I went to Raincamp Boston on Monday. I highly recommend that everyone go to the one in their area. Sure, it’s Real Estate specific but I learned so much there. Ben Kinney is so knowledgeable about how to use social media to get business. Although my brain was fried at the end of the day, Ben gave us many ideas that could be implemented immediately. If you want your site to come up when people are searching for what you sell, then you should implement these strategies too.

The first thing I did when I got home is went to my site and added titles and descriptions to every page. My site is built on the WordPress platform which gives my site an advantage because many SEO (search engine optimization) strategies are already built into it, and the ones that aren’t built-in are easy to add. Not that you can’t SEO a site built in HTML – but because WordPress is actually a blog, it has the advantage of built-in changing content. It’s less work for me to maintain it.

I then added titles to all the links in my pages – not any titles. I used keywords. When you create links here on ActiveRain, they ask you for a title. The title is not the word that you are linking, it’s the word that you believe people will type into a search engine so that your post pops up first.

Oh, most important about keywords, when choosing a keyword, try to get very specific: ie if you are writing about Worcester real estate, using the keywords (key-phrase) “WordPress blogs” is probably too broad and there’s too much competition. They may type in “how to SEO my blog” though. That is called The Long Tail, just to give you the technical term.

Now, on each page and when writing a blog post you should use your Long tail key-phrase at the beginning (in the title) and also at the end of each article, then once or twice in the middle of the article. Ben suggests 2-3 times for every 100 words that you write. A typical blog post is 300-500 words long. Any more often would be considered spamming the search engines.

Of course the most important SEO strategy is to write good content. Write for your reader first, the search engines second.

Another tip you can implement easily is to get other sites linking to yours. I use blogsearch.google.com to find other blogs to comment on. Since I am a WordPress expert, I look for blogs that write about WordPress. Oh, do not leave your URL (web address) in the post. WordPress is set up so that your name is linked to your site automatically. Leaving your URL is considered spam in the outside world.

I can go on and on with more SEO Strategies that you can implement right now, but I don’t want to leave you in overwhelm so I’ll save some strategies for later posts.

My code looks like this:

<title>

Visions Virtual Assistance </title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Website maintenance, webpage design, WordPress installation, blog theme customization, blog maintenance, email template creation, ezine/newsletter management, PHP Web form creation…” />

When someone does a search for a virtual assistant on Google, this is what they will see when they come to my site:

Visions Virtual Assistance Website maintenance, webpage design, WordPress installation, blog theme customization, blog maintenance, email template creation, ezine/newsletter management, PHP Web form creation… www.visionsvirtualassistance.com/ – 12k dvd quality the kings speech ipod – Cached – Similar pages filmul the tourist download – Note this

You see the title, Visions Virtual Assistance. And the description, which is just what I have above.

Try your own. Type in site:www.your-url.com and you will see all the cached pages of your site. More importantly, you will see the page title and description that you are using right now. Does it correctly reflect what each page is about? If not, change it. Or have your web person change it.

Each page of your site should have it’s own title and description since each page has different information. Then the next time Google comes crawling through they will pick up the new information.

So, what will happen if you don’t have any description – Google will grab the first few bits of text on your site and use that.