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So You Have Keywords, Now What?

So You Have Keywords, Now What? 

Having identified what keywords are important to your business (first keyword blog post HERE), our next steps are to narrow down to the best keyword choices and then start incorporating them into your marketing. 

How many keywords can you optimize for on your website?

Search engine optimization (SEO) experts debate how many keywords you should use, but most agree to not use too many. For each page on your website, choose between 1-3 keywords you want to optimize for on that page, which is specific enough that you can pay attention to them but not too overwhelming of a task. 

For example, your farm might produce meat, but individual website pages might talk about butchering, pork products, beef products, etc. Think of picking keywords for these pages as a way to get people to just the right spot on your website (remember to pull out those tools we discussed in part 1). It will be the same for your social media posts. One post might talk about an easy pork breakfast recipe while another might talk about the two breeds of cattle raised and the differences between their beef. Those will have different keywords as well. So rather than aiming for a specific number of keywords, focus on how you are going to use them. Over time, they are going to show if they are working for your business or not.

Where to put your keywords

  • On your individual website pages. 

So let’s say that after some research, you see that homemade ice cream is most searched online but small-batch ice cream also seems popular. You have plenty of room on the actual web page to talk about your product but to emphasize the importance of certain words on a page you can:

  • Use the keywords a few times (aiming for 1-3 times)
  • Bold them or write them in a larger font on your webpage 
  • Link them to other pages

In this example, I have made the start of an ‘about’ page for my homemade ice cream shop. You’ll see how I’ve used formatting to emphasize the ‘homemade ice cream’ and ‘small batch’ and ‘order ice cream’ ideas for the search engines without driving the people reading the website crazy:

  • In the metadata (fancy for: page title, tags, and description) or your pages

Read more So You Have Keywords, Now What?

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Invasive jumping worms

Raise your hand if you’re tired of hearing about new invasive species. I’m right there with you. Aside from the fact that there’s way too much bad news these days in general, we still can’t find good solutions for “old-fashioned” invasive species like Japanese beetles, European chafers, buckthorn, wild parsnip and Japanese knotweed. 

We don’t need a new invasive species every year, but try convincing the invaders, right? I half-expect that one of these days we’ll get a tropical soil-shark that stowed away in a shipload of potting mix. Probably it’ll feed on moles and woodchucks, but will also burst out of lawns to swallow pets, and gardeners might lose a finger while weeding. That will sure put the lily-leaf beetle in perspective.

I’d be a lot more hesitant to tell you about a new and significant threat to forests, landscapes and gardens if it wasn’t for the fact that you can make a real difference in preventing its spread. 

The new pest is actually a coterie of Asian earthworms in the genera Amynthas and Metaphire. These super-size (20cm. long) earthworms are variously known as invasive jumping worms, Alabama jumpers, snake worms or crazy worms. Unfortunately, they can be sold as bait, and also hawked online as a substitute for red wigglers used in worm compost bins. They move rapidly on top of the soil, resembling snakes more than worms. Lively and strong, they can flip out of your hand. Assuming you want to touch them.  Read more Invasive jumping worms

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Photographing Farm & Food Businesses in St. Lawrence County

I sat down with Jennifer McCluskey of McCluskey Photography LLC in Canton, who was hired by Cornell Cooperative Extension to capture photos at area farms and food businesses as part of a Farm-to-Table initiative over the past 4 years. Since 2018, Cornell Cooperative Extension has been offering free professional photo shoots to any direct market producer who sells food in St. Lawrence County. The producers have 100% access to their images which have been used for their own education and promotion purposes.   Extension spent the winter combing through the 12,000+ images and we curated an exhibit called In Season: Our Rural Food System in Photos. From pastures to deli cases to bee yards, it was a pleasure to travel the roads of St. Lawrence County documenting the farms and food businesses with Jennifer!

In this interview you can learn more about Jennifer’s background and her experience participating in this project.

Jennifer will also be leading a farm and food photography workshop on June 11th, read more here. 

Jennifer taking photos at Rock Hollow Farm

How long have you been photographing professionally? How did you start? 

I started taking photos professionally when I moved to St. Lawrence County in 2009. When I started the business, I had a purpose in mind. I felt like far too many people miss the small moments of beauty in their lives, instead thinking too much on the negatives in the world. I wanted to capture these moments of beauty, joy, and heartfelt emotion to help remind people of all the good that is out there. I feel like I have begun to accomplish that over the last few years in business, and want to work more to meet that goal.  I find the North Country to be a beautiful place with great scenery for photographing, and wonderful, kind people who have welcomed me and my camera into their homes and lives. 

How did you get involved with the Farm-to-Table photoshoots? 

I got involved with Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE), through Flip Flippi, the Local Foods Program Leader at CCE in 2018 when Flip was collecting ideas about what the project would look like. We started by just talking through the project and what it would entail. Eventually as we were planning I was asked to be the photographer for the farm-to-table professional photoshoots for food and farm businesses in the area, and it’s worked out really well. We’ve taken images of some 80 plus food and farm businesses. 

What aspects of a farm or restaurant photoshoot do you enjoy the most? 

I really like seeing all the different and interesting things that people are working on. I didn’t know about the variety of products or places we have here in St. Lawrence County until I started working on the farm-to-table photoshoots. Like for example, Deer River Cranberries, I had heard of it but I didn’t know the scale of the production until we went there and saw the whole process from start to finish. Plus I love trying the delicious foods from our area producers. 

Harvest at Deer River Cranberries

Can you give us an example of a memorable farm photoshoot?

At Thompson’s Tree Farm, the steam from the sugaring process made the sunlight streaming through the maple stained glass and gaps in the boards look really ethereal, which was enjoyable to photograph. The photoshoot at Our Little Grewve Farm in Hermon also stood out to me, there were lots of little details to capture and beautiful flowers to take images of. The same with Never Tire Farm, the weather was bad and sleeting outside but it was beautiful inside the greenhouse and the soft light made it nice for photos. 

Steam from the Sugaring Process at Thompson’s Tree Farm

Read more Photographing Farm & Food Businesses in St. Lawrence County