Content and SEO – SoloSEO

The Importance of Blogging for Increased Traffic

With all the changes in the Google algorithm over the years, one thing has remained consistent when Google determines the quality or relevance of a site, and that is content. If fact, some experts believe Google has effectively been able to reduce the gaming of rankings so much, that content has actually become more important […]

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) […]

The Paradox of Choice — How to Narrow your Options of SEO Techniques and SEO Strategies

As you research SEO techniques and strategies, it’s easy to blow a gasket. Hop from blog to blog on this stuff, and you will be inundated with facts, figures, promises, and warnings. Build content. Get inbound links. Submit to directories. Be on social networks. Twitter your brains out. So on and so forth. And that’s […]

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. […]

6 Steps to Effortless SEO

What’s the easiest way to make fast cash with search engine optimization (SEO)? If we knew that, we would be too rich to lower ourselves to write blog posts like this.

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.

Short-term SEO – Tactical Shots to Generate Traffic Spikes

Enough with the schtick about persistence, dedication, strategy, and patience. You want a fast acting SEO solution and you want it bad. While battle proven SEOs tend to frown upon the shortsighted path, every once in a while it’s nice to break down and give in and do something crazy. Kind of like cheating on […]

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, […]

6 Signs Your Website Has Been SEO'd

If you have hired an SEO firm, you may not know what to look for to check and see if your SEO firm is working hard at doing the SEO. Here are 6 signs to look for to know if they are making progress in SEO. If you don’t see most of these, call them […]

Content is Forever

Although I’ve known it all along, these three words sunk into my mind during a business meeting last night: “Content is Forever“. I thought of all the investments you can make in SEO, your site design, site organization, links, etc. Those things can change and “die”, but your content can live forever.

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 […]

7 Steps to Get Your New Site Indexed in 24 hours

Most SEO’s will advise you to buy an existing site/domain (lots of age benefit), but there are times when you need to start from scratch with a fresh domain. It can sometimes take a couple of weeks to get a new domain indexed by Google (even longer to start ranking!). In order to speed up […]

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 […]

IndexRank – A New SEO Metric of Indexing Rate

How do you measure the success of your content strategy? How do you compare your website’s growth with your competitors?

The Fate of the Keywords Meta Tag: Misspellings

Meta Tags were once a major player in SEO. With the advancement of search engine algorithms, meta tags become less and less significant. The description meta tag is still used for your search engine snippets, but the keywords meta tag has been disregarded by all the major search engines.

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,

Instant Testimonial Page, Just Add Blog Post

Recently I noticed a few backlinks to our blog coming from HitTail, a long tail keyword tool. Instead of being some spammer that puts up a temporary post that pings our blog, HitTail is collecting “testimonials” about their service from virtually any blog (that pings it), and delivering this list in a nice clean way. […]

Learn SEO Basics: Long Tail Keywords

As you’re learning about search marketing and SEO, you will definitely run into the phrase “the long tail”. Let’s turn this odd term into a familiar one by looking into long tail keywords.

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 […]

Can you do SEO with just Content?

Michael Martinez has a great blog called SEO Theory and recently wrote about the myth about search engines favoring large domains. When I read this my first thought was it was a response to Rand’s post (from the day before) about Why it pays (in search) to be big and popular compared to small and […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Hyphens and Underscores, Together at Last

Big news for small punctuation! SERoundtable.com reports that underscores will now be treated as word separators as hyphens have in the past. This might mean a little ranking change up (maybe we already saw this change in effect, or it could be occurring right now). Most wordpress blogs (and others) already use hyphens in the […]

Empty Title Tag = Google uses WHOIS data?

What happens if you leave your title tag blank? It’s a bit embarrassing, but I developed a site for a friend years ago and after a modification to the homepage earlier this year the title tag has been empty (note, I wasn’t doing SEO, just the site). I noticed this not from looking into the […]

The Googlerithm

The Googlerithm is the “Google algorithm”, rolled into a single, catchy term. Ask a programmer what algorithm means, and he’ll probably tell you something like: “An algorithm is a set of instructions to accomplish a task.” In the case of Google’s algorithm, the task is to take a search term and end up with a […]

SEO “Blog Posters” vs “Article Bloggers”

Jakob Nielsen at UseIt.com has posted a thorough, authoritative article titled Write Articles, Not Blog Postings. I highly recommend the read for anyone who has a blog, hopes to have a blog, or reads blogs (did I leave anyone out?).

Why You Should Love Yahoo! Answers

Just over a year ago Danny sullivan said “Look out Wikipedia, Here Comes Yahoo! Answers”. Yahoo! Answers is becoming not only a great resource, but also a social network (who isn’t, right?). I like Yahoo! Answers because people ask real questions and often get a handful or more of responses.

7 Months to Get Past Google’s “Did you Mean…”

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 […]

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 […]

Blog Your Way to Long Tail Success

In keeping with the theme of Michael’s earlier post called Links vs Content and Long Tail vs Short Tail Keywords, Michael discusses the differences between long tail and short tail keywords, as well as links versus content. I have had a few people ask me how to best attempt to capture long tail searchers, and […]

Links vs Content and Long Tail vs Short Tail Keywords

Opposition in All Things, Links vs Content Everything in life has its opposites. There is light and dark, hot and cold, black and white, and of course links and content. Even years after the debate began, the debate still continues. Before I uncover some insight into the answer to links versus content, let me give […]

Does Punctuation Matter to Google or SEO?

Nope. Except for @, -, and ‘. @ is nice to find someone’s email address. – and ‘ are less helpful because Google goes ahead and searches for the word with the – or ‘ but also without them (substituting a space, or for – it combines the word).

Does Keyword Capitalization Matter to Google or SEO?

There are two types of people out there, those who capitalize and those who don’t. When you search for something, do you bother capitalizing your query? Whether you do or don’t, capitalization would seem to be an important characteristic of a search engine query.

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 […]

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 […]

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).

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I can’t dig DIGG.

Digg… I don’t get it. After attending PubCon, and hearing many refer to Digg this, and Digg that, I figured I better do some digging myself to figure out what the buzz was all about. And yet, a couple months later, I know what Digg is, I understand the traffic it can generate, I have […]

Do-It-Yourself SEO for Small Businesses

I am sure we are all aware of the do-it-yourself craze. HGTV has decorating, remodeling and home improvement programs non-stop, and are unbelievably popular right now. My mom watches HGTV more than any other channel, which is great for HGTV, but not so hot for my kids who want to watch Cars every free second. […]

Globalization and SEO

The launch of SoloSEO.com has been quite an amazing thing to witness, not only the shear numbers of those that understand the importance of SEO and their sites, but also by the number of countries represented in those sign ups.

How to obtain, sustain and maintain SEO clients

Most businesses in a competitive marketplace view analysis of competitors as one of the most important aspects of remaining in business. Successful businesses are aware and attempt to out compete rivals by exploiting advantages, such as lower prices, higher quality or better services. Without information about a competitor and the marketplace, firms cannot know how […]

PubCon’s Top Ten lessons every SEO should know

I was a first-time PubCon attendee, and it was certainly eye-opening. It’s amazing how we have these “celebrities” in SEO (how about celebSEOs?) that everyone draws to, whispers about, or suffocates with questions. I was also surprised at how many people were there that really knew very little about search marketing. Don’t they read blogs? […]

MBAs vs. SEOs

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed WebmasterWorld’s PubCon in Las Vegas last week. It was very informative, and frankly even entertaining at times. To start it became very apparent, and seemed to be a consensus among the SEO elite including, Guy Kawasaki, Danny Sullivan, Andy Beal, Rand Fiskin, Aaron Wall, among others, that […]

Google ups Analytics: Now Track 50 Domains

Google has expanded Analytics to now let you track not just 10 domains, but 50. Google Analytics is a comprehensive statistics application that tracks traffic and stats for your domain.