Coconut Headphones

Bruce Clay's SEOToolset *click to enlarge*

In our recent post, High-End SEO on a Low-End Budget, we briefly mentioned Bruce Clay’s SEOToolSet®.  This is a great subscription service that has been around for a long time and has recently gone through a major upgrade – here we’ll take some more time to run through the service in detail.

Bruce is one of the original SEOs from back in the day, and his company provides a wide variety of training classes, SEO services, and even access to its proprietary optimization toolset.  In a nutshell, this subscription service contains Read on »

Black Hat SEOs of Yesteryear Working on a Meta-Description

Meta-descriptions are critical for two reasons; they are used by Google in the ranking process, and they are ultimately responsible for the Click-through-rate that your page will experience.

A properly written meta-description will stand out and have users clicking on it more often than it simply deserves based on its position in the SERPs; a poorly written one may garner as few as zero clicks.  Here we’ll detail best practices for writing your 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 »

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 »

While keyword density is important (regardless of what you’ve heard to the contrary), it’s not enough to simply say the keyword you want to rank for many times, or even better, the the proper number of times.
Keyword Density tools like Bruce Clay’s can help you figure out how to do that, but it’s important to be engaging to your end-users, and to look natural to search engine algorithms.   Peppering related keywords into your writing can help with both of these goals Read on »

They forgot "Be"

There is a company that has been doing content scraping on a level that’s really unimaginable, to the point that it can be regarded as a completely different business model than most others that do this.  Like many of the sites you’ve seen out there, its approach is to spider the web and copy other people’s content, then subsections of content are “mashed” together and presented to end-users – essentially auto-generated web pages.

The difference between this company and the myriad of other scrapers our there is in the “mashing up” process Read on »

Buried away in a Google patent application from 2006 entitled “DOCUMENT SCORING BASED ON DOCUMENT INCEPTION DATE“, there is a somewhat obscure reference to using the “entropy” of a document.  “Entropy” used in this sense is not simply as it’s defined in the field of physics, where your daughter’s room tends towards a maximum state of disorganization; instead, it refers to its definition in the field of Information Theory, which applies it to information rather than atoms.

Wikipedia has a lengthy entry on this,  but you can think of Shannon entropy as essentially measuring how much information is in a document.

If you have a 20,000 word document that simply consists of “all work and no play makes jack a dull boy” repeated 2,000 times Read on »

I fight for the users!

I’ve seen a number of postings about Google sitelinks, how you can influence them, how Google likely decides whether to assign sitelinks to a website’s entry in the SERPs, etc.  Ultimately these Sitelinks are, I think, a terrible thing  for Internet Marketers, and the LAST thing you should do is try and influence Google to add them for your site; here’s why.

If your website has come up in a search, then the name of your website is either a brand term, or Read on »

There have been  comparatively few articles written in the mainstream SEO blogs about creating content based on formulas – the only folks that seem to cover this topic tend to be from the seedy underside of affiliate marketing, under the term “article spinning”.  David Leonhardt’s recent article (more reputable I think), gives some good examples of what the practice entails.

There are various tools available for “spinning” content, but depending on the business Read on »