Easy Robots.txt Builder

Clickability has created a really nice Robots.txt Builder that helps you to configure your Robots.txt file. You can easily build a Robots.txt file to disallow robots into your file structure. There are options for easily adding web search robots, image search, contextual ads, web archivers, and even “bad robots”. The bad robots puts in a […]

Google Categories – Changes to Competitive SEO

Lee Odden blogged about Google Categories yesterday. I wasn’t able to duplicate the categories look, but it did get me thinking about the ramifications to online competition if categories in search become commonplace. As well as how categories might influence our SEO strategies as business owners.

Google Zigs… Let The Whining Commence.

Between the tragedy at Virginia Tech yesterday, a few headaches here at work, and the fact I had to send in a check for taxes, I was glad to finally turn off my lights and put yesterday in the books. It was quite an emotional day for many I am sure. To all of those […]

The Perfect Solution to Paid Link Disclosure

There is a big brouhaha over Matt Cutt’s recent postings (yes, 3 of them) about the disclosure of paid links (big one here, another here, and one more here). There’s been a lot of postings about it, with a great summary here by GrayWolf at SEOclass.com, some here by GrayWolf at Wolf-Howl.com, more here from […]

Even The Big Guys Must Know The Basics

I had the chance to sit down with a large, multi-national, manufacturing company the other day. We did some research on the company before I went into the meeting, just to get a feel for how they were doing online. We knew they were large, had hundreds of employees, spent quite a bit on traditional […]

Report Content Theft! Submit and View Domains That Steal Content

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 […]

Yes, you SHOULD Submit a Sitemap to Google

While others have spoken against submitting your sitemap to Google et al., I am going to stand up for sitemaps all across the web, and give you several good reasons for having a sitemap (now you can do sitemap autodiscovery instead of submitting).

How to Configure Sitemap Autodiscovery in Robots.txt

At Search Engine Strategies New York it was announced that you can now have your sitemap automatically discovered by configuring it in your Robots.txt file. It is simple and easy to do, you’ll just need to know the URL or web address of your sitemap.

Duh… Use What You Got.

I was on a flight the other day, and happen to see this guy with a really cool PDA phone. I wasn’t sure of the make, and being the gadget hound that I am, I had to know, so I asked. He replied that it was the new Blackberry 8800. It was incredibly cool, and […]

Why I Blog (5 Reasons)…

I have never liked tag games very much as a kid. It was mostly due to the fact that I was too fat and slow as a youngster to really catch anyone, so I frequently spent most of my early years as “it.” For the most part it was the mean, fast kids who would […]

Deliver on your Page and Ad Titles

A radio ad I heard this morning starts out “Another how-to half minute from the Home Depot…”. Now, before you read on, what are you expecting to get out of the next 25 seconds or so left of this radio spot? A “how-to half minute” makes me ready to learn something about landscaping or home […]

5 Reasons Why I Blog

I was recently tagged by Jaan Kanellis in a blog meme that has been circling around the blogosphere. The “theme” of the blog meme is “Why I Blog”, and as it goes traditionally, name 5 things and tag 5 other bloggers. As with the last blog meme I have created a Blog Meme Tracker. You […]

Blog Meme Tracker – Why Do You Blog?

With another game of blog tag coming around the SEO blogosphere, we have again created a page to track the blog meme. The first time we did this we created the blog tag tree for the “5 Things You Didn’t Know About Me” question. This time the question is “Why Do You Blog?”, and you […]

Top 5 Useful and Free SEO e-Books

Originally I wanted this post to be titled, “Top 10 Useful and Free SEO e-Books”, but I was surprised to find very few worthwhile free SEO e-Books, even when I enlisted the help of several SEO experts/friends! I had to dig more into “Internet Marketing” but SEO is such an umbrella term now that I […]

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

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.

Killer Keywords

In search marketing keywords have the potential to render a site useless, give it wings, or get it shoved somewhere in between. Keywords are the connection to potential online clients, to attract them to what you offer, while bolstering online visibility. As more searchers find the snippet of your site applicable and click your link, […]

Accidental Page 1 Ranking for One Word Keywords

Have you ever found yourself ranked for a popular one word keyword that you never intended on ranking for? Maybe we’re an odd ball, but the top one word keyword (besides our company name) that drives traffic to our site is “tagged“. That’s right folks, as in tag you’re it.

Mobile Search Madness

Last Friday William Slawski posted on an interesting new patent registered by Google. Essentially a non-browser program for mobile phones which allows search through Google, and viewing of emails. After my recent trip to Japan, my mind has been consumed with the mobile aspect of all things search, and how we may need to adjust […]

Search Engine Marketing Scholarship Contest Begins Again

Andy Beal announced today the launch of the second Search Engine Marketing Scholarship. This is a fantastic opportunity ($10,000 worth of prizes) for any of you Solo SEOs looking to get out and be known with your expertise. Sharpen your copywriting skills and impress the SEO world with your insight into Search Marketing as well […]

The Future of SEO in Japan

On my last day in Japan, I can report that there is a huge market for Japanese SEO services. And there are many companies not only with this understanding, but actively pursuing technologies to help them with their own SEO efforts, and to assist their clients better SEO their sites for more search powered success […]

A Corporate Blog Makes You Linkable

I was reading a post by Rand Fishkin about the “secret” that’s not really a secret for ranking. Essentially the secret is linkable content.

SEO around the globe

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 […]

How to Get a Double Listing in Google

The following are some steps on how to get double listing in Google. Step 1 – Pick a topic that you can write a series of posts/articles on. Step 2 – Start each post with the same topic name. Step 3 – Give each post its own unique title appended to the topic name. Step […]

Starting your SEO Business: 10 Ways to Make Your Small SEO Firm Look Big

Nowadays you don’t have to be big to get big clients. After 3 months of starting up (early 2006) our own web content firm (Applied Content), we landed a big deal with a Fortune 500 company (actually in top 30 though!). It’s not that we looked like a giant corporation, but we looked big enough […]

How do the Presidential Candidates Rate for SEO?

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.

What do the Presidential Candidates use for Analytics?

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.

Bloggers Lack Respect

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 […]

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

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 […]

Meet your Local SEOs

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!

Know your competitors, before they know you.

Many see SEO strategies as a process which is only used when you are constructing your web site, or after launch to improve the site performance in SERPs, but SEO tools can also be used effectively to analyze prospective markets, even before a decision is made to start competing in a particular market.

10 Reasons to use Paid SEO Tools instead of Free SEO Tools

If you take a step back and look at it, the SEO industry is rather odd. SEO experts who are paid thousands of dollars by companies will also freely share tips, tricks, principles, pricing structures, and SEO advice. Then we come to the tools, where there are literally thousands of free SEO tools spread across […]

New Competitive SEO Report at SoloSEO.com

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 […]

Out SEO Your Competition

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 […]

Keywords – More Than Meets the Eye

When you were a kid, did you ever have one of these transformers? I had several transformers and even loved watching the cartoon. A transformer, like Optimus Prime, would be a semi-truck at first, but then you could move the pieces around and make it into a robot machine. The tagline for Transformers was, “Transformers, […]

PPC Advice – Good or Bad… or VERY BAD

Today, I took a few moments to take in a bit of the current online marketing blogscape. I eventually came across a post entitled “17 most common PPC mistakes web marketers make” by Igor Mor. It was posted on SEOMoz as part of their YOUMoz program where they “claim” posts from others they deem appropriate. […]

SEO vs. Paid Search Marketing Clash

If you have not gone over and read about the tussle between Dave Pasternack and SEO pros, you must take a minute to review it, it has been quite entertaining. Our friend Michael Gray has jumped in with both feet, and his post called Dave Pasternack of Did-it.com – How to Fix Your Problem is […]

Huh? then Ah-ha!

After writing about Elusivity and Internet Marketing this morning, I put in the 3rd CD of the audio book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (I highly recommend it so far). Everything I was writing about, and frankly, trying to put into words, was iterated on the audio book. I’ve never […]

Benefits of Elusivity in Internet Marketing

The words “elusivity” (being difficult to describe, detect, or grasp) and “Internet Marketing” are not words I would typically join in a sentence (no one else in the world either). But after doing a tradeshow this last week for one of our companies I found there are many benefits to “elusivity” in marketing, and that […]

Local Search SEO from 20 Experts

Michael Gray, AKA Gray Wolf, has started a series called Local Search Tips, Tricks & Secrets where he is interviewing 20 SEO experts about local search. He has already done four of them, with Aaron Wall (SEOBook), Dean Bloomfield, Bill Slawski, and Scott Smith.

Your Customers aren’t Targets

I heard a great radio ad about radio advertising, which included the following: Your customers aren’t targets, they’re your friends and neighbors. They want to be talked with, not shot at.

Entrepreneurship… What was I thinking?

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 […]

Jumping on Keywords When they are Hot

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 […]

5 Minute SEO for Your Blog

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 […]

Can Web Designers do SEO?

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 […]

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

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 […]

Building the Perfect Link, the Ultimate Guide

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…

Free Links from MyBlogLog!

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 […]

Google… You’re Not The Boss of Me!

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 […]

Purchase Links… Is it Moral or Ethical? Is it Legal?

I was led to a post by Jordan McCollum on Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim today. It was there I read, to my horror, that V7, Inc, a hosting company (voted best hosting company in 2003, which is interesting) is now going to sell contextual links (links contained in the text of a web page), which […]

Starting your SEO business: 5 Steps to Getting New SEO Clients

Starting your own SEO business is an exciting new adventure. This is the first of a series of tips, steps, lessons, and tutorials on how to start your own SEO business. One of the many aspects of starting out as an SEO is finding clients. We’ve put together a list of five steps to start […]

Relevancy and Accuracy of Top Search Queries Tool in Google Webmaster Tools

Google has created a set of tools to help Webmasters see interesting and important Google data about your site (try it here). One of the “statistics” related tools gives you “Top Search Queries” for discovering keywords that you rank for (see image). The queries are more “fun” than interesting, in our case. Several of the […]

Fools Gold – The Risk of Buying Links

Get away from the edge, just calm down, back away, there is a better way. Just don’t buy a link, work for them. I am not talking about paid ads, I am talking about the sneaky practice of making a paid link appear to be a naturally occurring link. There is some confusion in the […]

Yahoo, the new Spyware?

Andy Beal and Jarrod Hunt reveal tactics Yahoo is using to get your preferences to switch to Yahoo. If you upgrade to Yahoo Messenger it will also try to download and install IE7 (ewww), and then it switches the browser default from FireFox et al to IE7 and search engine settings to use Yahoo.

How to Optimize your Search Engine Snippets

In search engine optimization it can be easy to overlook search engine snippets (you know, the smaller text below the title when you get your search results). All of us care a lot about rankings, conversions, and backlinks, but what about that first opportunity to tell a potential reader something with a search engine snippet?

Your Mom Can Understand SEO Too.

I have the opportunity to discuss SEO quite a bit, even my mom wants to understand SEO and our newest venture. However, within seconds of me starting the SEO intro, I get the look I give my dentist when he informs me of my next pending root canal. In these SEO discussions rarely does anyone […]

Free Advertising on TechCrunch with MyBlogLog Flaw

  MyBlogLog has become hugely popular and was even acquired by Yahoo recently, but I recently discovered a flaw that can easily be exploited by anyone in less than 60 seconds and create free advertising on TechCrunch (and hundreds of other sites). Please don’t do this, or even try this, as it is spammy. If […]

New SEO Tool – Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer

Last week we announced a new tool every day (except New Year’s), and we thought we’d kick off this week with one more tool announcement. We just finished the “Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer”, and are excited for you to start using it. This tool checks the backlinks for your site (or any site), and then […]

New SEO Tool – Search Engine Viewer

In SEO we spend so much time improving our rankings, getting links, optimizing content, and watching competitors (all good things), but it is easy to neglect optimizing the actual listing of each page in the search engines. The “Search Engine Viewer” is just that tool. And more than just showing you how it looks, we […]

New SEO Tool – Top Subpages Tool

This week we have announced a new tool each day, starting with the dead link checker that checks your site for internal and outbound links that point to a dead (not working) URL. Next we announced the XML Sitemap Generator now integrated with SoloSEO, so with just a click of a button you can create […]

New SEO Tool – XML Sitemap Generator

Today’s new tool in SoloSEO is an integrated XML Sitemap Generator. Previously you just had to create your own, now we’ll do it for you! All you have to do is initiate the process by clicking a button, and the Sitemap is created while you go on with your SEO. We’ve made it easy to […]

New SEO Tool – Dead Link Checker Tool

This week we are announcing a new tool each day (so stay tuned by subscribing). Today’s new tool is the “Dead Link Checker” tool. Many of you have probably seen Google’s tool (inside Google Webmaster Central) that reports pages on your site that can’t be found in their crawl. Although this is helpful, it falls […]

$350 in free ads from Looksmart and Ask.com

Paul Allen has been at SES Chicago and after talking to some exhibitors is letting loose some codes for $300 at looksmart and $50 at ask.com. I just signed up for the LookSmart ad center and have $300 in credit now. It’s not as nice/usable as Adwords but it works. We’ll see what kind of […]