SoloSEO

The Only Constant Online is Change.

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on February 24th, 2010

As many of you know, Michael and I have put a great deal of time and effort into building SoloSEO as an important service, a recognizable brand, while hopefully providing our clients the best Do-It-Yourself SEO tools available. We were the first to offer a comprehensive set of online SEO tools, all located in one place. It has been a great learning process, and quite a bit of fun. We both love learning new industries, and obtaining as much knowledge as our pee brains can handle.

Over the last few years we have pursued a number of new opportunities, and recently came to the realization that SoloSEO’s tools are a perfect fit within one of our other online service/products. After much thought and consideration, we have decided to take the SoloSEO tools private and utilize the SoloSEO tool suite in a different manner.

The company mentioned above is called EdgeAbove. A service and system we believe is revolutionizing the network marketing industry, by addressing many of the online challenges these companies face daily. SoloSEO’s tools will now be incorporated into this system, providing EdgeAbove clients a seamless and simple method to SEO their own sites. It is an exciting opportunity.

We will continue to blog on SEO matters here on the SoloSEO blog, especially on changes and interesting developments in the industry. We will also leave all our previous posts up indefintely for anyone looking to learn a bit more about SEO in general. It is a fascinating industry and very important to understand if you have desires of launching a successful online buisness.

It has been and will continue to be a great online ride, happy SEOing to each of you.

1 comment Visited 180 times February 24th, 2010 Aaron R Stewart

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The Missing Twitter Tools

Posted by Michael D Jensen on June 5th, 2008

Twitter has become a part of my every day life. When I first tried it, I thought it was a complete and utter waste of time. Nine months later I decided to give it another chance, and now I see the light. Twitter is great for networking, sharing links, getting ideas, connecting and meeting with people, and sometimes just saying something no one is around physically to hear.

Exactly one month ago, Lee Odden (@leeodden) asked me on Twitter if I was going to build tools for Twitter like I did for MyBlogLog way back when. I started playing with the API and began on the first of several tools. I decided to go with “Missing” Twitter Tools because some of these could/should be integrated into Twitter and I was surprised no one had built them before.

 TweetBeep.com is my favorite, and is the first Twitter Tool I made. It’s like Google Alerts, but for Twitter. If you want to know if someone on Twitter is talking about you, your website, your company or products, your competition, or anything else, just add a TweetBeep alert. You can set hourly or daily alerts for keywords, and link alerts are in real-time. The coolest feature is the link alerts will catch links to your domain even if they are shortened with tinyurl.com, snurl.com, etc. TweetBeep is great for online reputation management!

LiveTwitting.com came as a result of reading a conversation on Twitter between @dannysullivan and @lisabarone, about live twittering conference sessions. Danny mentioned that there was a lack of tools for consolidating tweets after the fact. I twittered with Danny, he sent me some of his ideas/specs, and out came livetwitting.com. With a few simple commands you can record your conference, meeting, or event coverage. You can even edit your text after the fact, and easily reuse the text using the RSS feed. SMX Advanced recently used livetwitting, and has several sessions available for you to check out.

TweetAnswers is like Yahoo! Answers but for Twitter users! Have a question you need answered? Instead of just asking your friends on Twitter, you can ask the growing network of people who follow @tweetanswers. Answers are organized by topic using hashtags.

HappyTwitDay is less useful than the other tools, but it is pretty fun. If someone wishes you a happy birthday on Twitter, @happytwitday will also wish you Happy Birthday, and records your birthday on its website. It keeps track of how many people wished you happy birthday, and you can look up other Twitter users’ birthdays, or who shares the same birthday as you. If you follow @happytwitday you can find out when your friends are having a birthday even if you don’t know it!

Twanslate is a Twitter bot (@twanslate) that will translate any text you send it. It’s very useful when you’re away from your computer and need a quick translation, like “Where’s the bathroom?”. Just follow @twanslate and send a direct message like “d twanslate fr Where’s the bathroom?”. It translates into lots of languages and automatically detects what language your text is in (so you can send it Spanish [es] and translate into French [fr]). 

If you have any great ideas for Twitter Tools you’d like to see built, or if you’d like to just see what I’m up to, follow me on Twitter at @mdjensen.

4 comments Visited 2640 times June 5th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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Announcing LiveTwitting.com

Posted by Michael D Jensen on May 8th, 2008

LiveTwitting is a new way to cover conferences, events, and meetings using Twitter and LiveTwitting.com. With the ease and simplicity of Twitter, you can cover sessions just like before but now in real time.

A few simple commands like ON, OFF, and SPEAKER will let you collect and organize the information for reposting on your blog, website, newsletter, etc. Here are the commands that you can use, after you’ve followed @livetwitting.

You can even take the live RSS feed and link to it (or pull from it) on your blog or website. Here is a fake event that shows how it can be organized, all from using the commands above: LiveTwitting of PubCon 2007: Online Reputation Management.

The whole idea was bred on Twitter, starting with @LisaBarone asking if she should do the next session live with Twitter or not. @DannySullivan responded and said she should but there needs to be some tools to collect and organize the LiveTwitting. I (@mdjensen) told @DannySullivan I’d be interested in working on making that happen. Danny had some great ideas and we brainstormed together, and now have LiveTwitting.com! See, Twitter has its usefulness!

We’d love to hear your thoughts, suggestions, etc. Send me (@mdjensen) or Danny (@DannySullivan) an @reply and we can talk!

Add comment Visited 2440 times May 8th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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IndexRank - A New SEO Metric of Indexing Rate

Posted by Michael D Jensen on November 5th, 2007

How do you measure the success of your content strategy? How do you compare your website’s growth with your competitors?

Enter, IndexRank. IndexRank is a new metric to summarize the indexing rate of your site. If you constantly add content to your site, big or small, your IndexRank will be higher. If you only periodically add content to your site, your IndexRank will be lower. The metric is based on an algorithm that makes use of time specific indexing data from Google to indicate (on a 0-10 scale) the indexing rate of a website. Hat tip to Aaron Wall for a great post about the value of this data.

Below is a snapshot of the IndexRank of several sites. Read on for an analysis of each site, and why their IndexRank is where it is.

Sites such as TechCrunch that create lots of content will of course be indexed more by the search engines, and this is reflected in the IndexRank. ColbertNation.com is a fan blog of Stephen Colbert, and content is added on a daily basis, although not to the same levels as TechCrunch. Bill Slawski has a great SEO blog, but with only him contributing to his blog every couple of days, he doesn’t get indexed as much as sites above him in IndexRank. A newer site, such as Gooruze.com has a lower IndexRank because it is new, but as it continues to create more content on a consistent basis, its IndexRank will continue to climb. Paul Allen (not the Microsoft guy) has a great blog, but only posts to his blog every now and then.

How to Use IndexRank

One of the best uses of IndexRank is to compare yourself with other sites, like your competitors. First, visit the Check Your IndexRank page and enter your domain name in the first text box. Then find a few competitors and enter their domain names in adjacent text boxes. (To find a quick list of competitors, search with your top keywords and select the top few domains that rank well.) The IndexRank of all of the domains will give you an idea for how your website is positioned with your competitors in terms of content growth. Remember, IndexRank must be acted upon to be useful, don’t just stare at it, improve it with action.

How Can I Improve My IndexRank?

If you find yourself lacking in IndexRank, the best place to start is by creating content. Start a blog and motivate yourself to write every day. Write articles, news, tutorials, or informational pages and post them on your site. Pay for content to be written for your site on a consistent basis (2-3 articles a week is a great place to start).

23 comments Visited 7123 times November 5th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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SEO for the Rest of Us - The SoloSEO.com Newsletter

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 2nd, 2007

This morning we sent out our first SoloSEO newsletter. Our newsletter’s main title is “SEO for the Rest of Us”, and anyone interested in learning and doing SEO, from beginner to professional, can benefit from the content we deliver.

The newsletter format is composed of a fresh new article (”Freshly Squeezed”), an SEO question and answer discussion with our readership (”Stump the SEO”), an article from the blog archives (”From the Vault”), details or discussion on new SEO tools (”Your SEO Tool Belt”), and a list of links to great SEO related articles published by others in the industry (”Super SEO Articles”). We also have a 5-minute SEO tip in the sidebar of the newsletter.

If you’d like to subscribe to our newsletter, which we foresee going out about once a month, use the following form to sign up instantly. No spam, no reselling, just a great SEO newsletter.

If you have any suggestions for what you’d like to see in the newsletter, leave a comment or email us at newsletter[at]soloseo.com.

1 comment Visited 3337 times April 2nd, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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SEO around the globe

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on March 19th, 2007

SoloSEO has been quite a surprise. When we launched last November, we had no idea the draw a stand alone SEO system would have, nor the level of interest it would generate. It has been truly a whirlwind. We did some quick figuring the other day and discovered that domains from over 40 different countries are currently using our site to SEO their sites. It is also surprising Germany and Russia are the top two, since the site is only being offered in English, and not localized for any other foreign language. There was no way to predict this amount of international interest. Of course we are thrilled to see so many from all over the globe interested in what we are doing, but we now feel pressure to address the SEO needs of site owners who can’t read English, and provide them with the SoloSEO tools in their own languages.

Personally, international business is a big passion of mine. My graduate work was done at Thunderbird, a graduate business school located in Arizona which focuses only on international business, and is ranked by U.S. News as the top school in that speciality. After graduating I was hired by a firm located in Utah, which sold a mineral in over 50 different countries. I was given the title of Global Marketing Director, and put in charge of overseeing the foreign markets, both in managing the distributors and determining our global marketing strategies. It was a wonderful time, doing what I had gone to school to do, international business. I loved the travel and the many countries I got to visit. In a typical year I would visit half of our distributors in 25 + countries, traveling about half the year. It was horrible on my social life, but I personally learned a ton about the world of international business, and how to ask where to find a bathroom in many foreign languages.

When I eventually decided to go out on my own and do the entrepreneur thing, I had hoped to continue with my international life. I started a consulting company with a partner, and we attempted to assist other companies on how they could expand their business operations into international markets, but this proved to be a tough sell. Many of the companies we met with thought we were too young, with too little international experience (5 years) to be consultants of anything, and especially in international business. Eventually, with my international dreams dashed, I had some technology built by a company I was attempting to represent in Japan, and started an online technology company that transfered digital files overseas for processing. This company became the extent of my global business aspirations and I was severely disappointed. But at least I got to be an entrepreneur, and I began to focus my attention on making a living in other ways. I decided it was time to put food on the table and take care of my families financial needs, but I hoped for an opportunity to “go global” in the future.

Michael and I originally met during the development on the first online company, and we struck a bond/partnership. 7 years later we have now launched other technology companies, all of which are focused on delivering online services to domestic clients. And this was also the original design behind SoloSEO. We just felt is was important for domestic site owners to have all the SEO tools they need, all in one place, so they could make SEO a less painful process. We knew others were probably struggling like we were, and they just wanted to optimize their site, to hopefully attract potential clients who were searching for their products. It was our hope the launch of SoloSEO would address the SEO needs of many domestic site owners, little did we know the international excitement which would grow quickly. Soon we had requests from the UK, Spain, Germany, among others for potential strategic partnerships, and international site owners, from many non-English speakers were signing up for the service. It was quite hard to believe, but here we are, and we are now trying to best capitalize on this interest.

So, as of last Friday, I have been here in Tokyo, Japan meeting with potential partners to hopefully offer our SoloSEO tool set in Japan (which is why my Japanese business card is included as the image above). I truly love Japan, I love being here. I lived here for a few years, over 20 years ago, and I studied Japanese in college, so I have grown to love the Japanese people, the culture, the language, the business methods and the food. Japan is as unique as any country on earth, but much more civilized, and perpetually polite and proper (and safe) than all others, which is also what I like about Japan. If you get a chance to visit Japan, you must take it, you will not regret it.

So in this post, I guess I wanted to say “thank you” to everyone who has made this trip to Japan possible, and I hope there will be many more international trips possible in the future. The growth and success of SoloSEO is remarkable, and we hope future international partnerships will contribute to our growth, which will continue to ensure that SoloSEO is always on the cutting edge in providing the best in SEO online tools. We assuredly continue to provide our clients with the most efficient and effective SEO tools available, no matter which country they are living in, or which language they speak.

Yoroshiku Onegaishimasu.

I’ll be back home Thursday, I hope the weather will be sunny and warm. I need to golf soon.

1 comment Visited 3171 times March 19th, 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 4230 times March 8th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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New Competitive SEO Report at SoloSEO.com

Posted by Michael D Jensen on February 20th, 2007

Watching your competition is an important part of SEO and it can take quite a bit of work to stay on top of it all. We are excited to announce that SoloSEO now includes a powerful Competitive SEO Report to compare your SEO statistics and rankings with your competitors. The report is included with a membership and can even be run during a free trial of SoloSEO.

This competitive SEO report will run each month and results are sent to you via email so you don’t even need to log in after you set up the report. The report is easy to start, just fill in a few keywords and the domains of your competitors.

Once you set up the report it runs in the background, so you can continue using other tools in SoloSEO. After just a few minutes you will get an email with the completed report.

The report has three parts: 1) SEO Site Statistics, 2) Feedback on your statistics vs your competitors, and 3) Rankings of you and your competitors.

SEO Site Statistics

This report compares backlinks, pages indexed in Google and Yahoo, PageRank, and Alexa Rank. The backlinks (as reported by Yahoo) give you an idea of how you compare with your competitors in terms of quantity of backlinks. The quality of your backlinks, as well as topic relevancy and anchor text will need to be looked at separately to get the full picture (SoloSEO includes tools for this too), but this is a general metric for knowing the popularity and connectivity of a site. The pages indexed is a nice way to compare the size of your site with your competitors. More unique and quality content will always help, so this gives you a way to gauge on what you need to more effectively compete. PageRank is somewhat useful as a gauge of the quality of a site, but is by no means the all-important factor to worship in SEO. PageRank updates also only occur every several months. Alexa Rank is a gauge of the traffic your site is receiving, and like PageRank is more of a general metric than a golden Willy Wonka ticket.

Some general feedback, suggestions, and even congratulatory statements are given for each part of the SEO Site Statistics section, which is intended for beginner SEOs and non-SEOs to get an idea for what the numbers are saying to them.

The rankings of your site and your competitors are displayed for each keyword, giving you a quick and easy way to check how your site ranks versus your competitors. For now the chart uses Google for rankings, although this may expand in the future.

We are very excited about this report and the opportunities it affords you. We have been having fun running the report internally for our own companies. Having the report automatically run each month and emailed is a great feature that makes it even easier to keep track of it all.

Two other reports are also available in SoloSEO, the Keyword Rankings Report and Keyword Competion Report. The Keyword Rankings Report can now be set to automatically run weekly and monthly, which makes it even easier to keep up on your rankings for important keywords.

Try the new Competitive SEO Report, and other powerful SEO tools today by signing up for a free trial or by logging in to your account!

2 comments Visited 6989 times February 20th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Out SEO Your Competition

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on February 19th, 2007

We all know SEO assists a site to perform better in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), but the reasons people SEO can differ. Some just want to share their knowledge with the world and aren’t selling anything, (like in informational blogs), some want to rank as an authoritative site to increase the revenue in their AdSense campaigns, and some want to find new clients through organic search, or do better in their PPC campaigns. There are also some that are motivated by all or a combination of these motivations. For me personally it is the opportunity to find more clients, and to out-compete my competitors for those clients.

In the introduction to his seminal book On Competition, Michael Porter (recognized Harvard professor and expert in competitive studies) states:

“No company, and no country, can afford to ignore the need to compete. Every company, and every country, must try to understand and master competition” (Porter, 1998, p. i).

I come from a primarily business background, and have spent a good bit of time studying competitive analysis theory, or the use of different analytic tools to attempt to understand, predict and prepare for the strategic adjustment competitors are most likely to implement in the marketplace. It is truly a fascinating area of thought. However, each of these competitive analytic tools requires considerable amounts of time and research to make them worth anything, and even when the analysis is complete, it can only provide the researcher nothing more than a more educated guess as to what a competitor might do. Some widely used competitive analysis tools used today include: SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), Competitive Array, Game Theory (very interesting), Five-Forces, etc., just to name a few. There are even many firms that will perform the analysis for you, using a variety of these tools for a fee. Dun and Bradstreet offers small business firms information about their competitors for a fee, $9.99 per firm, for a firm analysis, $24.99 for an industry analysis and $65 for various marketing lists. Despite the inherent weaknesses of these various analysis tools, innumerable firms continue to spend all kinds of resources to run these analyses in hopes of putting themselves in a better competitive position.

Now on to why I love the online competitive world… There are certain SEO tools and techniques which provide us the opportunity to really know what our competitors are up to online, with real data. The SEs (Search Engines) have already aggregated the data, and using these SEO analysis tools properly can drastically reduce the ability of a competitor to surprise you, or make huge moves online unnoticed. Not to mention this real data reduces the need of firms to “make educated guesses” as to what their competitors are really up to. Online, the competitive marketplace is more transparent than offline, and with the increased competitive information comes the increased importance to be more competitively astute and responsive. So once competitive trends are discovered, firms need to react more quickly to address these trends, to stay ahead of the curve, and remain competitively viable. This is done by using other SEO tools which assist your site to become more competitive online, specifically in the SERPs. SoloSEO was built to not only to provide competitive intelligence tools, which efficiently watch industry competitors, but to also offer effective SEO tools, allowing firms to improve their online competitive position.

This week we will be launching a new service, which will make the competitive intelligence process more convenient and streamlined for our subscribers. We are very motivated to assist our clients become more aware of their competitors more quickly, and assist them improve the competitiveness of their sites with effective SEO tools. Please stay tuned…

Add comment Visited 3056 times February 19th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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The Missing MyBlogLog Tools - Get More from MyBlogLog

Posted by Michael D Jensen on January 16th, 2007

The Missing MyBlogLog Tools, created by SoloSEO.com, give you a new way to harness the power of MyBlogLog. These tools let you compare and find contacts and communities in a new and powerful way. Our tools go beyond the basic searching and browsing available at MyBlogLog by relying on the networks created between MyBlogLog users and Blog communities.

These tools will help you to find contacts to add and communities to join, plus compare visitors and community members of your blog with other blogs. The following tools are available for your enjoyment:

Compare Blog Visitors
Ever wondered what other blogs your visitors are reading? With this tool you can compare your visitors with another blog’s visitors. Up to 130 of the last visitors are compared from each blog, and MyBlogLog members in common are displayed. Go »

Compare Your Contacts
See what other contacts your friends, industry leaders, and fellow blog readers have that you share and that you don’t have added yet. Just plug in your screen name and someone else’s. Go »

Compare Community Members
With this tool you can compare your MyBlogLog Community members with another community, and view members common between both blogs as well as members unique to each blog. Go »

Common Communities between Contacts
If you need help finding communities, see what communities your contacts share! This tool lets you choose up to 20 contacts to compare common communities, and gives you a link to quickly join the communities! Go »

Show All Visitors
Most blogs just show 5-10 MyBlogLog visitors, so usually that’s all we look at. This tool lets you see the last 130 visitors to all of your communities, all at once! Go »

Add Missing Contacts
Even with 20 or 30 community members, it is hard to keep track of who you have added as a contact. This tool lets you quickly see who in your community have not been added as a contact yet. A link to add them quickly is included! Go »

We hope you enjoy The Missing MyBlogLog Tools and that you can find some interesting comparisons, new contacts to add, and new communities to join.

If Yahoo/MyBlogLog is reading this, these tools would be great to implement as a part MyBlogLog. All we ask is for 1% of your acquisition price or a free trip to Yahoo headquarters.

If you have suggestions for other “missing tools” for MyBlogLog, please leave a comment or send us an email. We also have a poll to vote for your favorite Missing MyBlogLog Tool. Enjoy!

19 comments Visited 10963 times January 16th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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