• Facebook can be found at http://www.facebook.com

Action Steps from this Video

1. Not many steps to complete here, just go to the next video

Market My Website – RULE # 1 – Don’t break the rules! I am asked all the time, “how do I market my website and get it found by the Search Engines?” That is a difficult answer to give in less than 5 minutes, but I usually offer to analyze their site to give them some pointers. Most often, after analyzing a web site for possible reasons they are not winning in the Search Engine rankings, it is because they are breaking the rules the moment the game gets started. Unless you start out by following the rules, you simply won’t be successful in marketing your web site. Marketing on the web is just like football Say you are watching a football game and one of the players on the defense keeps jumping off-sides and tackling the QB prior to him saying “hike.” After the third or fourth time of doing this, the referees would boot him out of the game, the fans would be tired of it, and certainly the other players would be tired of it.

• In the web site world, the referees are the Search Engines. They try to keep the game in play, they penalize people for breaking the rules. They also have laid out all of the rules well in advance for us.
• The players are the other web masters and web site owners. If they are playing by the rules, they take great offense to the sites that don’t.
• The fans are the web surfers. They want a good game, fair search results and relevant information.

Below, you will find the rules as laid out by Google. Here are Google’s Quality Guidelines. They lay out all of the rules you need to follow in your web site design.

1. Cloaking – 15 yard (page) penalty – Second Down: Google directs us to not deceive our users by presenting different content to search engines than to them, which is referred to as “cloaking.” (read more…)
2. Tricking – 30 yard (page) penalty – Third Down: Google directs us not to try to trick them by hiding stuff like invisable text, links, redirects, forwards, or etc. They say to ask youself these questions, “Would I do this if search engines did not exist.” If you are just doing it to rank well on the search engines, don’t. It is against the rules.
3. Bad Linking – 10 yard (page) penalty – Still Third Down: Google recommends that we not participate in link schemes. The web is built off of the principle of links adding weight to or validity to a site. Link farms, schemes, and perhaps even paid link sites in the future are given negative weight.
4. Illegal equipment – 20 yard penalty – Fourth Down: Google says that it is against their terms of service to use computer programs to submit pages, check rankings or analyze anything. They specifically name WebPositionGold as one that is unauthorized.
5. Loaded pages – Irrelevant Keywords – 10 yards: Pages that are loaded with keywords rather than content are worthless and will be penalized by Google.
6. Too many pages on the field – 15 yards: We are directed to not create multiple pages, subdomains or domains with substantially duplicate content. You might cause both sites to be removed from the listings.
7. Trojans – Virus – Badware – 100 yards: You should have sand poured into your computer. If you participate in this practice, you should have fine grain sand poured into your hard drive. More
8. Doorway pages – affiliate pages – no yards gained: You won’t be penalized so to speak for using one of these cookie cutter programs where you pay a fee and you have your own website. Those pages are simply not going to every make Google’s index. They sort of fall under the duplicate content area, but they add no substantial content to the web, therefore Google ignores them. More

Does it mean you can’t participate in affiliate programs. Certianly not. But pages and sites must contribute something to the internet. For example, a gardening tips site that happens to have affiliate links on it is totally fine.

Don’t Break Google’s Rules Action Steps

1. Make sure you are not hurting your site rankings by breaking Google’s rules. If you are, you MUST change what you are doing. Google can and will blacklist sites and not allow them to show up in their index.
2. Go to the next video on the Google Local business Center

In a recent interview in Professional Photographer magazine, Gary gives us 21 steps to building your brand.

1. Identify your passion – If you aren’t doing what you love to do then you probably are not as happy as you could be.
2. Make sure you can think of at least 50 blog topics – Very important to getting people to follow what you are doing.
3. Answer these questions:
   • Am I sure that I correctly defined my passion?
   • Can I talk about my passion better than anyone else?
4. Name your personal brand.  Have a clear idea of who you are – “The connoisseur of cookware” – “the no BS real-estate-agent”
5. Buy your name on Godaddy – Get the .com and the .tv
6. Choose how you are going to communicate with your audience – video, audio or the written word
7. Start a WordPress or Tumblr account
8. Hire a designer for your site
9. Include a Facebook connect link, call-to-action buttons, share functions, and a button that invites people to do business with you.  Place these in a prominent place on your blog.
10. Create a Facebook Fan page
11. Sign up for a Ping.fm or TubeMogul account and select which platforms to which you want to distribute your content.  Twitter and Facebook are necessary and you can select others as you like.
12. Post your content
13. Start creating community by leaving comments on other people’s blogs and forums and replying to comments to your own comment.
14. Use Twitter Search to find as many people as possible talking about your topic, and begin communicating with them.
15. Use Google Blogsearch to find more blogs that are relevant to your subject.
16. Join as many active Facebook fan pages and groups relating to your blog topic as possible
17. Repeat steps 12-16 over and over and over and over and over.
18. Do it again
19. and again
20. When you feel that your personal brand has gained sufficient attention and stickiness, start reaching out to advertisers and begin monetizing.
21. Enjoy the ride.

1. Light Rain Images has show up on Bing on page three (#25) for the phrase Arizona Wedding Photographer.  After not being ranked at all last week, we changed his home page a bit and now he is showing up on page three of Bing.  The rankings have only begun…
2. Joey Chandler Photography made it to the number one spot on Google for San Francisco Child Portraits.   Ahhh yeah!  There are too many rankings for Joey’s site to list, but he has moved to page two for 5 different keyword sets, page three for 3 others and is killing it on Yahoo! now.  Great work Joey!
3. Studio Styles. Look who showed up on Yahoo, Bing and Google.  For several terms, Studio Styles has come onto the scene.  There are two that I am most excited about is the term “Learn Wedding Photography” on page 7 of Google at position # 64 and the other is “Learn Photography Lighting” at position # 28 on Google (page 3)
   
4. Aaron Eye Photography is on page 6 on Yahoo for the term, “San Bernardino Photographer”  Now, we really need to break into the first 10 pages for “Los Angeles Wedding Photographer“  Coming soon…
5. Tobin Photography – Coming in on page 5 at position # 42 on Google for the term “Santa Barbara Wedding Photographer” is Tobin Photography.  He has moved up over 11 spots in the last two weeks.
6. Tamara’s Photo just moved onto page three of Google for “Denver Photographer“  She is moving on up!

Being number one on Google, the largest and busiest search engine on the planet, has huge benefits for businesses fortunate enough to rank in that coveted position.  Let me point out just a few.

1. Instant credibility – Think about it.  When you search for something, which listings do you click?  The top three on the search engines get the most traffic by far and away.  We tend to trust these listings more because Google has ranked them there.    It is like Google was our filter of sorts.  We rely on the search engines to give us the “best” results.  Being number one means in our minds that they are the best.Who is number one in football right now?  The New Orleans Saints.   Instantly we know.  Are they the best team?  They were that day.  But no one is even allowed to argue that they are not the best until next year.  Fast forward to next year, there may be a better prepared team who just creams them.  The same thing can happen on Google
2. Traffic Jam – The top spots on Google gets the most traffic for it’s given search terms.  Let me illustrate the point.  A quick search for “Denver Photographer” reveals the below listing (remember, your Google server may give you different results, but it won’t matter for this example)  Listed beside them are their traffic rankings.
   1. Julie Harris Photo Com – She is ranked at number 139,000 in traffic in the US with 32% of traffic coming from searches.

   Below Julie, coming in at number ten right now is Denver Photographer Kelli Nixon (my wife’s site that I just recently started marketing for Denver)  Kelli’s site comes in at 574,000 or over 450,000 rankings behind Julie’s site.

   Remember, these are rankings based on traffic.  So, Julie’s site is 450,000 (can you say half a million spots) in front of Kelli and they both are in the top ten.  Number one on Google has it’s benefits.

3. Mo’ Money, Mo’ Money, Mo’ Money – I submit to you that a business that ranks number on on Google, like in the above example, makes approximately 5-10 times more money than the number 10 ranked company.  Traffic is a numbers game.  If 100 people see your site, and one person responds by filling in a contact form or buying something, then you are having a 1% response rate.

   Kelli’s site currently receives 1,300 hits per month and with a 1% response rate, she gets 13-15 contacts monthly for weddings and portrait clients.  Julie’s site, however, receives about 8000-10000 hits monthly.  Using the same 1% response rate, means that she receives 80-100 requests monthly.  If Kelli and Julie were priced exactly the same, then assuming a similar “closing ratio” Julie would make over 8 times more than Kelli.

4. Cost Savings - Being ranked in the organic or free section of Google means that your “money ain’t for nothing and your clicks for free”  Sorry for the 80s song reference.  Your clicks are free.  The traffic is something that you DO NOT pay for.  This stands in stark contrast to the Adwords section on the right side of the Google search results page where you may pay $300 for 100 clicks (at $3 per click) or more.  The company who is number one on Google gets to save the money they would have had to spend on advertising because they have plenty of contacts coming in without the advertising.
5. Good Googley Goo – Google ranks sites based on over two hundred different measures.  No one can accurately say what all of those measures are, but we know that traffic is certainly one of them.  So the snowball effect occurs for the number one position holders.  The more traffic they get, the harder it is to knock them off of their position.

Joining Smart Cabbage will open up a world of videos to you to teach you how to get ranked on the search engines like Google.  All of our methods are “white hat” and following our advice will not ever get you banned from the index.  Join now and start ranking higher.

Do we guarantee your rankings?  Nope and anyone who says that they can guarantee that for you is lying.  However, if you follow our methods, you will rank higher.  As a matter of fact, if you follow our methods, there is a very good chance that you could see yourself at number one on Google.

Find out how to get ranked on the search engines

Optimizing your site for local search is a great way to generate additional traffic.  This traffic can convert into leads and ultimately into a client.  And clients mean money.  Often, companies will call or spam (eh hum email) me and tell me how they can guarantee that I will be number on on Google and in the local searches.  They can’t and they won’t.  They will, however gladly take my hard-earned money.

This tutorial will teach you exactly how to begin optimizing your own site for the local search engines and directories.  We give you everything you need to learn what it takes to get listed and ranked in the local searches.