The writers of Sesame Street are masters at this. And in fact, you can keep their model in mind as you craft your own messages — from articles to workshops to any information product in between — even if you’re not aiming at the preschool crowd.

Here are the lessons I got from watching an “Elmo’s World” segment the other day:

• Stick to basics; there’s no question too obvious (“Do telephones have birthdays?”).
• There is an unlimited amount of ways to talk about any given topic. Scott has written numerous articles on one narrow but highly searched topic around resumes: The Summary section.
• Give just a little bit of information at a time. This is good to keep in mind when writing articles or planning a workshop; a little at a time is not only fine but preferable!
  
• Repeat, with variations. Reminds me of the age-old advice about speeches: Tell ‘em what you’re going to say, say it, then tell ‘em what you said.
  
• Let your audience tell you the answer. Or, you could say, Let them feel smart or Show them how much they know. A lot of kids’ shows do this – the actor or character plays dumb so the kids, those on the show/soundtrack and those watching, shout out the next step or the right answer.
• Enthusiasm is contagious.
  
• Use humor.
  
• Make everybody feel included. Sesame Street has been a pioneer of this since its inception, showing people of every shade and ability.
• Include cute things whenever possible. Animals, babies, smiling faces — I guess this is to make an emotional connection. I’ve certainly read enough email newsletters about people’s cats to turn me off for a lifetime. But done right, meaning when the connection is topical, it’s good. For example, have you met Havi’s duck, Selma?

Which of these ideas seems most do-able to you? Leave a comment and let us know.

Here they are, in the context of how to use them to optimize your site so you can show up on the first page of Google.

1. CHOOSE KEYWORDS. Enter words or phrases you think you want to use into the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This will show you how popular that word or phrase is. But don’t stop there when you find something like “leadership” that’s searched  a million times. Check your search term in quotes in Google, and see how many results come up. Look for (ideally) a 1:1 match of number of searches to sites found, or (again, ideally) a word that’s got bigger search number than sites found. That’s how you know that’s a good keyword (or phrase) to use.

2. USE YOUR KEYWORDS:

• in your URL (ideally)
• in your title tag, which is the little text that shows up in a Firefox tab or that top narrow strip on your browser (definitely)
• in the text on the web page (numerous times, but within reason).

3. CHECK YOUR PAGE RANK. This will be something you do on an ongoing basis, but get a baseline. Use Page Rank Checker.

4. BUILD LINKS, ideally from sites with much higher page ranks. Put in a request to broad link farms like Dmoz.com and also topical directories.
Pick a few from this Ranked List of Top Web Directories.

So that the links to you will use your keyword(s) as anchor text and give your URL, suggest exact wording that includes html code. For example:
Find out more about <a href=”http://www.yourcompleteurlhere.com”>Your Keyword Phrase Here </a> by visiting http://www. yourcompleteurlhere.com.

Check your link ranking using the Marketleap Link Popularity Check.

5. WRITE AN ARTICLE on your topic. Submit it to 3-5 of the top article directories, including EzineArticles.com