My New Friend Alexa
About two weeks ago I discovered the Alexa Traffic Rank widget, which you can download for free and insert into your toolbar. It looks like this once it’s installed:
This little guy tells you how highly a particular blog is ranked in a given country. If you’re over 500,000 in the US, you’re doing pretty well. If you’re over 100,000, you’re doing exceptionally well.
When I installed it, I was disheartened to discover that the site for my medical practice was in the 800,000 range, and my author blog was so far down the list that it wasn’t even ranked at all.
The Magic of SEO!
I spent most of last week at a medical conference in Oakland, CA (which, by the way, is a pit… this was the view from the window of my $180/night hotel!!!)
Anyway, while I was there, I learned a heck of a lot of good stuff, but while I was in lectures that didn’t require as much attention I went through all my old blogs on both websites. I started implementing all the SEO marketing stuff I already knew how to do but had gotten lazy about.
Here’s what I did (but I’m changing my pronouns to second person in case you want to follow this yourself!)
1) Sign in to your WordPress and pick the blog you want to optimize.
2) Scroll down to the section labeled “WordPress SEO by Yoast.” (I don’t know who Yoast is.)
3) Choose a single word as the keyword, or two words at the most, and try to think of the kind of keywords people might type in on a Google search. (You can actually search for those most often searched if you have a Google Adwords account.) The keywords should NOT contain a filler (like “the” or “at”) and the keyword should also appear in the title of the blog, in at least one of the headers, and in the body of the blog. If it doesn’t appear in the first line or two of the body of the blog, you should also type in a “meta description” that contains the keyword (s).
4) If your blog doesn’t yet have an image associated with it, go find one on a Google Image search. (Try to pick one that doesn’t look like it’s likely to have copyright issues…) Insert it into the post. Posts with images rank higher on Google.
5) Click update.
After all this, ideally you want a bunch of little green “yeses” under Focus Keyword, like this:
Pinterest for Business Marketing!
Once you’ve done this, log in to your Pinterest business account (to follow me on Pinterest, go here). Go back to each newly search engine optimized (SEO) blog page, and pin the picture you added from Google to one of your boards. When you do this, the image will link back to the original blog. This is important because Google is like a popularity contest… the more people out there are linking to your blog, the higher it goes on searches.
To encourage people to click on said images, include the blog title as a description under the pin (or if that’s not enough, put a little blurb on what the blog is about).
Buffer for Twitter Marketing!
THEN, go back and read through your old blogs. Sign up for Buffer if you haven’t already (it’s a great auto-tweeting solution for people who don’t have time to tweet all day.) Put little sound bites from each blog, along with the URL where they came from, into the auto-tweet queue. (To follow me on Twitter, click here!)
Alexa Rank A Week Later?
It took a lot of time, and if I had been seeing patients and running my practice like usual instead of at a conference, there’s no way I would have had the time to do all this. But only a week after implementing these strategies, my Alexa rank climbed from 800,000 for my doctor site and unranked for this site, to the 290,000 range for both sites! (I’m still a little skeptical, to the point of awe, to be honest. I feel like there has to be a catch somewhere, or somehow it isn’t what it looks like.) Time consuming, but a really simple solution!
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