Mobilegeddon and SEO – Why You Should Care
Mobilegeddon sounds pretty scary, right? But should you be scared? Absolutely! If your site is not up to speed on being mobile friendly, it’s time to kick that mobile website into gear. In March and April of 2015 alone there was a 4.7% increase in mobile friendly sites across the Internet, meaning a lot of people were […]
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 […]
Delivering Value from SEO for People as well as for Search Engines
SEOs come in all colors. The black hats game the system. The gray hats sort of game the system. The white hats play by the rules. SEOs constantly assess the mood of Mother Google (as well as the lesser search engines, such as Yahoo!, Ask, etc). And, yes, it pays to pay attention to what […]
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, […]
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 […]
A Brilliant SEO Tip for Getting Links
Links. They are a key currency for any great SEO campaign. But how do you get them? Who do you get them from? How much time will it take you? And how do you maximize the investment of your resources so that you get the best, most SEO friendly links for the amount of time/money/energy […]
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 […]
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 […]
Can Twitter Help Small Business?
In my attempt to learn and grow, I have really focused on being a participant of Twitter the last week. It isn’t something I am comfortable with, I prefer to avoid the public eye, I prefer the shadows and the back row, to the sunlight and the attention. I wasn’t always this anti-social, it has […]
How to Implement “Canonical Tag” To Reduce Duplicate Content
The Big 3 search engines have agreed on a meta tag standard for identifying a page’s “permalink” or “Canonical URL”. One problem a lot of sites experience is having the same content show up with different URLs due to search features, categories, etc. This can hurt your pages and your site, and so having this […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
It’s All About the Experience
Marketing, in whatever form, is all about the experience. This is the why behind how link bait and viral marketing work.
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 […]
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 […]
Taking the Ordinary to Extraordinary
Stuffed animals have been around as far back as Ancient Egypt. Undoubtedly if you have kids you have a collection of them. Although stuffed animals are no longer stuffed with straw or beans, they haven’t really changed much at all over the years, until now. A new company has created the transformer of stuffed animals, […]
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 […]
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, […]
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.
1-800-GOOG-411 Another Reason for Local Search SEO
I am surprised I didn’t hear about this from any typical news source, but Google has launched a 411 information service powered by their local search engine.
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 […]
Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz – Do NOT Market to Ignorance
“Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz, I don’t know what’s in 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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]