Organic SEO - Research
11 Dec 2007 at 09:07 by Joshua J. Steimle
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 for terms like "utah seo," "utah search engine optimization," or "utah web design."
Recently, I reworked the structure of the mwi.com website, and so Google has had to figure out where all the new content is. As a further experiment I did not use 301 redirects, just to see how long it would take Google on its own to figure things out.
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26 Sep 2007 at 16:55 by Joshua J. Steimle
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 that term is not the most competitive term around and the keywords match the domain name exactly, but still, isn't that a bit fast? And it doesn't end there. The site ranks #4 in Google for "shoulder pain class action", #5 for "pain pump class action", #9 for "shoulder pain lawsuit, and #9 for "pain pump lawsuit". This despite the domain having been purchased less than two weeks ago, this despite there being competitors who have been out there longer and who want to rank for these keywords, this despite there being no indexed backlinks, this despite a lack of content on the site, and this despite the site only being live for five days.
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17 May 2007 at 09:23 by Eric Morgan
Article distribution is one method of gaining links to your website. Although it is not near as effective as it was in the past it can still be worth the time. One of the most difficult aspects of using articles for SEO is getting the articles distributed on the right websites. We tested 3 different services, you can see the results after the first 22 days in this post.
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22 Jan 2007 at 17:24 by Joshua J. Steimle
What if the elections were today, and whoever had the best search engine rankings for their campaign website was the winner?
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9 Jan 2007 at 15:27 by Joshua J. Steimle
"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 share of "SEO professionals" who talk about PageRank, algorithms, and, heaven help us, meta tags as though these things were the essence of SEO rather than fading whisps of what SEO was in 1999.
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29 Dec 2006 at 08:41 by Joshua J. Steimle
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 question by almost every customer looking for SEO services, so here's your answer--it depends.
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29 Dec 2006 at 08:09 by Joshua J. Steimle
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.
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26 Dec 2006 at 13:41 by Joshua J. Steimle
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 help. I've posted a few references, please respond with any others you know of.
First up is Deftly dealing with duplicate content by Adam Lasnik, posted on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. The article covers what is and isn't duplicate content (as defined by Google themselves), why Google cares about duplicate content, what Google does about it, and how SEO experts, webmasters, etc. can deal with the issue.
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7 Nov 2006 at 08:26 by Joshua J. Steimle
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 knew previously what SEO stood for, whether their companies had done SEO before (either in-house or by hiring an SEO firm), how much they paid for SEO services, and how much they would be willing to pay for certain SEO services.
Spreadsheet - Full, detailed results
Spreadsheet - Summary results
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28 Sep 2006 at 12:02 by Eric Morgan
This is somewhat of a debate in the SEO realm, here is where I stand, feel free to post comments.
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15 Jun 2006 at 08:03 by Eric Morgan
Here is a list of how many times people searched for 'search engine optimization' related keyword phrases last month according to Overture. If you want a list of keywords for your website we would be happy to get you one...
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7 Jun 2006 at 07:28 by Eric Morgan
What is link popularity and what does it mean in terms of SEO?
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24 May 2006 at 19:44 by Eric Morgan
Have you ever got frustrated because Google or Yahoo used a description from DMOZ or the Yahoo directory for your website when it is displayed in search engine results? Here is MSN's answer to that:
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11 Apr 2006 at 16:05 by Joshua J. Steimle
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.
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28 Mar 2006 at 15:51 by Joshua J. Steimle
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 #2 in Google for "how to design a lake" - Since we're a web development/marketing firm, it's difficult to understand why we rank so well for such a keyword combination. Just think of all the people who actually do build lakes who would love to have that ranking. The reasons why MWI ranks so well for that particular phrase are as follows:
1. MWI's site ranks well in general due to a multitude of factors.
2. Our homepage includes the words "design" and "lake" in the title tag because we do design and we are located in Salt Lake City.
3. Our homepage also includes the word "design" at least two more times on the homepage as well as "lake" one more time.
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