October 16, 2010: This afternoon as I was doing research for my new business idea (more of that to come soon!) I was searching on Google for articles to help me increase my knowledge about advertising for the Modern Mom. The first phrase that I typed in was “advertise mom businesses” and the first website that popped up was Living My MoMent. Great, how am I supposed to give myself advice on how to advertise for mom businesses?

So, I tried another set of keywords “how to market mom businesses” and here I was number two. I didn’t know what to think so back to the drawing board I went. In the meantime, I posted my findings on my facebook page and Jennifer from Organizing Without Limits told me that I should write a blog post about my findings: aka. share the wealth about how I increased my SEO.

Most of these are universal tips with SEO. Some of you might have read them somewhere before, but they are tried and true methods that worked for me and I’ve already used a couple in the article so far:

1. Bold a few keywords in your article. For example: I’m writing this article about Search Engine Optimization so I bold those words. Google will pick up on certain bolded words in your work.

2. Outgoing links are great to have. Of course don’t go overboard. First off, I wanted to give Jennifer a shout out for her suggestion but also hyperlinking her business will help bring people to her site as well.

3. You can never hear this enough: CONTENT is so important. Make sure you have articles and posts that are relevant to your site.

4. Make sure your articles/post get listed on your main page at some point. Google will search for keywords from your main page first and grab information from there.

5. If you using WordPress there is a great feature in custom fields section called natty_keywords and I always put the keywords that I want featured into those fields so that Google can find my articles faster.

6. Make sure you update your site with relevant content at least 3-4 times a week. You want your readers coming back for more.

7. Guest Blog on other sites. If they will let you put a link back to your site, this is even better. You will increase your pingbacks (which on incoming links) this way.

8. Put relevant links from your older articles/posts into a current post that you are writing. This will create a trackback within your own site.

9. The tagline of your website is a great place to put your keywords and of course the title of your site. “Shop, Support and Free Advertising for MoM Businesses and Blogs” is the tagline for Living My MoMent. So if someone is looking up Shop MoM Businesses, our site is the first site that pops up on Google.

10. It’s never to late to start optimizing your SEO on your site. I wish I had known more about SEO when I started my website, but once I got the hang of it, I totally saw the results!

If you have any questions about how to increase your SEO or would like help, please feel free to email Abbey from Living My MoMent.

Tags: advertise mom businesses, google, keywords, living my moment, organizaing without limits, pingbacks, search engine optimization, seo, trackbacks, wordpress