Organization: Why your SEO plan may fall flat without it

Above top desk of SME owner people home office call talk in SEO chart sale report

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!

Competent young business secretary

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) […]

6 Steps to Effortless SEO

Missing jigsaw puzzle with text HARD and EASY.

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.

Can Twitter Help Small Business?

Twitter and tweets on social media

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 […]

5 Ways to Get Visitors Coming Back Every Day

Launching “Link Bait” is a new and popular strategy for gaining traffic and links (and hopefully conversions), but one of the problems is that one visit isn’t enough! I’d like to discuss 5 ways to help keep your visitors coming back every day, besides just posting more often and having good content! Before I get […]

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 […]

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,

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 […]

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 […]

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.

How To Tell iPhone Visitors in Google Analytics

You’re either sick of hearing about the iPhone or you eat up anything said about it. I have gadgetitis, and so does Aaron, so we’ll be getting iPhones next week. If you’re a Mac user, the iPhone is a heaven sent, despite what others are saying. I’ve tried the Sidekick, Blackberry, and the Treo, all […]

Top 100 E-commerce Tips from WebmasterWorld

Over at WMW there is a fun thread started by Habtom covering the Top 100 Ecommerce Tips. It’s kind of hard to read in a forum list, so I’ve put it together here for you (and fixed some spelling and capitalization). This has relevance to all sorts of aspects of Internet Marketing.

Top 5 Top Blog Posts in SEO

I love a challenge. In fact, if I don’t take on a challenge it drives me nuts. So when Darren Rowse came out with his group writing contest (project) with the topic of “Top 5”, I had to come up with an entry. I thought I would get creative and make a top 5 list […]

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 […]

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.

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Building the Perfect Link, the Ultimate Guide

Small Business SEM has an excellent post titled Ultimate Guide to Building the Perfect Link. This is a great read for anyone considering or getting into links. The guide walks you through all the various aspects and things to consider when link building. A snippet from the guide…

Free Links from MyBlogLog!

Everyone’s always out looking for good quality backlinks (inbound links) at a great price, and what’s better than free? Hopefully MyBlogLog will patch this up quickly, but I just noticed that you can easily insert links into messages and rel=”nofollow” is not even added. Don’t try this, it’s spamming…get natural links. To do this (please […]

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 […]

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 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.