Business – SoloSEO

The Power of Persistence in SEO: Seriously, it may be all you need

Doing SEO is hard. It’s long. It’s challenging. It’s technical. There is so much out there that you don’t know. Tap into any informed blog about the topic, and you will be hit with a firehouse of information. Whether you are building your first website, or your sixteenth, you can rest assured that you haven’t […]

Organization: Why your SEO plan may fall flat without it

The forces of order and chaos are always at war, as anyone who has read (or watched) Lord of the Rings or Tim Burton’s new Alice in Wonderland sequel will tell you. On the one hand, SEOs must have structure — guidelines that keep you focused on your goals and principles. On the other hand, […]

Value of Short-Term SEO Goals

SEOs tend to get infatuated with the latest tricks and techniques published on the hottest blogs. And while it’s enjoyable (and often extremely useful) to check out what other people are doing and to reassess your own process and projects, too much of this “blue-skying” can lead you down the road to severe anxiety and […]

Defining your SEO Core Competency – and Sticking to It!

What is a “core competency”? Simply put, it is the kind of work that you do best. We all wear multiple hats at our jobs. If you’re a journalist, you’re not only a writer but you’re also a reporter, a networker, a self promoter, and in some senses a psychologist (especially to your interview subjects) […]

Tips for Making a Killer Blog Post

You used to make fun of bloggers, didn’t you? Even up until a few years ago, the “blogosphere” was seen as the last refuge of the modern crackpot. The typical blogger, in your mind, was an ageing 30-something or 40-something year old man ranting about an obscure political cause while living in his parent’s basement. […]

7 Ways to Go Broke Doing SEO

So you want to go broke on the Internet? The good news: it’s easy. This article will provide a step-by-step way of burning through massive piles of cash on an ineffective SEO approach.

Saying No to Unfair SEO Client Demands

As an entrepreneur and SEO professional, you crave credibility and good relationships. This is all well and good. To nourish any business relationship, you should go “the extra mile” – not just because it’s savvy business but also because it’s the right thing to do.

SEO: If you can’t do it at all, what do you do?

SEOs typically find themselves between Scylla and Charybdis. On one hand, you absolutely, desperately, 100% must leverage the power of the web for your business through some dynamic SEO strategy. On the other hand, you can’t possibly master all of the tactical nuances of things like Facebook marketing, twittering, website building, PPC advertising, and the […]

Great Read: How to Get an Influencer’s Attention

Every so often I read a blog post or article that really impresses me, and that happened this morning with Tamar Weinberg’s (@tamar on Twitter) post called How to Get an Influencer’s Attention over at Techipedia. She obviously put a lot of time into it, and received back a lot of noteworthy responses. Not only are […]

Finding Motivation When You’re “Not Feeling It”

SEO is rough, let’s face it. One minute, you feel like you’ve found the key to long-term wealth and high keyword rankings. The next minute, you read an article that makes you rethink your entire plan. It’s easy to get caught up in the emotional roller coaster — changes in attitude that can disrupt your […]

SEO 101: How to crank out content for SEO

It is a cliché in the SEO world that “content is king” – that to feed the hungry search engine beasts of Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, you need to churn out targeted, keyword focused, and most of all useful content. This leads to the long-term passive pay-off that is the SEO pot of gold.

The Only Constant Online is Change.

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 […]

9 Steps to Land & Keep Fortune 500 Clients

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 […]

Is Blogging For You? Heck, Is Blogging For Me?

I have blogged here regularly in the past, I could easily see blogging was a pretty great idea, especially to generate new content for a site you want to start ranking well. I still think blogging is an excellent method to add content to a site, we have seen the benefit of content with SoloSEO.com, […]

Don't be a Victim of Online Fraud

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 […]

Paid Links are Bad, No Good, No Bad…

Michael Gray doesn’t know who I am, I don’t expect him to. We sat next to each other one day at lunch during Pubcon, he is a polite, engaging guy, with obviously tons of knowledge in SEO/SEM field. I enjoyed Michael’s many interviews on Local search, and learned much from his posts. He has earned […]

Specialized Search is Simple Economics

There has been much speculation about how personal and local search, which I term “Specialized Search,” will affect search marketing strategies in the future. Although it feels recent, the discussion of more specialized search systems really started to heat up back in 2004, when Google’s Sergey Brin made comments concerning Google’s foray into Specialized Search […]

What the Customer Actually Wanted

In SEO – Be A Tortoise, Forget the Hare.

On Aaron Wall’s site www.seobook.com, Aaron Wall makes a statement which makes me chuckle every time I read it, not because it isn’t somewhat true, but because I can imagine how it must drive others crazy. Aaron states,

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 […]

Is a Customer Ever Wrong?

The simple answer is yes, there are times when the customer is wrong, but that doesn’t really matter much in the end. We still have to deal with the situation and attempt to make the most of it, while not further upsetting and potentially losing a client. This can be very tough for some, I […]

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 the First Result Is Not the Best Result

You have probably tried Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button before. But what if you based your business and purchasing based solely on getting the first result of a query?

Discount or Ignore Paid Links

There has been some post and comments lately which have expressed frustration with Google’s attempts to discount the referral power of links purchased to bolster rankings. Why people have a problem with this makes no sense to me. I personally don’t have a problem with any SE discounting paid links. Why wouldn’t they attempt to […]

SEO – Vital to Small Business

To small business owners, SEO cannot be seen as the “end all – be all” to their potential success, but it rightfully should be considered a “must do” in order to maximize their full business potential. Based on our own situation, and finally deciding ourselves we needed to spend time on SEO, we now understand […]

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 […]

The Increasing Importance of Content

To really get an understanding of what good content is about and why it is so important, Copyblogger is a great site to visit. I subscribe to their blog and really find the advice and examples offered extremely helpful when it comes time for me to sit down and write. And because content will always […]

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 […]

Does SEO work in Hawaii?

I was gone all last week, in Maui. Yeah baby. It was our first time to Maui, and I loved it. I didn’t even think about writing a post the whole week, I am sure you understand. We had a great time, we enjoyed the beauty of the island, stayed in an amazing place with […]

Becoming SEO Famous: Neil Patel, YOUmoz, SEM Scholarship

I’m obviously not the authority on SEO fame (if I was I’d be famous), but I wanted to write about a few opportunities that can help you to become famous, at least in SEO. First, Neil Patel from ProNet Advertising has started his own blog with a cute domain, QuickSprout.com. It’s all about this topic, […]

Google… Here they go again.

I read an interesting/alarming Associated Press article by Dibya Sarkar, AP business writer, in the local paper yesterday. Four states, including Arizona, California, Utah, and Virginia, have agreed to “free consulting services” provided by Google. Essentially Google is going to help these states make searching and finding online public documents much easier. While I am […]

Doing Good as Link Bait

I was reading an article (here too) just the other day about how National Amusements, a company that owns 1500+ theaters, gave away free movie tickets (and popcorn and drinks!) for the US armed forces and their families to “offer enjoyment and relaxation, and to keep families together” for the whole month of July. Starting […]

Report Search Spam

I was plowing through the myriad of blogs yesterday and found a couple of things I found interesting in Rand’s post called Identifying and Calling out Web Spam on Engine Blogs. While I find the endless online discussion of marketing spam, what it is, where it is, and the ethics of spam to be as […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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.

Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz – Do NOT Market to Ignorance

“Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz, I don’t know what’s in it?”

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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!

Small Business Ingenuity with a Wok

A television station who couldn’t afford the $20,000 commercial link for their station enlisted the help of a wok and saved $19,990. The story goes beyond the pringles can wireless antenna because it’s not just hobby anymore, they actually use this for their business.

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 […]

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 […]

Misinformation in Entrepreneurship

On January 25, 2007 Guy Kawasaki posted a blog called “Ten Questions With Donald Trump” at the very end of the article Mr. Trump is asked to give advice to entrepreneurs, and he recommends entrepreneurs should be passionate about what they do, so they won’t give up when times get tough. I was kind of […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Using Social Networks like MyBlogLog for Marketing

Social networks are amazing from a “data mining” perspective. I’ve had a few posts about MyBlogLog recently, uncovering an easily exploitable flaw and announcing the Missing MyBlogLog Tools. As I’ve looked in depth into the MyBlogLog “network” that is accessible by the public, I’ve realized how much potential there is for doing so much more […]

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.

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 […]

How to Get Your Web 2.0 Brand Past the “Did you Mean” in Search

We’ve all typed something in a search engine and the first thing we see is “did you mean…” and then an alternative to what we typed. Obviously it can be helpful, unless of course it gets in the way of your branding.

$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 […]