How To Get Good Search Engine Rankings for Your Personal Training Website
Sunday, August 17th, 2008
A lot of trainers these days ask me how to get their sites higher in the search engines.. and it’s for a good damned reason. Today, when most people look for a service like a personal training business or a boot camp, they look online.
Sure, some of the older generations still use the Yellow Pages and there is a certain percent of the population who will ask their friends and go through that route via referrals. However, the majority of people will look on the Internet and at this point in time usually it ‘s Google.
I get the question constantly, "how do I get my site to rank higher in Google. Is it the meta tags?"
My answer to that is NO. Google is mostly an off-page search engine. Meaning it is not so much what is on your page that is going to help you rank high in Google. The meta tags, specifically the meta description and the meta key words, won’t really help your site rank higher.
However, the meta description is what is shown when a lot of people search and your site comes up in the search engine. So you want to have a compelling meta description ready and you might want to throw in a few of your main key word phrases in the meta key word tag. But make sure that those words are on the page, otherwise that can count as points against you if they’re not and you will actually rank lower.
The title tag still seems to carry quite a bit of weight in Google in terms of ranking, and it is also the first name people see when your site pops up in the search engine. So you definitely want to have your keywords or your main one, two, or three key word phrases in your title tag.
You also want some of your key words to be contained within your page naturally, but don’t just stuff them in there. You definitely want them to occur naturally and you want them to read naturally to your visitors. Only put your keywords where it makes sense for your visitor. Google is all about providing the best and most useful experience for the user… period.
When I say Google is mostly an off-page search engine, what I am talking about is that what other pages on the internet say about a particular page has the most dramatic affect on how that page will rank.
You want to get a lot of high quality links out there with your main key words in the links, and the best way to do that is to create a large site that contains a lot of high quality content that people will want to link to and visit on a regular basis. It is all about quality. You want people to come back to your site on a regular basis and you want people to want to link to your site. You want the information on your site to be so good that people want to link to it… that’s what good personal trainer internet marketing is all about.
Focus on building relationships with other sites on the Internet and create high quality content that people will want to link to .
Getting sites to rank high in the search engine is it is all about quality links and you get those by adding massive value to your visitors and to the entire web.
Here's Some Tools For Your Fitness Keyword Research
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
Here’s some things that work pretty well for keyword research for your fitness business:
http://labs.google.com/sets – get Kw ideas that are similar to the kw you type in
http://www.google.com/trends – see what’s hot in google right now
http://www.wordtracker.com/ – many people love it, I can’t stand it. A little pricey, has a learning curve
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/- Paid version better than free. Their premium data base also has seasonal results. A lot of heavy hitter SEO’ers I know LOVE this one.
http://spyfu.com/ – Allow you to spy on competitors kw’s
http://stompernetsiteseer.com/ – Great free SEO analysis tool. ANYTHING Stompernet put out pretty much rocks.
http://www.nichewatch.com/ – Competitive research free tool
Here’s a killer one I got at Eben Pagans Guru Mastermind this weekend
Step 1. Go to clickbank and find top selling products in your niche
Step 2. Go to google and type in name of product and see who’s selling it
Step 3. Look at those sites source code for kw ideas. Also – you could run those sites through the Stomper site seer.
Also – Look at your competitors meta Kw tags, meta desc. tag and title tags
Hope that helps, now I’m off for a few weeks vacation… gonna spend a lot of time on my Harley =)
Examples of Good Websites
Monday, June 9th, 2008
Here’s a video I created that goes over some of the important aspects of a good personal training website.
Hover Ad Strategy
Monday, March 17th, 2008
Recently I grilled a few direct response and fitness marketing experts about opt-in strategies for different personal training sites. I wanted to address the concern over the possibility of a hover ad annoying a lot of visitors and driving them away from a site.
So as usual, one of my favorite guys to grill is Michel Fortin. I asked Michel if he were a personal trainer or fitness professional and had a high priced service if he would implement a hover ad.
Here’s what Michel said:
“Yes.
Creating Opt-ins For Your Fitness Site…
Thursday, March 13th, 2008
Recently I was grilling famous copywriter Michel Fortin about creating fitness site opt-ins. Michel is one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet when it comes to internet marketing and direct response marketing.
I was talking to Michel about marketing a personal training business and telling him that since I have sites that rank well in the SERPS and don’t want to mess with sticking an opt-in on the home page for fear of confusing people, I would ad other squeeze pages to collect peoples name and emails so I could put them on a drip campaign.
Here’s what Michel told me:
“I think that, if you’re not going to use a forced opt-in process (before the salesletter), then you need several landing pages, with different marketing strategies catering to each one of those pages.
Facebook, Craigslist and Blog Comment Linkbuilding Mistakes
Thursday, February 14th, 2008
Building links is one of the best strategies at this time for increasing your rankings in the search engines, especially if those are high-quality, relevant links and you’re adding value to the web. And if you’re gonna market a personal training business or a health club, you gotto get hip to search engine marketing.
One mistake I see a lot of fitness professionals make is that they’ll add a bunch of spammy links on Craigslist, Facebook, and by commenting on other people’s blogs.
Now, if these links are to help you drive traffic and add value to the internet and add value to the user, then these are good links. But, the mistake I see is that a lot of fitness professionals are just blasting these links out there to try to help them in the search engines, when this doesn’t help them one damn bit. And many of these links not only don’t improve the visitors experience they do a disservice to the user.
For example I’ll see a health club or personal trainer marketing on Craigslist with a bunch of keyword rich anchor text links thinking this will help them rank better for those terms in Google.
Three Surefire Ways to Dramatically Increase Your Website Conversions
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008
Today just about every fitness business owner has a website, as they should. But let me ask you…
What’s the purpose of your website?
I hope you didn’t answer with something like “To get my name out there” or “To sell supplements, get people to call my business, sell e-books, sell affiliate products AND to get my name out there”
The sad fact is that most fitness, health club and personal training business owners go about their website all wrong. They’re trying to do WAY too many things and their sites are all over the place. They’re trying to be all things to all people. There’s way too many links to click, way too many things they’re trying to sell, and just way too many damn things going on at the same time. This not only creates a weak message but it confuses the hell out of the visitor, and a confused visitor doesn’t respond, they retreat and go to your competitors site.
Quick and Easy Testimonial Video Marketing
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
One of the best personal trainer marketing and health club marketing strategies and one THE BEST ways to bring in loads of new clients is through the effective use of testimonials. What someone else says about you or your product or service is always many more times more powerful than what you have to say. I mean come on, you’re the business owner, of course you’re going to tell me that your service is the best, I’ll be a new person after using it and your s#%! don’t stink and never will.
But I know you’re the business owner and will probably tell me anything to get me to hand over my hard earned cash. You’ll tell me know that I’ll lose all my fat, my back will feel great, I’ll be able to take on any gang of thugs I meet in a dark alley, I will soon be rich and successful and that my sex life will be one that will go down in history and be envied by rock stars and drugged out 25 year old movie stars across the globe.
How to Avoid Abandoned Shopping Carts
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008
If your local health, wellness or fitness website has a retail aspect to it you know how frustrating an abandoned shopping cart is. It is nothing but a pile of lost money. Here are a few great strategies to encourage your customers to get through your forms and make that purchase.
1. Ask for a little information as possible
Your customers think just like you. Their time is valuable, so they don’t want to waste it filling out little boxes indicating their age, gender, and favorite flavor of ice cream. Sure, from a marketing perspective it would be nice to have all of this info. But if you want your customer to reach the “confirm” button, you are going to have to keep it short.
2. Clearly Indicate which fields are required
A sad number of retail sites don’t provide this basic information. If your potential customer is trying to enter their information, but it’s not going through because they didn’t enter their zip code, they should be informed of this as clearly as possible on the page. If this info isn’t provided, they might just think your site is buggy and choose to move on.
The Four Elements of Valuable Content
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008
By Guest Author Logan Strain
I know you’ve already heard this one a million times, but one of the essential keys to building a high traffic website is valuable content. Unfortunately, usually the people who explain this to you don’t take the time to explain what “valuable” means. So for your benefit, here are the four things that make content truly valuable
1. Original
When I say your content for your fitness marketing efforts should be “original,” I don’t just mean original in the sense of SEO, through that is important too. Your content should offer your readers something they may not be able to get elsewhere. Ask yourself: why would somebody come here for this information instead of somewhere else?
2. Written for Humans, not Algorithms
If you want bring traffic, you shouldn’t ignore SEO, but you shouldn’t forget your potential human readers. A lot of people, when they get really educated about SEO, spend all their time fretting about very specific keyword density and other technical details. While writing your content, you should pretend that it will be published in a magazine, or some other place where SEO isn’t a factor. Only after you are done should you glance over it to make a few SEO adjustments.
