When I started Opinion by Pen, I knew I was posed for fame, fortune and wealth. All I had to do was get my website established, put some advertising up and the money would start rolling in. Only two things stood in my way. I had no advertising on my website and I had no one coming to my website. That’s when I started taking SEO seriously. No matter how you look at it, making money with a blog is a matter of numbers. You have to have lots of readers to make money from advertising and in order to get those numbers you need a dedicated following or high SEO.

I’ve written about SEO (Social Engine Optimization) before. In a nutshell, it’s the things you do to make sure your website has high ranking with the search engines. The sad truth is that before people can read your post, they have to find it and unless you have a dedicated audience,  search engines will provide the vast majority of that traffic.

There are other sources of traffic. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and a number of other Social Media sites provide traffic to your site as long you or someone else provides linkages to your site. This usually requires that people find your material so entertaining they feel compelled to share your material with their friends. Judging by all the traffic I get from these sites, I need be a lot more convincing.

Do an experiment for me. Using Google, type in “3D Artwork using Poser”. If all goes well you’ll see a number of posts on 3D artwork. I’ll give you a clue, I’m not on the first page. When I looked I was close to the bottom of the second page. Google also helps by making suggestions for you, making it even harder for me to come up with the right combination of title and key words.

If you did see my post listed, you would have seen that my title matched your search term and yet I was still listed on the second page. The first time I did this, I did a search on Opinion by Pen because I wanted to see my website listed by Google. Like today, Openionbypen was buried somewhere on the second page. Talk about being disappointed, but it was a good lesson for me. A good title does not mean a good listing by Google.

When you look at the articles matching your search, you also see the title and a paragraph from the post. The paragraph is my next opportunity to catch your eye and to convince Google I’m worthy of notice. I only have 156 characters to convince you that reading my post will inspire you to greatness or give you a strategy for buying the winning lottery ticket. Unfortunately, catching your interest with just 156 characters is only slightly easier than choosing that winning ticket.

Once you get to my website, the sheer mastery of my HTML skills and my writing will inspire you to read more articles. That’s the general theory anyway. In reality, less than five percent of my visitors read a second post. If you’re reading this on my website, look on the right side and you will see a list of random posts I put there to catch your eye and get you to read a second or third post. I noticed a slight increase in people reading my older posts after I put those links up. Every little bit helps.

To recap, before someone can read your post they have to find a link to it, this could be Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter or as in the case of my subscribers, a direct email but somehow they have to know your post is there. Just to make it interesting, the more links you have in the other media, the higher Google ranks you in their search.

I’m still working on attracting hordes of readers. As much as I hate to admit it, I’ll count this post successful if as many as fifteen people read this post. After doing this for two years I’m getting a feel for the rules but most of the articles I write are for my own enjoyment. If other people enjoy them too, so much the better. I thought everyone else operated under the same principles until I got this from a company offering to improve my SEO ranking.

Here below is the content marketing activities “Monthly Task and responsibilities”

1. 200 Press Release Submissions (20 press release x 10 press release websites)
2. 20 Press releases, 400+ words written
3. 5 Unique Articles will be written
4. 5 Web 2.0 Properties will be made
5. 5 unique “how to Articles” will be written
6. 1 YouTube channel will be created
7. 10 YouTube videos will be created by SuperSEO.com (paid)
8. Will likes, shares, tweets, reedits, and 1+ in order to get natural back links
9. Anchor text diversity (will not use exact keywords for back links).
10. Will get Natural back links by link worthy articles
11. Will draft & submit 5 articles to Ezinearticles.com
12. Will create Google+ page for your business
13. Will distribute 15 posts daily via Google+ Page
14. Will make 1 post daily on your blog
15. Will bookmark real content to leading 150 Social Book marking sites as dig, delicious
16. Will submit your website to 10 leading Web directories as Dmoz.org On-Page work activities “Follow only first month”.
17. Meta tags/Title tag changes
18. Keyword research/Analysis
19. Competitor Analysis
20. Analysis by our Paid SEOMoz Program
21. Alt tag changes
22. Interlinking wherever required.
23. Keyword density in site content.
24. HTML Site Map
25. XML site map and Submission in webmaster tool
26. Ror.XML File creation
27. Robots.Txt File creation Extra work activities
28. Google Webmaster tool
29. Google Analytics
30. Html to text ratio optimization
31. Keyword Prominence

Wow! I only thought I knew about SEO. On my best days I only do 22 thru 25 and 28 thru 31. I admit I had to look up Ror.XML file creation. After looking it up, I know why I seldom see traffic from Yahoo. It’s not that they’re ignoring me, they just don’t understand me.

I’m tempted to ask them how much this service would cost but I already know I won’t spend the money. It’s not that I’ve given up on making a fortune with my website but somehow this kind of effort reminds me of the spam I get every day. I can’t see using mass emails and press releases to broadcast Opinionbypen to the world. This company makes it very clear what level of effort they believe it takes to keep your website in the public’s eye and they do this monthly. In their opinion I’m barely scratching the surface of what I need to do to become popular.

On the other hand, I’m starting to feel really good about the fifteen people that will read this post. I don’t know who you are, I don’t know how you found this post but I really want to thank you for reading it.  Thinking about it, that should be task number one, thank your readers.

Every time you use Google to find my site, every time you put a link to my site on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, when you comment on one of my posts, you boost my SEO ratings and help direct more people to my site. With your help, someday I’ll make it to page one of the search results. Thanks for helping me meet my goal, I really appreciate it.

© 2014 – 2019, Byron Seastrunk. All rights reserved.