In this week's website review, I'll show you an example of how Google reads words on your website and how you can see those words for yourself. I'll also show you why you should host your blog within your own website instead of using an outside service, I'll even show you screen shots of how Google views a website when the blog is hosted outside.
It all starts with a Google search for "jewelers flagstaff az." According to these results, there are not many jewelers n Flagstaff:
For this week's #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to a Daily Golden Nugget that's in desperate need of updating, specifically what I wrote about the Jewelry Information Center, otherwise known as the JIC. JIC was created by Jewelers of America as a consumer education service. The jic.org website commonly posted current jewelry trends and was a great inspiration resource ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Last month, I spent a lot of time analyzing the keyword data I collected during the 2015 holiday season. The information that surfaced was just the tip of the iceberg that I had, but it would take months to go through and write about it all, so I limited my analysis to the list this list:
Don't want to read? This week you can also watch the video recording of this review here!
This is the #FridayFlopFix website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. This week I've randomly chosen Santa Clarita, CA as the city to search for my review candidate. When I searched Google for the phrase "jewelers Santa Clarita, CA," I saw these three Google business listings:
In this #ThrowbackThursday nugget edition, I'm jumping back to a simple one from October 2010 about finding blogging topics.
Blogging has become the primary way of generating content for your website that search engines then use to better understand what your website is all about so they can correctly match you with the people searching for... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the weekly website review where I choose a random retail jeweler and compare their website and online identity to what is commonly known about search engine optimization, online marketing, and customer usefulness.
I started this week's review with the Google search "jewelers athens oh" and saw these results:
In this edition of Throwback Thursday, I'm jumping back to September 2011 and the topic of Article Spinning.
To understand what Article Spinning is you must first understand the importance of having a blog on your website. My avid followers will already know that I'm all about the blogging. High value blogging content... High value blog content that you post on your main website!
I'm not sure if it's just me or general public awareness, but I feel that the subject of blogging has been a hot topic for the last two months. I think it started as a snowball effect because of this post where Robinson Meyer expla... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This Daily Golden Nugget is my 1,276th in a row. When I started this blogging journey nearly 5 years ago, I never expected where it would take me. Truthfully, every blogger begins their writing journey for personal reasons and we never know where we will end up.
Blogging is huge. The word blog has become the general term to represent all types of content creation that involves written words. When I started writing these Nuggets, I envisioned them only as email newsletters that would be archived online. I... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Blogging has passed through various evolutions in the years since its original inception in 1994. The first blogs were created to help people keep their friends up to date with what they were doing. Services like Open Diary, Slashdot, and LiveJournal we... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
A jeweler wrote to me the other day asking for help with their Mother's Day contest promotion. The promotion is being advertised through the local papers but the contest takes place through their website. To enter the contest you need to fill out the online form and agree to sign up for their newsletter.
Because the contest is centered around creating a custom design, this jeweler wants to send out a series of additional custom design em... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I received an interesting question the other day from Suzie, a jewelry designer. Well, her name wasn't actually Suzie, but let's just say that it was so it makes this story easier to tell.
For several years, Suzie had an Etsy account where she sold a line of baby toe ring jewelry. This was her fist line of jewelry before she started making gemstone jewelry necklaces. Realizing how different these two lines of jewelry are, instead of using Etsy to sell the necklaces, she opened an e-com... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Throwback Thursday is the name of a weekly internet trend where participants repost photos from the past. This is especially popular on Instagram where users tag their photos with the #TBT hashtag.
Truthfully, you can "throwback" anything that happened in the past. It could be a social media post, a photo, a blog post, or yes, even a Daily Golden Nugget!
Honestly, this is my first participation in a TBT, but what the heck; let's do it with a slightly different spin... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Every week, I receive at least one question from my readers through Facebook, Twitter, comments on jwag.biz, and even direct emails. Sometimes I reply privately, but sometimes I use those questions as source material for future Nuggets, like this one.
Here's a question that arrived via email about a week or so ago:
Regarding Blogging... Can post-dating a blog that you "should've" written months ago help you now if you date it the date from before (i.e. it's Feb and... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
What's your favorite type of content? Given that content includes written articles, videos, podcasts, photography, and every other type of creative digital experience. There's a labor cost associated with creating a digital experience for your customers, a cost that's not easily understood by small business owners.
There's also a competing value of the content that swings between the long term value to attract quality customers and the short term value of getting a lot of attention. S... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
What is the real value of the content you produce? Should you be creating your own content or hiring someone to do it for you? What about content curation?
This is part 2 of my in-depth answers to those questions. I've identified 6 levels of content and list them here in order of their most valuable to least valuable:
1. Business Owner Creates Content 2. Business Owner Curates Content 3. Business Owner Socially Engages 4. Hire Content Creator or... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
For the past several years, Google has been telling website owners to write quality content for their website in order to rank higher in search results and to satisfy customers. This directive of theirs has spawned an entire industry of freelance writers that produce content just to satisfy Google's directions.
The optimist in me wants to say that Google has spurred the creation of a new generation of writers, but the pessimist in me looks at the type of content that's generally created and sighs in discon... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
There have been a few special number nuggets so far, like the 100, 200, 404, the 505, the 970, 1000, and now the 1099. What's so special about 1099? Well in the United States, that isn't just a number; it's also the tax form you give to your freelancers and subcontractors at the end of every year instead of a W2.
Although the US employment rules say you should hire employees and put them on payroll, there are times when you might want to only hir... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Content creation is a continual task for every website owner. It can also be a very challenging task to come up with new content all the time without suffering from mental burnout or writer's block. That burnout will have a bad effect on your long term SEO, so it needs to be prevented.
One way to prevent content creation burnout is to spread the task around between several employees on your sales staff. Remember that website content isn't just blog posts. Content... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This week I've been explaining the differences between Technical SEO,On-Site SEO, and Off-Site SEO.
While the technical aspects of search engine optimization include a lot of analysis and analytical thinking, the on-site optimization requires a creative flair for writing, photography, and customer satisfaction that... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's not easy to beat writer's block once you have it. You can sit for seemingly an eternity trying to find the right words. Oftentimes, you might even feel completely defeated.
Thankfully, I learned how to beat my own writer's block a few years ago. This is my 1,028th blog post and I would never have gotten past 100 if I didn't figure out how to solve that problem.
Here are my 2 secrets to preventing my own writer's block:
Every blogger believes that they have something great to say in their blog and people will beat a path to their website to read it. This is part of the allure of blog writing, but it's also one of the fallacies that bloggers lament over once they realize it.
If you're going to start a blog to get famous, you're probably starting in the wrong place. Here are some of the realities I've learned about a blog reading audience:
Blog writing can be fun, educational, rewarding, and a boon for your business over the long term. If you're blogging just for the fun of it, then you might not spend the extra time to edit each blog post before publishing it. A quick read through for spelling mistakes and simple grammatical corrections might be all that's necessary.
Those of you blogging for business should take a slightly more professional approach to your blogging and spend a little more time on the editing proces... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The process of writing a blog post is more involved than just coming up with an idea and typing it out. Writing has its own set of interesting experiences which were holding me back from my writing creativity until I started to identify them.
What I've itemized below are 12 things that I discovered about the writing process and how to deal with them. Your own writing experiences might differ, but you won't know until you start blogging on your own.
Good ideas happen at the least opportune moments. When driving, while walking, brushing your teeth, watching TV, and of course the worst time is when you are just drifting off to sleep. You'll never remember that idea in the morning.
After writing more than 1000 blog posts, I came up with a few thoughts of my own for how to make sure I don't forget a good blogging idea when it comes to me.
Here they are:
Blogging ideas will come whenever they want to come to you. You need to fig... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Blogging is a method of online marketing, but it also has many other personal and business benefits. When I started blogging 4 years ago, it was partially because jWAG was a paid subscription education service and partially because I honestly just had the desire to do it. About a year later, it was decided to deactivate the subscription portal and turn jWAG into a philanthropic endeavor.
Since I started blogging on July 26, 2010, I've written 1006 Daily Golden Nuggets. This is my 1007th. I'm sure an accomplishment like this is child's play for a daily journalist who is paid to write several news articles in a single day, but I'm not a trained journalist and I don't have an English or Communications degree. I started as a lowly tech geek who suffered from a mild case of dyslexia with degrees in Computer Engineering and Applied Mathematics.
In the past, I've expressed my point of view that Google+ seemed to be a more intellectually stimulating social network than its direct competitor, Facebook.
Many users in the early days of Google+ were more technical and built relationships with other technically savvy people. Those relationships were built through +1s and thoughtful commenting on social posts. There were few internet memes and jokes shared on Google+ in the early days.
But that's changed now that the social network has matured ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
There are so many factors that need to be assessed when evaluating the success or failure of your website. So many website owners are stuck worrying about ranking in the search engines instead of paying attention to making the current customer traffic happy.
After all, happy customer traffic should reflect somehow to the overall money that you make in business.
There are 4 potential ways to measure how happy your website visitors are: 1. Number of repeat visitors 2. Number of pages they look at 3. How much total time the... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Every SEO professional will tell you that the process of search engine optimization is learned through experimentation, trial and error, and fortuitous discovery. Indeed, it's that same process that allows me to find many of the Daily Golden Nuggets I write about.
On the other hand, I have found that time and time again Google actually tells us exactly what they want us to do through their countless blogs, help videos, and support forums. But they don't tell us exactly; instead they are more like a psycholog... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I'd like to propose this question: What's the best way to use your blog?
Before that can be answered, you need to understand some of the different pages on your website and how you might be using your website currently.
Each webpage serves different functions; here are 4 examples:
* A home page is the point of first impression for most people who visit you. Customers usually don't get past ugly home pages unless you provide a niche need.
* Product catalogs show the world what you sell. This is essential for a retail store.
About 4 weeks ago I received and email from a jewelry store that wanted to know why they weren't ranking for the phrase "gold buying." The store's website didn't appear in the search results when the owner of the store did a Google search for that phrase along with their town name, and he wanted to be in the results.
Today's Daily Golden Nugget explains what I set up for that store, and the results we already see after only 3 weeks. Use this case study as a blueprint for your own efforts.
This particular jeweler had 60 pages on their website and a pr... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
You have traveled the world, bought diamonds in Antwerp, have taken thousands of photographs during visits to diamond mines in Africa, won awards for your custom jewelry designs, and have a wealth of knowledge spanning back through all your years as a jeweler. Your career has been fulfilling and enjoyable.
It's too bad no one know about you.
Why not? Because you don't make time to blog about your experiences as a jeweler, about the trips you've taken to benefit customers, about the unique designs you've created that are now treasured family heirlooms, or about the happy couples that you've helped.
Blogging is probably the most important method of achieving "people optimization" for your website instead of search engine optimization, but it takes time. According to Wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute it takes one m... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today, once again I'd like to hold your virtual hand as I lead you through another exercise on how to use someone else's blog as the creative spark for your own.
To start, you have to find yourself a few fashion blog websites. You could simply search Google for "jewelry fashion blogs" and look through the results.
What you'll find is that an overwhelming number of them are very photo-centric with very little commentary on the photos. Many of them will also be from your competitors, or from sites that sell the jewelry that's being blogged about. You don't want that type of site, because that's what you are trying to accomplish for yourself.
I found this blog from the South Florida Sun Sentinel that will work well for this example: http://blogs.sun-sentinel.com/features_fashion/2012/06/jewelry-trends-for-the-fall-... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Over the past few weeks we were trying to get a better understanding of how Google will translate a long tail search query into a valuable SERP for users. Specifically, we were testing queries that started with this:
"What is the ________"
Have you ever tried a search query starting with either of those 3 words? Google understands that this query search is for information; therefore they try to return some type of quality educational article before any potential e-commerce site.
Google doesn't have an all-powerful artificial intelligence that would be able to directly return an answer to a question. They have to rely on mathematically matching a search phrase to phrases found on web pages. Other than the mathematical word matching, they also compare the results to more than 300 other ranking factors to give you th... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Are you aware of all the little nuances of Internet Marketing that could improve the conversion rates from your blog site to the main area of your site where you make money?
Internet Marketing is a learned skill. Even with many years of experience in traditional media marketing, you couldn't possibly know the how's and why's of Internet Marketing. We're giving you a few easy ones below.
By now, you should have an established blog set up. We hope you have it on your own website rather than a Blogger or WordPress account. Here are some tactics that you should be employing in each of your blog posts.
1. Your main headline needs to be the largest words on the page. 2. You should break up your blog entry into subsections with a sub-heading for each. 3. Headings and sub-headings should be in a Sans Serif font. Good ch... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
"...articles are easy to follow and seem to have information one can use right away." -Ann, Gallery 4, Hamden CT
"...serious kudos to you. We love your straight talk, pertinent information and plain language. I don't know how many industries have something of jWAG's caliber available, but I learn from the emails every day. Really, really nice work, and very appreciated." -Cheryl Herrick, Global Pathways Jewelry
VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Don't want to read? This week you can also watch the video recording of this review 
In the past, I've expressed my point of view that Google+ seemed to be a more intellectually stimulating social network than its direct competitor, Facebook.
There are so many factors that need to be assessed when evaluating the success or failure of your website. So many website owners are stuck worrying about ranking in the search engines instead of paying attention to making the current customer traffic happy.
Every SEO professional will tell you that the process of search engine optimization is learned through experimentation, trial and error, and fortuitous discovery. Indeed, it's that same process that allows me to find many of the Daily Golden Nuggets I write about.
I'd like to propose this question: What's the best way to use your blog?
About 4 weeks ago I received and email from a jewelry store that wanted to know why they weren't ranking for the phrase "gold buying." The store's website didn't appear in the search results when the owner of the store did a Google search for that phrase along with their town name, and he wanted to be in the results.
