Apparently I have it so easy, working 100% from home. I guess I do. I don’t have to deal with the office drama, the condescending boss, the rush hour traffic, the mileage on my car, the gas to get to work, $10 lunches 5 days a week and a snack, getting up before 8 a.m., I don’t think I’ll continue. Working from home and being your own boss is great, but what most people fail to realize is all its cons.
Working for yourself means you do not know and should never count on when you are going to be paid. Clients will give you the run around, checks may bounce, disagreements on an invoice, you never know what may prolong getting paid for a job. However this can be great because it can force you to learn how to become frugal and pay everything on a cash only basis. Cash is King.
It also means you do not have all those nice benefits like health and dental conveniently taken out of your non-existent biweekly paycheck in small sums.
There are of course other cons working from home, but the pros most definitely outweight the cons. For instance, its 4:21p, 84F, and sunny, I’m going to take a little break and go take the motorcycle out…
The past month or so I have been putting a lot of effort into learning Search Engine Optimization(SEO) and Search Engine Marketing(a term less known) for my own benefit and so I can sell it. In just two weeks I was able to put my company’s website on the third page for a search phrase that resulted in 393,000 other websites. So again, as a true beginner of SEO, in two weeks I was able to put a website in front of about 392,975 other websites for a given search phrase. So here are a couple things I’ve learned along the way and how to help achieve something similar.
Depending on what you want to accomplish, find a single or multiple niche searches and hit it hard.
It would be HIGHLY profitable for me to be on the first page of Google every time someone searched “web design” being that I own a web design company. However, it is sort of unrealistic to achieve that in a very short period of time. So why not narrow it down? In my case I made most of our website geared toward getting ranked higher for the search “Schaumburg web design”. In addition to this I made specific pages that had nothing to do with Schaumburg but to other cities and subjects. For example I made a page for cities that are known for housing business owners and a page for small business in general.
Each of these pages have the same idea as our standard home page, basically an introduction of the company, but have unique content that are relevant to the niche search I was targeting. In the end, you are not only developing pages/content to take over specific niche searches but at the same time they all tie into the broader search, in this case, “web design”. Simple really, right?
Relevant Back Linking.
I have read that this is 90% of the battle of page ranking. If someone puts a link to your website on theirs, they must have some sort of trust to do so. If this someone’s website is bringing in thousands of visitors a day and is a highly respected site, well you’ve just hit the gold mine. Not only will you see traffic through theirs(maybe not your target audience however) but search engines recognize this trust between the sites. A couple things to mention about linking is that it will benefit you more when the site pointing to you is relevant to what your website is about. In my case I submitted our company site to web designer directories which not only brings in the target audience I’m looking for but also creates a link to my site from one that is highly relevant.
There are things that can definitely hurt your page rank and even become what is called black listed. Then there’s even SEO espionage…scary. I will get into these things later this week and supply links to great resources.
