9 Steps to Land & Keep Fortune 500 Clients

Making big business moves

I’ve been inspired today by a post written by Demian Farnworth entitled: What a Cocky CEO Can Teach You About World-Class Blogging. The post was excellent, and as a small business creator and owner, I loved the points made in the blog on keeping our companies “focused, lean, fast.” Embracing these attributes usually keeps you […]

Best PubCon 2007 Swag

We had a great time at PubCon and I got several great gems and tips for SEO and SEO tools. Many of you conference goers know there is always lots of swag (freebies, promos, giveaways) given out at these shows, so it is good to have a backpack or bag. I thought it would be […]

How To Profit From Site Images

The other day we were leaving a soccer game for my 6 year old boy. My 2 year old wasn’t quite happy with her perceived lack of playground time, and she expressed her upset quite loudly, while she thrashed around. I calmly (kind of) chased her down, picked her up and lovingly wrestled her into […]

Image Isn’t Everything, But It Is Something.

Taking a look at the corporate logs in the image to the left, how do you feel about those brands? Do you feel anything? Much in marketing is focused on influencing the public’s perception of our companies, our products and our brand. We want others to think our products/services are high in quality, a good […]

Doing Good, with Good Content, is Great Branding

Earlier this year I wrote about Doing Good As LinkBait, specifically about a movie theater company giving a discount to our troops. Last week I also wrote about how great content is really at the heart of SEO. Well, Xerox has gone out of their way to “do good” by creating LetsSayThanks.com, where on their […]

Unexpected Features Gives Product Passion

I took up running about a year and a half ago, starting with a 4K. I’m hoping next year to run the St. George marathon with Aaron. Being a gadget guy, and an Apple guy, I asked my wife for the iPod Nano and Nike+iPod kit for Christmas. This gadget tracks how far and fast […]

Hey Businesses… Its about Blogging time.

A good friend of mine, Thayne Peterson, called up yesterday and asked what he should do with his website to just help it perform a bit better. As you can imagine we get that question quite a bit around here, especially now that more people have kind of figured out what SoloSEO is about. This […]

The Marketing 4 Ps and SEO

Much of a discussion on marketing can be broken down into what is termed “The Marketing Mix, or the 4 Ps” namely; Product, Price, Place, Promotion. Product being the service or product we sell, Price being the retail price a customer will pay for the product, Place being the locale where the product is purchased […]

When a Good Domain Name is Bad

I just moved to Southern Utah (hence the lack of posts). We found a nice local furniture store, Boulevard Home Furnishings, that everyone calls “The Boulevard”. They seem to do everything right, the perfect furniture store. They have car shopping carts for the kids, candy for the kids, bottled water for the adults, sales people […]

Stay Online Stupid…

Mike Moran’s post today, entitled Should Small Business Ditch the Web? discusses, well… I was going to say an “interesting point,” but I think instead I will say “ridiculously obvious point.” Mr. Moran essentially uses some of this post as a rebuttal to a comment to a prior post, by someone with the screen name […]

If You Want Customers, Don’t Scare Them Away

Many of us in the Internet Marketing world may not use mass physical mailings very often, but they are a very traditional form of marketing. Note the back of this mailing I received the other day. You might first notice it has a rip in it. Yes, that was my first instinct after seeing what […]

Google + SEO = The New “AOL Keyword”?

We all remember TV, radio, and even print ads back in the AOL era that left us with an AOL Keyword for finding their site. Over time, and as AOL became less important, TV/radio/print ads gave you a domain name instead. Today on the radio I heard a commercial from Honda Certified Used Cars that […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Treat your Visitors from Search Ads and Contextual Ads Differently

If you are running a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign with search engines, you can create campaigns that are either Search or Contextual based. Both have their merit and usefulness, but both have unique traits about the customer and their current frame-of-mind. If you’re looking to improve your conversion rate (who isn’t?), knowing these differences can certainly […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Google Insider: Google’s click fraud rate less than 2%

Andy Beal over at MarketingPilgrim.com picked up an “inside” scoop during SES Chicago from Google’s Shuman Ghosemajumder (business product manager). Shuman sat down with Andy and revealed an “inside Google only” presentation about click fraud rate, showing that Google’s click fraud rate is less than 2%, much much less than the 20% that other reports […]

$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 […]