How to Correctly Implement Mobile SEO
With mobile internet browsing slowly overtaking desktop and laptop browsing, business owners and marketing experts alike are switching to mobile ideas that can revolutionize how search engine optimization works. Many of the successful eCommerce businesses such as Amazon and Apple have already begun to cater their strategies towards captivating a market of individuals that browse their products […]
Google RankBrain: Everything You Need to Know About Google’s New Search Algorithm
Google recently released a new search algorithm known as the Google RankBrain, and many people are already asking questions about it. The main purpose of this algorithm is fairly simple, so there is no need to worry that it will cause any serious upheavals in anyone’s daily online routine. Here we will cover the basics of […]
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, […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
SearchMe.com Breaks the Search Engine Mold
With the SearchMe beta announced last week, and my invitation to participate arriving today, SearchMe.com has arrived to change up the playing field of Search Engines. Will it be successful? I think its new and fresh search engine interface will make a lot of heads turn. Here are 3 areas where SearchMe has broken the […]
24 Hour Site Indexing Works Again
I created a new site on Friday, and by Saturday exactly 24 hours later it was in Google’s Index. I posted about this just over a month ago in my post, 7 Steps to Get Your New Site Indexed in 24 Hours. I had a lot of comments about whether or not Adwords was necessary, […]
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 […]
Local Search is Changed Forever – Now Google Knows Where You Are
Instead of showing you restaurants, hotels, and stores related to your keyword search, now Google automatically knows where you are at. How?
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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.
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
Quantcast.com – Better than Hitwise, Alexa, and Compete.com Combined?
Quantcast.com is a new “Open Internet Ratings Service” that I learned about from Paul Allen. It’s a free service that looks nice, runs quick, seems to have a good amount of data, but with questionable accuracy. Quantcast says this about their service:
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 […]
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?