SoloSEO

Entrepreneurship… What was I thinking?

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on January 31st, 2007

I know this is a little off topic, but since Michael has been discussing how to get your own SEO company off the ground and growing, and due to the week Michael and I just suffered through, I had to remind myself frequently on why I traded in my previous “easy” life as a corporate suit, with a cushy job, limited responsibilities, manageable workload, consistent salary and paid health care for this life of entrepreneurship. And so I now share my thoughts…

Here is what I love about entrepreneurship:

1. The Risk. I like the fact that at any given moment (especially at the beginning) one bad day, one downed server, one mistake and the whole dream can come to an abrupt end. I personally have not settled on a word which aptly describes this phenomenon, but I know many who term this behavior as “just plain stupid.”

2. The Flexibility. I like to have some flexibility with when I work. I now need to work longer and harder than I did in the 9 to 5 world, but it is nice to be able to get away and see my kid’s school program, take a long lunch, hit some range balls or just take a break for an hour, without “asking” for permission. If I do take some time off during the day, it just means I will be staying up later to finish all that needs to be done, but at least it is my choice.

3. The Ambiguity. Kind of a funny one here… I love the fact no one has any idea what I do for a living. My neighbors ask my wife, and she can’t explain it. I am pretty sure the neighborhood just think we are in some kind of witness protection program and leave it at that. When someone pins me down personally and asks me what I do, I really don’t have a good knee-jerk answer. I usually just say, “I work for myself” or explain what one of our companies does, usually the one I have worked with most recently. I do know that answering “I would tell you if I thought you were really interested” does not go over very well, so avoid this reply.

4. The Learning. I love to learn, and running a small business is all about learning, and the faster you learn the better. You have to learn to assimilate info quickly, make a decision, and be flexible in your response. Even through a myriad of poor choices, and even poorer implementation, you can learn much. I have been forced to better understand or be hands on with our cash flow, advertising, sales, marketing, financing, HR (not fun), customer service, technical support, training (both internal and external), shipping, purchasing and charitable funding. It is quite a bit to do, but it sure makes the business world around you less complex, and all that stuff they teach in MBA school finally starts to make sense.

5. The Opportunities. I love helping people help themselves. Some of our companies provide work for hundreds of stay at home parents. They do a wonderful job, they enjoy it, they thank us for the opportunity, and they are helping their families economically, while being home for the little ones. That is a fantastic feeling. We look forward to providing more opportunities for more people in the future, hopefully contributing to their success, and making what we do very fulfilling.

6. The Dream. I love the dream, just the thought that something we do might really be helpful, might really change the world for good, is revitalizing. The dream is what gets you through the tough times, and through the items on the next list, which are the things I dislike about entrepreneurship.

Here is what really hurts:

1. Family Hardship. The hardship on your family is real. I have put my wife through more disappointment and difficult circumstance than most women would allow. She has had to do so much more because I am not home as much as I used to be. She is quite amazing and incredibly supportive, she sees the dream, and it keeps her on board. Without support from home, the dream of entrepreneurship is near impossible. It is also hard in other ways. When we started this journey our oldest was only about 6 months old, and I worked from home, so I got to see much of his early life (he is almost 8 now). But as the businesses grew, I needed to move into an office to be more “professional,” and by so doing I missed much of our second son’s early years (he is now almost 6). He was asleep when I left, and usually asleep when I finally got home. I can’t remember his first steps, his first words, and that is brutal to me. It is one of the most difficult things and it still makes me hurt, and I don’t think I will ever fully get over it. No amount of money, cool vacations, or times together now will get me back those experiences, I simply blew it. I hope no one makes this same mistake. Fortunately the businesses have grown, and I have been able to be at home on a more regular schedule and have not missed much of my youngest’s life, she is now 2. I just go into the office earlier, or work late at home after they have gone to bed. It is much, much better.

2. No Time Off. There is only one day a year I don’t work, and that is Christmas, every other day something has to be done. That does wear on you, but the buck stops with the business owner, and if they don’t do it, no one else will. I am fortunate in that most of what I do, can be done remotely. As long as I have my MacBook Pro, and my Sprint PCS Connection Card, I am in good shape. So we do vacation as a family, which is great, but I work every day, which isn’t so great.

3. The Risk. I know I have risk up in the things I love about entrepreneurship too, but when you have a family to support, a mortgage to pay, college funds to save, etc., the risk kind of loses its luster. So in my dreaming phase, risk is great; in my realistic/provider role, risk is terrifying.

4. No Rest. I don’t sleep well, and I used to sleep like a log. The slightest noise wakes me up, I am always worried my cell phone is going to vibrate and there will be a problem, and we will need to deal with it ASAP. Our clients use our services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, including holidays, as many are located in other countries. So we are always on call, and always ready to address a problem. That not only affects your sleep, but going to movies, out on date night, during birthday parties, I never know when that call might come, and you can not totally relax with these contingencies hanging over your head.

5. The Money. When you don’t have much or any coming in, it is hard to get everything paid, take some home for yourself, and then hopefully gather enough into the coffers so you can pay the bills again next month. However, when you do have money coming in, a whole new set of problems pop up. Should you hire someone, how much to invest in infrastructure, how much to set aside for taxes, should you advertise, how? The problems seem to grow proportionate to how much money you have in the bank account. All that being said, it is much easier to deal with these problems when your personal finances are no longer an issue. So while there are more problems, there is less stress in dealing with those problems, because the bankers aren’t coming to take your home away, and you aren’t eating Ramen every meal.

6. Those Clients. For the most part I love dealing with clients, and solving problems. However, as with every business, there is always those individuals that will take 90% of your time complaining about every little thing, although they only account for a relatively small portion of your gross income. And they never know who they are, because they are confident they are like everyone else. Be wary of these folks. It has taken me a while, but I now can part ways with client much more easily when I determine they are a “90 Percenter.” Whether to part or not to part can also be influenced by how much money is coming in at the time, I had a lot more patience when we were desperate for any cash.

7. No Benefits. It is pretty tough to provide the 401K plans, good health insurance, and the other benefits the big guys can provide. That is tough both personally and professionally as you want to do what is best for everyone, but the cost of benefits is outlandish, you really have to be flush to afford them for everyone.

8. Taxes. Seriously folks, can’t anyone in the government come up with a better plan than this? We now spend thousands of dollars every year for accountants to figure out how much we need to pay in taxes. In the early days I would trade an accountant friend of mine my dad’s basketball tickets for his tax expertise, because it was so complicated. And this was when we just lost money every year. Now the whole situation is beyond ridiculous. I have little to no patience for inefficient organizations of any kind, and politicians don’t seem to care about being efficient, or taking care of their constituents. They only care about gaining power and hoarding it. I don’t care if you are a Democrat, Republican or Independent, if you are a politician on the local, state or national level, I’m not impressed.

While there are fewer points on the why I love entrepreneurship versus what I don’t like, there is no comparison in my mind. I love what I do, and the challenges faced just make the accomplishments more enjoyable. Any entrepreneurial likes or dislikes I missed? Please do share…

5 comments Visited 1732 times January 31st, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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Jumping on Keywords When they are Hot

Posted by Michael D Jensen on January 30th, 2007

Recently a big story hit the news about Google modifying their algorithm to fix googlebombing. When news hit, my first instinct was to start buying PPC ads for classic googlebombing phrases, like miserable failure. It was a good instinct, as we got some decent traffic from our market audience who, just like me, needed to see it for themselves in the search results.

I wasn’t the only one that started advertising, as there was at least one other company that had an ad up on Google. And interestingly, Rand posted about predicting search queries over the weekend.

A very similar situation happened to me a few months ago after Aaron Wall posted about the keyword “trust rank” and how it wasn’t being utilized at all by PPC campaigns (can’t find the post, sorry Aaron). Being the thinker I am, I created a page about Trust Rank as well as Page Rank, and then created a simple PPC ad and put it up. Minutes later…traffic. Not a whole lot, but definitely traffic from our market audience.

Being able to predict search queries would be fantastic. However, I think being observant (reading blogs, talking with people, being attentive in your audience’s shoes) will keep you in the game and help you to catch search terms quicker than others. This not only applies to PPC, but also to blogging, where if you can get to your audience before other communities do, then you’re more likely to get further credit when they blog or comment.

3 comments Visited 1709 times January 30th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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5 Minute SEO for Your Blog

Posted by Michael D Jensen on January 29th, 2007

Your blog is an important part of your business, so why not optimize it with the rest of your site? You’d be surprised by how many people, even big names in SEO, don’t fully optimize their blogs. I’m obviously not the first to write on this topic, but I have some of my own ideas for quickly optimizing your blog, in 5 minutes or less. These are all WordPress Plugins, but certainly applying this to your own blog type would be great for your SEO.

1) Alinks
Lee Odden suggests using a keyword glossary for your blog, and this plugin takes that one step further and combines it with intralinks. Intralinks is an SEO strategy that shows emphasis on important content of your site by “intralinking” to those pages more often (and with related anchor text). This plugin does it automatically for you. Not only does it help with SEO, but your readers may find more articles in your blog that way. Alinks does have one limitation: it is only intra-blog. If anyone knows of another plugin that lets you put in a keyword and be able to choose your own URL, let me know!

2) Increase Blog Comments: Show Top Commentators
By showing top commentators, you can motivate people to post on your blog because they can get/stay in the top commentators list and have a link to their site. One of the great things about Web 2.0 is “user-generated content”. Web 2.0 sites wouldn’t survive without it, because all they are really doing is providing a platform to let the world speak in different ways. Your blog gets content from you, but also from your commentators. Think of the amount of content that Matt Cutts gets on his blog, even after just posting 54 words. His 54 words turned into over 10,000 words on one page…now that’s user-generated content. I’ve seen search engine snippets pull directly from comments even.

3) Increase Blog Comments: Subscribe to Comments
Although this plugin doesn’t directly affect your SEO, it can keep readers coming back and contributing to ongoing discussions within your comments. Like the top commentators blog, your users can help create content along with you. Of course, you’ll need to kick it off with some really good content.

4) Ultimate Tag Warrior
This plugin extends the ability of the categories part of your blog. You can do a lot of things with the tagging, such as tag clouds and go out to technorati and de.licio.us. I haven’t played much with it, but I know there are a lot of blogs that use it.

5) Related Entries
This is a very traditional one, but one that I don’t see nearly enough on blogs. I love being able to see entries that are related to what I am reading, and I like it right after a post because that’s where my eyes are. We saw a huge increase in the number of people reading more entries in our blog as soon as we added this feaure.

6) Add meta tags
So meta tags have a bad rap, but certainly they’re not something to just disregard completely. Even Vanessa Fox of Google has said you should have description meta tags. This module makes it super easy. There are other plugins for meta tags that even let you write your own custom description for each post, which is the best way to do it, in my opinion.

In 5 minutes or less you can download and install these plugins, and be one step closer to better SEO for your blog and website. If you have other plugins you like, use, or recommend, please comment on them and we can grow a list together.

11 comments Visited 3612 times January 29th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Can Web Designers do SEO?

Posted by Michael D Jensen on January 25th, 2007

An excellent post by Lee Odden over at the Online Marketing Blog brings up an interesting issue about if asking your web designer to do SEO is a good idea or not. More and more we see web design companies offering SEO services, so the big question would be to ask, “who actually does the SEO?”. My guess is most of these smaller web design companies will have a designer or two that knows something about SEO, and will have a few items that they do to incorporate it into their design, like from Lee’s post:

Many times, web designer SEO involves being given a list of keywords by the site owner or someone in marketing and asked to put them in title tags, meta tags, alt text, link text and possibly modifying code so that urls are crawler friendly.

The best thing to do, in my opinion, would be to have an open discussion (after knowing a bit about SEO yourself) about what they will do in terms of SEO. If you can afford it you may be better off hiring an SEO or you can do it yourself with SoloSEO.

Lee ends his post with a nice summary…

Can a web designer do SEO? Some can, some won’t and some just don’t have the time to stay current with SEO methodology. The question is, can they do the kind of SEO that will help build your brand AND increase sales?

2 comments Visited 1725 times January 25th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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SoloSEO downtime

Posted by Michael D Jensen on January 25th, 2007

Some of you may have noticed we were down some yesterday and early this morning. We ran into hardware issues with our DNS servers. Note to anyone hosting their own servers and DNS servers…multiple back up DNS servers are good.

Our apologies for the downtime, and with it being a DNS issue we couldn’t get anything up until now to make you aware of the issues. Thanks for your patience while we grow!

Add comment Visited 1045 times January 25th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Starting Your SEO business: Tapping into Local Business with Local Search Tools

Posted by Michael D Jensen on January 23rd, 2007

Two important things come together that make local business a great opportunity for finding SEO clients. First, there are tons of local search tools and directories (online) that are used by millions of people every day to find local shops and services. Second, most local businesses have no idea about most or all of these tools and directories. A good way to start or grow your SEO business right now is to approach local businesses with your expertise and know-how of these local search tools, and how to get them listed and start getting traffic.

Let’s go through local search engines and PPC together, to help you know what to say and do for your new clients.

Local Search Engines and Directories

As we discussed last week about getting new clients, the first place to start is to start a list of local businesses you want to approach. Pick businesses that would have a clientele that could potentially find them via search, and choose 5-12 of them. You’ll need to do some prep work for each one, including making a keyword list and checking rankings, as well as some investigation into their status (are they listed??) in the local search engines. You may want to provide a simple report that shows them some keywords, any rankings, and a list of local search engines and directories and a big NO if they don’t have a listing (my guess is most won’t, depends on your area of course). The next part is to educate your client.

By being listed in local search engines, a local business can easily be found through both local search and regular search (like google.com). Search engines like Google will often integrate local search into their search results. It is thought that 10-20% of searches actually use “local modifiers” such as a city, state, or region. Most of us are probably pretty computer savvy, but even for those less savvy, the search engines are becoming our address book, our yellow pages, and our map. If I want to find a plumber, it takes less time for me to get to Google and search for one, even if its just the phone number, than to pick up a phone book and thumb through it. Plus, I get a map and a website (if any) which is an extra step if you’re just hitting a phone book. Take the opportunity to get this into their heads, as more and more this is how everyone is going to find them.

The local search engine relationship chart can give you a good idea of who the main players are in local search. infoUSA and Acxiom are the two main sources for other local search engines, so having a listing with both of these companies is vital to local search exposure. You can also list individually with other local search engines (read on for links). Two companies make it easier to manage your information in these listings and also directly with local engines: Relevant Ads and Register Local. You can manage your listings separately for less, it just takes a bit more time.

Here are some quick links to a few of the main local engines:

Yahoo! local listing
Google local listing
TrueLocal local listing

Offering other Services

Just because you are doing SEO does not mean you can’t offer other services, such as web design, content writing, and PPC management. You may find that most of these local businesses have done nothing, so they are starting from scratch. If you can package multiple services together, not only do you have a more complete solution that maximizes your SEO strategy, but it’s almost like getting two clients for the sales work of getting one. If you don’t have other complementary skills, then you’ll want to make some business relationships with other trusted individuals or companies that provide such services. By offering multiple services you can offer a complete service that truly accomplishes the goals of SEO. Worst case is they just want to focus on one part of it right now.

Targeted Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Local businesses can benefit very quickly by a targeted PPC campaign. Even if you don’t do PPC (pay-per-click) advertising right now, it is something you can learn in a few days to a few weeks (not necessarily being a super expert in that short of time, but good enough to go on). PPC advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry. Why? Because people use Google and Yahoo! as a dictionary, encyclopedia, white pages, yellow pages, and address book (and many more things). One of the features of PPC advertising is local market targeting. You can pick regions and cities where your ads should be displayed, to market your site just to those specific areas. This, coupled with an SEO strategy, will give a jump start to your new client to gaining the traffic, branding, and traction.

Local search is an exciting and growing area of search marketing, and now is a great opportunity to find companies, even in your own backyard, that are in need of SEO for their business.

For more reading, here’s a great article about local search.

8 comments Visited 2923 times January 23rd, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Building the Perfect Link, the Ultimate Guide

Posted by Michael D Jensen on January 23rd, 2007

Small Business SEM has an excellent post titled Ultimate Guide to Building the Perfect Link. This is a great read for anyone considering or getting into links. The guide walks you through all the various aspects and things to consider when link building. A snippet from the guide…

Fact #1: The competition for links is tough for any business, big or small. Confusing the issue is “link lingo” — inbound links, reciprocal links, sitewide links, paid links, text links, deep links … the list goes on and on. How’s a business owner to keep track of it all?

Fact #2: When you’re looking for links, quantity is one thing — but quality is better. Not all links are created equal. How can you tell which links are better than others?

That’s the idea behind this guide — to help you understand which links will help the most. To help you … Build the Perfect Link.

Look at the ultimate guide to building perfect links for more helpa and info. And good job building natural links with worthwhile content on building natural links!

1 comment Visited 2250 times January 23rd, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Free Links from MyBlogLog!

Posted by Michael D Jensen on January 22nd, 2007

Everyone’s always out looking for good quality backlinks (inbound links) at a great price, and what’s better than free? Hopefully MyBlogLog will patch this up quickly, but I just noticed that you can easily insert links into messages and rel=”nofollow” is not even added. Don’t try this, it’s spamming…get natural links. To do this (please don’t), just leave a message for Rafer (sorry man), or any other MyBlogLog member. Notice the spam already in there from the DJ guy.

For all the help we’re giving MyBlogLog (mybloglog flaw, missing mybloglog tools), you’d think we were getting paid (we’re not), or at least getting a free trip to Yahoo! HQ (not yet…).

UPDATE: Rafer just let me know they are already planning to fill this gap. No use trying it out, I’m sure old links will be updated because it’s all dynamic.

UPDATE: nofollow is now active, all sealed up. Good job MBL, very fast work. That is what we like!

4 comments Visited 2052 times January 22nd, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Quantcast.com - Better than Hitwise, Alexa, and Compete.com Combined?

Posted by Michael D Jensen on January 20th, 2007

Quantcast.com is a new “Open Internet Ratings Service” that I learned about from Paul Allen. It’s a free service that looks nice, runs quick, seems to have a good amount of data, but with questionable accuracy. Quantcast says this about their service:

Quantcast is the world’s first open internet ratings service. Advertisers can find reports on the audiences of millions of web sites. Publishers can ensure their sites are represented accurately by tagging them for direct measurement. The service is free to everyone.

Their FAQ tells more about them, how they get their data (affiliations with partners, who include advertisers, publishers, ISPs and advertising networks), etc.

From a query, like techcrunch.com, you can view demographics (gender, age, household income, ethnicity, head of household education, and children in household), audience keywords, common audience (other sites these visitors go to, and “siteographics” which define as:

Quantcast’s Siteographics™ show other sites an audience frequents, which can reveal lifestyle and behavioral traits. The Siteographics section of a site’s profile shows other sites that the audience is likely to visit, and the index indicates how likely, where 100 is neutral. For example, an index of 300 would mean visitors are three times more likely to visit the correlated site than by random chance.

Quantcast.com also shows an estimate on unique visitors, and what kind of visitors they are (passers-by, regulars, and addicts). I would guess there are a lot more regulars and addicts than is being counted here.

Like alexa and compete.com you can compare estimated traffic to websites. I created a comparison between Hitwise, Alexa, Compete.com, and Quantcast, and results are interesting. It seems Quantcast.com is in quite a growth stage, Hitwise doesn’t show up on Quantcast’s graph, Alexa is pretty constant, and Compete.com had a spike at the end of last year. Interestingly the data for all of them except Quantcast is missing for the last month or so.

I ran the same comparison on Alexa (note, you can’t compare anything with alexa.com and they don’t even rank themselves…interesting):

Quantcast seems to have a lot of interesting features, all for free, and features that seem to combine features from all of the others. Is it better? Or are the estimates not very good? With a lot of SEO blogs, even popular ones (SEOmoz, TopRankBlog, MarketingPilgrim, SEOBook), Quantcast says “We have sparse data about [domain name]…”.

This will be an interesting tool to play with more and compare with the others. If you have some interesting comparisons, please comment below or blog them yourself!

3 comments Visited 3913 times January 20th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Google… You’re Not The Boss of Me!

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on January 19th, 2007

I ran into a buddy of mine the other day, and during our “catching up” conversation, the topic eventually turned to his manufacturing business, and I asked him if he felt his site contributed positively to his company’s strategic vision. He quickly began complaining about how they couldn’t figure out how to be ranked organically in Google, that Google requires them to pay to get on the first results page for their chosen keywords, and who does Google think they are anyway, etc. It was quite the emotional rant, and one I am afraid I hear and read quite often. These rants usually remind me of my niece who frequently tell her aunts and uncles “you’re not the boss of me!”

Unfortunately I didn’t have much time to discuss my view of my buddy’s Google opinion that day, so I thought I would take some time to address it here.

Fact is this; Google is the boss of us… if we want to rank high on their site. I frankly don’t have a problem with it, but many do. Google suggests how our sites should be optimized so they can best provide their clients (all those that come to Google to search) the most relevant search results. Google’s power to make these suggestions is provided by those of us that use Google to find what we are looking for, nothing more. Google did not put something in the water, nor are they blackmailing the president, the public simply liked the results obtained in the past, and continue to trust Google to deliver appropriate search results now. Google’s ability to guide our optimization efforts has been earned through the years and is presently sustained by a primarily satisfied public.

The ire aimed at Google for these optimization requirements/rules can be quite humorous at times, but it is hardly justifiable. Most (and hopefully none) of us would ever consider walking into Walmart and setting up a table in the front of the store to sell our products to Walmart customers as they pass by, and we wouldn’t expect Walmart to allow us this access to their customers. And even though most of us have no idea what is required to get a product approved for sale in Walmart, most of us would assume Walmart has a very systematic methodology in place to properly consider and approve new products. Additionally we would also assume Walmart is predictably careful when they determine where in a store a product will be physically positioned, as they want the product easily found by as many customers as possible. I have personally been through this Walmart process, it is quite an ordeal. I didn’t find it enjoyable, but we did it anyway to hopefully get a chance at Walmart’s clientele. Despite our best efforts, Walmart chose not to take on our product, and while we were disappointed, we didn’t then decide to circumvent the new product evaluation process and somehow sneak our product into their stores anyway, I doubt anyone would.

So, I say “so what” if Google asks us to jump through a few hoops? If we want the opportunity to sell to THEIR clients, much like Walmart, we should expect Google to require our sites to comply to their suggestions, so they can more easily position our sites properly, and facilitate the client/seller introduction. It is in our best interest to do so.

Now I will admit, if Google was the only game in town, then I would probably be on the ire gang band wagon, and suspicious of Google’s monopoly power over us, but with Yahoo, MSN and others also in the search game, each of the SEs are motivated to make their search results as relevant as possible, to rank our sites as high (or low) as they deserve, or run the risk of losing market share, or being forced out of the market completely. The requirements SEs place on our sites are simply the hoops SEO tools help us jump through, and as long as we are willing to do the work, then we can expect to see a trend of positive results in our rankings. No tricks, no shortcuts, just honest optimization, earning our position.

Those that don’t like what the SEs requests are probably going to be upset to discover you actually have to complete homework assignments to graduate from school, you have to register to vote, you have to file articles of organization to start a company, you have to use an iPod to listen to your iTunes library, and you have to put a postage stamp on a letter to get it to go anywhere, but that is unfortunately the tough world we find ourselves in… what an insufferable drag.

4 comments Visited 1473 times January 19th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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