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:
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
Throughout the past month, I analyzed different sets of keywords that I collected during the 2015 holiday season. Most of that research focused on overall analysis of the keyword data without breaking it down into the desktop, mobile, or tablet categories of devices. I chose that approach to save time, and quite frankly, so as not to bore everyone with too much similar information.
That said, in this edition, I am splitting apart the results to show you how the u... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
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:
A lot has changed in the world of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) since I first started my daily blogging more than 1000 posts ago.
The most significant SEO changes over the last 4 years are related to Google Panda and Google Penguin, but there are dozens of other notable changes, and hundreds of subtle changes throughout the entire internet.
Although I'd love to write a "then and now" post about all the intern... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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.
You have to own your identity. One of the jewelry designers sitting around my live Q&A table the other day at MJSA was a little embarrassed by her company name and her website. She chose a business name which perfectly reflects what type of jewelry she designs, but during the current launch process she was starting to feel a little unsure of the name.
To maintain her anonymity, I won't mention the name of the company or the domain name; let's just say that I really made me laugh that she wan... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
A blog can serve a variety of purposes. Actually a blog has so many purposes that WordPress became popular because how easy they made it for a blog to be used in flexible ways.
Here are some ideas of how you can use the blog on your website. 1. It can be used to post information about upcoming events. 2. The blog can have updates on the latest jewelry styles you have in the store. 3. It can tell stories about happy customers. 4. You can post educational information about jewelry to your blog.
Throughout the upcoming 45 days, your staff is going to put in long hours in hopes that customers will be beating down your door 7 days every week. Financial forecasts say that this year will be better than last.
As you are hurried and harried through your daily routine you should try to take notice of the people come to you looking for the perfect holiday gift. Customers come looking for gifts for him, gifts for her, gifts for a child, or even a grandparent. Some customers might even stop in for a smal... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
A few years ago I remember a Tacori ring was used on the TV show Desperate Housewives. The appearance of this ring caused a measurable spike in search traffic for Tacori rings.
Another time I also caught a recording of the daily talk show The View in a waiting room and saw their presentation of the Debbie Brooks line of handbags. Again, another measurable spike in search traffic was seen.
Time and time again there are casual mentions of jewelry, or even product placement throughout many television shows. I'm not talking about paid commercials, but rather integration in the actual shows that people watch.
Award ceremonies are the typical places to look for the latest clothing and jewelry fashion trends. Many jewelers already blog about who's wearing what at those red carpet events because those are planned in adv... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I'm on a mission to help a retail jewelry store owners find new and interesting things to blog about.
Every jewelry store should have a blog as a way to build organic traffic to their website. Making the blog interesting is important, and the Jewelry Information Center (aka JIC) can do a lot of the legwork for you.
JIC maintains 3 different website properties that all jewelers should tap into. Here they are:
Many jewelers already share the blog posts from the JIC website to Facebook and Twitter. Other jewelers retweet their Twitter musings. You could copy those strategies, or you can step up your marketing effectiveness by blogging about the JIC. Here's how...
I'm sorry if the link building topic seems like such a well covered topic of late. The Google Penguin filter has everyone up in arms about link building and if SEO was killed by the Penguin.
SEO is not dead, and neither is link building. In fact blog writing is one of the best ways to keep building quality links back to your website, or from your internal blog to other pages within your site.
I say that jewelers should use blog writing for 3 reasons: 1. Build website content to illustrate expertise and to soft sell. 2. Build content to attract organic visitors. 3. Build links to internal pages of your website.
The first 2 items on that list happen automatically when you write a blog. The 3rd item requires extra work on your part, but you can't post a blog and NOT link to something on your website. Otherwi... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Blog writing is different than book writing because you need to assume your blog's readers are distracted.
Many readers will skim through an online editorial when it's written in standard 4 sentence paragraph format. Readers who skim are more likely to jump to the next paragraph long before they finish reading the current one.
Skimming is a natural part of online life. We don't have enough time to sit and read every word, so we jump from paragraph to paragraph trying to glean the most important bits.
To combat skimming, and to make sure your readers do read the most, you need to break your blogging format from 4 sentences per paragraph to 2 or 3 sentences.
Another difference between book writing and blog writing I learned through many frustrations when I first began blogging.
I'd like to share with you a few of my daily blogging techniques that keep me going, and that I hope keep you guys coming back to read. It took me quite a while to get comfortable with blog writing and hopefully I can shortcut your learning curve with what I've learned through 513 Daily Golden Nuggets.
I do my best to write at least 500 words in every Nugget. I didn't come up with this number arbitrarily; it happens to be the magic number that many print publications ask for when you write an editorial. Sometimes my Nuggets are 800 words, and sometimes they are 400, but 500 is always my target.
At first you might find it impossible to write 500 words, 400 words, or even 300 words. Be verbose in your writing without repeating yourself or keyword phrases for your products and just do your best to reach 300 words.
Do you have a personality? That a serious question. Are you a shrub or do you happily greet each and every customer that walks into your jewelry store?
Chances are that shrubs don't make for good entrepreneurs and they wouldn't be in business long. It's doubtful that you would employ a shrub to work in your store either since they certainly do not make for good jewelers.
Let's face it, it's not the price of the jewelry that matters; it's the customer service with a smile that convinces someone that they cannot live without the fine jewelry you're selling. Your personality closes the sale and you need to allow yourself to write your blog entries using that same personality.
Some people create different aliases and new personas for themselves online. Does "J.J. Smith" actually work for you or is that just an onlin... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Other than creating new video, blogging is the best and most versatile method to create new content for your website.
Through blogging, you can demonstrate your expertise on topic, give a product review, provide a commentary on something you read online or in a magazine, talk about jewelry or fashion trends, create event write-ups that leave the reader envious that they missed the soiree, and so much more.
Since I've been blogging professionally now for 510 days perhaps it's time to share my own tips and tricks that keep me going, so you, the everyday average jeweler, can copy my methods, and success.
Admittedly, my success at blogging has a very limited reach since everything I write for jWAG is focused on the retail jeweler and I don't attract much attention outside our industry. But your success can be much furthe... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
An interesting debate about blog posting sparked up in the jWAG office the other day.
We were reviewing how the URL, H1, and page Title Tags all relate to one another, and how effective they are for SEO. Our standing recommendations are that all three items should match.
Example of Best Practices: URL: /best-cathedral-engagement-rings.html Page Title: Best Cathedral Engagement Rings Header 1 Tag: Best Cathedral Engagement Rings
This is a well known strategy amongst SEO experts and it's one we also want you to use when posting to your own blog.
On the other hand, typical newspaper, news blog, and even our own industry websites like JCK and National Jeweler Network don't usually worry about the SEO aspects of their blog posts. Instead, they sensationalize their headlines to attract readers.
Today we have 2 simple blogging tips for your jewelry website.
1. Kill the keyword cloud.
A few years back the "keyword cloud" feature was pretty popular and found on most blogging sites. The feature allowed you to indicate a few important keywords or phrases for every blog entry you posted. The usage count for all these keywords was tracked and then presented as a jumbled mess of words using various size fonts. The larger fonts represented commonly used words, and the keywords in the smallest font were used only once or twice.
Keyword clouds were thought to have high SEO value because they would repeat the same words over and over on every page of your blog. The truth was that Google view this repetitive keyword usage as pure webspam and many blogs lost ranking.
We love blogging. In fact this is our 441st Daily Golden Nugget. It's not a special number like 100 was, or 200, or 400, or even 404. But the interesting thing is that once you have more than 300 real blog posts on your website you start to attract a lot of new visitors every month.
We're referring to a "real" blog post as something written about a topic that's near and dear to you, like celebrities adorned with jewelry at red carpet events, or jewelry fashion trends, or jewelry in entertainment news.
Paparazzi are not the only people interested in what celebrities are doing, or wearing. Your jewelry customers are also interested, which means you can blog about celebrities and attract attention... a lot of attention through Google SERPs.
As a long term test, we once wrote a celebrity blog post about reality-star-t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Yesterday we suggested you take a moment and write down some of the romantic Valentine's Day stories you've heard over the last few days.
This wasn't just a wild suggestion, but rather the first step down a path of real world storytelling and answering of questions. Any time you add more stuff to your website, you are actually adding "content." It could be a product catalog, or it could be a story, but it needs to be written for real people to read rather than for search engines.
Quality content is rewarded, but let's explain how and why this is so.
As of today Google is already attempting to build a search engine powered by artificial intelligence (known as AI). According to Amit Singhal, one of Google's top engineers, they hope to one day have a very large database that understands the relationship between words,... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Blogging is such an important part of website content. Using your blog, you can add real content that Google loves to index and use in the search.
You blog is a forum for so many different things. One day you can use it to showcase a new line of jewelry in your store, and the next you can use it to talk about your sponsorship of the local Little League.
Everything you post in your blog will feed Google's ability to bring you traffic. But what if you would rather have people share your blog posts on Facebook or Twitter? How can you get them to do that?
Google is a machine, programmed to do what it does and it doesn't care if your content is boring. It only cares if your content matches a search query.
To get interest from real people, you need to make your blog posts interesting. Give people a reason to b... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Blogging is a great way to increase traffic to your website. A blog entry allows you to create conversational information and use words more naturally than simply trying to keyword stuff all the other pages of your website.
Let's look at a good way to use blogging to increase organic traffic to your website.
Perhaps you have a landing page for the category "Diamond Wedding Sets" and on this page you have links to 4 sub pages: * Round Diamond Sets * Princess Cut Sets * Marquise Diamond Sets * Vintage Wedding Sets
This would be a "thin" page of information because you probably only have 1 photo and 1 sentence with each of those links. You don't want to keyword stuff that page because it would be unnatural. What does that actually mean? Well, don't use the words "diamond sets" or "wedding sets" or "diamon... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Let's jump back to the very basics for a moment. The word "blog" is a portmanteau of the words "web" and "log." In 1997, the process of writing and publishing online was considered a weblog, but then in 1999 it was shortened to just "blog."
Blogs are extremely popular now. In fact, we might even say they have become one of the largest driving forces of the internet. Everyone with an opinion (or a passion) has the ability to get online and offer a piece of their mind.
We'd love to see all our jewelry stores add a blog to their website. Naturally, we hear opposition to this all the time because "who has the time?" Right?
For business purposes you should consider your blogging time as "necessary advertising." But you should not consider it to be a chore; after all, aren’t you passionate about jewelry?
Can you come up with a list of 52 little tips for your customers? There are 52 weeks in a year and it would be great if you had a tip to share with your customs every week.
Here are some ideas:
* Announce the birthstone of the month each month. That's already 12 weeks.
* Give a tip each month on the colors of the season and the type of jewelry, whether a style or a specific charm, that will match the season and fashions. That's another 12 weeks.
Only 28 more ideas needed. Can you come up with those on your own?
Once you have them all written out take an evening or a weekend afternoon and type them all into your blog.
Then set up an account with Hootsuite.com and attach your Store's Twitter and Facebook Business Page.
Next grab the URL of each blog post and create a status update in Hootsuit... 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 
You have to own your identity. One of the jewelry designers sitting around my live Q&A table the other day at MJSA was a little embarrassed by her company name and her website. She chose a business name which perfectly reflects what type of jewelry she designs, but during the current launch process she was starting to feel a little unsure of the name.
A blog can serve a variety of purposes. Actually a blog has so many purposes that WordPress became popular because how easy they made it for a blog to be used in flexible ways.
Throughout the upcoming 45 days, your staff is going to put in long hours in hopes that customers will be beating down your door 7 days every week. Financial forecasts say that this year will be better than last.
