God Bless the Families and Friends whose lives were changed on this tragic day!

I don’t drink Budweiser, but I LOVE the USA!!! These Clydesdale horses are one of God’s Great Gifts!

Hello Again!!

This week has been full of blessings! One major blessing in my life is David Walker and he has agreed to guest post on my blog! David is a professional blogger and internet marketer and he is enjoying the financial freedom that the internet can bring. He is actually “living the dream”!

Thank you David! I am honored!! Please leave your questions and/or comments below!

By now you’re probably familiar with blogging. If not, a blog in it’s simplest form is an online diary displayed in reverse chronological order (i.e. most recent entry first). A blog will generally be updated regularly and written in the first person rather than the third which is a common technique used on web pages.

Blogging for business is becoming very popular as companies, both online and bricks-and-mortar see the numerous benefits from doing so. Here, David Walker discusses five advantages of blogging for business.

1. Easy to Set Up

There are several blogging platforms available that are free of charge and easy to set up. WordPress is the primary example of an open source blogging platform that is free to use.

The good thing about WordPress is that there are various free themes (templates) available for you to change the way the website looks without being technical.

When you start to make money online and want something a little more bespoke, you can hire somebody to create a tailor-made design unique to your business.

The costs to create a theme are focused much more on the overall design than traditional web development costs which focus a lot on what goes on “under the hood”.

2. Quick and Easy to Keep Your Customers Updated

Writing a blog entry is quicker and easier than a web page update.

First of all you simply have to log into the administrator section of your blog and you’re ready to go. This means you can update the blog from anywhere with an internet connection.

Blog entries are written in the first person as an individual blogger, rather than as the ‘organisation’ and hence you don’t have to be as precise with the spelling and grammar although that doesn’t mean you should take a sloppy approach to blogging.

The blog should be the first place you tell customers about new products or developments.

3. Search Engine Friendly

Blogs in their nature are updated frequently and often rich in content.

It is for these reasons, search engines love blogs more than any other form of content delivery at the moment.

Blog posts are usually to the point and representative of what people are talking about whether it’s a news item, pop culture reference or product and another reason blog posts rank well in the search engines.

Blog posts are very “linkable”. Somebody may write an opinionated blog post and another blogger may disagree, write a blog post from an opposing view point and link to the first post as a point of reference.

These links will also help your overall search engine position.

4. Build a Relationship With Your Readers

When blogging you will blog as an individual on behalf of the company. This enables you to be more open and transparent in your opinions and thought than if you were simply “towing the company line”.

For this reason you readers (customers) will be able to associate with you as a human being. This will establish a much closer, stronger relationship and will extend the overall lifespan of a particular customer.

5. Get Opinions From Your Customers

Blogs are great to gage opinion from your customers.

Each post can allow readers to add comments, offer their opinions and contribute to the discussion.

This is a much more interactive way to deliver content than the traditional format of simply “broadcasting” your message on a static website giving your customers no way of responding.

The opinions of your customers can help you make educated business decisions in the future – at the very least you can find out the type of content they respond to and give more of it to them!

Hey Y’all!!

I have been so busy and it’s all good!!

First of all THANK YOU!! I won the traffic competition in the Marketing Startup Masterclass and am the very proud owner of my very own product which will be unveiled very soon!!

THAT’S some very exciting stuff and I owe it to all my readers and friends who stopped by and Tweeted, Stumbled, Facebooked and Digged!! I got it FREE! MY OWN PRODUCT!! Worth like a gazillion bucks!! YAY!

ANOTHER FREEBIE going on and I wanna WIN!!! This brand spankin’ new company WPStartups is having a Win a Free Website Sweepstakes and all you gotta do is enter!! How cool is that? Read about them right here!!  I could win a $500.00 blog?? Just by entering!! I’m THERE!! I have been on a roll lately…told you things were looking up! But like they say in the Lotto…you can’t win if you don’t play! So go on over and (READ THE DIRECTIONS!) get signed up and maybe you will be the winner of a brand new blog or website!!

To enter the contest you must Fan them on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/wpstartups or go to their website and enter through there. Contest ends July 31, 2010 and winner will be chosen August 01, 2010, blah blah blah all the info and fine print are over there, so I will let them tell it.

You know what else I got FREE?? I got SEO’d! YAY!

I met the most awesome SEO expert and got a chance to chat with him and get my blog SEO’d! It’s still a work in progress, but it is so cool to be able to talk to someone who understands WordPress like a pro AND Search Engine Optimization! Like when I ask him about this particular thingy in the WP Dashboard, and he knows exactly what I am talking about.

That’s cool.

His name is Alex Miranda and his company is PRUnderground.com. It’s a Social Media Press Release Company (the only one ran on WordPress!) and they are probably one of the only social media services company that will not only answer all your questions (YAY! even the stupid ones, cause I had A LOT!)…. but….they will also help you write SEO optimized press releases!! I know I don’t want to have to worry about SEO and just want to write what I want to write….but with an awesome company like PRUnderground helping you write your press releases AND SEO-ing it…how can you go wrong?? They also research your topic and find totally relevant photos, logos and videos, and it’s all included!! YAY!

So this big time SEO Expert and really cool guy called me and SEO’d my blog!! Just because…talk about paying it FORWARD!!

Some of you know I couldn’t even get on the first page of Google with my own name! Lisa Hernandez,  so we started with that.  I used to be on page 3 of Google so people looking for me wouldn’t find me unless they searched around. I am in competition with a News Gal! Well I am on page 1 now in the 6-7 spot!

We changed the title tags to more search engine friendly title tags. We also changed the meta tag description so that it matches my title tag keywords. Here are the basics steps we took :

1. Sign up with Google webmaster Tools: https://www.google.com/webmasters

2. Verify your website with Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/verification

3. Add a sitemap to the footer of your website:

Search engines crawl websites regularly. In order for them to crawl all the pages on your website you must install a sitemap on your footer. As of right now, I only have one page, so I haven’t done this yet!!

4. Once you install the sitemap if you are using WordPress install the Google XML Sitemap plug-in. You can just search for it in plugins.

5. Now add your website to Googles sitemap. Go to  https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/sitemap

6. You can also run all the tools available on Google Webmaster Tools to do a complete diagnostic of your website.

7. Add a unique title tag to each page. Try and think of search terms people would use to find your website. This is where keyword research comes in handy.

For example: Social Media Press Releases | Online Press Release Services | PRUnderground

See how they use long tailed keywords? If they had used just “press releases” that would never get picked up by Google to rank on the first page. Also notice the breaks in between the keywords. Do not use commas or dashes. Use those little lines on the backslash key.  This is another spot where I messed up!! At the end of the title tags I put the company name. (Me) So if you look at my title tags, you will see

Successful Internet Marketing | Easy Blog Setups | Lisa Hernandez Online

Lisa Hernandez Online isn’t first anymore. This is the right way to add title tags to your website. If you do it any other way you can affect your rankings

8. Make sure you use a Meta tag description using keywords from the title tag. Also take note that if you do not use a Meta Tag description Google now adds one by default.

9. There is this big misconception that we must use Meta Tag keywords. Apparently Google does not check for that anymore. You can have them on the site but they are not necessary. What’s most important is that you have keyword rich content throughout your website that matches your title tags and description for that particular page. Hence, the need for multiple pages. Still working on that!

There are tons more things you can do to get noticed by the search engines. I just learned this too! I need to use a press release service such as PRUnderground for back link purposes. The more reputable links you have coming to your website, the higher your Page Rank and the better your search engine visibility. We are working on that next!! I definitely need more quality backlinks.  (I didn’t even know what a backlink was until I talked to Alex!)

And there you are!! You’ve been SEO’d!!  I have more coming up because this blog post is getting really loooonnnng so stay tuned and see how my blog blossoms into an SEO’d killer blog that gets itself on the front page, time and time again!!

Now Alex uses special software to do all this analyzing and I will be researching that and letting you know all about it in the next few posts.

Whew! So what do you think? Have YOU been SEO’d? leave me comments and let me know. If you have any questions, let me know. I am sure Alex will stop by to answer them!

Take care and have an amazing day!!

Lisa~