The Tin Shingle Blog - #SEO

Entrepreneurship can be lonely. And if you're looking for 'friends' there are plenty of networks that you can join. But if you're looking to grow your business, to increase your exposure, to improve your sales, to get more press and to establish your credibility in the marketplace, then Tin Shingle has your back. 

What makes 'PRENUER unique is that we were founded by real experts in the areas of business strategy, marketing, online media, public relations and SEO. We leverage our more than 30 years of collective business experience to give your brand, your company and you the edge you need as a small business owner. 

We don't just send you a list of PR leads and hope for the best, we connect you with the people who are writing the stories that are going to bolster your sales. We don't just tell you that search is important, we actually work our SEO to help improve YOUR site traffic. And we don't just espose business theory, but we give you real concrete guidance and strategic tools that you can use to make an impact in your business.

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We're helping you prep for your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales on your website, and the most important thing is to lay the seeds early!

Sabina wrote a great blog post about how to market your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales and capitalize on each sale for future sales. This post is about how to spread your message in the search engines, aka SEO. And you definitely need to start early.

According to my brain, and confirmed by Google Trends, a tool created by Google that shows how many searches occurred for a phrase throughout the year, searches for "cyber monday" and "black friday" start in October, quickly build into a spike through November, and end December 1st. That means that the searches are going on now as I type this!

As you can see from this chart from Google Trends, interest in Cyber Monday is growing. Searches for Black Friday follow a similar growth pattern:

Your goal? You want your website included in these search results. When someone types in "cyber monday", you want Google and other search engines to serve up your website in their list of recommendations. Here's how you're going to do that:

Publish a webpage or blog post about it 3 weeks out: Google and other search engines need time to "index" the content on new web pages. They've gotten very swift at doing this, and can do it in a number of days, but you want to give them time to find yours. Remember to include "cyber monday" or "black friday" (whichever sale it is) in your title, plus other special words that you are selling, like "pink earrings" or "sexy sunglasses". People get very specific when they search online, and this is your golden opportunity to deliver your gem.

Spread the wealth, post your sale on other websites: Here at Tin Shingle, we know you need multiple angles to accomplish your goal (to get more sales). That's why we encourage our members to post their sales in our Events Calendar. You will want your sale to appear on other websites as well, such as this one. Why? You want to claim as many positions in the search engines as you can - as long as they all point back to your website for the shopping to make their purchase. If you're website isn't strong enough to claim a high ranking, a larger website might be.

Go for the "long tail": What the heck is a long tail, you ask? Sounds silly, I know. It's an industry term for "really long keyword". For example: I'm focusing on the term "cyber monday". But, you're not going rank #1 in Google, or even probably on page 3 for the term "cyber monday" alone. Competition for that term is too high - there is too much history published already. Plus, you don't want to. It's too broad. You want a focused search. A search from a person desperate to find what you sell. A "long tail" keyword is a phrase that has additional words in it, like "cyber monday chocolate sales" or "cyber monday pumpease coupon".

Let's break each of these terms down:

• "cyber monday chocolate sales": this would be typed in by a person who does not know about your company, but wants to buy chocolate on sale during Cyber Monday. Cha-ching! Enter you. In this case, enter our member Simply Sweet Arrangements, who is having such a sale! If Simply Sweet Arrangements wrote a blog post about their Cyber Monday sale, with links and pictures and other SEO goodness, they may show up in the search results for this term. They also posted their sale here on Tin Shingle. A person may see that as well, and even though they are getting Tin Shingle, they are linked to Simply Sweet Arrangements to get their chocolate fix and party favor ideas. Same goes for any blogs that include Simply Sweet Arrangements in their shopping guides.
• "cyber monday pumpease coupon": This term would be typed in by a person who knows about the company that designs stylish pumping bras. They are looking for a coupon, and they're figuring Pumpease is offering one for Cyber Monday. And they are right! Pumpease also posted their sale here on Tin Shingle. That doubles their chances of coming up in search results for that term.

Now that you have your marching orders, let's go claim some Cyber Monday and Black Friday searches! Remember to use your most special, descriptive keywords to help people find you! You may have pictures on your website, but search engines and people need to read the words describing what is there!

And, if you want to get listed in our Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping guide, or any other round ups we feature, read about our special Event Listing benefit, and get yourself a ProPreneur membership today, and get these and other business tools to help your business succeed on many levels!

Part of your SEO (search engine optimization) strategy should be how to use other websites to your advantage. You will want to approach other websites to link to your home page, as well as your interior pages. You will also, however, be a shining star on one of those websites. And it's those websites that may out rank your website for a specific term. If that's going to happen, you want to be sure you write your content in a way that will make your potential customer want to click on a link pointing to your website (hopefully there is one from the website that is ranking for you), and buy what you are selling.

We designed Tin Shingle to do just that for our small business #propreneur members. In addition to the editorial we create that in some cases features them, members are also able to create their own features on our website, literally, whenver they want. We've given our small business owners some SEO power, and many of them are using it to attract new clients and customers. Here is how they are doing it.

As you plan your SEO (search engine optimization) strategy, factor in the importance of copywriting and how your page titles will be written. The page titles are the blue underlined links that you see in search results at Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. They are what people read (or skim over in the blink of an eye) when evaluating which link in the search result that they want to click on.

If you've done your keyword research, you will have an idea of which keywords to target. That's the first step. The next step is looking at your website stats and in live search results to see how your website is ranking. If your website is ranking well for a specific term, but your traffic for that term is low, then you could have a problem with how your page title was written. Not a technical problem, but a creative copywriting problem.

Here is a breakdown of how to approach your page titles to increase your website traffic for a specific term. Even if you're hired an SEO team to do this work for you, you'll need to be aware of this angle as they try and build your traffic. If you've left your SEO work to the technical person who built your website, and they told you in an off-the-cuff way that they SEOed your website, then you really better read this article.

Yup, time for some creative writing with a fresh cup of coffee! And visit our Workshops schedule to see if we have any Private SEO Blitz Sessions available.