do to integrate your blog with your other social media accounts.  Last week, I installed a plugin entitled Twitter Tools.  It basically does three basic things.  First, if you post a tweet, it will automatically create a post in your blog presenting the contents for your website visitors.  Second, if you post a blog post (like this one, for example), it will automatically post a tweet announcing your post to your twitter audience and telling them where to find it.  And finally, it allows you to post a tweet from your WordPress dashboard.

I originally installed the plugin because of this last feature.  I don’t do a lot of texting and never get around to visiting my twitter account so the ability to post a tweet when I’m managing my website is a great feature.  But since I’ve installed the plugin, I’ve come to appreciate the first two features as well and have noticed an increase in traffic to my blog as a result.  I’ve also had a number of new people start following me on twitter.

In my post about twitter and utterz, I described the ability to make one cell phone call into the utterz platform and automatically populate your twitter account, your website (via the blue widget you can see on the left hand side of this website) and your facebook profile (because twitter integrates nicely with facebook).  Well, it turns out that facebook can be seamlessly integrated with your blog as well.  By going to your “Notes” page, you can add the RSS feed from your blog and have your facebook profile be updated every time you write a new blog post.

Between my website, facebook, twitter and utterz, all my activity is completely integrated.  I am now looking at ways to integrate other platforms like LinkedIn or BlogCatalog or YouTube.  I’m sure there are and just have to allocate some time to do the research and then take the steps necessary to complete the process.  My point is that your digital footprint grows exponentially when you integrate your different audiences and it doesn’t cost a thing.

This same concept is true for so many things.  Take YouTube videos.  If you do just one video, you’ll most likely get lost in the thousands of other videos.  But if you do a series, you broaden your reach.  Think about it like a fishing net.  You want your net as big as possible, catching people in different ways and for different reasons.  But once they see one of your videos, they’ll quickly see all the other stuff you’ve done.  And at that point, the cross-polination increases the traffic to all your videos, not just the original one.

With all the social media platforms, you can see the same effect.  You have friends on facebook.  You have followers on twitter and utterz.  You have fans on YouTube and visitors to your website.  Regardless how they find you initially, they can immediately be introduced to all the other stuff you do, augmenting your online identity and increasing your traffic at the same time.

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As of this morning, we have 596 members and it’s growing all the time.  These people all find our group on the Meetup platform.  I have never done any real marketing for the group.  People ask me why my group is so successful and I usually respond with three primary factors: content, structure and communication.  We have one of the most active meetups in the area and our members keep coming back because they get good information in a predictable format.

Last November, the Entrepreneur & Small Business Academy got sponsored by American Express.  They selected the 50 largest entrepreneur clubs across the country and put a program together to support them while building awareness for their OPEN program.  I never solicited their sponsorship.  They found me.  This is just another example of the power of Meetup.

Our members are all entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs or established business owners.  We have a great group of people and I truly enjoy the role I play.  It’s been a great experience and has allowed me to meet a ton of people I would’ve never come across in my regular business life.  Today, I have people I can call for almost anything I might need in my business, all from my Meetup group.

When I became the organizer, I was hoping the group would be a source of business for me.  I wanted to use it to promote myself and find new clients.  As it turns out, I have yet to make any money from the group but the benefits are far greater than I ever expected.  The underlying objective behind the group is to allow members to share and benefit from each other’s expertise.  We facilitate that very well and I have learned incredible things from their presentations and contributions.

Meetup is a fantastic platform for creating and building clubs.  With valuable content, a little structure and good regular communication, you can build a successful Meetup group and gain exposure for yourself while meeting tons of new people.  Further, the experience will help you build confidence and improve your leadership skills.  Planning, coordinating, holding effective meetings - all valuable skills for your career.

What’s your passion?  What are you interested in?  What are you good at?  Think about these questions and then consider starting a Meetup group around that topic.  You’ll probably be surprised how many people find your group and if you deliver value to your audience, you’ll see that group grow and grow.  And as Meetup becomes better known, your audience will grow even more.

Last July, my Meetup had about 170 members.  Today, it has almost 600.  I’d bet the Entrepreneur & Small Business Academy will have over 2000 members by this time 2009 and I can’t wait.  I want to hold bigger events with more content and more attendees, and I have no doubt it will grow into that naturally.  In the meantime, I have to finalize my agenda for this evening and invite you all to come by and visit.

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Before jumping into the meat of this post, I also want to address the fact that the internet has changed a lot over the past decade and the concepts behind Internet Marketing have changed as well.  Although the modern realities all have roots in those early years, the dynamic was very different in the mid to late 90s.  Today, the internet is starting to mature with people using it in predictable ways.  And perhaps more importantly, the internet has become more social; hence the new buzz words like social media tools, social networks and social bookmarking.

The driving force behind modern Internet Marketing boils down to one simple phrase: conversations are markets.  If you want to access a particular market, you have to find that conversation and participate in it.  Let me say that again.  If you want to access a market, you have to participate in the conversation.  Simple.  But let’s dig a little deeper and see how we might accomplish this.

MySpace is a huge conversation.  In fact, there are thousands or even millions of individual conversations taking place on MySpace.  Same with Facebook.  The blogosphere is one massive conversation.  Forums are conversations.  Bulletin boards are conversations.  Twitter is a conversation, as is Utterz.  All the social bookmarking platforms like DIGG, delicious and StumbleUpon are all conversations.  People are interacting.  And if you want to sell a product or service to those people, you have to participate in that conversation and establish credibility within those circles.

If you’ve spent any time on the platforms just mentioned, you’ll know that within each certain users stand out as authorities.  Perhaps they have more posts or more friends or more content or more bookmarks.  In general, those who are active are quickly recognized as authorities.  So what does that actually mean?  It means you can be an authority yourself by just selecting the conversation that best matches your business and becoming an active user.

For most people, there are two problems.  First, people are fickle.  Second, they have no discipline.  Go to a gym in January and it will be packed.  Go in March and it will be quiet.  Why?  Because everyone had a New Year’s resolution they soon abandoned in favor of other healthy activies like watching TV or drinking beer.  Bottom line; those who stand the test of time will win in the end.

Never before has the formula for success been so clear cut.  It’s a simple formula.  Participate.  Be active.  Establish yourself within a community and you’re almost guaranteed to succeed, or at least make progress.

Let’s move on to fickle.  Every single day, new platforms are launching on the internet and they all allow and even promote interaction within their users.  Every day, there’s a new fad.  The problem is that if you constantly follow these new fads, you never become established anywhere.  At some point, you have to pick a particular conversation and focus on that.  Even if something flashier comes along, there’s value in sticking to your plan.

Now, am I saying that you have to limit yourself to all the old-school platforms that are no longer attracting fresh visitors?  No.  All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t be too quick to jump from one to the other.  Put some time into the initial selection process.  Find the conversations that apply to your business.  Find the best forums.  Find the best blogs.  Find the best groups on social networks.  Look at them all and decide which ones you want to focus on.  Then stick to it for a while and see how your efforts pay off.

There’s another level to this discussion.  There’s something even more powerful than participating in conversations and that is facilitating conversations.  This might include becoming an organizer for an online group.  It might include adding a forum to your website.  It might include creating a wiki and then opening it up to your audience.  It might include using Ning to create your own social network around your particular business.

The possibilities are endless but you have to ensure you have an enthusiastic audience before you pull the trigger.  There’s nothing worse than a forum with no posts, a wiki with no contributions or a social network with no members.  But let’s look at an example of someone who has truly capitalized on the axiom: Barack Obama.  Now, I am not referring to his politics at all.  That is not my concern here.  But in terms of participating and facilitating conversations, he’s done more than any other politician in history … by orders of magnitude!

If you go to his website, you can create a profile and accumulate friends just like any other social network.  You can create a neighborhood and stay updated on events or even organize your own events.  You can obviously donate to his campaign or you can offer to match someone else’s donation, and even stay in touch with that other person.  But most interestingly of all, you can create your own blog within his web platform.

As of this writing, the Barack Obama website has over 40,000 active blogs, all written by individual supporters.  All these people are thoroughly engaged in his campaign and are contributing buckets of unique relevant content to his website.  They’re interacting with each other and getting more and more intertwined with the Barack Obama “change” movement every single day.  There’s no question he has capitalized on the “conversations are markets” moniker and I personally expect his dominance in this area will carry him through the November election.

Take some time and think about the conversations taking place in your field, in your business.  Do some searches on Google and Technorati and Big-Boards.  Find the conversations and begin participating in them.  You might be surprised how quickly you become a known quantity and how quickly you can start promoting your own products or services to the people you meet.

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