Monthly Archive: July 2008

Jul
29
2008

Get links Virally with this tool – Awesome Link Building Strategy

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July 29, 2008

Imagine a strategy you have probably never heard of that’s follow all white hat SEO strategies, provide valuable ‘link bait’ to your site and virally bring you quality links with high relevancy to your site.  Do you want to know more?

As you know, many of the best strategies aren’t talked about by SEOers, some strategies I would never post publically.  I do however never hold back behind closed doors.  This strategy is probably one of the better quality strategies I’ve learnt.  I’m sharing this one publically because it’ll benefit both of us downstream.

I’ll be showing you a tool.  This tool plays on the emotions of pressing issues in 2008. 

–>That fuel has increased 100% in two years.  Fuel is above $4 a gallon! 
–>The economy is hurting.  Foreclosures are at all time high.  People are downsizing and moving further away to live a similar lifestyle.
–>Global warming is killing our planet.  CO2 emissions are killing wildlife.  the planet is dying.

The follow tool, placed on your website plays on the emotions of your visitors with the above pressing issues and provides a solution.  Therefore, you now have link bait for people to link to your ‘tool’.  Wait, it gets better.

They can rip your tool off and put it as link bait on their site.  Once they install the tool from your site, it’ll provide a solid link, with your desired link reputation.  How cool?!

We’ll even help you further.  Once they install the tool from your website, we’ll send them instructions by email on how to promote the tool, through Press Releases, articles and other strategies through both traditional and online means.  This means they’ll have link bait, others will download the tool from their site, and guess what?  You also get link juice from people that download from their site!

Check it out.  Try the tool yourself or visit Cost of Transportation

DOWNLOAD TRANSPORTATION TOOL HERE

 

How much are you spending on your commute to work? Whether moving,
considering a new job, weighing the benefits of tele-commuting, or just curious
what you're spending given the current cost of gas, you'll probably be interested to
see how expensive simply getting to work actually is.

It's more
expensive than you think!

Volume/Distance Units?
Current Cost of Fuel
$

Add this calculator to your site. Download it here.

Commuting Details
Current One Way Commute Distance (Mi)
Work Hours per Week
Commutes per Month
Value of Car
$

AVG MPG of Car
Annual Gross Income (more info)
$

Add More Commuters (more info)


Time Clocks Allied Time has an extensive selection of time clocks and supplies to meet your employee payroll needs.

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Jul
28
2008

Ex-Googler launch rival search engine

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July 28, 2008

Anna Patterson’s sold her search engine to Google in 2004.  Now she’s left Google and started another search engine, this time its not for sale.

If you visit CUIL (pronouced cool), you’re find a new interface, something the other search engines would not venture from.

While I’m not impressed with CUIL, there are some fundamentals that make sense.  SEO today is shady in my opinion, with strategies and tactics that I know to dup the search engines.  They don’t put enough value on the actual content of a site, something CUIL promises. 

CUIL also claims to be the largest of the search engines, with 120 billion pages indexed, while as last check Google indexed half as many as that, and MSN is 1/10th.  While 120 billion pages indexed, I was least impressed when I searched for Los Angeles Courier Company and didn’t find a single courier company on the front page!

While Google has become so synonymous with searches on the Internet, it may no longer matter how good CUIL or any other challenger really is.  Google has 62% market share this month.

The world of SEO has not changed much in recent years.  The fundamentals still work.  I think this rival will change a few things.  I believe the SEO community and industry will slowly move back towards traditional means…effective marketing….to increase rankings.  Who would have thunk….

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Jul
14
2008

Actual Search Volume Data!

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July 14, 2008

Time has come folks, depsite Yahoo! being highly scrutinized in the past for releasing hard data and Google being the convert engine dangling carrots, Google has finally provided a tool to give us actual search data!.  I mean, this means no longer we need to use expensive services like Trellian Keyword Discovery or Word Tracker that has data compiled from Dogpile and other not so reliable sources.  Granted, Google’s data may be skewed from rank checkers and they provide ‘approximate’ data, but with roughly 67% market share, we not have even better data for keyword research.

Did you know ‘Chicago Courier Service” is searched over 5980 times a month?  That’s 200 times a day!  There’s business folks out there on the Internet.

Here’s is the information right from the Horse’s Mouth.

Based on advertiser feedback, and our commitment to provide useful tools and information for our advertisers, we’ve now added search volume data to the Keyword Tool. Now, when you use the Keyword Tool to search for relevant keywords to include in your keyword list, you’ll be able to see the approximate number of search queries matching your keywords that were performed on Google and the search network. These approximate numbers are intended to provide better insight into keywords’ monthly and average search volumes than previously provided by the tool.

You can view the new statistics by looking at the Keyword Tool’s Approx Search Volume columns. Search volume data can be useful to you in several ways, including:
• Account structure: You may want to create a new ad group around high-traffic keywords that you find particularly relevant. Closely target ad text and a specific landing page to the small, narrowly-focused set of similar keywords you’ve found through the Keyword Tool.
• Budget planning: See how much traffic is available to your keywords so you can better plan your budget.
• Keyword choice: Search for and select the relevant keywords most likely to return quality leads within your budget.
Remember, the Keyword Tool also provides several other keyword-related metrics that can help you select highly relevant keywords to improve the overall performance of your campaigns. You can easily view data on advertiser competition, search volume trends, estimated average CPCs, and estimated ad positions for keywords.”

To use this tool, visit Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

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Jul
09
2008

SEO Rap! The SEO rapper brilliantly discusses web design

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July 9, 2008

OK, I had to share this.  This dude works for an online marketing agency in the southwest and did a pretty darn good job at rapping about SEO, what to do and what not to do.  Its definitly worth the listen.  You can see him live at Stompernet Live 6 in Atlanta this June.

 

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Jul
09
2008

Online Marketing Mysteries for your small business

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July 9, 2008

I was asked to speak on Online Marketing for the MCAA‘s national convention.  Here I took a piece of it to discuss Search Engine Optimization for your small business servicing a local market.

Watch Part 2
Watch Part 3
Watch Part 4

 

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Jul
09
2008

Optimization Tips for your small business website

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July 9, 2008

It amazes me how many websites in the world exist that are poor design.  Dealing in the Courier industry, their website is their store front, one of two points of contact with customers.  Why, when the average courier company in the USA does roughly $2.5M in sales have such crappy websites?  I mean, cough up $3000 for a well designed site that caters to the various audience members.  The Internet is here to stay folks.

Putting functionality and design aside, the Search Engines want to rank quality sites higher in their ‘organic’ listings.  If they provide poor quality sites in their rankings, the ‘searcher’ will go to another search engine.  Point is, if Google doesn’t like certain things about your site, you won’t get ranked.

What are these things?  There are two places you need to look. 

1.  On-the-page factors

2. Off-the-page factors

Today, I’m going to point out some basics from #1.  Although this only represents somewhere around 30% of the weight in your rankings, without it, you won’t get ranked…period.  This information is readily available and basic, so do it!  If you website lacks any of this, contact your webmaster immediatly to enhance your site for promotion.  You’ll enjoy the benefits.

This is your On-the-page Website Check List.

1. Validate your HTML code.  Use the W3C Markup Validation Service.
2. Name your files with keywords and make sure you use hyphens instead of underscores.
3. Quality Anchor text in the footer of each page. 
4. Have you properly ALT tagged your images?
5. Title Tag with main keyword and 100% relevant to the content.  Stays withing the SEs guidelines.
6. Your description tag needs to work hand-in-hand with the Title to get the searcher to “click” on the listing.  Sometimes this is what is displayed in the search engine results page.
7. Every page should have a unique Title & Description.
8. Be careful of using the money keywords in the keyword description for competitors to yank.
9. Is the correct DTD statement being used?

10. Avoid using Javascript and when used, it should be referenced as an external file.

11. CSS should be referenced as an external file.  DO NOT use tables or frames.  CSS is more work and effort on the developers part, but its better design
12. Are you using a heading tag and is it compelling?
13. Do your main graphics use the ALT tag properly?
14. Place your keyword phrase in the following areas:

     i. Title Tag

     ii. Meta Description

     iii. H1 tag to begin the content

     iv. First paragraph of content

     v. Appearing in Bold or Italic in the first three paragraphs of content

     vi. Appearing in the filename (with hyphens not underscores)

     vii. Used in anchor text to either an internal page or relevant external site.
15. Check for bad links.

16. Fix bad links and create XML Sitemap and submit to Google.  That’s submit your sitemap, NOT your site to the Google directory.

17. Don’t display different information to the search engines to deceive them.  They are getting smarter daily at the black hat tricks.

18.  READ THE GOOGLE WEBMASTER GUIDELINES!  (be weary, Google only gives a very high level overview of what they want, but they’ve done a great job outlining the biggest, most common tricks)

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