If you have the budget resources the best time to hire an SEO is before you start your website projects. However, most people new to the web lack the cashflow needed to buy quality SEO services. Further if they don’t understand the complexities of the market and get bombarded with cheap (and low to no value) SEO package offers from web hosts, registrars, and email spammers they may think SEO should be cheap and easy, causing them to buy garbage - and become distrusting of the concept of SEO…

You would either have to be new to the industry or under a rock to not notice how the SEO industry has become more corporate over the past 3 or 4 years. The trend has been slow and gradual with many small steps, but I thought it would be a good idea to try to put the pieces together. What started off as a 5 minute project took a couple hours. I hope you like it! If you are a creative thinker you should be able to get a number of actionable ideas by thinking about how such trends will change your market…

Online Marketing is Complex

One thing I believe about online marketing (and SEO in particular) is that the more rigid the advice the lower its value, particularly when it is cast out to a general audience. Why? Online marketing incorporates psychology, sociology, game theory, etc. The human mind is complex. Understanding how many of them work together (or against each other) is even more complex…

Unbelievable Stupidity

When I was in the military they would run these stupid drill where they would try to create as much stress and chaos as possible in a short burst of time, find someone who makes an error, and chastise them for it. That killed morale. So to make up for declining morale they decided to run more frequent test and drills. And thus being an enlisted nuclear power sailor in the US Navy is a horrible life that I wish on nobody…

Keyword Technology Improvements

WordStream offers a free tool for keyword research. The coolest feature it offers is that it allows you to download thousands of keywords at once, though it requires giving them your email address to get the keyword list. Their FAQ states they use a variety of keyword sources: internet service providers, browser toolbars, and search engines.

At SES I got to see a demo of their keyword management software, which uses semantic analysis to help cluster keyword themes to automatically mine and group related keywords based off the incoming traffic going into your site…

Danny Sullivan highlighted his frustrations with dealing with running Sphinn, a social media voting site for internet marketers:

Sounds easy, right? Sure, but as I’ve learned in the two years since we’ve run it, it’s a minefield.
…
While a community site can be fraught with egos, and concerns about double-standards or fairness, at least you have sympathy for people who are part of the community itself…

While some members of the SEO industry encourage outing, it should be highlighted that they are not above duping their customers with launching a “new” tool that is actually a dumbed-down rehash of a tool we have offered for years here.

If you want the full version with additional features please do check out Hub Finder, as it is way better than the hyped knock-off is…

Recently a well known SEO blogger mentioned that they didn’t understand why real professional SEOs advocate variation between page titles and on-page headings. This blog post is a free SEO consult for that person

Hopefully it clears the public SEO space of some misinformation.

Are You Missing Keywords?

People search for literally billions of unique search queries each month…

Does brand matter? That seems to be a question Google wants to challenge. Eric Schmidt offers quotes like “brands are how you sort out the cesspool”. Google’s search algorithms this year have put more weight on domain authority (which is often associated with brands).

But while Google is telling everyone else to build a brand, Google might be looking to compete head on with brands in many large verticals…

When I launched the membership site about a year ago I decided to set a membership limit at 1,000. Recently we have been getting a lot of word of mouth marketing and our growth rate has surged beyond my wildest expectations. We recently raised our price to try to curb growth, but promotion associated with that caused another rush of sign ups and even after we raised our price we did not see any slowing down on new subscribers…

Paul Sloan has been a good friend of mine who has worked in journalism far longer than I have been an SEO. In this interview we discussed journalism, marketing, and public relations.

You have been a journalist for a wide array of publications. How would you describe the differences between the various journalistic roles you have played at the various companies you have worked for?

Let’s start with the obvious: Journalism is in major upheaval and how it all shakes out is anyone’s guess…

Website Validation = Important SEO Tip?

In April a web designer who came across our site gave me the following feedback “I don’t know how you can advertise your skills in SEO when such a vital part of a good quality site is valid markup. Your homepage has 40 errors when I just checked.”

To which I replied “…and yet I rank page 1 in Google for SEO. Who cares about valid code? Not me…

Google recently upgraded their Insights for Search tool to include predicted keyword search volumes as well as interactive maps of how keyword search volume changes over time.

There are lots of business implications of the forecast data:

Having predictable trends for a search query or for a group of queries could have interesting ramifications. One could forecast the trends into the future, and use it as a “best guess” for various business decisions such as budget planning, marketing campaigns and resource allocations…

Fox News slammed SEO without even understanding what SEO is. On this slide from their Top Online Marketing Jobs to Leave You Friendless they cover SEO, and they do it with a typically Faux News sub-par form

Ever wonder why “nonsense” Web sites sometimes turn up in your search results on Google or Yahoo? That’s because search engine optimizing scammers work full-time to create thousands of other Web sites that link to the spam site…

Just before last week’s SES conference Google announced the launch of their new caffeine infrastructure:

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions…

I am going to be speaking at SES San Jose Tuesday of next week on SEO Tools stuff. My wife and I should be there for most of the conference roaming around. If you see us please say hi.

I am also hoping to be up in time to catch the Clay Shirky keynote on Tuesday. He has been right about the direction of the web on so many fronts including newspapers, micropayments, and communities. While his new book Here Comes Everybody book might be a bit idealistic, it is also one of the most compelling looks at the ever-changing nature of how the social aspects of the web intersect with our lives, and a nice counter view of the web to Nick Carr’s The Big Switch…

Rae Hoffman nailed it:

Is your Web site and marketing strategy really the best it can be? Focusing on what everyone else does and why your organic SEO life is so unfair distracts you from doing what will benefit you most - improving YOURSELF. The best thing you can do for your Web site is to focus on IT and not spend all your time whining about your competitors.

Reporting your competitors is no more an SEO strategy than a heavyset person complaining about what good genes her skinny friend has is a weight loss technique…

Anyone who is a member of of our community likely knows that I am a fan of Cartman. It all comes down to Cartman’s understanding of marketing principals:

Being perceived as a trusted authority is a powerful marketing tool for many reasons. Here are a few examples…

• People fear making bad decisions. The fear of loss is one of the biggest emotional hurdles in the conversion process…

Recently I saw Barry Ritholtz mentioned that he was selling video recordings of a conference he put on for only $69, and some of the people who commented on his site wrote garbage like this:

These people have enough capital to try to trade the markets, but spending $69 for one of the most in depth and most current pieces of information about their livelihood is completely out of the question…

SEO Question: Hello, How do site suchs as: ____ and _____ work with flat fees Where everyone else charges us up the wazoo.
Do you offer such a program for my business. - Thanks, Paul

Short answer: “Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one.” - Mark Twain

Some People Provide Value, Others Steal Money

Long answer: Believe it or not, at one point in time I was an SEO client who bought a trashy scammy service…

Anytime any of these words are in the name of an informational product or software tool you can be 99%+ certain it is a scam:

Money Words

• money
• cash
• wealth
• income
• unlimited
• rich

Automated Words

• automated
• automatic
• autopilot
• magnet
• easy
• lazy
• system
• blueprint
• plug and play
• turnkey

MLM Words

• network
• downstream
• empire

Social Power Words

• power
• secrets
• seduction
• hypnotic
• domination
• success

More Tips

Thumb rules…

Well they got that link because they were the best site out there. That was organic. It is a naive view of marketing to assume that if you are the best people will notice you and people will care. It is not enough to be the best…you need others to say that you are. If anything the web is making most people more driven by self interest - rather than lending a helping hand.

Worse yet, due to the anonymous nature of the web (and other automated technologies), we are bombarded with every type of spam imaginable (auto-dial telemarketing, fakevertising, reverse billing fraud, phishing, bait & switch marketing, etc etc etc) and the people who have distribution are gaining a predisposition that if you contact them out of the blue with anything commercial you are a spammer…

Today is the last day to lock in our current price, as tomorrow we increase our prices 50%. It looks like we decided to do the price increase just in time too, as we have added 378 new members this month and we are rapidly approaching our 1,000 member limit.

If you are already a subscriber, thanks a bunch…you make this site possible! If you are not yet a subscriber and were thinking of joining here is the link…

Yahoo Had No Leverage…

In case you didn’t look at the stock market today, Bloomberg highlighted what investors think of the Yahoo! / Microsoft deal

“This deal was a big disappointment,” said Moran, an analyst in Boca Raton, Florida. “They needed this deal, and it shows in terms of how the negotiations were concluded.”

…Because Their CEO Did Not Grasp the Importance of Search

In the same article Yahoo!’s CEO justified the Yahoo!/Microsoft search deal as something that clears fog:

“The priority was not to do the deal,” Bartz, 60, said in an interview…

A couple days ago in a blog post we published this image.

And that image recently appeared in a copyright HitWise “advanced SEO” presentation

Whenever we share their data / research / charts on our site we try to attribute them. Not only did they offer no attribution, but they also cleansed our logo from our branded image. In the above image you can see

• they just happened to use the same scale and title and colors AND
• how the logo was removed AND
• how the line at 700 (where our logo was) is darker than the other lines AND
• how the line at the 600 level is broken slightly toward the right side slightly (like we accidentally did on the original image when we took the screenshot)

This sort of activity is from a marketing company that thinks our site is important enough to pitch new releases to…

by Jonah Stein and Jonathan Hochman

The FTC recently announced guidelines for bloggers that requires that they disclose financial interests, freebies and paid reviews.  This decision is seen as a shot across the bow of pay per post networks and bloggers who are monetizing through affiliate programs.    The FTC has decided that compensation is the reason bloggers choose to write about a particular topic and that readers deserve to be informed about the financial relationship…

One of the common questions we get is how to build links for a new site. In our training site we offer our 12 week link building roadmap and a list of directories to submit to, but I also thought I should discuss link building in general. A good basic rule of thumb (though a bit conservative of one) is to build links in a manner where every month you build as many or more links than you built the prior month…

The #1 SEO Community

Since the end of last year (when we started working with Conversion Rate Experts) we went from sorta not caring too much about conversion rates to making it a priority. Part of the reason we originally did not worry about it was just because I wanted to keep adding value to the service and make sure that the quality of the site was far better than any competing site. That goal has been achieved, and recognized by our customers and in the marketplace amongst SEO experts…

I tend to be somewhat cynical toward Google because I generally do not trust authorities and they CAN and DO kill many web based businesses that are too reliant on search. But to offset such posts I figured it would be cool to do a counter post on reasons to love Google

They pushed search. Back when search was unprofitable they believed in making it better rather than being at least 80% as good as the next portal…

Want To Make a Living on Google Money?

AdAge has a good post about how Google’s promotion of fraudulent advertising is undermining their brand…

In a world of double-digit unemployment and old-line industries in mid-collapse, here’s a sales pitch tailor-made for the times: “Get Paid by Google.”

It’s a pitch that’s compelling millions of people to visit sites such as Kevinlifeblog…