Kauai Vacation Resorts Directory
Need to promote your Kauai vacation rental property? This directory will help drive traffic and inquiries to your website.

Hawaii Health Guide Directory
Get your site listed in this comprehensive Hawaii guide.

Hawaii Visitors Bureau – GoHawaii.com Visitor-related businesses should seriously consider a membership with the Hawaii Visitors Bureau which includes a link from the GoHawaii website. The GoHawaii website receives over 350,000 visitors each month.

Kauai Chamber of Commerce
Promoting, developing and improving commerce, quality growth and economic stability in the County of Kaua’i. The Kauai Chamber also offers banner advertising on its website.

www.Skaffe.com

www.WowDirectory.com

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SEO – an acronym for Search Engine Optimization is the act of optimizing a website or blog to rank well for keyword phrases in the Search Engines.  (Google is still The King of the search engines with somewhere around 70% market share (the rest is distributed amongst Yahoo!, Bing, Ask & AOL.  SEO is highly mis-understood  because there is so much mis-information out there and so many people selling themselves as SEO experts.  While SEO is not really “rocket science”, there is alot to know and having years of experience in seeing  what works and what doesn’t certainly helps.  Experienced SEO professionals know that it takes a  combination of strategies to help sites come up in the top positions in the search engines results.

So let’s get back to the soup analogy.  The ingredients of our SEO soup include keyword research (finding out what keywords people use to search for products & services), on-page optimization (integrating the targeted keywords into the copy on the site), off-page optimization (writing unique, keyword-rich titles and descriptions for every page of your site), link building (building links that point to your website) and social media (spreading the word about your website online).  The goal of any solid SEO strategy is to make your site’s content easily found by the search engines and easily found and used by real people.  By making your site user-friendly, full of interesting content and building links to your site, you are ensuring that people interested in what you have to offer will find it.

As you know, it’s not just one ingredient that makes a great soup.  Just as with SEO, it is the combination of measures that make a site “great”  and rank well in the search engines.  Using quality ingredients makes a difference too, when I make soup I like to include the freshest meats, vegetables and herbs.  With SEO quality impacts the end result too, its not how many links you acquire, it’s how valuable, relevant and quality the sites are that are linking to your site.  It’s not the quantity of content you have on your site, it’s the quality and originality of the content and how many other people on the web find it valuable.

A great soup needs a stock to be – well, a soup.  SEO requires a stock of patience.  One of the most frustrating things is to wait to see how the search engines will rank your site once optimization efforts have been implemented.  But that is the nature of SEO and soup – you put your best effort and ingredients in and then you have to sit back and wait for the results.  As someone once said “a watched pot never boils” so it is with SEO, it’s best to implement your quality SEO strategies on the site and then “walk away” and let it all simmer.  Checking rankings daily will make you crazy, so give it a few weeks and then do some exploring of the SERPs (search engine result pages) and watch your website analytics to see if you have increased non-paid traffic to the site via your targeted keywords.

Like a watchful chef,  an experienced SEO professional is constantly evaluating (tasting) the strategies implemented and how the search engines are responding to the changes, adding this or that to get the perfect balance of  “ingredients”.

You can and should “spice up” your SEO soup by including social media (entering into conversations online that will build relationships with your allies and potential customers).  I’m calling social media the “spice” because social media can get “spicy” when your customers have a venue to express what they do and don’t like about your business.  However, using the feedback that you get via Social Media can be invaluable in growing and evolving your business.

Ever notice how soup always tastes better the next day?  Age matters in SEO too!  Understand that time can help you build a solid reputation with not only your target audience but also with the search engines.     Make a commitment to your website for the long haul, don’t throw in the SEO towel when you don’t get the rankings you want after trying one or two measures to improve your site rankings.

Do consult and  follow Google’s webmaster guidelines and don’t hire unethical/high-pressure SEO consultants.  If you do hire an SEO professional ask to be informed of the measures that will be taken on your site, and check Google’s guidelines to make sure that the measures being taken won’t hurt your site rather than help.

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• What to Know BEFORE You Hire an SEO…

Click here to learn more about the All in One SEO Pack.

Here’s a screenshot of the All in One SEO Pack fields available for each post and page in WordPress – found at the bottom of the page/post editing screen.

How to use it

Here is a list of the most important on-page ranking factors and how they are addressed by this WordPress SEO plugin. You might want to visit the Options screen under Settings for the All in One SEO Pack to tweak the default options before getting started.

• Titles
  The text that you see in your browser’s window bar is one of the most important things *on* your page to search engines in knowing where to place your pages in their search results. Make sure your titles are optimized by using the title field (see figure above) to write a custom 10 to 12 word title describing the content of the page or post.  If your blog post or page titles don’t contain your most precious keyword phrases you want to rank for then tweak them using the custom title field will help keep your title tag optimized.
• Descriptions
  Once your pages and posts rank in the search engines your description (aside of course from your title) makes a potential visitor want to click through to your page, or not.  I try to write compelling descriptions of a sentence or two that provide whatever extra detail is needed (that won’t fit in the title) describing what is on the page or post and why it is unique and of benefit to the visitor.   If you don’t want to invest the time and write a description for every post at least let them be auto-generated (check this option in the settings area).
• Keywords
  Hopefully you have a customized keyword report for your business when you are writing blog posts and content for your website.   Be sure to include the relevant keyword phrases that have been identified on your report within the keywords field (see figure above).   The keyword tag doesn’t hold as much weight or value as it once did, but I believe it is still good practice  to include a few targeted keyword phrases for each page and post.

There are quite a few options in the settings area for this plugin that you can play with, however following these basic tips and using these three fields will help keep your WordPress site optimized for your targeted keyword phrases.

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How to Engage Online Marketing in an Offline World

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5 Factors When Choosing an SEO Company

July 22, 2009 by Jill Whalen
A lot of companies get so confused when attempting to hire an SEO firm that they simply give up altogether and don’t hire anyone. Part of the problem is that they simply don’t know whom to trust for this service.

Trust is always a tricky issue, and one that is emotionally charged based on our individual experiences with others as we navigate through the maze we call life. In SEO, trust issues are further magnified by the fact that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, nor one method that all SEOs use to bring targeted traffic to their client’s websites.

Read the rest of the article here

If you need a Hawaii-based professional, SEO expert to help you improve your website and its visibility on the web, contact Michelle Harrington for a website review and monthly SEO contracts.

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If you suspect that your website content has been stolen, you can use www.CopyScape.com to see if you have content that is considered duplicate and where the other instances of the copy is located.

If you find that your copy has been “hijacked” then by all means contact the website/business owner to advise them that your unique original content has been found on their site and ask them to immediately remove it.  You can also claim ownership of the content and request removal of the other site from Google’s index by filing a DMCA request.

If you’ve got a website and you’ve considered just taking someone else’s content, think again – what you are doing is stealing and its not going to help you get noticed (favorably anyway) by the search engines.  Building great website content is a long-term commitment and involves an investment but the payoffs are always worth it.  So before pressing Ctrl+V (shortcut for paste) do the right thing and write your own website content.

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Click here to learn more or to purchase this helpful internet marketing book.

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“I’ve been approached by numerous webmasters to do a link exchange and I’m wondering if this is a good idea.  Does it have some value for me to link?  I just don’t have a clue about the pros & cons regarding this.  I’d love to know your professional opinion.”

Here’s my answer:

When you link out to another website, it’s considered by the search engines to be a “vote” for that website.  It essentially says “I like this website and I think it has valuable information that MY website users would find helpful or interesting.”  If you can say that about a link you provide on your website, then I say go ahead and add it.  But if you are just adding the link because “its the thing to do to achieve high rankings”, think again.

The search engines continue to find ways of fighting link spam – so gone are the days of getting high rankings simply based on how many incoming links you have to your website.  And they even have ways of detecting linking schemes and low-quality link farm types of links.  So your best bet is to only link to websites that you feel would be of interest to your website audience.

Is it relevant?

Any link you feature on your site should have some relevancy to your website topic and audience.  My friend owns a massage business on Kauai so adding a links to other health and wellness products and/or services based on the Island or in Hawaii would be completely appropriate.

Evaluate the Website Before Linking

If you are considering linking with another website, make sure you visit the site and see if you get the sense that the site is worthy of your link.  Is the site filled with hundreds of other links with no real content?  Is the site populated with a ton of ads and banners?  Is the copy poorly written, with typos, etc?  Consider whether you want to be associated with a site of this caliber.  If it were me, I’d pass.  If the site is well done and there is relevancy in topic or audience, then by all means exchange links.

You also need to consider that any link you provide to another site from your site is a doorway for them to leave your site and begin exploring somewhere else.  This is another reason to only add relevant and high quality links to your site.

If you want to build valuable links to your website, I would suggest exploring the following posts….

Is Your Business Featured in Local Search?

Provide Valuable Relevant Links

A Few Things You Need to Know About Links by Stoney deGeyter

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• My Favorite Directories

If you own a vacation rental, condo, hotel or visitor activity business, adding a link that promotes ocean safety is a valuable and relevant link to provide on your website or blog as anyone visiting the Island should know about beach and ocean safety.

The Kauai Beach Explorer website provides beach, trail and ocean safety information and helps to raise visitor awareness of hazardous conditions found on our island.   By adding a link to the  Kauai Beach Explorer you are helping to promote ocean safety and showing your customers that you are concerned for their safe enjoyment of the Island.

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