If you’re into affiliate marketing, or even if you aren’t but are curious, go check out the post about DeclareMedia’s new affiliate program. We want to find 10-20 people to beta test the system. Although we say “beta” that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t make real money. It just means we’re going to pick and choose who we allow to …
Author Archive for admin
25
Aug
Free Web Directories
If you’re looking for a mountain of well-optimized, local, national, and free web directories, check out DeclareMedia.com. 700+ directories so far, and thousands more on the way. Here’s a run down of the categories so far:
Advertising Agencies
Apartments
Architects
Assisted Living Facilities
Bed and Breakfasts
Carpet Cleaners
Computer Repair
Dentists
Dollar Stores
Drug Rehab Clinics
Eating Disorder Treatment…
A little over a year ago I created this post, calling out anyone using Web CEO, SEOmoz’s Rank Checker, or SpyFu as being dishonest. My intent wasn’t to make anyone feel guilty or really call anyone out, my intent was that hopefully someone could convince me I was wrong, and that violating Google’s terms of service is, in fact, …
How ironic that after writing this post about automatic queries, I should be the one to get penalized for supposedly sending automatic queries.
All I was doing was manually typing in some keyword searches, and bam! I got the screenshot you see below. The restriction lasted for about 20 minutes and now it works again, but not after seriously …
As the owner of an SEO firm I get a lot of people who want work sending me resumes, emails, etc. I probably get 10-15 of them per day, and most don’t catch my eye and are promptly deleted or filed away. But every once in a while something special comes across my inbox, and this email was one of …
Ever done something stupid? Well, read this post on Google penalties, and then come back and finish reading here. Oh, and read the 3rd and 4th comments.
Yeah, stupid. I’ve found when you make a mistake the best thing to do is to own up to it, and then find something interesting you can learn from it. Aside from …
06
Jul
Who is Sedat Yüksel?
Or perhaps I should say “What is sedat yüksel?” In the analytics stats for my SEO firm I see that my firm’s site has received 14 visits in the past 30 days from people who searched for the keywords “sedat yüksel”. The thing is that the word “sedat yüksel” do not appear anywhere on my site. And if I do …
PPC in the news on NPR. A decent piece on the basics of using Google Adwords. Hopefully this will drive more and more advertisers to PPC and SEO. Maybe this is why some SEOs are seeing the growth of their businesses while traditional advertisers are hurting?…
If you do a search for “301 redirect seo” you’ll find all sorts of how-to guides on how to create 301 redirects, the right way to create them, and you’ll learn a lot about the value they provide to the site you’re redirecting to. What I can’t find is what a 301 redirect does to the old site, or the …
I don’t know about you (please chime in), but since the beginning of the year my SEO firm’s business has been picking up. Maybe it’s just a fluke, but the same factors that make search engine optimization a good marketing tool in any economy make it especially good in a down economy. That is, SEO is relatively inexpensive compared to …
Warning: If you’re the type of person who would rather remain in ignorance because you think that makes you innocent of any crime because you don’t know if you’re committing one or not, then you probably won’t want to continue reading. Of course now that you’ve read this it’s too late.
Disclaimer: I’m not really calling you a liar, cheat, …
From the folks who brought you What’s a Link from Wired.com Worth? and How to Get a Link from CNN.com now comes How to Get a Link from SearchEngineLand.com!
1. Set up a blog, just like this one.
2. Spend 100+ hours writing posts.
3. Spend another 20+ hours building links to your posts.
4. Give up and don’t …
Disclaimer: The author of this post has a company that competes directly with OrangeSoda, so beware of competitive bias.
Update: Since posting this, it has come to my attention that there is no “About OrangeSoda” paragraph at the end of the press release, although there is one for REMAX, which might indicate that this press release wasn’t even issued by …
Except I’ll burst your bubble right now and tell you the link isn’t followed. But it can still generate some traffic and perhaps some links will come from that. This technique has been out there for a while, this is just the first time I’ve had it be successful for me, hence the post at this late date.
Yesterday I …
Because it can’t accurately identify them. Frankly, I don’t have much against Google having something against paid links. It’s their search engine, they can do whatever they want with it. Of course I’d prefer they live and let live when it comes to paid links, for my own self-interest as someone who occasionally uses paid links as a way to …
While not specifically talking about search engine optimization, this survey of dentists that asks them if their dental practice website marketing is worth the expense is certainly relevant.
It certainly would have been interesting to know how many dentists are using SEO and whether or not those who are using it are more or less satisfied than others.…
17
Apr
The SEO Con Artists
A real description of an SEO firm on an SEO directory:
Full service 1-on-1 SEO marketing since 1996. Check out comprised month-to-month packages at SEOgame.com (Eg. $375 package will start out at 2,220 manual directories and 550 manual article directory submissions) Manual submission services will provide permanent 1-way links and include 3 project managers and 17 site submitters to get …
All too often we take over search engine optimization efforts for a new client, only to find that the last SEO firm or SEO professional they were using did so many things wrong it’s going to be a major effort just to clean up their mess, let alone start making progress (although I suppose cleaning up is a form of …
MWI has a growing number of free directories for web design and search engine optimization firms located in Boston, Utah, and California.
Utah Web Development Firms
Utah Internet Marketing
Utah Web Design Firms
Utah Advertising Agencies
California Web Design Firms
Boston SEO Firms
Boston Web Design Firms
Utah SEO Firms…
New free directory of Utah-based SEO firms launched by MWI.…
MWI has launched two new directories, one featuring Boston search engine optimization firms and the other Boston web design firms.…
To do a 301 redirect on JSP pages simple modify this code for your own purposes and place it on the page you want to redirect:
<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( “Location”, “http://www.new-url.com/” );
response.setHeader( “Connection”, “close” );
%>…
I would assume that most search engine optimization professionals in Utah are earning somewhere between $60-80K. But that’s all it is, an assumption based on limited factual information. So, let’s all find out what we make, shall we? That way if you’re not making very much relative to other SEO types you can know to ask for a raise, and …
First of all, this only works on web servers running on Linux, like Apache. It’s no good on a Windows server, which stinks, because I think this is the best way to do redirects because you can manage all the redirects on your entire site from one file, and you don’t actually have to create files and directories or leave …
<?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.yoursite.com/new-page/” );
?>
Pretty straightforward. I just did it for a bed and breakfast client of ours.…
A lot of clients ask me whether I can point them to industry statistics showing what their conversion rate should be when using Google AdWords. Although it’s perfectly understandable that a company would want to know how their conversion rate compares to their competitor’s, this data is virtually impossible to get, and even if you could, it would be almost …
I’ve had a lot of trouble finding code to do a 301 redirect in .NET, but I finally found some that works, courtesy of Keyvan.
<script runat=”server”>
Private Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader(“Location”, “http://www.mwi.com/”)
End Sub
</script>…
For those of you who may be new to SEO and don’t know if you really believe that search engines can impact your business’s bottom line, here’s some interesting data from my own SEO company, based in Utah. You see, over the past years I’ve gotten quite a bit of business from search engines, especially when people were searching …
While there are many authoritative sources out there for content related to search engine optimization, SEOmoz is something of an authority of authorities. A few months ago they started offering what they call “Premium Content” for $50 per month. Even though I had found SEOmoz to be a valuable resource in the past, I resisted signing up.…
Microsoft has a beta version of their Webmaster Tools up at http://webmaster.live.com. It gives you various bits of information and tools, the most awaited of which is the ability to upload and manage XML sitemap files as we’ve already been able to do for some time with Yahoo! Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Central.…
It’s one thing to understand why building links is important, and quite another to figure out how to do it effectively. I’ve found there are three primary ways to build links:
1. Create your own links
2. Recruit links
3. Buy links…
Incoming links, also call backlinks, inbound links, or “links from other sites”, are one of the primary means by which Google (and many other search engines) ranks websites. There are four ways in which incoming links can affect your website. If you’re not interested in why linkbuilding is important but rather how to build links then take a gander here…
I started my SEO firm in Utah in 1999. Except back then we weren’t an SEO firm, we were a web design firm, and we were at the tail end of the time when it was easy to start a web design firm, as we soon found out after the stock market crashed in March of 2000. With SEO …
Do you blog for business? Heck, that doesn’t even matter. Do you want people to visit your blog, whether it’s for business or it’s personal? Then here’s a simple tip that might seem obvious, but which the majority of bloggers ignore. Use keywords to title your blog posts. Here’s how……
It’s funny how you can have a thought and then see it enacted in the larger world. The last few months I’ve been thinking about how the majority of SEO sites seem to market themselves towards other SEO professionals, rather than people buying SEO services, and I don’t know about you, but if I have to put my limited time …
A lot of what SEO is all about is the content on your website. When I say “content” I mean HTML text that can be selected with the mouse cursor. Graphics and Flash are not content in a strict sense, although that isn’t to say you can’t do things with either that can help with SEO efforts. But content is …
30
Oct
Google Sitemaps
The word “sitemap” has typically been used to describe a page on your website that has links to all the other pages on your site in one place, arranged in a hierarchical structure, like this. The sitemaps we talk about in this post are similar, in a sense, and yet completely different.
Both Google and Yahoo! allow you to …
A post on my personal blog regarding the practice I observed of an SEO firm creating blogs for no other apparent purpose than search engine optimization has caused enough controversy (i.e. at least one person has a different person than my own) to motivate me to expound on the matter. And thus I give you my opinion on good, better, …
I don’t have a specific recommendation for you. What I do have is a list of features you should look for if you’re planning on building an ecommerce site that will depend on search engine optimization to attract customers and drive revenue.
Lest we cause any confusion, I am using the term “shopping cart” to refer to any of the …
Interested in a lucrative career in the world of search engine optimization? Then don’t sign up for any SEO classes or training programs and don’t spend a dollar on educating yourself until you read my story on how I got started as an SEO professional.…
If you’re just starting out and trying to learn SEO basics then you might see a lot of low-end search engine optimization companies claiming to be able to submit your website to “200+ freakin’ search engines!!!!!!!$#$%!!!!” Don’t hire any of these companies. The fact they’re saying this proves they don’t know what they’re doing.…
11
Oct
Title Tag Basics
The title tag is one of the primary means by which your website is categorized and ranked by search engines. It is one of the easiest things to change on your site and also nets some of the largest benefits and is therefore one of the first items you should look at when doing search engine optimization.…
Nielsen surveyed 26,486 internet users in 47 markets from Europe, Asia Pacific, the Americas and the Middle East and found they trust newspaper ads more than they trust ads in search engines, or pay per click advertising. In response to the question “To What Extent Do You Trust the Following Forms of Advertising?” people gave search engine advertising a …
The following is a listing of paid directories you can use to quickly add some quality inbound links. If you’ve got any to add just post some comments.
Yahoo! Directory – Although it’s out of alphabetical order I’m going to put the Yahoo! directory first in line because it’s probably the most important directory to be listed in.…
The “bounce rate”, according to Google Analytics, is “the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. You can minimize Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages …
You’re just starting out and have almost no idea what search engine optimization is. All you know is you have a website and you need it to come up in Google for some keywords so you can make some scrilla. You’re going to need some help, and one of the areas you’ll need to learn about is SEO …
What is SEO? That’s easy, it’s an acronym for search engine optimization. Explaining what search engine optimization is will take slightly more time. Bear in mind this is for people who don’t have a clue, so if you already know anything about SEO, this post is not for you. For those of you who aren’t sure what a search engine …
01
Oct
Google Keyword Tool
Sure, the Overture Inventory Tool or Overture Keyword Selector was great, relatively speaking, and free, but the thing never worked that well, and occasionally, as in lately, doesn’t work at all. Enter the Google Keyword Tool. As far as free SEO tools go, this is one of my favorites.…
01
Oct
Backlink Basics
Incoming links, also call backlinks, inbound links, or “links from other sites”, are one of the primary means by which Google ranks websites. There are four ways in which incoming links can affect your website:
1. First of all, Google assumes the more incoming links a website has, the more important it is and therefore it should get ranked higher.…
Apparently in as little as five days. My SEO firm launched a website, actually a microsite, for a Utah-based law firm towards the end of last week at ShoulderPainPumpLitigation.com. A few days later and the site is already indexed in Google, and not only that, but it’s got the #1 rank for “shoulder pain pump litigation”. Yes, I know …
25
Sep
SEO KISS
No, it’s not a new cover band of SEO professionals wearing makeup, it’s just my way of saying that getting results from search engine optimization doesn’t have to be that hard–keep it simple, stupid.
What I mean is that as I frequent SEO websites and read the SEO blogs I see a lot of very detailed discussions about the science …
When beginning to start your search engine optimization efforts you run into a problem right off the bat–since you can’t get a #1 ranking for every single keyword on your list, which keywords should you focus on? Here is a very simple matrix for helping you prioritize.…
That’s the question asked by Loren Baker over at Search Engine Journal.
I think the answer is “Parts of it, yes, parts of it, no.”…
For those of you involved in the search engine optimization industry, how many of you offer your clients SEO services that are of a consulting or training nature, as opposed to full-service SEO?…
This coming Wednesday, August 29th at 1pm EST/10am Pacific, radio host RSS Ray will be interviewing Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz . They will be discussing the landing page contest SEOmoz held. Rand will tell us why and how the contest started, how the results were measured, what benefits came out of the contest, and even who WON! If you …
Review of Hiring an SEO Consultant at Entrepreneur.com. Don’t outsource your search engine optimization without asking these 10 questions. …
I manage a skateboard blog and like all my websites I commonly perform experiments with it in the name of learning something new about search engine optimization. Other times, I do something that turns into a lesson on SEO without that being the intention.
Recently, I decided to give away $1,000 on my skateboard blog to the skater who could …
Have you read Crossing the Chasm
But here’s the Cliff Notes version. It all has to …
We’re a bit confused as to why nobody is using the SEO forums. We’ve had at least one report of somebody having trouble posting on them, but we’ve tested it out ourselves and can’t duplicate the issue. Maybe the problem is that it’s just hard to get a forum started……
I recently received these questions regarding SEO job opportunities in the field of search engine optimization and search engine marketing.
——————————————-
I’m going to assume that when you say “marketing” you are referring specifically to search engine marketing and such.
1) What surprised you the most when you started your career in marketing?
How much money was being made by …
About 583 visitors so far. On December 13th, 2006 I happened to post on my blog about Best Buy’s results-only work environment. On January 18th, 2007 Tony Long, the fightin’ Luddite!, saw fit to link to my post via his article When Less is More.…
What if the elections were today, and whoever had the best search engine rankings for their campaign website was the winner?…
I gave a presentation to a group of about 30 the other day entitled “Top 10 SEO Tips Anyone Can Implement” although perhaps “anyone” is a stretch since there’s always somebody who will claim they can’t. If you would like to get more info I’ve posted the SEO presentation at WeLoveBlue.com, MWI’s official blog.…
As I learn more about what other SEO firms and SEO professionals are doing for their clients I am very often shocked at the techniques they are using. People still stuff the keyword meta tag, place big blocks of text off the side of a page, and point two or more domains at the same site. More often they do …
09
Jan
Google PageRank
“I’m kind of suprised at how many people are still stuck in some SEO technique timewarp of what was effective in 1999.” That from Jim Boykin’s SEO blog, and amen to it. What Jim’s talking about is Google’s PageRank, which a Google rep labled as being “for entertainment purposes only.” Like Jim, I have seen more than my fair …
For the first time in history annual online spending topped $100 billion. Online shopping during the holidays rose 26 percent over sales during the same period in 2005. And the Monday after Thanksgiving this year was nothing unusual, as it was surpassed on 11 other days before the end of the year by greater sales.…
03
Jan
250+ SEO Blogs
Lee Odden over at Top Rank Marketing has put together a list of more than 250 SEO related blogs, and he was kind enough to include TheOrganicSEO.com. I guess that means we’ll be adding him to our SEO directory 
Oh wait, we already had. Man, I am so on top of things.…
29
Dec
How to Post a Job
If you want us to create a post about a job opening your SEO firm has or something of that nature just contact us.
However, you might have better luck posting in our newly active forums. There is a forum just for posting information about SEO jobs / employment there.…
If you’d like to have your company profiled on TheOrganicSEO.com answer the questions below and send them to us via our contact info. There’s no cost, it’s just a matter of whether we like you or not and think there’s something of general interest to the SEO community and SEO customers.
These profiles are meant to be personal and …
I just read a “help wanted” headline written by someone looking for an SEO specialist that read “I need a real seo specialist for my upcoming website. Please mention how much time required for a brand new site to hold top page position in google and what methods will be adopted.”
My SEO firm gets asked this same type of …
29
Dec
Drawbacks of SEM
If you’ve found this post because you were searching for “drawbacks of sem” then I assume you want to know what the drawbacks of SEM are compared to the benefits of SEO. If I’m mistaken in that assumption please leave a comment so I can more accurately answer your question. I’ve also written a companion piece to this on the …
29
Dec
Drawbacks of SEO
I’ve noticed a number of people searching for the terms “drawbacks of seo” or “drawbacks of sem” which I find interesting, because there are really only two drawbacks to either one, and those drawbacks are common to anything you do in business and life–time and money.…
28
Dec
SEO Forums Are Live
Sorry for the wait folks, but the forums are finally up and running at http://forum.theorganicseo.com/. We’ve got tips, tools, and techniques forums on keyword research, link building, linkbait, and SEO tools. We’ve got forums on other disciplines that intersect with SEO like web design, CSS / XHTML, copywriting, and programming. And …
According to a number of search engine optimization experts, duplicate content (having essentially identical content in more than one online location) is a bad thing. My attempt here will not be to give my opinion or to conclude the argument one way or the other, but merely to catalog what everyone else is saying, and I’d like to enlist your …
Loren Baker has an excellent article at Search Engine Journal entitled 9 Ways To Get Banned by Search Engines.
I think the article is highly relevant because quite a few people, some of them purporting to be SEO experts, seem to assume these are accepted SEO techniques when in fact they can do great damage to your website’s rankings.…
I was just turned on to an article by DM News entitled Troubled times for SEO firms by Lee Odden at Top Rank Online Marketing. The article cites a report from MarketingSherpa that says, amongst other things, that revenue for SEO firms fell from 124% growth between 2004-2005 to just 6.7% between 2005-2006. It then goes on to give …
If you want to increase your rankings by building links, focus on how human being work rather than search engines. Such is the advice included in a post on building link popularity on Google’s webmaster blog where the author, Stefanie (a Google employee), goes so far as to call the practice of buying links a “risky and short-term option.”…
You’ve got two firms pitching you on their SEO services. One costs thousands of dollars per month, the other hundreds. There is a temptation to think “Well, I’ll try the cheaper SEO services and see if it works out. If it does, I’ve saved a lot of money. If it doesn’t, then maybe I’ll go back to the other one.”…
I recently conducted an informal SEO survey on behalf of MWI through my personal blog. 124 individuals responded, and the complete results (sans personal info) are posted in the files below, and the summary results are displayed in HTML in the extended portion of this post.
Questions covered what respondents knew about search engine optimization or SEO, whether they …
The MWI website was recently redesigned, and as part of the redesign the site structure was changed such that pages that were once at a certain url are now at a different url. Rather than just leaving the old pages there or deleting them and delivering a 404 not found error, we used a 301 permanent redirect, which we …
Microsoft announces through it’s IE blog that IE7 will be released via automatic update when the time comes.
I don’t know about everybody else, but this is probably one of the less exciting browser launches I’ve waited for. IE5 was the last big deal as far as IE is concerned, and then of course FireFox, but I’m reserving judgement as …
Google has launched a microsite dubbed Conversion University. The site’s description reads “Learn about marketing and content optimization and read web analytics tips from industry experts at Conversion University, the Google Analytics companion site.”…
I just read Scottie Claiborne’s instructions on how to change your domain name without getting penalized by Google’s aging delay, which I found via Paul Allen’s post on how he learned this lesson the hard way.
The trick is to make switching to a new domain a two-step process that starts with 302-temporary redirects and later changing those …
MWI has a new search engine optimization whitepaper for download.
Full content available below.
YOU CAN DO THIS.
This white paper addresses 10 relatively easy steps you can take to get your website ranking higher in search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo!. While search engine optimization (SEO) can be a difficult process it is easier than most people think …
If you use Google’s AdWords for pay-per-click advertising on Google you might have questioned the validity of the numbers AdWords gives you, like I have. Today I saw something, once again, that I find hard to believe and which causes me question whether AdWords is entirely accurate.…
We always tell our clients that they can’t rank #1 for every keyword or keyword combination they want. The opposite is true as well. You can’t not rank for every keyword you don’t want either.
For example, here are some of the rankings my firm has that stump me at first until I start looking at the details:
www.mwi.com ranks …
If you were searching for a search engine optimization (SEO) company what keyword search terms would you search for in a search engine? Could I use the word “search” once more?
Most people feel more comfortable dealing with businesses that located within the same geographic area. This is because it facilitates face-to-face interaction, and there’s something comforting about being able …
17
Feb
Free SEO Tool
Need suggestions for keywords and you wish you knew what people were searching for? Yes, to anyone who’s involved with SEO this is very basic, but for those starting out this is still a helpful tool.
Simply go over to http://inventory.overture.com and type in a keyword. It will give you a list of keyword combinations that include your keyword along …
I like the MovableType platform for blogging, now that I’ve learned it. It sure was a pain to set up though. I wouldn’t recommend it for people who aren’t technically inclined. But now that I’ve learned it I can’t use anything else because I’ve made this huge investment of time.
Anyway, I just learned something new today that may be …
