Getting over the learning curve — slowly but surely

I finally feel like I’m getting over the initial learning curve. I still have fights with some of my keywords, but I’m getting the hang of where to place them on the page. No wonder the average person starting out without guidance can’t get found on the search engines! The search engine optimization rules aren’t hard, but they can be confusing.

Just the other day I was working on one of my pages and my faithful Analyze! button, included in my web design package, almost drove me to drink. I wrote my initial paragraph for the page and I was told that my “keyword didn’t appear enough in the first 500 characters. “

So, I reworded my paragraph. I thought it was perfect. I was quite proud of my work. So I clicked Analyze! again and was told that now my keyword appeared too many times in the first 500 characters! AAAAAAAAH!

I went through this at least three additional times before I got it right. Talk about sweat and tears going into a page … But that just made me more thankful that I do have the ability to Analyze! each page before it’s published. Why? Because once I get it right I know that I have created something that the search engines will love.

If you’d like to learn more about how to make your words sell, feel free to download the free ebook that will get you started to Search Engine Optimization heaven.

As for me, back to creating more content. Keep your fingers crossed — I might actually get it right the first time!

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SBI Week 2 — My Home Page

Well it’s been a busy week learning how to build up my website. I finally “passed inspection” and was able to setup my home page. Before I tell you about my home page trials, let me tell you about a few things I’ve learned about the internet through this journey.

I’ve helped people build their websites before. I’ve put in the text, put the graphics together and thought I’d done a good job. My apologies to all of those I “helped”. Like most people I thought that you basically set up your shop window and waited for the customers to run — not walk — into the business and become a lasting customer.

Well, since that didn’t happen (I guess the throngs got lost!) and I started trying to learn all about SEO and the ways to get noticed by the Search Engines and things like that. I found that all to be a bit confusing, but after an intensive 7 days of information and training I at least now have an inkling of a clue.

SBI makes sure that you do lots of research into your website subject before they even let you near the actual creation process. Being Blue this is a wonderful asset for me. It is so easy to get distracted and lose track of what is the most important part of having a website — the content.
The pretty pictures are nice, but they don’t drive traffic to your website; interesting content does.

So, I was finally “allowed” to put my words on the internet. Yipee! I thought I could shoot off some quick copy and tweak it at another time. Nope, wrong again! SBI has a built in “test” that you take before you can actually build the page. Building the page, for those of you who aren’t familiar with SBI, means that your page can go live into the worldwide web. Anyway, suffice it to say that my initial offerings met with strong resistance, to say the least.

I started with the idea that it would take me about 30 minutes to put my introduction together, but in reality it took me over two hours! But by the time I finished this little blurb I understood where keywords need to be placed in order to make the search engine spiders happy and many other tidbits.

This next week I’ll be putting together more pages for my website. And I’m sure that I’ll be learning lots more before this journey is through. One thing is certain — I’ll be a much better writer by the time this website is done!

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