SoloSEO

Search Engine Marketing Scholarship Begins

Posted by Michael D Jensen on May 12th, 2008

Andy Beal at MarketingPilgrim.com opened up the 3rd annual Search Engine Marketing Scholarship, open to anyone who wants to write an article about SEO, PPC, or SMO (social media optimization) and have a chance at more than $10,000 worth of prizes! Beyond writing the article, your next task is to get your article some traffic! You can do it any way you want, but this year quality traffic is getting some bonus points.

This is a great opportunity for rising stars in search engine marketing to get a leg in and get some traction, attention, and recognition. You can use your SEM knowledge to get your article links, publicity, and traffic and make it into the top 5. From there, a panel of “expert judges” (quotes because I’m one of the judges…), will select the winner.

Best of luck (and skill) to all entrants!

Add comment Visited 86 times May 12th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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Feedburner Drop? Don’t Worry, Your Subscribers Are Back

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 30th, 2008

In case you were concerned with your blog, like I was, with a mass exodus of Feedburner subscribers, @AndyBeal helped me figure it out this morning through Twitter (you can follow me if you want @mdjensen), which I am coming to see its importance more and more.

It looks like Netvibes was undergoing some maintenance and so it was under reporting, and at least from this blog it was from last Wednesday (April 23rd) until yesterday. Here is what it looks like over the last few weeks:

Today is the highlighted green bar with a T (Tuesday). You can see that our overall blog subscribers count when up even higher after the Netvibes result. Maybe they are reporting more accurately now? Usually we only see dips on the weekend, so seeing a mid-week dip (from last week’s Monday and Tuesday down to Wednesday) was unusual.

Andy Beal was saying he lost 1300 subscribers from his count based on that, and for us it looks like NetVibes makes up 32% of our subscriber base.

1 comment Visited 205 times April 30th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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International SEO in 1 minute

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 7th, 2008

International SEO has been a topic at recent SEO conferences, and one that we’ve discussed here before. One aspect of doing International SEO is having your content available in other languages. Hiring a translator to translate your blog is cost prohibitive for most bloggers, running $50-$250 for each language per post.

Although no automated translator is perfect, Google has come up with a great translator, perfect for translating your blog. Of course the translation won’t be as accurate as a real translator, but if you can’t afford that, this service is better than nothing at all.

Lucky for all of us, there are several Wordpress translator plugins. The best one I have found and implemented (see the flags on the right sidebar) for our own blog is the Global Translator Plugin for Wordpress by Nothing2Hide.net. Some of the advantages are:

1) Easy to install, just unzip, upload the folder, turn it on, and check the settings (under Options).

2) SEO Friendly URLs! For example, http://www.soloseo.com/blog/it/ goes to the Italian version of our blog, and http://www.soloseo.com/blog/it/2008/04/07/international-seo-1-minute/ is the URL to this post (notice just the /it is added). Your blog posts will start to show up on other versions of the search engines, and hopefully start generating some traffic, subscribers, and conversions!

3) Caching - Instead of going out to Google Translator every time the post is viewed, it will cache the translation.

Of course there is more to do than just getting content into different languages, but it is certainly a great place to start with International SEO.

So if you want to take that first step into International SEO, start with getting your existing content translated into several other languages!

Update - 403 Forbidden Errors

After posting this and letting it go overnight, it appears that Google does not like its translation service being used every hour! (we were getting 403 Forbidden Errors for all translated pages) Luckily the service has several options built-in, and so I opted for using AltaVista’s Babelfish service. The translation works fine and I don’t get the 403 Forbidden Error page instead of my translated blog pages. Hopefully Google will let us use their service more, I will probably try it again and change the interval to every 24 or 48 hours.

3 comments Visited 671 times April 7th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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SearchMe.com Breaks the Search Engine Mold

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 18th, 2008

With the SearchMe beta announced last week, and my invitation to participate arriving today, SearchMe.com has arrived to change up the playing field of Search Engines. Will it be successful? I think its new and fresh search engine interface will make a lot of heads turn. Here are 3 areas where SearchMe has broken the traditional mold of a search engine, and may add some new areas of emphasis in the SEO industry.

1) Site design, not page title
For most users, the page title that Google et al. display in the search engine results page (SERPs) is the first “eye-catcher” to draw in a reader and attract attention. Second comes the “description” which is pulled either from the meta tag or content on the page around the search term.

SearchMe.com makes your site the number one focus. Emphasis in terms of search engine optimization now has a design element.

Pages that are spammy (lots of ads), have little content, or an overwhelming menu structure will most likely be skipped. Optimizing your page for SearchMe might include making important text (like a heading) readable at that size to garner attention.

I found myself considering the following: (1) my first impression (good or bad), (2) is the content type what I expected based on my search (lots of product images, lots of content, a video, etc.), and (3) from what I can read does it address what I am looking for (including the page title when that pops open at the bottom of the screenshot).

2) No more Page 1
Instead of having a next page button, you can keep on scrolling for forever (I didn’t get to any end of results after 2 minutes of scrolling, so that’s assumed). This seems inconsequential, but it no longer gives us a “top 10″ results. Obviously the first listings will be seen more, but there is no more defined line.

3) Assumed verticals
Google et al. have different verticals like web search, images, blogs, maps, shopping, books, finance, etc. SearchMe also has verticals, but automatically generate what verticals they assume you are searching for if you would like to narrow your search. When I type in “pizza, st george ut” (a local search type of query), for example, I get “Lodging & Hotels”, then “Restaurants”, “Sales & Bargains”, “Skiing”, and “Dentistry”. Of course they have more verticals than this, and each set is based on what you are typing. Very slick. The other thing I might mention too is that the verticals are actually centered on what I am actively seeking, rather than just having a defined set of verticals that you have to make a decision of relevance on.

I think SearchMe has a great product, and I’m looking forward to the refining of the algorithm, speed, and total index.

3 comments Visited 558 times March 18th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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Free SEO Tool: XML Sitemap Ping Tool

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 10th, 2008

All the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live, and Ask) use the XML Sitemaps protocol for getting URLs from websites. Of course they all still use good old-fashioned crawling, but the XML sitemap can be helpful for getting new content indexed quicker and also helping spot errors using other tools the search engines offer. Simply put, if you don’t have an XML sitemap already, we suggest you get one. XML-Sitemaps.com offers a free service that works very well, and you can also download (not free) a version to run on your own server.

As the major search engines all agreed to a protocol (basically Google’s protocol), they also made it easier to let them know when a sitemap has been updated. They let users “PING” them with the URL for the sitemap. This makes it easy to build into software and such, but not necessarily easy to do. So, we thought we’d make it easy to do for you.

Just put in the URL of your sitemap, and then we’ll send it on to all 4 search engines in one big swoop. If there happens to be an error, you’ll get an error message.

You can also check out our other Free SEO Tools like the LinkSearch Tool and IndexRank.

5 comments Visited 844 times March 10th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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Blended Search… Should We Care?

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on March 5th, 2008

Michael and I had the opportunity to attend the SMX (Search Marketing Expo) last week in sunny Santa Clara, CA. It was a shame to spend those 60-degree days inside, especially since I come from the cold, white Rocky Mountains, and we spend as little time as possible outside this time of year. But for the good of our readership, my poorly educated mind, and to get our money’s worth we suffered through some questionable meals (sorry guys, most of it was inedible), and overly well air-conditioned conferences rooms (where’s my parka?) to gather all the information we could.

From the get go, it was obvious the conference was going to spend much of the time discussing what Danny Sullivan and others are calling “Blended Search.” I am not a big fan of the term “blended search,” it isn’t an accurate descriptive term. In my mind when something is blended, a bunch of ingredients are taken and acted upon to create a new product, with the ingredients of that product not being individually identifiable from that point forward. What we are talking about here is not a blended new search results page, but more like a new look, and a re-organization of information from sources, which were not previously utilized, but where the data remains very much identifiable. Google is calling this mega- results page Universal Search, which is a better term as far as definitions go, since Google is essentially universally searching all their database silos for all the results possible. Essentially, the search engines are now able to draw from more databases at one time and return results from all those queries to us on our results pages. The database sources used by search engines can now include blogs, books, catalogs, programming code, online directories, stock quotes, images, maps, news, video and standard web searches.

So on a so-called blended or universal results page, the searcher could see data from anyone of the above listed sources, organized by relevance, instead of just the page of links and snippets we are used to seeing now. In the past if we wanted to search specific data silo, we had to select Images, Maps, News, Shopping, etc, from the top of the search page, now all those silos can be automatically included.

I personally wonder how much this sort of mega results page will benefit us. My biggest complaint with search now is the shear volume of superfluous garbage we still seem to receive in our SERPs today, so I worry that unless the search algorithm gets drastically better, all these new search results possibilities could potentially just turn out to add to the useless noise and clutter plaguing us now. We shall see.

The most important question to us small business owners becomes, what does this mean to our sites, and how does it change the way we SEO? In short, for now it doesn’t change one thing. In two different sessions representatives of Google made it clear that good, proven SEO strategies are still as important as ever whether is be in web search or universal search pages, so we do not need to change what we are doing (assuming we are doing our SEO right). I think that is the best way to play it, just keep adding the rich content, building natural links, adding popular keywords, and our sites will continue to grow and do well. However, I am concerned with the prospect that we are now going to now need to compete with large companies and other media types for position on the SERPs. For example, if I am an online advertiser for my plumbing services, I don’t want the listing I worked hard to achieve to be replaced by some absurd YouTube plumbing mishap video, or by an image of Miss Plumber America, scantily clad holding a pipe wrench. I want my listing to rightfully stay put… I hope good SEO practices and a more defined and appropriate algorithm protect small business owners, our site’s position, and they continue to provide us with the opportunities to still do well online as Integrated Search becomes more mainstream. We will need to keep a close eye on it, and if we must, we will figure out how to make the new changes work best for us. I am sure Michael could make us some sort of another helpful tool. ☺

Add comment Visited 499 times March 5th, 2008 Aaron R Stewart

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What’s New with Yahoo! and Google

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 4th, 2008

Some exciting things have been happening in the world of search.

At SMX West last week, Yahoo! announced their Open Search Platform. This was the talk of the town at SMX, and a novel idea from Yahoo. Basically, instead of just being able to somewhat control your search engine snippet with your title tag and description meta tag, later this year you will be able to customize what is shown, such as ratings, reviews, site links (like Google does now), an image, address, contact info, and more. Here is an example from the Yahoo Search Blog.

Before

After

Obviously if you are on the front page we’re going to see a skewing of what the normal percentages of users click on, because it’s going to stand out and be very functional and user friendly. Great move for Yahoo! too in empowering even the small business to stand out from the crowd and take search to a new level. Obviously Microsoft hasn’t taken over Yahoo! yet.

On the Google front, several sites have reported Google adding another element to their Universal search, with a site search box right in the SERPs. Check this out:

Pretty handy and pretty interesting. I couldn’t duplicate it myself interestingly, it’s probably a limited data center roll out. I do find it interesting seeming Amazon has their own search, A9 search, which I haven’t heard mentioned for a long time. Of course it’s not really a search engine, more of a search aggregator.

I’ll put together the highlights of SMX and post that later this week, in case you missed it or don’t want to read through the liveblogs (they’re actually pretty good).

Add comment Visited 831 times March 4th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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Free Backlink from Apple.com

Posted by Michael D Jensen on February 25th, 2008

Everyone’s always looking for a free backlink with lots of link juice, and I’ve got a great one for you (not nofollow’ed either). Although the page itself doesn’t have an updated PageRank yet (PageRank 0), the domain itself, Apple.com has a PageRank of 9, so you can expect it to carry a lot of great link weight. And to do it, you just need to create a Web App made for the iPhone and then submit it to their directory. You can even create something basic and simple (but I would suggest useful). Here are the steps to making your iPhone web app and securing a nice permanent link from Apple.com:

1) You need an idea - You’ll want to make something worthwhile and that adds value to users, of course. Maybe its a simple tool, calculator, news site, game, or list.

2) Interface template - The most well known “template” was made by Joe Hewitt and is now the IUI project at Google code (download here). This template is great for a news, list, or some type of hierarchal content. If that doesn’t fit your project, search for an existing iPhone Web App and see what they did to make it, then write your own. I made one that is the scriptures for the iPhone, for example.

3) Create an icon and screenshot - You’ll need an icon, even if its just a simple one (like the first letter of your app), and save it in PNG or TIFF format. For the screenshot, there are directions when you submit your app to create the screenshot using a little javascript trick.

4) Submit your iPhone Web App - Submit your application to Apple. You’ll need to register as a developer but it is free. Your company name will be your anchor text, so you may want to “massage” it a little bit to target the link more. The company URL will be the URL that will get the link (your web app itself will not be linked directly).

There is an editorial process but if you stay within their guidelines you will have landed yourself a free backlink from Apple.com!

7 comments Visited 820 times February 25th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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Learn SEO Basics: Internal Anchor Text

Posted by Michael D Jensen on February 14th, 2008

This is one of those things that is somewhat obvious but often overlooked when doing SEO. I’ve discussed previously about Anchor Text for Backlinks, but what about the anchor text of links between the pages of your site? To prevent from boring you, I will be going beyond the lecture about not using links with the word “click here”, and give you some ideas of how to improve your existing content quickly and easily.

But does internal anchor text really matter to Google and other search engines? The answer, Yes! Even though backlinks (links from other sites) are definitely one of the most important aspects of SEO, internal links have an important role in showing to search engines what is important on your site as well as what is related.

Before you proceed, two things to keep in mind. (1) Too many links is not better than just the right amount. Keep it user friendly and readable and I think that’s the balance Google et al. will like. (2) This is especially helpful for long tail keywords, which users are using more and more.

Siloing (Theming)
Don’t let the word “siloing” scare you. All siloing means is sectioning your site into “themes” and structuring your menu and links in a tiered fashion within each theme. If you offer a service, for example, section out your services or products into several (3-5) themes. Each theme has a major keyword and a main page. Your site template should have a link to all of these themes (so on every page of your site). On the theme main page you would then have links to sub-pages that use sub-keywords of the main theme keyword. For example:

Service: Plumbing
Themes: Plumbing Supplies, Plumbing Services, Plumbing Emergency
Plumbing Supplies sub-pages: Kitchen Plumbing Supplies, Bathroom Plumbing Supplies, Wholesale Plumbing Supplies, Discount Plumbing Supplies, Plumbing Supply Stores, *brandname* Plumbing Supplies…

Link With What You Got
If you have a site, you should have some content already too. Here is a simple query that will help you to find where on your site you’re already using keywords:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:mydomain.com+”my+keyword+phrase”

Notice I am limiting the query to only my site/domain using the site: operator. Also notice the keyword phrase is in quotes, so you find an exact match.

So if I were writing about link building (look at that, I am) then I would first do a search like:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:soloseo.com+”link+building”

and see which page I mention the phrase “link building”. I see many pages that I do, but the top result has that keyword in the title tag and in the URL, so that is the page I am targeting for that keyword.

Go through your top 20 keywords to start with and see how many more links you can get to them from within the content of other pages. In-content links have innate value because they have context (text around them) and are thought to be more “editorial” than site-wide or menu links. (Google is pretty smart, they can tell which part of your page is the content and which is the menu)

Link While You Write
While you are writing a blog post, an article, or a new page for your site, keep in mind other pages that have been written before as you go along (and you can use the same query above). If you are writing and you mention something related to another product, service, article, or blog post, consider using the keywords for that page in the sentence and make it a link.

For another nice review with some diagrams (albeit a little busy), see this YouMoz article.

Add comment Visited 755 times February 14th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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Don’t be a Victim of Online Fraud

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on January 24th, 2008

Due to all the mortgage fraud around here, and throughout the country, there have been public service announcements popping up, to better “educate” us about the dangers of fraud. Fraud seems to be a part of life, with new ploys being developed all the time to take advantage of trusting individuals. The last comment of one of the public service announcements heard frequently around here states: “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” We all have heard this comment before, and frankly it is a good piece of advice. Due to blatant greed, we all need to be suspect of almost everything, if not everything. I can promise you there is no money locked in a secret US bank account, which only you can get out to help a banished Prince of Nigerian royal decent, and for your efforts the good Prince won’t be giving you a few million as a commission either.

In online business the same goes, I am sad to hear of stories of people who put out their hard-earned money on some hyped-up trick to increase traffic to their site. These programs might in fact increase traffic a bit, but it isn’t quality traffic, it isn’t qualified traffic, so it isn’t worth what was paid.

Then there are the “online marketing experts” who are willing to open their secret treasure trove of online selling secrets for a nominal fee. These are the secrets that have “made them millions” and they are going to hand them out to you for only $29.95. Oh, but that’s not all, you can also get a special bonus of the super-duper extra secret online marketing magic techniques for just another $19.99, but you have to do it before that 60 second timer ticks off to zero… hurry!!! Please…

I am also tired of hearing of the many SEO scams, and then dealing with the fallout these scams put on the SEO industry. These SEO scammers are the people who ask you to pay a relatively small fee up front, then monthly fees thereafter for their masterful “SEO services.” All of which can’t be audited or proven, while you are being assured by the scammer they are working hard on your site, and you sense they are sitting in their underwear, and you swear you can hear Halo 3 being played in the background. I am sure there have been many occasions when all these SEO guys have done is sign our sites up for that traffic-pusher scam system mentioned earlier, and then they just sit back and claim the new increase in traffic is from their relentless SEO efforts. Total scam.

In the world of Internet marketing, let’s just agree on this… If it sounds to good to be true, it MOST DEFINITELY IS NOT TRUE. Please do not fall for any of these and a myriad of other online scams, there is not easy money out there, not legally anyway.

Making a site a success is like anything else in life, it takes work. SEO is work, it takes time to build links, create content, research keywords, all of which are important in SEO efforts. There are tools you can use to make the process of SEO more manageable, but the work has to be done by someone, somehow, somewhere, in order for a site to really improve its performance. You can use a system like SoloSEO to help you keep track of all your progress and provide you with tools and training to do it yourself, but it does take time and effort. Or you can hire a reputable SEO firm, one that will be a bit pricey, but they will tell you what they are doing, and show you reports of the progress they have made, and you will see an increase in qualified traffic, and ultimately sales. Good SEO efforts drive real potential clients to your site because they already know what you are offering and it is what they are searching for, that is the type of pre-qualified clients we all want browsing our product pages.

At SoloSEO we are working to make the tools and processing of SEO easier to use, as well as more educational. We not only want our clients to see their sites improving the right way, we want them to know how SEO works and to understand what the tools and processes are doing, and why the positive results are happening. Understanding the concepts behind SEO allow us to better understand our online marketplace, and helps us quickly determine the different online tactics be employed by our competitors, so we can better compete. Learning and doing are both important in SEO, as it is with many other worthwhile endeavors.

In short, please be careful when purchasing SEO services, make sure the providers will be accountable, make sure they give you some benchmarks on what they will accomplish over the term of the contract. Not so much in terms of traffic, traffic will come if the SEO is done right, instead make sure they give you a timeline on when the keyword research will be done, how much time they will spend building links, and how they build links, (hopefully they avoid purchasing links), and how much time will be spent on content, etc. Pin them down, and make them commit to a defined time-line. This is the way business is typically done in the offline world, we should demand and expect the same level of responsibility from the online world. Don’t be intimidated by their perceived expertise, you know more about other stuff than they do, I assure you. Speak with confidence, and expect them to stand by their performance.

If you have any questions on whether a SEO service provider is a good one or not, ask them to provide you a few URLs they have worked on and talk to the owners of those sites, see how past clients have felt they were treated. You could also use our SEO tools to analyze these sites and see if they have addressed basic SEO principles required to improve a site for the long haul.

Ultimately, just be wary, money can make good people do some pretty dumb/dishonest things. We unfortunately had $20K stolen from us last year by a family friend. This someone we allowed in our home as one of the family and we mistakenly trusted, so it can happen easily, anywhere, anytime, even to the most untrusting among us.

One final note on fraud, pay attention to all the political campaigning going on right now. Some of the very best scammers in all the world are now running for President of the United States, it is fascinating to watch. Let us all remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, even ( or especially) in politics.

4 comments Visited 925 times January 24th, 2008 Aaron R Stewart

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