If you’ve been following this blog, you may have noticed that I’m touching on a number of topics that essentially fall within three key categories:  small business, writing, search engine optimization – and they all are in pursuit of quality marketing for your company.  It’s the typical story of ‘tell what you know’. I’ve been in a wonderfully, euphoric experimental phase with my own marketing over the past few months and want to share what I’ve learned with you so that you might feel confident trying new things to make your company even more successful. If I can do it, you can do it.

SEO can be boring. If you're in the business of selling a product or service, you may not want to know the details of how to get your website to rank better with the search engines. So you either hire someone to deal with that, or you try and figure out how to do it yourself.  But some of this stuff can make your eyes glaze over.

Enter the SEO Rapper.  In a couple minutes, this clever guy gives you a lot of SEO tips to help you and he's done it in a fun way! Check out his videos to see what I mean. (Thanks go out to Dave Fleet who mentioned this on his website). I'm still giggling!

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Perhaps that is true for many people, but it really isn’t applicable for the search engines. The picture here suggests a family on vacation, visiting a huge historic castle on a sunny day. It might cause you to wonder who the people are (my family), why they are there (summer vacation), and where the castle is located (Trim Castle in Co. Meath, Ireland).

One of my faves, Nick Stamoulis from Brick Marketing, shares a great list of social factors that affect your SEO. Here is the list, but to read the whole post check it out here 

1) Quality of followers – having real, human followers connected with your Twitter profile is worth more in the long run than many ghost profiles.

Although it certainly is the most widely used search engine, Google does not stand alone.  To have a thorough understanding of search engine optimization and what sorts of options exist out there, our friends at seologic.com have compiled a detailed list of search engines. Although there have been changes to the list over time (one search engine buys out another etc.), there is still value in reviewing the list. You can learn about the multi-layered relationships that exist between search engines, how they create their rank-ordered listings of websites, and how to submit your website to each search engine.  Formulate your submissions strategy after you've studied the list.