Well, that headline probably got some attention.

Brainstorming is a way to generate ideas in business and personal
life. It's also a way to come up with ideas for articles, speeches,
presentations, and blog post titles or headlines.

Part of website and blog optimization is finding ways of attracting
visitors. Catchy headlines are catchy - what website optimization and
SEO analysts call "sticky." They get visitors to stay on a page and
click to read more.

What's the best way to brainstorm sticky headlines?

I listened to an Internet presentation by blog expert Nina East today.
One of the best pieces of information I got from the presentation was
a website that generates up to 1,200 headlines or ideas for articles
and blog posts.

I went right to the site and started experimenting. Fill in some or
all boxes and see what happens. You will be amazed.

The website is http://www.rackandwrite.com.

Let us know your favorite result!

        

Driving out of Chicago, from one family minireunion to another family
reunion in Michigan, I saw a commercial van with writing on the side.
That in itself is not unusual. They all have advertising copy of some
kind as well as contact information. This writing stood out because it
was a list of words that described what the business product created
for customers and looked like keywords or tags for a blog post. It was
a sentence that started with "We provide..." followed by the effects
or keywords/tags and the actual product at the end. My older daughter,
who has a keen eye for detail as a graphic designer and experienced
photographer, pointed out two hours later when proofreading this post
that the words 'natural gas' were larger font size and green. She
commented that it looked like the tag selection section on Flickr, the
photo sharing site.

The phrase looked a bit like a poem by ee cummings. This whole word
scene definitely attracted my attention. What a great way that is to
describe a business! In addition, analyzing the side of this an
provides a way to generate keywords and categories to boost the rank
of your website or blog.

So - quickly - list what your business provides first - the actual
product or service. For mine, that would be communications services
and products or "websites ~ writing ~ social media consulting ~
graphic design."

Now list what the effects are for your customers and even the effects
you'd like to have in the future. For my business that would be: solid
brand identity, good impressions, looking good, sounding great,
attracting customers, improved internal communication, advertising
makeover, standing out among the competition, standing out in the
crowd, put voice to your dreams, multiply your connections, save
money, better business through beautification, self-expression,
stories told, grammar and spelling tune-up, making sure what happens
in your business doesn't just stay in your business.

Then you will have a poetic line that expresses the customer benefits
realized by shopping with your business or organization. This sentence
will also contain keywords and tags for blog posts and the copywriting
on your website, which are all important for SEO. Identifying and
using keywords in the writing on your website and in the metatags is
important also for helping search engine crawlers and people find your
website within categories of concepts typed into an Internet search
field.

Now for the information you were probably waiting to read - what did
that van have written on the side?

I didn't have time to write it all down but here is the gist of it:

We provide warm winter nights, peace of mind, comfort, coziness, clean
air, relief for your budget, overdraftiness protection, natural gas."

The company is Peoples Gas and their website is below. By the way, it
looks like they are using a Content Management System for their
website similar to the kind that SAID & DONE provides. They have a
Login area, which is the main clue. Good for them!

http://www.peoplesgasdelivery.com/default.aspx

After you finish your poetry phrase, type each keyword or keyphrase
into your Internet search window one at a time, and see what pops up.
You can add the word 'blog' next and see what blogs relate to the
concept. Maybe some of them are sites or communities where it would
make sense to post a comment with a link to your website or blog and
increase the number of links to your sites.

Post a comment here and share anything you learned from this post and
the exercise of listing tag and keyword poetry for your business for
SEO! I think the exercise is good for business planning as well.

        

Benjamin Franklin was an interesting guy or a weird dude, depending on your knowledge of his life. He was definitely marching to the beat of a different drummer. One good thing he did was to write a book of virtues - 13, to be exact.

I believe that visiting his short summary of the 13 virtues can lead to a better lived life, a better run business, and can even help elevate your website rank.

Here are the 8 that deal with personal traits:

... << MORE >>

Web crawlers are software critters that search engines such as Google send to observe websites and rank them.

How does a web crawler access your site? As mentioned in the post on images and Alt text to accompany the images, the software that crawls a site can't see images. There are a lot of other things that crawlers can't process.

An analogy between web crawlers and persons with different types limitations would be very accurate.

There are some people who view websites, by choice or due to technology limitations, with browsers that don't allow viewing of
images or video or listening to audio files. Web crawlers experience a site similarly. There are some people who have visual or auditory impairments and can't view images easily and can't hear audio files easily. Still others can only grasp website content through software that reads its content aloud. Such readers will read the Alt text - like a background caption - associated with each picture so the person knows what is there. The software that reads aloud will go through a Web page in a specific order, and a good website developer will make sure that the pages are organized toward that order.

Go here to view your website much as a crawler and a person with technology limitations will see it - through the browser called Lynx mentioned in the post cited later from A List Apart:

http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html

Many websites have images for navigation buttons - for example, a site map of images hyperlinked to pages or a single image of a looking glass to stand for "search." Someone looking at the website through a plain browser will not see the images. A search engine crawler will also not be able to "see" the images - unless each has redundant text beside it with an additional hyperlink, which is good accessibility.

If you have an iPhone, you have experienced a lack of access to certain website content: you can't view Adobe Flash files. Wouldn't it
be nice to see some kind of alternative description at least? While out shopping last week, I was trying to find information about a very good local restaurant on my iPhone. Unfortunately, the hours and address were in a Flash file that I could not see, and the information was not displayed anywhere else on their website. I made a note to myself: potential client for website makeover. Then I found their information on Urban Spoon. It was an extra step that was a bit annoying.

The idea is not to quit or avoid using images and multimedia on websites, but to find ways to convey the content they provide to
people who can't experience them as most people can. By doing so, the website will be ranked coincidentally more favorably.

A great article on the overlap between SEO and making a website accessible to viewers with constraints is here:

http://m.alistapart.com/articles/accessibilityseo/

And here is an article from the mysterious people in charge of The World Wide Web about making websites accessible to those with
disabilities - focus on the Introduction.

http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/

The Introduction has a good bullet point summary of main ideas about differences among persons accessing websites.

One important point is that some people do not have or are unable to use a mouse or keyboard. We may question whether a person without a mouse or keyboard would be likely to purchase something from a website or become active with a non-profit. I am sure there are some good stories out there about people with limitations who found a way on the right websites to buy or do what they wanted.

Accessibility has been increasingly important in the United States - witness the Americans with Disabilities Act, rules about handicapped parking spots and elevator dimensions and more. When I trained as an election official a few years ago, I was fascinated by the voting booths that have accessibility modifications. Maybe you have noticed these when voting - maybe some of you have used one due to a disability. It is good that such things exist.

Today, more than ever, it is essential to make sure your website is accessible. We have a graying population with a growing number persons whose visual and auditory acuity diminishes - and arthritis can make it tough to do mouse motions and keyboarding. We also have a large number of soldiers who have returned from active duty with disabilities, and a significant portion of these individuals can benefit from websites that are designed for the highest standards of accessibility.

As in all things, consideration and inclusiveness are best practices for being a good person, getting into heaven, and building a popular business. Remember the story about the difference between heaven and hell? In both places, people sat across from each other along a narrow banquet table with bowls of soup and very long handled spoons. In hell, no one ate. In heaven, however, each person fed the person on the opposite side of the table.

Accessibility revision to a website is one important thing we can do to help others and at the same time help ourselves.

What will be the first item you put on your long-handled spoon?

        

As mentioned earlier this month, links to your website of blog are one
of the best ways to boost your website rank.

I know many small business owners who hesitate to delve into having a
Facebook Page, Twitter for the business, blog, YouTube - you name it.
Some worry about privacy. If such social media sites are for your
business and in the name of your business, there should be the
opposite attitude - promoting your business, the opposite of privacy.

So, stop hesitating and go get set up with at least a page and a
Twitter. Once set up with Twitter, link back to your website by
putting the URL on your Twitter info area. Then get - or have your
webmaster or web goddess do this - the widget from Twitter that will
display Tweets on your Twitter home page in real time. People who
click to your website will click to Twitter and may "follow" your
business there. If they don't want to follow yet, or don't have a
Twitter, they will at least be able to see two "channels" in one place.

Get the widget here and see what it looks like:

http://twitter.com/goodies/widgets

        

Some experts say to limit the amount of images on your website to what
would bring and keep visitors. Obviously, product catalog sales images
are important for certain businesses. But keep in mind that search
engines can't read images. So plain images don't do anything for or
against your rank. But if you have Alt text associated with each image
that may help your rank because search engines can read that text.

Also, having Alt text linked to each image is user friendly for a
small class of Internet users who use a text-only browser.

Ask your Web guru to make sure to write brief text descriptions in
each image's properties. The Alt text field should not, by the way, be
a place to stuff endless repetitive keywords. That is viewed as spammy
and will count against your site in ranking.

        

How do you find the best online places to engage in conversations where you
can leave a link to your helpful website and blog? How do you plan for
unique content?

One of the best articles I have seen about both these concepts is on
Problogger. The title as well as the content are instructive.

"How To Build 22,938 Links To Your Blog"

Who wouldn't want to read a blog post with such a title?! Go to
http://www.problogger.net and enter that title into the search window.

Ideas include an example of choosing a specialized and interesting niche for
the topic of the blog and information about how to promote a blog.

Once you have narrowed down a niche, because that is part of trying to
provide unique content, the writer advises identifying the top 10 blogs
related to the niche. Once those blogs are identified, start visiting and
leaving helpful comments.

How do you find top 10 blogs related to your niche? You can search on
Google, Bing, or other search engines. You can do a Twitter search for #
followed by the key words you are seeking. You can sign up for Google Alerts
on the topic of your niche - see http://www.google.com/alerts. Type in your
"Search terms" and select "Blogs" under type of item, choose how many alerts
you'd like to receive per email and how often, and whether you'd like to
receive these by email or by "Feed." You can click to the right on "Preview
results" to see what items are available.

Go to Technorati.com and click on their Top 100 Blogs report - it is updated
daily. You also can click to the listing of blogs by category. Poke around
and see what looks reputable and well rated (higher authority number).

From your various searches, choose one or two of the higher ranked blogs in
your general area of expertise, and set a goal of leaving a comment on each
blog once a week. Choose a few more that relate to an area that you sell to
or partner with for your business. For example, if you are a pet resort
business, you may want to look for a blog that relates to animal well being,
vacations and cruises, home based mommy businesses...brainstorm a list and
try reading a few a day quickly and decide what is worth regular reading and
commenting.

Always leave your blog website URL in the body of your comment - many of the
blogs will leave a place for you to type your website or blog URL but what
you type in that box will not be automatically included when your comment is
approved. Once you have managed to have multiple blog posts on your own
blog, you can leave a more specific URL to a specific article that relates
to the content on which you are commenting. And as you will see in the
Problogger article cited, it is a great idea to get links to internal pages
of your website or blog, not just to the main page with the recent posts.

Twitter and the conversations there are important components of your SEO
strategy. I advise clients to have at least three social media accounts: a
Facebook Page, a blog, and a Twitter, preferably with the same name as your
business or as close as possible. I was able to get saidndone.com for my
business website and saidndone for our Twitter account. If you have the same
name everywhere, and you start doing regular Tweets, people who first find
you through this avenue will have an easier time finding your website or
blog. In any case, make sure to put your blog or website URL on the Twitter
information area. That is a link from one of your sites to another one of
your sites, and that is good for visibility.

You never can tell where Twitter conversations will lead. My son is
interested in the entertainment industry, with talents ranging from DJ work
to acting to planning student TV shows at college. He is a heavy Twitter
user, which happened after a film professor required her students to have a
Twitter account as part of the communications and learning process. While we
were in Florida as a family in June, he happened upon an opportunity to
exchange Tweets with the Queen of Jordan. It was a lot of fun for us all to
see this happening, and perhaps that conversation, or just his ability to
look for those opportunities and engage, will help him in making connections
someday.

And while we are talking about cross-referencing - do you have a link to
your blog on your website? It should be easy to find. See an example at
http://www.saidndone.com - we provide links to the blog as well as the
Facebook and Twitter landing pages.

        

Attention and mention are keys to optimizing the visibility of your website.

How do you get attention and mention?

Your content needs to be as unique and helpful as possible. Many people
think that keywords are king. Having the right keywords present in your
website content is important. But keywords should not cover the entire chess
board. Some prospective clients have asked SAID & DONE to rewrite their
website content with many mentions of their company focus. However, this
strategy as a way to boost rank is a myth. Too many mentions of a keyword,
and the software that crawls through your website will downgrade the ranking
of your website. That does make sense. If you were at a networking event and
a business person came up to you and talked about what they do by repeating
their main business function twenty times, would you be thrilled? No, you
would be asleep or moving on quickly. You would downgrade your assessment of
that person and probably of their business as well.

Think about who you enjoy being with at networking and other events. The
phrase "life of the party" should pop into your head about now. You want to
be the life of the online party. Be fun, be memorable, be helpful, be
respectful...be all the things you learned in kindergarten, from your
grandmother, and from your best teachers in life.

Be concise, to the point, not repetitive, and work on updating your content
regularly to provide relevant and helpful information. Then participate in
online discussions on different sites where you can leave a link back to
your website. If you make helpful and meaningful comments on blogs, people
will click back to your site, and if the content there is entertaining and
helpful, your website will get mentions.

It takes time, consistency, and relevance. It takes the "R" motto words of
good education: Relationship, Rigor, Relevance, all built on Respect for
those with whom you are attempting to interact.

How do you find the best online places to engage in conversations where you
can leave a link to your helpful website and blog? How do you plan for
unique content? Stay tuned for tomorrow's episode on SEO.

        

If you are still in the planning stages of setting up a website, you have
time to consider the name or topic of your website. The choice of website
name can impact your website's visibility. Whether you are still planning or
already have a website, realize that boosting your website ranking is much
more difficult for some topics than for others.

For example, if you Google the term "interior design" you will find more
than 72 million results on the Google search index that results. If you
Google "Feng Shui" you will find about 12 million results - a sixth of the
previous term. Google "Feng Shui LEED" to find listings for this design
approach combined with environmental certification, and 23,000 results are
indexed. A business specializing in Feng Shui green design will have less
difficulty boosting its ranking among that topic listing than an interior
design business that does not focus on such a specialized topic.

Here is a link to a fantastic guide on Search Engine marketing basics. It is
very well written - concise and with useful graphics and analogies. For
example, the writer compares the World Wide Web to a "network of stops in a
big city subway system."

http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization

If you'd rather get an even shorter version, we will try to put it here.

Happy optimizing!

        

One way to optimize your website for search engines is to sign up with Google Webmaster.

The main page is at http://www.google.com/webmasters/.

This offers a free set of tools that helps increase traffic to your site - visibility.

It's simple to get started. You sign up for a Google Webmaster account and list your websites. You can list up to 1,000 websites - which won't apply to most people. But even a small business might have two websites - a website and a blog that is separate.

Many articles are available on the Google Webmaster blog that can give you great knowledge about how to increase the visibility of your website.

If you have a webmaster, you can ask if he or she is signed up for Google Webmaster and plan to get briefings on how your webmaster has set up your website to increase traffic.

A main concept for visibility is getting your URLs (main or other pages of your website shown as links) listed on other websites. You must grasp that, as with any networking activity, it takes time and genuine helpfulness to develop a reputation that builds mentions. There are some short term workarounds, but they are not recommended.