SEO and the Job Hunt...

On Tuesday, May 18th I had the opportunity to speak at the CareerConnection "Hire DFW First" Symposium at the Addison Conference Center. Below are a few notes from my presentation.

With the limited number of jobs and the high number of candidates, it is critical to have your Resume and LinkedIn profiles optimized for keywords which will increase the chances of being selected as a candidate.

As you may be aware when looking for a job you are now a sales and marketing professional. You are now the product you are selling and need to market yourself to be know. One of the task that we need to do in this role is to now our market and who our competition is.

First, we need to define a list of 10 keywords that help define what we do. My list is something like this:
SEO, Social Media, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEM, analytics

Once you have a list of your keywords, run a few searches on LinkedIn and identify the top 10 in your field. Review their profiles and look for terms that help in increasing your value.

While you are looking at the search results, see if you can find yourself. If you are not in the first couple of pages, you need to increase your keyword usage. Narrow your search to your local area. You can also change the relevance to keywords and have a broader result.

The quantity of keywords on your LinkedIn Profile and your resume is the key. You have to have one more instance of your keyword and you will be above the rest of your field.

For your LinkedIn profile, the Professional Headline, Summary, Specialties and all job titles are the key fields when search. Go through all these fields and add instances of your keywords. Don't forget that you can use parentheses to add more value as a definition to the job title.

Keep tweaking your keyword count till you are at the top of your field. At that time you will see inquiries about your skills and request for interviews increase.

Keywords are king, the one with the most wins. Know your competition and you will be on top of your market.

DFW SEO - Presentation Notes

Tonight I had the opportunity to present to the Dallas Interactive Marketing & Internet SEO SEM Meetup.

As a independent consultant that provides SEO and Social Media Marketing, I am looking for ways to quantify my results with clients. Everyone wants to be at the top of the search results but can't truly afford the time and effort that it takes to increase the SEO value and increase the results on Google and Bing.

The first tool that I use to quantify SEO value and effectiveness is Web Site Grader. With Web Site Grader, I am able to have a grade value of the site, all on a scale of 100. Not only does this site give the grade, it also gives suggestions on things that need to be improved. Image Alt Tags, Meta tags, age of domain and inbound links are taken into consideration.

Second, I showed the web site SpyFu.com, SpyFu is great for looking at the competition and what they are doing with PPC (Pay Per Click). I can see what campaigns they ran and get an overall impression of how they have been marketing them selves.

The third tool is a plug-in for FireFox called SEOQuake This tool allows me to look at the keywords and density of any page on the internet. This allows me to get a good over view of a competitors site and develop a list of keywords to start the process of SEO.

So what I am looking at with these tools is to evaluate the competition. Ultimately, we are wanting to one up our competitors and have more SEO Value that them. Look at there keywords, there current CPC campaigns and look at their scores. From there I will go into action to increase my clients SEO presence and have tools to see the effectiveness of my efforts.

Where is Waldo... I mean John...

Well, it has been a few months since I have written a new blog post. So I thought I would take a few minutes to crank out a quick post.

First and foremost, business has picked up and the weather has increased to a much more desirable temperature. The past several weeks have been a flurry of meetings and putting together proposals for a number of potential clients. All a great thing since as many of you know, I am doing my own start-up and making a go of it on my own. Just for grins, here is a partial list of some of my new clients. OK, this is also a shameless plug and a attempt to increase the off page SEO value of my clients sites.

DentSquadUSA • P+D Solutions • dZignPak • WhiteShield • Virtech Paralegal • The Solar Group • RDH Vending • Pacific Church of God • It's Rocket Science • Heritage Vistas • Calahan Design Solutions

The services that I am providing for these clients varies from client to client. Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, web site design and maintenance. I am totally having a great time working with these clients.

Hands on with the iPad

If you have not had the opportunity to have a little hands on time with the new iPad from Apple, you will find yourself,or at least I did, start thinking of ways to justify spending the money to buy one.

My first impressions was great, I was impressed with the screen, the size and the applications were beautiful.

The physical device felt a bit thicker than I was expecting. The edges of the body were smooth much like the newest generation of the MacBook Pro screen. The screen was larger than I imagined and was crisp and clean. Clicking or tapping icons was a little more pronounced than I expected. Several times while I was testing the unit, i tapped an icon and nothing happened. I had to slowly and intentionally tap the icon to get it to register the selection.

The software was very iPhone like and the same gestures allowed me to quickly pick it up and start flipping screens left and right. I also found it very responsive to the orientation of the iPad and flipped as needed.

Using the keyboard was pretty easy I did find the vertical keyboard a bit cramped to type with both hands as a keyboard. Flipping it horizontal was a much easier typing experience. However, I was unsure where my fingers were since I did not have a bump on the "f" and "j" keys.

The e-mail application was much richer than the iPhone version of the app. It was more like the Mail app on the Mac OS which allowed you to see your folders and accounts I like that added functionality.

The Calendar would allow you to flip to a horizontal version and gave a much richer look and feel with having a column on the left to see your calendars. I really liked the fact that each event in the calendar had a colored bullet with black text unlike the Mac OS Calendar where all the text for an event is color. That might be a preference but did not take the time to look.

iPhoto was very much like the iPhoto on the Mac. It allowed you to double tap a photo thumbnail and open the image to full screen. Flipping a finger left and right was smooth to navigate between images. Using the thumb and index finger would allow me to rotate images effortlessly. You could also setup slide shows by accessing a menu and defining time and transition.

The iBook app was nice. There were all the expected functionality that I would guess would be available with other eBook Readers. This included the control of brightness, text size and bookmarking. I really enjoyed the page turning animation. It was very intuitive to allow the 3D representation of turning a real books page. I also loved how you could run your finger back and forth to control the animation. Several of the books that I looked at also included illustrations and looked great.

The web (Safari) looked great. I looked at a couple of my sites and a few others to get an idea of the format. My sites generally are 955 wide and looked great in both orientations.

I also looked at a couple of YouTube videos and they were a bit chunky but would not slow me down from watching old StarTrek content. I viewed a HD video and it looked amazing.

Summary, I would love to have one of these now, but I am not at a point where luxuries are allowed :-(. I could see that this could easily replace a computer for my kids since all that they do is surf the web and do e-mail. As a student I can see the iPad quickly becoming a norm on campuses with the availability of the books in the iBook format. Adding the iWork tools allows you to word process, presentation creation and many of the other standards.

If you dare, go check it out at the Apple Store and see what you think. Oh by the way, you might want to leave your wallet at home, since the $499 starting price is pretty tempting.

Its valuable, Its cool and Its Free...

Google Analytics

As I am reviewing clients current web presence many times I find that clients are not making use of any kind of analytics for their site. They have no idea how many visitors they have on their site and not sure how effective they are with their web presence.

There are a wide range of analytic tools on the market. There are high end enterprise solutions like Coremetrics which will monitor an online store and make relevant recommendations to the site visitor based on previous viewed or purchased products. For today, we are going to focus on Google Analytics and see, while it is a free tool, it does provide a lot of useful information that allows you to have a better understanding of your visitor and how effective your site is.

I am not going to take the time to go through the details of setting up a Google Analytics account and how to add the needed script to a site. If you are needing assistance in doing this please let me know and I would be happy to talk with you about getting you setup.

Above is the Dashboard for Google Analytics. This is where the fun begins for looking at the activities that are happening within a site. We first see a time line that shows the sites total visitors for the past month. This chart always surprises me with the fact that every site has its unique peak peak day. In the above example, we see that Monday and Tuesday are the traffic days for this site. Other sites that I work with vary greatly. One site that I work with peaks on Thursdays and another peaks on Saturdays.

What does this peak tell us? From a marketing stand point, it shows us when we need to drum up traffic to the site. Send out an e-mailing around the low time. Make an offer on a blog to drive traffic to the site. Most action that is taken will clearly be seen in this chart.

The next area that we can look at is the Site Usage, where we are seeing the overall numbers for the given time frame. In this section we see Visits, Pageviews, Pages/Visit, Bounce Rate, Avg. Time on Site and % New Visits. Let look at each of these and get a better understanding of each.

Visits – This is the total number of visitors to the site. In another section in the report there is also a Unique Visitor stat that is unique as defined by a machines IP Address.

Pageviews – This is the total number of pages that were served or viewed by the above users.

Pages/Visit – The average number of pages viewed by each visitor

Bounce Rate – This is an interesting item that is tracked. And can be used as a gauge for how effective or relevant the content of a page is. In other words, If visit comes to the site and looks at the home page then leaves without looking at additional pages that would be one bounce. This becomes informative when you drill down in the report and look at specific pages and see the bounce rates.

Looking at the bounce rate we can gather the value of the page to our visitors. If there is a high bounce rate we may need to look at the content of the page and rethink what is said or show about your product or services.

Avg. Time on Site – This shows the average amount of time that a visitor spends on a site. We can compare the statistics for Bounce Rate with this and get a better idea of the overall effectiveness of the site. If this number is high then we can say that our audience is spending time on the site.

% New Visits – This is the percentage of the total Visits that are new or have an IP Address that has not been to the site previously. When you first start gathering data on your site, this number will be high so keep that in mind as it goes down over a period of time.

Each of these sections can be drilled into further allowing you to see greater detail into your sites activity.

The next section that I would like to focus on today is the Traffic Source Overview. Clicking on the View Report link will allow us to drill down and see a greater wealth of information on the source of our visitors. In this section we will see details about Direct Traffic, Referring Sites and Search Engines. This is were you get a since for the overall value of your site. Questions that I ask when looking at these details are: Where are the largest number of users coming from? Is a large percentage of my traffic coming from a Search Engine? How effective are third party sites at bringing traffic to my site? Is Twitter, Facebook or a Blog driving traffic?

Here is where I can talk about needing a good Search Engine Optimization or SEO plan in place. But you will need to look at you sites data and make that call on your own. Better yet, give me a call and I can help you get a better understanding of what is going on.

Another part of the Traffic Source Overview is the keywords section. Here you will see a list of the actual words that were used to search and find you. Here is where you can monitor the effectiveness of your keywords found on your site. If the words you think are your keywords are not being searched for to find you, you need to revisit your sites content.

Remember, ultimately keywords are king, and those keywords are made up of the relevant content of your site. This is heading to the subject of SEO but we will have to wait to and discuss that at a later time.

John
I am your CEO for SEO
NosalCentral, Your Central Source for Internet Marketing Solutions

Tips For Using LinkedIn Effectively #10

Making Connections With People

When it gets down to the root use of LinkedIn, its making connections with people. My philosophy with establishing connections is pretty simple. If I've meet you through networking, I will connect with you on LinkedIn. I do have one requirement, when you ask to link with me you have to state were we meet.

If you have been using LinkedIn for a while you have seen that there is no way to delete messages that you have received. Your only option is to archive the messages to remove them from your Inbox. I mention this to explain why I request that you tell me where I meet you. It allows me to go back at anytime and search my Inbox for people that I meet at a specific event. What a great way to recall how you met someone when that name is on the tip of your tongue.

So lets talk about the options that you have when connecting with people. The key as you may know, is knowing someone's e-mail address in most cases. Connections or links are defined by how you know the connection. These connections are Colleague, Classmate, We've done business together, Friend, Group and I don't know... All of these options require a sub selection with the exception of Friend and I don't know...

I find for most of the connections that I do, that I use the Other option. This option requires an e-mail to complete the connection. Secondarily, I make a lot of my connections via the Group option.

The personal note section is where we can type a personal note to the person that we are wanting to connect with. I always encourage making the note personal. Again, tell them where we meet them this makes it easier for the other person to recall where they meet you. After all not all of us have photographic memory and remember everyone's name and face.

Every now and then, you may be wanting to connect with someone that you don't have their e-mail address or have a direct way to connect with them. This is when you may need to reach out using your network to get in contact with someone. This generally happens when someone is two degrees of separation from you. At this point you will be required to connect with someone that would act as a middleman. You will be required to not only type a note to the person you are trying to connect with, but you will also have the opportunity to send a note to the middleman. Please note that both notes will be seen by all parties. So keep the note to your networked acquaintance professional.

When establishing this multi-degree connection, it will take sometime and require the middle man to forward the request. When typing your notes, tell everyone why you are wanting to establish the connection.

If you are ever in a position that you are unable to find a way to connect with someone, remember to Google them by name and company. You never know, you might find their e-mail address in this manor.

In summary, tell everyone how you know them when establishing a connection. Know the people that you connect with. Do your part in helping to establish connections between people.

Next time we will be moving away from LinkedIn and start looking at tools for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

And if you are your company is needing help with your internet marketing contact us at NosalCentral for all your Internet Marketing Solutions.

Tips For Using LinkedIn Effectively #8

Groups are the bomb...

One of the things that I enjoy using in LinkedIn is the Groups. In the Groups, you can do additional networking with people that have common interest. And best of all, you have the opportunity to post and respond to messages that are specific to that group.

Lets first define what Groups are. First off, Groups are made by users of LinkedIn. Anyone can create a group even you and I. So if you want to create a group for Breeding Goldfish for Fun and Profit, you can do that. Groups are a great way to talk and connect with others with like interest.

Lets focus more on how we can use groups to our advantage. First lets look at finding a group that we may want to join. Using the Search option at the top of any screen in LinkedIn , you are able to search for any keyword or topic that you may have interest in. Everything from Abacus to Zooligy there is probably a group on the topic.

Many times you may find a number of groups for a given topic. Here is where you have to look at the value of a group. Look at the number of participants that are in the group. If you have a couple of good fits, join both and get a feel for the topics that are discussed. If after a week or so you see one group is better than the other, you can unsubscribe from the unwanted group.

One thing you will want to do is keep the groups that you are members of relevant to your professional branding. So you may not want to join groups for political, religious, or others that are controversial in a corporate environment.

Once you have joined a group or groups, you are able to start posting and answering questions. This is a great opportunity to establish yourself as an expert in your area of interest or expertise.

A hidden gem that is part of being members of groups is that you now have access to the membership list for the group. You can access this from the More > Members secondary menu when you are on the page for a specific group. Here you will find the complete list for all the members in that group. Once viewing the Members list, you are able to search the members of the group for specific keywords.

When searching within the Members list you could look for contacts at specific companies for that you may be targeting for a work search or sales opportunity.

Groups allow us to add a whole new dimension to our networking with professionals in our area of interest. By responding to post we can establish our expertise in a given subject. Then using the members list we can find people in our area within companies that we may be wanting to connect with.

While Groups in LinkedIn are a great way to network, NosalCentral is a great way to gain control over your web presence. Weather it is Analytics, SEO or a Social Media we can help you with increasing your value on the web.

Tips For Using LinkedIn Effectively #6

Keywords and Branding

Our profile, resume and our social media presence are all key to defining who we are. One of the challenges that we have when defining who we are is defining things that set us apart from the rest of the world. We also want to be found if we are looking for our next career opportunity.

The way to stand out in the crowd is to have relevant keywords and a strong branding of who you are and what you do. Lets take a look at these two items, Keywords and Branding and how we can do this within our profiles on LinkedIn. Note: these same approaches can be used with our resume and other social media sites.

Lets first look at keywords. These are the words that are specific to who you are. For example, if you are a Project Manager: PMI, PMP, SixSigma, Green Belt, Program Manager, MS Project, Visio and any other terms or software that are specific to your expertise would be the keywords that you may have.

Another example that we could look at is a Administrative Assistant, they would have a list of software and skills that they are experienced with: Microsoft Office (MS), Excel, Word, Power Point, Outlook, FrontPage, Shorthand, Event Planning... Notice that I listed out all the pieces of Microsoft Office, I did this to cover the many ways that someone might be searching for your skills.

So why are keywords so important? Think about you being in a position where you are needing to find a person that has a specific skill set. You might search for specific software that this individual would need to have experience with in order to fill the position.

Now, do a search to find yourself, are you in the top 10 results? Take a look at the people that are higher in the ranking than you. These people may be your competition. Look at their profiles, what put them higher in the results?

You may be asking yourself, what can I do to get higher in the ranking. Here is the key... Review your profile and use your keywords as many times as you can in your Summary and Experience sections of your profile. Use the Specialties section as a place to put all of your keywords. Look at job posts or descriptions for your position and incorporate the terms and phrases that are used.

Now that we have identified keywords and looked at how we can increase the relevance of our profiles, lets talk about branding a bit more. In a recent marketing networking group, we had a lengthy discussion on branding ourselves. What can we do to set ourselves apart froom the rest of the crowd?

Work on developing a unique statement that defines who you are. It needs to be catchy and memorable. One friend of mine brands himself as "the Joe Montana of Marketing". As you might have seen with my company I am branding my company as "NosalCentral, Your Central Source for Web Solutions".

Develop a statement that you can use to brand you as... who knows, the "Stretch Armstrong of Admin Assistants". Have fun with it and you will come up with something great.

Keywords and Branding are an important aspect to having a strong presence on LinkedIn. These same tips can also be used for your resume and other social media sites.

Keywords are also a vital part of a corporate presence on the internet. Want to know what search engines see your keywords look like? Let NosalCentral help you get on top of your keywords and ultimately be at the top of the search engine results to increase your ROI on your website.

NosalCentral is your keyword for SEO, SEM and Analysis of your web presence.

Introduction

Greetings from NosalCentral - Your Central Source For Web Solutions. My name is John J Nosal and I am the President of NosalCentral, LLC. a company that I started in July of 2009.

NosalCentral offers web consulting to small and medium sized business that are needing to increase the effectiveness of their web presence through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and Social Media Marketing. In addition we can help you learn to use analytic tools to monitor your traffic and to react accordingly.

My goal with this BLOG is to share information about my areas of expertise like social media, SEO and other things that I run across from time to time. This will include tips and tricks on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and hints and tricks that will help in Networking with others.

A lot of the tips that I share will be from the perspective of the job hunt since I am active with a career networking organization called CareerConnection (www.careerconnection.org) where I am a regular presenter on the topics of LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook and there use in the job hunt.

If you have questions or suggested topics please let me know, I would be happy to write about the things you would like to know more about.

Happy Networking,
John