SoloSEO

Is Blogging For You? Heck, Is Blogging For Me?

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on July 3rd, 2008

I have blogged here regularly in the past, I could easily see blogging was a pretty great idea, especially to generate new content for a site you want to start ranking well. I still think blogging is an excellent method to add content to a site, we have seen the benefit of content with SoloSEO.com, and our rankings. However, I was also pretty shocked to discover some unexpected results from blogging, which I kind of feel need to be addressed.

Others have discussed the time commitment required to keep a good blog going, such as adding a good post once a week, well written, and contributing something worth reading. This is definitely the case, and I personally think blogging is even more difficult for the small business owner. Owning your own business, let alone two or three, means you have a number of hats you need to wear to keep the business running. Small business owners have to be the marketing, HR, accounting, sales and maintenance departments all at once. Allocating time to manage a blog, although important, may not be the best use of your time. It really depends on the type of business being run, and just how much revenue is hope to be gained from online leads and sales. If online sales will never contribute more than 25% of total revenue, I would suggest not spending to much time on it. If more then 25% is or hopefully will be from online leads and sales, then working on content is a good strategic use of time. In this case, my suggestion would be to keep posts pretty short, a paragraph or two, and focus them on the company, products, policies, and vision of the company, etc. I good history of the company and how it came to be, can also be good reading and provide clients with a good feeling about the business. Blogging like this makes it pretty easy to write something quickly, as business owners are well versed in these areas, and are virtually assured to use keywords which relate well to what a business is and does, which in turn helps rankings for keywords potential clients are using when the search.

There are other results of blogging which I never imagined. Over the last few years I have attended PubCon and SMX. They are great shows, and I have a great time learning, but the last show kind of freaked me out. I was just moving along through the show, headed to another session, when I was stopped by a few people who kindly informed me they liked some of the stuff I had put up on our blog. I had never been stopped abruptly like that before, expect maybe a Highway Patrolman. It was very nice of these folks to stop, it was very nice of them to be nice, whether they really felt this way about our blog or not, but I was kind of mystified by it all… Everyone needs to understand before they start a blog that putting your stuff online, and attaching your name to it means your content will be there for a very long time, if not forever, and you might actually become “known” in the industry are attempting to succeed within. There are those on this earth who crave attention, and desire to be in the public eye. I am sure you know a few, there are some obvious examples in the SEO industry. However, I am not one of these people. For me personally, any notoriety at all is not a good thing, positive or negative. I would rather sneak through life leaving as little a mark as possible. Don’t get me wrong, I want to be educated, successful in business, I want to be a good dad and husband, but I would rather accomplish these things without anyone else outside of my close circle really knowing or caring.

My personal goals include contributing to the public good, help as many people as I can, through business, through sharing expertise, through any method possible, but I want to be able to do it as anonymously as possible. The thought of being recognized out on the street, by anyone, for any reason, is very, very unsettling, I want no part of it. So, if you are like me, and are attempting to go through life as quietly as possible, I would suggest not blogging, or at least not blogging with your name attached to it. Instead blog as a company staff member, or use a stage name, “SEO Stan,” “Golfing Joe,” or something like that, so you can remain nameless.

The experience at the show has really reduced my desire to blog, which is too bad… I want to share stuff I have learned, I want our site to grow and continue to rank better, and blogging is an excellent way to get that done, but I don’t want any notoriety for it. Kind of a weird place to be… When was the last time you listened to a nameless face offering advice? I am not sure how to get that done at this point, but I am working on figuring it out, when I do, I will let you know, until then I guess I blog as me.

All this being said, content really is king for sites attempting to rank well for a long period of time, and blogging is a great way to get the content up there, it just isn’t as painless as I had originally thought, or hoped it would be. To avoid the spotlight, perhaps we could just spend time on improving or expounding on the products pages and descriptions, as well as on pages about the company, product quality, guarantee policies, new products, goals for the company, etc., rather than just blogging this new content. The topics for new pages to add to a business site are endless.

Ultimately, if you want to get your name out there and be recognized as an expert in the field, then blogging is a great way to do it. If you don’t, that’s fine too, but content still needs to be created for your site, either don’t attach your name to it, or just focus on pimping out your web pages, with superior, unique content as no author’s name is required.

Oh, one last thing… If our paths happen to cross in the future at any of the upcoming shows, just ignore me completely. I would really appreciate it.

I hope everyone has a safe and happy 4th of July holiday.

Add comment Visited 63 times July 3rd, 2008 Aaron R Stewart

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6 Signs Your Website Has Been SEO’d

Posted by Michael D Jensen on July 2nd, 2008

If you have hired an SEO firm, you may not know what to look for to check and see if your SEO firm is working hard at doing the SEO. Here are 6 signs to look for to know if they are making progress in SEO. If you don’t see most of these, call them on it and probably find a new SEO firm.

1) Title, URLs and Meta tags

You should see your main keyword in the title of your homepage and unique titles for each of your pages (with keywords in them). You may see your URL structure change, but your old URLs should still redirect somewhere relevant.

Your meta tags (description especially) should be well-written and concise, and unique for most pages of your site.

2) Analytics code

When you “view source” you should see some type of Javascript code for an Analytics program, like Google, Omniture, or IndexTools. If you don’t see this, you should have been given a link to view them because they are using a log based analytics tool (like AWstats).

3) Image Alt Text

When you “view source” your images (not all, but relevant ones like product/service related images) will have an “alt” or “title” attribute, preferably an “alt” attribute according to some.

4) New Links

Go to Yahoo’s SiteExplorer, type in your website URL, and then look at the “Inlinks”. You should have links from other websites you didn’t get links from already, and this number should grow month after month. You should get unique links, from more than just one website, so don’t just look at the number of inlinks.

5) New Content

You (or your SEO firm) should be continually adding content to your site. Whether you add and maintain a blog, develop something for user-generated content, or just add articles to your site each week/month, new content helps keep you in good terms with Google. You can check the number of pages from the Pages link in Yahoo’s SiteExplorer or by using the “site:” operator in Google.

6) Reports

Your SEO company should also be sending you periodic reports and rankings, covering the above items. Most SEO companies send out ranking reports, but be sure to ask for reports on new link strategies, data from your analytics (popular keywords, referrals, goal conversion, etc.) and competitive analysis.

For most of these you should be able to see changes within the first few weeks of starting with an SEO company. Links and content can sometimes take a little longer to see come through, especially if your site is newer. If you don’t see any progress, call up your SEO firm and ask about it. If they give you the “wait 6+ months line” then run away. You can always try do-it-yourself SEO too!

Add comment Visited 108 times July 2nd, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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Local Search Ranking Factors Report

Posted by Michael D Jensen on June 17th, 2008

An excellent report on factors that affect rankings in local search was released today by David Mihm (davidmihm.com and @davidmihm). I was happy to participate as a contributor to the report, particularly with my interest in local search marketing and online customer reviews.

Please read the report yourself, but I wanted to just highlight the top 5 factors for ranking in local search, most of which had fairly good agreement between the contributors.

1. General importance of claiming Local Business Listing
2. Local Business Listing address in city of search
3. Proper Categorization of LBL
4. Product / service KWs in LBL title
5. Proximity to centroid

Two of these factors actually depend on the physical location of the business. The other three of these factors rely on getting and filling out a local business listing. Interestingly, none of these deal with on-page (website) factors!

Thanks David for an excellent resource for local search!

Add comment Visited 232 times June 17th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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The Missing Twitter Tools

Posted by Michael D Jensen on June 5th, 2008

Twitter has become a part of my every day life. When I first tried it, I thought it was a complete and utter waste of time. Nine months later I decided to give it another chance, and now I see the light. Twitter is great for networking, sharing links, getting ideas, connecting and meeting with people, and sometimes just saying something no one is around physically to hear.

Exactly one month ago, Lee Odden (@leeodden) asked me on Twitter if I was going to build tools for Twitter like I did for MyBlogLog way back when. I started playing with the API and began on the first of several tools. I decided to go with “Missing” Twitter Tools because some of these could/should be integrated into Twitter and I was surprised no one had built them before.

 TweetBeep.com is my favorite, and is the first Twitter Tool I made. It’s like Google Alerts, but for Twitter. If you want to know if someone on Twitter is talking about you, your website, your company or products, your competition, or anything else, just add a TweetBeep alert. You can set hourly or daily alerts for keywords, and link alerts are in real-time. The coolest feature is the link alerts will catch links to your domain even if they are shortened with tinyurl.com, snurl.com, etc. TweetBeep is great for online reputation management!

LiveTwitting.com came as a result of reading a conversation on Twitter between @dannysullivan and @lisabarone, about live twittering conference sessions. Danny mentioned that there was a lack of tools for consolidating tweets after the fact. I twittered with Danny, he sent me some of his ideas/specs, and out came livetwitting.com. With a few simple commands you can record your conference, meeting, or event coverage. You can even edit your text after the fact, and easily reuse the text using the RSS feed. SMX Advanced recently used livetwitting, and has several sessions available for you to check out.

TweetAnswers is like Yahoo! Answers but for Twitter users! Have a question you need answered? Instead of just asking your friends on Twitter, you can ask the growing network of people who follow @tweetanswers. Answers are organized by topic using hashtags.

HappyTwitDay is less useful than the other tools, but it is pretty fun. If someone wishes you a happy birthday on Twitter, @happytwitday will also wish you Happy Birthday, and records your birthday on its website. It keeps track of how many people wished you happy birthday, and you can look up other Twitter users’ birthdays, or who shares the same birthday as you. If you follow @happytwitday you can find out when your friends are having a birthday even if you don’t know it!

Twanslate is a Twitter bot (@twanslate) that will translate any text you send it. It’s very useful when you’re away from your computer and need a quick translation, like “Where’s the bathroom?”. Just follow @twanslate and send a direct message like “d twanslate fr Where’s the bathroom?”. It translates into lots of languages and automatically detects what language your text is in (so you can send it Spanish [es] and translate into French [fr]). 

If you have any great ideas for Twitter Tools you’d like to see built, or if you’d like to just see what I’m up to, follow me on Twitter at @mdjensen.

3 comments Visited 485 times June 5th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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Tracking Twitter Traffic Trick

Posted by Michael D Jensen on May 22nd, 2008

Twitter has become a great place to network, vent, and share links, including your own blog posts. But how do you quantify the traffic you are getting from Twitter, especially if people are using applications like Twhirl, or even a mobile phone? I’ve got a special trick for you, and it’s really easy to do!

Now for the Trick!

Step 1: Add a parameter to the URL, such as twitter=1

If your URL is http://mydomain.com/blog/post.html then it should be http://mydomain.com/blog/post.html?twitter=1

If your URL is http://mydomain.com/blog/2008/5/postname/ then it should be http://mydomain.com/blog/2008/5/postname/?twitter=1

If your URL is http://mydomain.com/page.html?id=9 then it should be http://mydomain.com/page.html?id=9&twitter=1

You can of course use any parameter you want, like tw=1 or source=twitter, be creative. Your analytics program (see step 3 in just a sec) may benefit from using the same one consistently so you can measure all your twitter traffic.

Step 2: Type or cut/paste the new URL into the text box

Put in your link just like you would any other link, just make sure you have the “twitter=1″ at the end.

You can use the online interface for Twitter, or any other application like Twhirl or Twitterific. This trick takes advantage of one of Twitter’s built in capabilities of shortening URLs that are longer than 30 characters using TinyURL, so you’re not wasting any of your precious 140 chars.

Step 3: Track it!

Using whatever analytics program you use, you should be able to differentiate views by the full URL. With Google Analytics if you go to Content > Top Content you will see a list of all the viewed pages, including your link with “twitter=1″ (see page #9 in image for an example). If you don’t see the page with “twitter=1″ at the end, do a search at the bottom (Find URL:) for “twitter=1″.

Now you can see how many pageviews, unique views, etc. came ONLY from the link you shared from Twitter, giving you a more accurate idea of how many people actually click on the links that you share!

If your analytics program lets you view statistics by parameter, you will want to use the same parameter consistently so you can not only see stats for each page, but for all of your twitter traffic. (I used to be able to do this on Google Analytics, but I don’t see this feature anymore.)

With this simple trick you can track your Twitter traffic in a jiffy! And if you liked this trick, share it with your friends on Twitter with this URL: http://tinyurl.com/4zjopu

And if you’re looking for a way to track who else is linking to you, try one of my new Twitter tools, TweetBeep.com. TweetBeep is like Google Alerts for Twitter, and it even has x-ray eyes to see through shortened links, so even if they are disguised with TinyURL, TweetBeep catches them.

Add comment Visited 838 times May 22nd, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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Search Engine Marketing Scholarship Begins

Posted by Michael D Jensen on May 12th, 2008

Andy Beal at MarketingPilgrim.com opened up the 3rd annual Search Engine Marketing Scholarship, open to anyone who wants to write an article about SEO, PPC, or SMO (social media optimization) and have a chance at more than $10,000 worth of prizes! Beyond writing the article, your next task is to get your article some traffic! You can do it any way you want, but this year quality traffic is getting some bonus points.

This is a great opportunity for rising stars in search engine marketing to get a leg in and get some traction, attention, and recognition. You can use your SEM knowledge to get your article links, publicity, and traffic and make it into the top 5. From there, a panel of “expert judges” (quotes because I’m one of the judges…), will select the winner.

Best of luck (and skill) to all entrants!

1 comment Visited 425 times May 12th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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Announcing LiveTwitting.com

Posted by Michael D Jensen on May 8th, 2008

LiveTwitting is a new way to cover conferences, events, and meetings using Twitter and LiveTwitting.com. With the ease and simplicity of Twitter, you can cover sessions just like before but now in real time.

A few simple commands like ON, OFF, and SPEAKER will let you collect and organize the information for reposting on your blog, website, newsletter, etc. Here are the commands that you can use, after you’ve followed @livetwitting.

You can even take the live RSS feed and link to it (or pull from it) on your blog or website. Here is a fake event that shows how it can be organized, all from using the commands above: LiveTwitting of PubCon 2007: Online Reputation Management.

The whole idea was bred on Twitter, starting with @LisaBarone asking if she should do the next session live with Twitter or not. @DannySullivan responded and said she should but there needs to be some tools to collect and organize the LiveTwitting. I (@mdjensen) told @DannySullivan I’d be interested in working on making that happen. Danny had some great ideas and we brainstormed together, and now have LiveTwitting.com! See, Twitter has its usefulness!

We’d love to hear your thoughts, suggestions, etc. Send me (@mdjensen) or Danny (@DannySullivan) an @reply and we can talk!

Add comment Visited 576 times May 8th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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Feedburner Drop? Don’t Worry, Your Subscribers Are Back

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 30th, 2008

In case you were concerned with your blog, like I was, with a mass exodus of Feedburner subscribers, @AndyBeal helped me figure it out this morning through Twitter (you can follow me if you want @mdjensen), which I am coming to see its importance more and more.

It looks like Netvibes was undergoing some maintenance and so it was under reporting, and at least from this blog it was from last Wednesday (April 23rd) until yesterday. Here is what it looks like over the last few weeks:

Today is the highlighted green bar with a T (Tuesday). You can see that our overall blog subscribers count when up even higher after the Netvibes result. Maybe they are reporting more accurately now? Usually we only see dips on the weekend, so seeing a mid-week dip (from last week’s Monday and Tuesday down to Wednesday) was unusual.

Andy Beal was saying he lost 1300 subscribers from his count based on that, and for us it looks like NetVibes makes up 32% of our subscriber base.

1 comment Visited 518 times April 30th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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Google Helps You With Mother’s Day

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 30th, 2008

I was trying to figure out for sure if Mother’s Day was this Sunday or the next, so of course I went to Google. Thankfully Google knows when holidays are, albeit they use Wikipedia. So now I know, Mother’s day is May 11th. And you know too (so get her something!).

One of Google’s more well known features is related searches, and these suggestions seem right on for helping people like me gear up for Mother’s day (for my wife and my Mom). There are mother’s day poems, mother’s day cards, mother’s day crafts, and mother’s day ideas.

Of course you could make her smile by following this Adwords ad:

Or if you really want to wow her, get her a TIGER!

Whatever you do, just don’t forget it’s Mother’s day on May 11th!

Add comment Visited 384 times April 30th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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Content is Forever

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 24th, 2008

Although I’ve known it all along, these three words sunk into my mind during a business meeting last night: “Content is Forever“. I thought of all the investments you can make in SEO, your site design, site organization, links, etc. Those things can change and “die”, but your content can live forever.

Content is such a personal and sensitive aspect of your interaction with your customer because IT IS your interaction. The difference between so-so content and great content is HUGE. Yes, you can write your own content. From our experience in web content writing, great content comes from talented writers. Seeing what our writers can put out in a matter of hours compared to my own writing is night and day.

With content you pay for it once and then its done. Compare that to link building, where if you are buying links you may pay every month for those links and if you don’t, they go away.

Your content is what sells your product, your service. Your content is what engages your customer, keeps their eyes and mouse on your site. Your content is what defines you and your company.

And content is one of the only SEO investments that can live forever.

1 comment Visited 424 times April 24th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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