SoloSEO

Nobody Logged Into MyBlogLog Anymore?

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 15th, 2007

From all of my daily blog browsing, as well as watching our own blog, I don’t think many people are logged into MyBlogLog anymore. I know several blogs that used to have MyBlogLog on their sidebar, but don’t anymore.

I disabled MyBlogLog a few times early in January because it was dead slow, but that seemed to get resolved for the most part.

Then after the Shoemoney incident MyBlogLog fixed the authentication issue and in order to be logged in you had to go back and log in again. TechCrunch has a great round-up about the whole thing, including our second debut on TechCrunch (first).

I ran some tests earlier this week using one of our Missing MyBlogLog Tools, the Show All Visitors tool. I looked at several different blogs I read that are still using MyBlogLog on their site (graywolf, yaro, lonelymarketer, and andybeard). I know the traffic varies significantly between the sites, but even the high traffic sites had nowhere near the MyBlogLog turnover I would expect. On our blog, I used to be able to refresh every hour or two and have a whole new set of 10 pictures of people that came to our blog, but now I’m lucky if one or two new avatars shows up every hour or two. And it’s not our traffice, because since then our blog readership has increased more than 50%.

I think Yahoo is going to need to promote MyBlogLog a bit more with some integration efforts before they convince more of us to put it back on our sidebar. I loved seeing the faces of my readers, but now if only 3 or 4 of them are actually logged into MyBlogLog and the sidebar has very little turnover, I have little interest in watching it (it’s like watching a snail race) when I know by our analytics we have a ton more people actually visiting our blog.

Sorry MyBlogLog, you’re going to have to win me over again. Plus, you can’t say I never helped, I created a whole tool set for MyBlogLog (and still no trip to Yahoo or 1%).

9 comments Visited 5679 times March 15th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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How do the Presidential Candidates Rate for SEO?

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 13th, 2007

A recent article posted on Slashdot looked at various website design points of the top 6 Presidential Candidates. Here I compare SEO statistics of the top 6 Presidential Candidates’ websites: Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and John McCain.

I will compare SEO statistics and information about the age of domain, length of domain registration, domain characteristics, backlinks, Technorati links, .edu links, Alexa Rank, Page Strength, indexed pages, supplemental results, name search on Google, other search terms on Google, and pay-per-click. The order of candidates is listed in order of “rank” within each category of statistics.

Age of Domain

This comes from either Alexa data or WHOIS data. The age of domain is important in SEO because older sites typically hold more credibility and trust with search engines.

Hillary Clinton – 22-Oct-2001
John Edwards – 16-Jul-1998
Barack Obama – 28-Dec-2004
John McCain – 17-Jul-1997
Mitt Romney – 08-Feb-2002
Rudy Giuliani – 17-Nov-2006

Length of Domain Registration

This statistic looks at how many years the domain has been registered for beyond the create date (based on WHOIS data), and the candidates are listed in descending order of year that the domain expires. It’s considered good SEO practice to register a domain for a longer amount of time (5+ years)

John McCain – 15 years, expires 26-Jan-2017
Hillary Clinton – 15 years, expires 22-Oct-2016
Barack Obama – 11 years, expires 28-Dec-2015
John Edwards – 11 years, expires 14-Jul-2009
Mitt Romney – 8 years, expires 08-Feb-2010
Rudy Giuliani – 2 years, expires 17-Nov-2008

Type in Domain

Everyone except Rudy Giuliani has a perfect type in domain for their name, so you can just type in their name, add the .com and you’re at their site. This may hurt Rudy a little, but his last name is hard to remember how to spell for many so perhaps joinrudy2008.com is better in some ways.

Backlinks

Backlinks, or inbound links, are how many sites link to your site. These figures are from Yahoo.

Barack Obama – 119,909
Hillary Clinton – 79,219
Mitt Romney – 39,245
Rudy Giuliani – 38,236
John Edwards – 15,498
John McCain – 7,428

Technorati Links

This is used as a measure of popularity in the blogosphere world. The more the better.

Barack Obama – 6,527
John Edwards – 4,952
Hillary Clinton – 3,710
Mitt Romney – 1,756
John McCain – 670
Rudy Giuliani – 342

.edu links

Links from educational institutions are regarded as passing more weight or confidence as a backlink, and are highly desirable (and hard to get).

Hillary Clinton – 97
Barack Obama – 87
John Edwards – 35
Mitt Romney – 33
Rudy Giuliani – 21
John McCain – 0

Alexa Rank

I know Alexa isn’t perfect, but it’s an interesting comparison. The lower the number, “the better”. The number represents the rank of the website out of the top websites on the Internet in terms of traffic. The most visited site on the Internet is ranked 1. A zero (0) means either an error or not enough traffic to rank.

Barack Obama – 12,581
Hillary Clinton – 18,727
John Edwards – 33,485
Mitt Romney – 129,490
John McCain – 178,788
Rudy Giuliani – 0

Page Strength

John Edwards – 6.5/10
Hillary Clinton – 5.5/10
Barack Obama – 5/0
Mitt Romney – 4/10
Rudy Giuliani – 3.5/10
John McCain – 3.5/10

Indexed Pages

Google and Yahoo both give a different number of pages in their index, so I’ll show both, Google/Yahoo.

John Edwards – 4230/66
John McCain – 457/155
Hillary Clinton – 387/1133
Mitt Romney – 309/157
Barack Obama – 148/525
Rudy Giuliani – 91/34

Supplemental Results

If pages show up as supplemental results (use this query, just change domain) it means they aren’t carrying as much as weight as they could be and their rankings probably suffer. The figure shown below is supplemental/total indexed, as well as what percent of pages are supplemental results out of their total number of indexed pages (both from Google). Lower % is better.

John Edwards – 260/4230 (6%)
Mitt Romney – 71/309 (23%)
John McCain – 104/457 (23%)
Barack Obama – 35/148 (24%)
Rudy Giuliani – 38/91 (42%)
Hillary Clinton – 168/387 (43%)

Name search on Google

If you type in the candidate’s name in Google, where does their “official” election site come up in the SERPs?

Hillary Clinton – 1st result
Barack Obama – 1st result
John Edwards – 1st result
Mitt Romney – 1st result
Rudy Giuliani – 2nd result, 1st is Wikipedia entry
John McCain – 33rd result, 1st is his Senate page

Rankings for name, party, etc

Terms searched for included: presidential election, presidential candidates, 2008 elections, compare candidates, and candidates issues. The top 100 results were checked for each search term. If no ranking is listed below, the candidates site does not rank in the top 100 for that term.

Barack Obama – #35 for presidential candidates, #66 for candidates issues
Hillary Clinton – (none)
John Edwards – (none)
John McCain – (none)
Mitt Romney – (none)
Rudy Giuliani – (none)

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Terms searched for included: presidential election, presidential candidates, 2008 elections, compare candidates, candidates issues, democrat, democratic party, republican, and republican party. Certainly there are many others I could have typed for but these are ones I thought would be critical to any PPC campaign.

Barack Obama – presidential election, presidential candidates, 2008 elections, democrat, democratic party,
John McCain – presidential election, presidential candidates
Hillary Clinton – (none)
John Edwards – (none)
Mitt Romney – (none)
Rudy Giuliani – (none)

Obviously we are very early on in the elections, but certainly SEO efforts should be underway if they are going to occur at all. In some ways it is evident there are definitely SEO strategies in place, but what about the lack of PPC? What are some of your observations?

Also check out my post from yesterday about what Analytics programs the Presidential Candidates are using.

5 comments Visited 7155 times March 13th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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What do the Presidential Candidates use for Analytics?

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 12th, 2007

I thought it would be interesting to look at all of the top presidential candidates and see what they are using for analytics for their site. I visited each site, viewed source, and looked for Javascript code or any other trace of analytics code I could find.

Hillary Clinton uses Google Analytics

John Edwards uses Google Analytics

Barack Obama uses Google Analytics

Rudy Giuliani uses Google Analytics

Mitt Romney uses Omniture

John McCain uses either Revenue Science (if they have some analytics system built-in) or it is a server-based (non-Javascript) analytics solution.

We use Google Analytics for SoloSEO but I have heard Omniture is a great solution too. Setting up with Omniture takes a little bit of work because you need to put in variables for each page (like page name), but other than that it is pretty easy and has lots of features.

I would suggest the candidates use Crazy Egg and track where people are clicking around on the site. We’ve discovered a lot of interesting behavior on our site, I can only imagine having that much more traffic and learning what you can do to maximize it.

7 comments Visited 9498 times March 12th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Bloggers Lack Respect

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on March 9th, 2007

Due to our launch of SoloSEO and our foray into blogging, I have been more sensitive to the plight of all bloggers, and to the generally less than optimum reputation of bloggers. I knew about blogging before our launch, and I got a sense from the talking heads of TV land, and the faceless voices of radio land, that bloggers weren’t held in high regard in the media world, but who is? Personally I have never understood why a degree in Journalism gives a reporter more of a “right” to report about SEO, medicine, politics, marketing or anything, over someone who blogs and actually works or has earned degrees related to those industries, but this seems to be their indefensible attitude. For my view, reporters without “real-life” experience in the industries they are reporting about, aren’t worth the time it takes to drop off that printed media in the round file, or the effort one must expend to turn off the offending electronic device, but I digress.

During my non-blogging years, I didn’t read many blogs, and the ones I did read where scrutinized before I would buy in. I personally felt each author needed to be: 1. Formally Educated, 2. Obviously Knowledgeable (in the blogging topic), and 3. Successful (in the industry they were blogging about). If the blogger didn’t meet muster, I didn’t view them as a viable blogger or worth my reading time. My views on this have obviously changed slightly over time.

As I now I sit here… a blogger, somewhat educated (with a Bachelor in Economics, a MBA, and working on my dissertation for a Ph.D. in OM), but with no formal education in SEO. I don’t remember that class being offered at the university. So my formal knowledge on SEO is suspect I guess. It has come from a few popular SEO books, personal experience, attendance at PubCon, and blogs. Our success with SoloSEO, although steady, isn’t as earth shattering as I would liked it to be after only 3 “official” months, and yet here I am still blogging, pretty hypocritical huh? I can now see Blog mountain from this side and my perspective is different. Before getting our first businesses online, I had no extensive knowledge into Internet Marketing or Do-It-Yourself SEO, as Internet Marketing wasn’t a course offered way back then. Nor did I have any idea there was such a wellspring of information on the SEO topic online. This abundance of info comes from some very intelligent, and trustworthy individuals. However, because of the three strict credentials listed above, I truly had a difficult time giving many “SEO blogging experts” much respect right out of the gate. While I have made my peace with many SEO blogs and are comfortable with their interpretation of SEO principles, others have fallen out of favor. I am still often dumbfounded by some of the speculation, and mind-numbingly simple deductions made by some considered most knowledgeable among us. Comments I read in blogs like “I think,” “my Spidey sense tells me,” or “based on my gut” followed by a claim concerning how search engine algorithms MAY work, cause me to gulp the Pepto. In the world of academic writing, any claim made by an author needs to be defended by statistically reliable results, or at least based on some long term research which indicates, within a statistically acceptable level, a strong possibility of fact. But in the world of blogging, anyone can claim to be an expert, run some unscientific, and even questionable tests (or not do anything at all), and then throw the results out there as probable truths. I believe it is this free wielding of ideas which causes many “offline” reporters/media sorts to question the credibility of bloggers. I’m not saying it’s right, and it is obviously stereotypical. Plus I don’t think many reporters have a sound footing from which to throw stones anyway, but with major market changes comes detractors, and due partly to woeful failings of mainstream media, bloggers have continually gained notoriety, and have found an increasingly important voice.

So, do we at SoloSEO consider ourselves to be SEO experts and qualified to blog. According to my narrow, academically weighted criteria, probably not. However, according to the general blogosphere criteria, yeah baby!! We are as qualified as anyone. It is not a position I am completely comfortable with, but we have learned a bunch over the years SEOing our own sites, using lots of other’s tools, and we have enjoyed good online success in the process. We learned more about SEO when creating Solo, and we will share what we think is important to those who care to read. I will say through our own research, and through discussions with leaders in the SEO field, we have been able to create and consolidate the most comprehensive set of SEO tools, all in an online environment, all in one place. That is something to which we are very proud. We feel we have contributed to make SEO more accessible to more folks trying to be more successful for themselves online, and that feels pretty great. These tools are as simple to use as any SEO tool out there, and they work one with another, and build upon each other, making SEO a smooth flowing process, much different from the segmented SEO tool parade that previously caused us much suffering.

Rest assured, we will continue to blog on topics we feel are important to our fellow Do-It-Youself army of SEOers. Our perspective is quite different as we are first small business owners, with our own business sites. And we too have struggled to learn SEO to better our business’ position online, as opposed to SEO professionals who earn their living assisting others SEO their sites. We see good SEO as a competitive advantage, and we focus on doing SEO better than our competitors, which increases our access to potential clients. We do appreciate the votes of confidence and support from you in the infancy of Solo, and we will not take this loyalty for granted. SoloSEO tools will continue to evolve and adjust to best provide you all with a powerful, yet simple solution for your SEO campaigns, and we will continue to use these tools for our own sites and blog when we learn something cool.

So, will the mainstream media ever give bloggers credit for the important work they attempt to do? Probably not. Do we care? Absolutely not.

2 comments Visited 4554 times March 9th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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Overture Keyword Tool Resurrected, 3 Source Keyword Tool is Back!

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 8th, 2007

Overture’s Keyword Tool was declared dead by many, then Yahoo said it wasn’t dead yet, and now I can confirm it has been resurrected. Before it took FOREVER to load, and would often time out. Now, it runs like a charm. But don’t use it there, you can access not only Overture’s Keyword Tool from SoloSEO, but also WordTracker and Google Adwords, SIMULTANEOUSLY. Is that cool or what. You don’t even need an account from WordTracker, and you’re not limited to a measly 100 words either.

Try a free trial of SoloSEO, and if anything use it for the sweet keyword tools and keyword manager. This is what it looks like:

In case you’re wondering, before it was only 2 sources as Overture’s keyword tool was dead. Those funny little icons might need some explaining too. The > Play one is to re-run the keyword query (it’s all AJAX, pretty slick) and the + Add icon is to add it to your list (you can add as many as you want without leaving the page, AJAX again, real slick). The 5 bar icon is for popularity. Instead of those obscure numbers that come with Overture and WordTracker, we’ve normalized popularity of keywords to a 0-5 scale (yeah, that’s sweeeeeet). When you save keywords to your keyword manager, it saves the popularity with the keyword. Then you can use those keywords in other tools quite easily (like our keyword ranking reports that run weekly or monthly straight to your email box).

Try SoloSEO!

1 comment Visited 5796 times March 8th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Meet your Local SEOs

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 8th, 2007

If you don’t already know SEOs that live around you, use your search engine superpowers to find them, then contact them and meet up for an hour and get to know each other. It’s fun!

I live in a small college town, so for a while I thought I was the only one doing SEO stuff around here. I fell upon SEOThursday.com, now EnviSEO.com (a great SEO blog by the way), and noticed Nathaniel lived in the same city as me. After corresponding a few times we finally got together for a nice chat of SEO this evening. We met at a cafe downtown with an SEO buddy of his, Jay, and had a great time just talking SEO. Thanks guys!

The neat thing about meeting people is you never know what will come of it. So get outside your box and meet some people. You’ll have to take the initiative to set it up, but the perspective you can get from others, even on just life itself, can be priceless.

UPDATE:

I didn’t have Jay’s blog when I first posted, so I wanted to include that here. It is a search engine optimization and marketing blog called SEOFoSho and it contains some neat insights from a true SEO. Jay and Nathaniel of EnviSEO are both excellent SEOs I would recommend working with anytime and I’m following both their blogs now. They’ve got quite a client list and are two of the nicest guys you could ever meet.

Add comment Visited 4449 times March 8th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Small Business Ingenuity with a Wok

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 1st, 2007

A television station who couldn’t afford the $20,000 commercial link for their station enlisted the help of a wok and saved $19,990. The story goes beyond the pringles can wireless antenna because it’s not just hobby anymore, they actually use this for their business.

There are obviously some things you don’t want to go cheap on (anything that protects life…and data?), but when you’re a small business you have to make it with what you have. If all you have is time, then your time should be spent in things that will promote the success of your business.

This television station didn’t even need to hire the guy (it says volunteer). There are many opportunities to network and gain help from others without paying a dime in consulting fees. We don’t want to be bottom-feeders, but rather be resourceful and glean what you can from your surroundings. Luckily the Internet makes our surroundings quite expansive.

Add comment Visited 4040 times March 1st, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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