Welcome to the FocalPoint Business Coaching Challenge of the Week:

“How can I drive results as a business coach for a Trade Contractor?”

This week’s challenge is led by Dulcee Loehn.

Dominic Rubino is executive vice-president of FocalPoint International, a network of business coaches practicing the methods of Brian Tracy to bring success to executives and business owners all over the world.

According to Blog Pulse there are 147,047,076 blogs indexed in their system as of today.

One of the most popular blog topics is American Idol judges, specifically keywords Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler. Their names appeared as keywords on nearly five per cent of all those 147,047,076 posts yesterday.

That doesn’t make “J-Lo” and “Tyler” good keywords – as a matter of fact that makes them a little bit weak because the bloggers that have used them are competing with around abouts 7.5 million other bloggers.

Jennifer Lopez, Stevie Tyler or American Idol have no business being mentioned in a business coaching blog about keywords, page rank and search engine optimization.

A couple of months ago I wrote a blog entitled “Billy Currington is good at drinking beer, what are you good at?” It was the highest ranking blog this site has ever seen. But the conversion rate sucked. The people looking for Billy didn’t want business coaching, they wanted lyrics, info about drinking beer, and maybe even stuff about Billy.

Billy’s a country music singer for those of you who don’t know.

So if I laden this blog with American Idol, Stevie Tyler and Jennifer Lopez and I pull in a bunch of hits from Google – chances are none of them are going to stay. They might even make a mental note to get mad at FocalPoint Business Coaching for abusing their search terms.

Three keys that come up consistently when you start researching how to improve your website’s popularity are links, keywords and keyword placement.

Links. Try to link to good websites – the higher ranked website the better the link – but it can’t just be random, find ones that have content that compliments yours. Like FocalPoint Business Coaching for instance.

Keywords. There’s keywords and then there’s keywords. Like I said about the Billy Currington Google hits, there were loads, but, just like men walking past a dress shop, most of them just kept on walking. Brainstorm and then use a tool. By brainstorming, I mean, pretend you’re looking for yourself on the internet and think about what terms you would use. Someone looking for a personal trainer may not think “resistance training,” but they might think, “help overweight.”

Keyword placement. You need to use your keywords in the right place so the search engine spiders will find them. They should be within the title and within the first few lines. Spiders look in the H1, H2 and H3 (heading) lines and in the title bar. They also look for repetition – not always in a good way. Two to four  repeats of a keyword is okay, more than that and you might kill yourself and get stuck at the bottom of the rankings as a hunk of spam.

Here’s a short video on how Google works.

http://www.google.com/howgoogleworks/

 And this is an amazing article on the whole Google story.