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elcome to the latest Talking Shop Wrap and Review.
In case you are new here, this is a monthly series where I will briefly delve into our latest Talking Shop show and the points that were especially smart, surprising, and useful (there are always so many).
If you are new to my little corner of the web or new to Talking Shop let me give you the lowdown: Talking Shop is a podcast now in its 5th year. It is hosted by Theresa Reed aka The Tarot Lady and moi. You can access every episode right here for free, and yes, you are welcome.
Last week on Talking Shop we had the pleasure of jamming with the incredibly smart Liz Lockard. Liz is dedicated to bringing in more business to small businesses and one of her primary tools to make that happen is Search Engine Optimization, known more commonly as SEO.
We know that any time we have a technical topic on Talking Shop it can make some of our listeners a wee bit anxious; tech stuff often seems so complicated, hard, and expensive and it is one of those areas where not knowing what you don’t know can become a significant pain point for your business and your bottom line.
Fortunately Theresa, the resident Talking Shop fearless leader and guinea pig had taken a course with this awesome teacher a year or so back that was all about SEO. She had learned a ton and put the lessons into action on her own site with great success. She also raved about the teacher who was a smart lady, able to break down complicated ideas with ease and help her students implement them effectively. The teacher of course was Liz!
When Theresa and I decided that it was time to tackle the SEO monster we knew we wanted Liz in our corner.
Liz started out by explaining one of the biggest benefits of SEO which I had totally overlooked. As it turns out when you create a blog post or a page on your site and you take the steps needed to optimize it for a search engine you have an “evergreen” asset. This means that your page or blog post will rank higher in search engine searches day after day and year after year.
One of the biggest complaints I have heard from people who want to “do” SEO but never get around to it is the time commitment involved. But the fact of the matter is that this is time well spent because the investment you make in SEO is a gift that keeps on giving (unlike say, a Facebook ad or sponsored Tweet).
Another really useful point that Liz made was about key words. One of the primary ways you can optimize a page or post for search engines is by giving that page a key word. Liz explained that often people miss the boat on this opportunity because they think about what they would like the key word to be instead of thinking about what the words are people will type into Google in order to find a specific thing that you offer on your site.
So those of you who create key words for your pages and posts already, make sure that you are thinking about it from the users perspective and those of you who don’t…well, there’s no time like the present!
A final (and really useful) point that Liz made? SEO does not have to be painful! If you have a site hosted on WordPress there are several good SEO plug-ins to choose from; the favorite of most people is Yoast. Snagging an SEO plug-in and making sure your site is connected to Google Analytics are the two essential steps that can really help you optimize your site in a painless way and play the long game with your business.
I hope you enjoyed checking out the highlights from our show. You can listen to the entire show here. We also invite you to join in for our next show which will continue our coverage of the intersection between technology and your Sacred Arts business: Getting Techy With It with Forest Linden and Chris Bleill