How do you brand yourself with SEO?

Hello all!
I recently joined the community and I've met great people, found tons of useful information and tools I plan to begin using now. I'm a mortgage banker and plan on using SEO to blow my competition out the water. I plan on doing so by being the information highway. The man with the answers, news, and info available 24/7. I'm all about putting my business on auto control but yet still remaining personable. Here's where I'm at so far: (All insight and opinions are welcomed)

I have just created a wordpress blog (haven't provided any content yet). Which I plan on updating daily and sending the articles to ezine

I was posting ads on craigslist with the use of Easyad suite, until the updates ruined the program.

I have twitter, no facebook, and finally signed up for a youtube account (to lazy just viewing vids in the past).


I'm a networking guru, I'm doing speaking engagements and seminars, and everyone I'm speaking with I plan to point them to my blog. How can I take over I want to be the answer to where my customers, new customers, and competition can come for info??

It sounds like you're off to a good start. With regard to using SEO for branding, you could either brand your name or your company's name. (Branding both would obviously require twice the effort.) Since you want to remain "personable", I recommend that you brand your own name and establish yourself as an authority in your field.

As for how you can "take over", there's not enough time in a day to describe all of the ways. However, here's a tip that may help you drive traffic to your blog and "be the answer" to where your "customers, new customers, and competition can come for info"...

First, come up with a list of common questions that your target market has. You can use G00gle Suggest (now integrated into the homepage of G00gle) to get some ideas. Do some keyword research as well.

When you have your list of questions and longtail keywords, head over to G00gle Alerts (you'll need a gmai1 account to use this service):


Enter your first longtail keyword phrase (if it's a question, don't include the question mark). In the "Type" dropdown, select "Blogs". In the "How often" dropdown, select "as-it-happens". Then enter your email address and create the alert. Do this for every question or keyword that you want to monitor.

Note: You could also select "Comprehensive" instead of "Blogs", but I recommend that you choose the blog option because whenever someone asks a question on a blog or makes a post that deals with a question on your list, you will be alerted by email when it gets published. Then you can go over to that blog and post a comment with a link back to YOUR blog. It helps to be the first one to make a comment so that the majority of people who read the post will see your comment, thereby increasing your potential exposure. If you make a useful contribution to the discussion, people will take notice, and you'll start seeing traffic to your blog.

Yet another way to get traffic from other people's blogs is to compile a list of blogs in your field, preferably blogs where the blogger sends out an email whenever a new post is added. Subscribe via email and/or RSS, and when there's a new post, go there quickly and make an intelligent comment (and hyperlink your name to your blog -- people will click on it out of curiosity, especially if you say something noteworthy in your comment).

Get a Blog to Appear at the Top of Searches


1. Update your blog - daily. So to begin - you must be serious about your blog. Update it at least 3-4 times a week, preferably once a day.

2. Write clean, precise, and accurately. This includes grammar, spelling, and punctuation. The next step is very important: write clean, precise, and accurate blogs. How do you do that? You learned this in junior high - use correct grammar, spelling, punctuation etc, but go beyond that - create your own voice, one that commands respect and one people will turn to for whatever it is that you provide.


3. Provide a consistent "product or service" for your audience that they want to come back to. That leads me to the next step: provide something for your audience. It can be entertainment, advice, riddles, jokes, laughs, just about anything - but be consistent. If you're predominantly positive, then one day you spew negativity and rant about something, be aware that you might be turning off regular readers of your blog.

4. Promotion! How do you promote your blog? Link your blog to as many sites and blogs as you can. Search engines, like Google, track this networking through an always changing, mathematical algorithm. So it's simple, post comments on other sites and blogs and sign off with your blogs 'address'. Contact site administrators and ask to post a link to your blog on their site (this will happen more frequently if your blog is relevant, and useful!). Part of promotion is registering your site with search engines. It may take some time once you register for the search engine ‘people' to review your site or blog, but once they have, you will start appearing on search results. They look for keywords, relevance, etc. The two biggest search engines are Google and Yahoo.


5. Keywords: use popular keywords that are relevant and can be used in the context of your article. Use them often in your article, and in the title of your blog! This is somewhat complicated because people use keywords to search for what they need differently. Some keywords are searched for more often than others. Only use keywords in the context of your article, and make sure they are relevant, or else you can be ‘black-listed' by search engines for spamming. With that in mind, use the keywords frequently in your article. Let's say my keyword is " Mortgage Guru", use it about 10 times throughout the article you write, but again, use it only in context and not just to use it. How do keywords help? Search engines scan your article for these keywords. The more often you have used them, and the more relevant they are, the more they appear on searches. Remember, you appear at the top of search results because advertisers are willing to pay the search engine for advertising on your site. If it's not relevant, or it's a worthless laundry list of keywords, you'll be spotted right away. And finally, use these keywords in the title of your blog entry!

6. Use photos! If someone is searching for a photo, and your blog has keywords from their search, your photo will come up in the search. If they are interested in the photo, they may click on it to enlarge it or get more information. If they do this, and if they are searching using Google or Yahoo, then they will get taken directly to your blog. Free promotion

195471 and Starlogic thank you for your advice. I will put it to use and update the community on my progress. My industry is changes daily as so many non producers are forced to leave, and now is the time to capitalize and secure myself as a top industry expert. For those in the service industry, especially financial services branding yourself is the answer.

Happy Holidays!
dfitz

195471 - I like the google alerts idea! thanks

Better get as many backlinks from inside real blog posts as possible, with smart anchor text of the backlinks - thus you will get Google page 1 and this is the best SEO branding you need (I guess)

dfitz said:

Hello all!
I recently joined the community and I've met great people, found tons of useful information and tools I plan to begin using now. I'm a mortgage banker and plan on using SEO to blow my competition out the water. I plan on doing so by being the information highway. The man with the answers, news, and info available 24/7. I'm all about putting my business on auto control but yet still remaining personable. Here's where I'm at so far: (All insight and opinions are welcomed)

I have just created a wordpress blog (haven't provided any content yet). Which I plan on updating daily and sending the articles to ezine

I was posting ads on craigslist with the use of Easyad suite, until the updates ruined the program.

I have twitter, no facebook, and finally signed up for a youtube account (to lazy just viewing vids in the past).


I'm a networking guru, I'm doing speaking engagements and seminars, and everyone I'm speaking with I plan to point them to my blog. How can I take over I want to be the answer to where my customers, new customers, and competition can come for info??

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