Coconut Headphones

Location of a Business Called "123kjkjad9 -" * click to enlarge*

“Local search” is a term used for searching on websites that let you find different types of businesses in a geographic area.  These can be map sites, search engines, yellow pages sites, or local directories.  Unlike traditional organic search optimization, there are numerous places you must go to create, correct, and optimize your business’ listing, and this can be a daunting task.  Also, this portion of the SEO industry uses intimidating terms like “7-pack” “NAP”, and “Citations” that can be a little off-putting.

This posting will de-mystify all of this and simplify the process by breaking it down into eleven steps Read on »

Rankings Explained.   Any Questions? *click to enlarge*

Last year, some people from the academic community who hadn’t been snatched up yet by Google or Bing did a really interesting study.   Rather than simply researching factor correlations to rankings, as SEOMoz does a great job of doing every so often, they used machine learning techniques to create their own search engine, and trained it to reproduce results similar to Google.  After the training process, they extracted the ranking factors from their trained engine and published them and presented on them at an industry conference.  They were able, for the queries they trained on, to correctly predict Read on »

Google and Bing are in an arms race.  The two weapons they are deploying are datacenters and Ph.D.’s, which are substitutable for each other.  If a Ph.D. comes out with a way to store or index data that is 5% more efficient,  this can result in hundreds of *millions* of dollars of savings in datacenter costs.

Often these companies will file patents if they have some really good ideas, or they will file them just to have some patents in a particular area they are worried they may eventually face a lawsuit in.  For instance Read on »

1-2-3, That's How Elementary It's Gonna Be

Last week we covered the basics of SEO for YouTube – this week we will run through some of the more advanced techniques I came across when researching this topic Read on »

Truly Penetrating Analysis

You’ve probably had to research internet usage at some point – whether to figure out browser usage percentages so you can decide which browsers to bother supporting, looking at internet usage by country for a business looking to expand geographically, or any other myriad of reasons.  Like me, you probably did this by doing a ton of Google searches.  Well, I ran across a site that aggregates much of that information, and also the sources for the rest of it, all in one convenient spot Read on »

Let’s say you were stranded on a desert island, per our previous scenario, have your positioning book in hand so you can properly straighten out the product you’re trying to sell with your burgeoning lead-gen business, you’ve SEO’d (is that a verb?) your lead-gen site with the help of your SEO reference book, and you’re having trouble getting to sleep at night due to wild monkeys screeching as they bang coconuts together.  What business biography would be really beneficial?

Well, if you want to get some sleep, don’t get Read on »

Let’s say you were stranded on a desert island, as in our previous scenario, but luckily managed to land a number of marketing consulting gigs with your remote internet connection, so you could earn some money helping companies straighten out their marketing (and receive Dr. Pepper etc. via parachute drop by transferring money to some shipping company via PayPal).  And let’s say you could start out with only ONE book on marketing.

My choice would be Read on »

Let’s say you were stranded on a desert island with no landing strip and surrounded by terrible rocks and breakers such that no boat would be willing to rescue you – without even coconuts to sustain you.  But in the midst of this you somehow had an internet connection, so you could throw together a quick lead-gen business, and then through PayPal you could transfer money to some shipping company who would then drop food, Dr. Pepper, and other essentials down onto you via parachute in exchange for your earnings. Read on »

There are a ton of great free tools out there, but there comes a point where you need to actually shell out a little money for tools if you’d like to accomplish some substantial results from an SEO standpoint.  If you’re an in-house SEO doing it all, you’ll  need tools for the six major pieces of SEO – Keyword Research, Architecture Analysis, Performance Tracking, Content Optimization, Linking Analysis, and (optionally) Monetization.  For Monetization, Google AdSense is pretty hard to beat, at least if you have under 500,000 page views, and the AdWords Keyword tool does a great job on the Keyword Research front, so in this posting we’ll focus on the other four areas.

The following tools are great values and add up to well under $100.00 a month Read on »

"Thank you very much" for the SEO Badge, Mr. President!*

Today, in the spirit of Wired Magazine’s “wired/tired/expired” series,  we’re going to run through some online marketing terms that have become downright “square”, and either are being, or should be replaced by, a more “hip” counterpart. This one goes to eleven!

Read on »