Posts filed under 'Misc'Merry Christmas From SoloSEOPosted by Michael D Jensen on December 25th, 2007 From the folks at SEO to you and yours, Merry Christmas. It’s a time to not only remember what the reason for the season is, but to make a change in ourselves for the better. Be a better father, mother, husband, wife, sibling, and friend. More time for family and what matters most. Be kind, show love, give service, and do good. Add comment Visited 1467 times December 25th, 2007 Michael D Jensen Related Posts: Introduce Yourself at PubCon and Get Some SwagPosted by Michael D Jensen on November 28th, 2007 If you’re not going to PubCon, you’re missing out on a great conference. Aaron and I will both be there again this year, and we’d love for you to introduce yourself to us. As a bonus (or a bribe I guess) we’ll give you some swag (freebies, promos, giveaways)! And for the first 50 to introduce themselves, you’ll get a bonus swag! I’d tell you what our swag this year is, but I’ll leave the anticipation to drive you to introduce yourself to us. We did put a lot of time into finding a functional, useful swag item that you wouldn’t just throw away after the conference, or give to your dog to chew on. So keep your eye out for us and don’t be shy, we’d love to meet you! To help you recognize us by face a little better, here are our mugs:
8 comments Visited 2846 times November 28th, 2007 Michael D Jensen Related Posts: You may have noticed…Posted by Michael D Jensen on July 30th, 2007 You may have noticed a little slow down in our blog posting rate. I’ve been finishing my degree and it has been crunch time for a few weeks. I am in the middle of moving now, so my posting will be light over the next two weeks. I’m headed from Missouri (where I am now) to beautiful Saint George, Utah (red rock country). We have some exciting things happening with SoloSEO and we are developing new features that are very exciting and will further add to what has become a great SEO platform. Thanks to all our users, and for the rest of you who haven’t jumped in yet, bump up your SEO and get started today! Thanks for reading! 1 comment Visited 2241 times July 30th, 2007 Michael D Jensen Related Posts: 7 Months to Get Past Google’s “Did you Mean…”Posted by Michael D Jensen on July 2nd, 2007 One of my early posts to the SoloSEO blog was How to Get Your Web 2.0 Brand Past the “Did you Mean” in Search, and I discussed how in Google if you searched for our brand name “soloseo” Google would come back and say “Did you mean: colosseo”. Well, it’s time to celebrate around here…we have overcome! No longer will Google give a suggestion, but now it knows that when people search for “soloseo” they mean it! What contributes to that? It’s very hard to tell, and I don’t have case studies beyond our own, so it’s all just a guess. I think the main factor is the two main focuses of SEO, content and links. We establish our brand through both content and links, producing content from our site, and obtaining links to our site (many of which have soloseo as the anchor text of the link). Since November 2006 when we first launched SoloSEO, we have gained thousands of links and have created hundreds of pages of content. My blog post mentioned above gave another example, this one with Alexa.com. Alexa also has a “did you mean” when searching for our domain name. Unfortunately, things haven’t changed there. If you type in soloseo.com it says: “Did you mean: solosexo com?”. How crazy is that? What experiences have you had with getting past the “Did you mean” in search engines? 1 comment Visited 2457 times July 2nd, 2007 Michael D Jensen Related Posts: Happy Birthday to Aaron!Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 24th, 2007
It’s a big day for Aaron here at SoloSEO! Happy Birthday! Aaron has been such a great inspiration and motivation to me. He is an amazing entrepreneur and an amazing dad to his family. I hope you have an awesome birthday Aaron! You deserve it! Add comment Visited 1754 times April 24th, 2007 Michael D Jensen Related Posts: Report Content Theft! Submit and View Domains That Steal ContentPosted by Michael D Jensen on April 12th, 2007 I’m sick of trackbacks to my blog from other sites that steal my content. Sure they “cite” me with a link, but it doesn’t count when you say “submitted by kaker” and then link to me, and it doesn’t count even if you link to me and say “read more”. If you’re just quoting me or commenting on a post, you are not stealing my content. So, I thought I’d start keeping track of these content thieves, and I wanted to let you too! Report Content Theft and View Domains That Steal Content I’d love it if someone took this one step further on this and made a wordpress plugin. The plugin would: 1) Add to this list when you find a site that does this. I’m not worried about getting out-competed by these slimeballs, but I don’t want someone monetizing on my hard work and tainting my name with their unethical practices. 6 comments Visited 7291 times April 12th, 2007 Michael D Jensen Related Posts: 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 4183 times March 15th, 2007 Michael D Jensen Related Posts: 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 DomainThis 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 Length of Domain RegistrationThis 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 Type in DomainEveryone 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. BacklinksBacklinks, or inbound links, are how many sites link to your site. These figures are from Yahoo. Barack Obama - 119,909 Technorati LinksThis is used as a measure of popularity in the blogosphere world. The more the better. Barack Obama - 6,527 .edu linksLinks 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 Alexa RankI 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 Page StrengthJohn Edwards - 6.5/10 Indexed PagesGoogle and Yahoo both give a different number of pages in their index, so I’ll show both, Google/Yahoo. John Edwards - 4230/66 Supplemental ResultsIf 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%) Name search on GoogleIf you type in the candidate’s name in Google, where does their “official” election site come up in the SERPs? Hillary Clinton - 1st result Rankings for name, party, etcTerms 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 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, 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 5116 times March 13th, 2007 Michael D Jensen Related Posts: 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 7496 times March 12th, 2007 Michael D Jensen Related Posts: Meet your Local SEOsPosted 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 3420 times March 8th, 2007 Michael D Jensen Related Posts: |
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