I recently read The Google Story and am currently reading In the Plex, both of which are biographical pieces covering the history of Google, its founders Brin and Page, its employees, business relationships, and so forth. As I’ve read these books I’ve been able to get some insight into Google’s core business model, which is [...]
Search Engine Optimization
I got into search engine optimization (SEO) about three years ago and now my web design firm is becoming an SEO company. While my posts in this category have slowed due to having an SEO blog devoted to the subject, I still try to keep some fresh content here as well.
I don’t know why I’m writing this. I don’t need more competition. Maybe I hate to see wasted potential. As I see more and more people losing jobs and waiting around for someone to drop one in their laps, I can’t help wonder why more people don’t go out and create their own jobs. Maybe [...]
I get by with a little help from my friends…I get high (rankings, that is) with a little help from my friends. So…I’m in the midst of a little experiment. You see, I’ve got this new business launching local business directories, and one of the categories is self storage directories, of which we currently have [...]
An open letter to the marketing team at Blendtec: Dear Blendtec, your website needs a search engine optimization overhaul, and my SEO firm is the one to do it. I won’t dwell too much on why you need SEO, other than to point out that your site will show up higher in rankings in Google, [...]
That is, who are Utah’s top 5 SEO professionals as rated by their peers? This is merely an informal survey, but if you’re an SEO professional here in the state of Utah, then who are the other five SEO professionals (other than yourself) who you think are on top of the game or are next [...]
11
Aug
Google Penalty
Well, donloper.com has been penalized by Google, but I’m not sure why. Up until June 16th, 2009 the site would get between 130-300 visitors per day, depending on the day of the week and how frequently I was posting. On June 17th the traffic dropped to 99 visitors, 73 visitors on June 18th, 25 on [...]
Like any web marketer I love stats, and that extends to the analytics stats for this blog. I love seeing how many people are reading which posts. Below are the posts that have received the most pageviews over the past 30 days on this blog. Ironically, some of what gets me the most traffic is [...]
I’ve been working on niche directories since 1999. Geez, you’d think I’d have more to show for it after almost 10 years, but I’m a bit slow. I guess if I were a politician or corrupt CEO of an ailing public company asking for bailout dollars I’d tell you that “I’ve been refining my business [...]
What is link baiting, you ask? It’s when you develop content on your website that is intended to get other people to link to it, therefore boosting the number of inbound links pointing at your website, which will boost your website’s rankings in the search engines. Generally the best link baiting comes naturally. I wouldn’t [...]
CNN and Careerbuilder just published an article on ten jobs that pay around $80,000 per year, such as attorneys, economists, associate actuaries, marketing managers, pharmacists, and veterinarians. The trouble with all of these jobs is that with rare exceptions they require a four-year college degree or more than that. But there is an 11th job [...]
My SEO firm has had a blog dedicated to SEO up at TheOrganicSEO.com for some time, but we’ve let it languish this year. We’re interested in getting it back up and running and turning it into a valuable resource, and if you’re an SEO professional with a penchant for writing we’d like to invite you [...]
One of our SEO clients is an eating disorder treatment center. We also manage their Google Adwords account, which I’ll refer to as search engine marketing for the remainder of this post. With both SEO and SEM there are two components to a successful campaign; the first is getting traffic to the site, and the [...]
Google’s terms of service states: 5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google. You specifically agree not to access (or attempt [...]
10
Sep
WordPress SEO Tips
A week or so ago I stated that I thought some of my blogs had been hammered in the search engine results pages (SERPs) because of the theme I was using and so I was looking for a new and SEO friendly WordPress theme. While perhaps true that my theme wasn’t the best for SEO, [...]
I haven’t been paying attention to donloper.com rankings lately as I’ve been busy with other things, but apparently it has gotten absolutely hammered. Whereas anything I posted on donloper used to end up at the top of search engines for whatever the topic was, now even a search for “donloper” has it coming up on [...]
If you sell or are privy to sales data for SEO services in Utah are you noticing any decline in lead flow? At MWI we have been, but I figured it was because we haven’t been maintaining our rankings lately, but I just talked with a friend at another firm and he said they’ve been [...]
If you’re in any way involved with search engine optimization / SEO and you have any sort of tie to Utah, please join the newly created Utah SEO group on Linkedin.com.
18
Jun
The Future of SEO
I think search engine optimization is going to follow the same path as web design, just 10 years behind it. When I started my web design firm in 1999 I thought I was on the cusp of being wildly rich and amazingly successful. After all, I knew other people who had started web development firms, [...]
It’s funny how you get an idea of how something could be done better, only to find out you’re completely wrong. A few years ago I started working on the idea for The SEO Consultants. The idea was fairly simple–a lot of small businesses can’t afford search engine optimization services at a price tag of [...]
MWI just launched a few more of our simple directories, namely Boston web design firms, Boston SEO Firms, and Utah SEO Firms.
This post is purely an experiment in search engine optimization. Yes, I’ve talked about moving my business to Boston before, but it’s starting to get more and more serious and I think we might actually make it this year. And if’n I do, that means optimizing my SEO firm’s site for a new group of [...]
Apparently Utah SEO firm Vizad is setting up various blogs with “fake” content as part of their SEO methodology. That is, they set up a blog, make it look as thought it’s some person, post all sorts of content related to their clients along with contextual links, and in this way build up incoming links [...]
As of today I’ve seen in happen in five days. It’s a brand new website on a brand new URL. The website has just a few pages of content. And yet if you search for “shoulder pain pump litigation” in Google you’ll see it there, smiling away in the #1 organic search result. I’ve covered [...]
The last time I wrote about the state of the Utah SEO industry was in May of 2006, so it’s probably time for an update, especially after all the activity going on just within the last month or two. There have been a number of Utah SEO firms that have popped up, along with a [...]
If you could enter a contest for $500 simply by putting a link from your website to another website, and your chances of winning were roughly one in a hundred, would you take 30 seconds and do it? That’s my latest experiment in linkbaiting (see My Web Design Company Contest on the MWI blog for [...]
Linkbaiting, linkbait, link bait, or whatever your term of choice, is pretty much what it sounds like–putting out bait in the hopes of getting links. Here’s an example: I just created a post on another blog called “If the 2008 Elections Were Based on SEO.” While perhaps not the most fascinating piece of literature you’ve [...]
If you’re not into SEO you won’t be interested in this post. But if you are, then well, you’re in for a treat. The long-awaited SEO forums are finally up and running at http://forum.theorganicseo.com/. We’ve got tips, tools, and techniques forums on keyword research, link building, linkbait, and SEO tools. We’ve got forums on other [...]
16
Dec
SEO Training
Part of the service we will be offering at our subsidiary The SEO Consultants (the site is definitely under construction at the moment) is search engine optimization training. We’ve seen instances where companies hire an outside firm for a period of time, but then realize their need for SEO services is large enough that they [...]
You don’t have to provide search engine optimization services very long before you start seeing that many, if not most, people have a slew of misconceptions about SEO. Inspired by Lee Odden’s post on Five Myths About SEO I’ve created my own list of statements born out of misunderstandings about SEO as follows: “SEO means [...]
We just met with a prospective SEO client yesterday. They’ve been using another Utah-based SEO firm who shall remain nameless. The client actually didn’t want to tell us who they had been using, but we ended up finding out anyway in the course of doing research in preparation for our meeting. During the meeting we [...]
I’m calling you out. You firms who claim to know something about Internet marketing, search engine optimization, search marketing–whatever you call it, and yet who haven’t been able to get your own sites ranked in Google for any terms relevant to the profession. Richter7 – “We develop Internet marketing strategies…” Cogbox – “Put us to [...]
16
Oct
SEO Survey Results
A few weeks ago I posted a link to a survey about search engine optimization with the incentive of one of those who filled out the survey being able to win an iPod Clip Shuffle. And the winner is Joel H. There’s probably only one of you Joel, so I think you know who you [...]
SEOmoz is a search engine optimization firm in Seattle, and I’ve recently subscribed to their seo blog. I’ve been impressed with the firm’s openness to publish their pricing on their website, and this latest post Pitching an SEO Client is just one more example of how open they are to share their methodologies and internal [...]
I don’t usually solicit comments with my blog posts, but this is one on which I would genuinely like to get your opinion. The more negative your opinion, the more you can poke holes, point out flaws, expose idiocy, the better. MWI will soon be launching a new SEO service. It’s not that the service [...]
Click here to take survey. MWI is getting ready to launch a new service related to search engine optimization, and would appreciate your input. As an incentive we’re giving away an iPod Clip Shuffle.
MWI has officially launched a blog at TheOrganicSEO.com that is all about organic or “natural” search engine optimization. The site features articles with SEO advice, techniques, practices, etc., a news section covering the SEO industry, an SEO forum, and an SEO directory. The site is brand new so the content is sparse in places, and [...]
I’ve started reading Andy Beal’s SEO blog dubbed MarketingPilgrim lately and the guy seems to be on top of things. The latest good reading from his site was a piece titled “Signs You Need to Switch SEO Providers“. There are several things I agree with Andy on. Allow me to share one and why I [...]
MWI is developing the identity and content for a subsidiary called The SEO Consultants. I’ve been working on an SEO presentation which I’d like to solicit feedback on. If you’re interested/willing, click on the link, download the file, check it out, and let me know what you think. Is it too long, too short, boring, [...]
Have you ever been in the business of selling something, be it a product or service, and you’ve had to compete against someone else to get a deal, and you lose the deal? Nobody wins all the time. But later you find out that you lost the deal because the person/company you were competing against [...]
If you are a home builder or a realtor then your business is selling houses. You’re also somewhat uncomfortable around computers or people who talk about computers, and you know people are using the Internet to sell houses but you’re not sure how they’re doing it because every time someone sells you some new service [...]
No, I am not selling a townhouse in the city of Herriman, Utah. I am researching the possibility of buying one. So why is it that after 20 minutes of searching Google, trying to find someone who is selling townhouses in Herriman, I haven’t been able to find anything even close to information about what [...]
For many, there is confusion over what is meant by “search engine optimization” vs “search engine marketing.” After all, if I’m optimizing my website so that it gets more traffic and I make more money, isn’t that marketing using search engines?
If a firm states on their website that “we’re highly skilled in search engine optimization” would you find it strange if their website doesn’t rank well (if at all) in search engines nor does it appear that any attempt has been made to optimize their site for search engines? I regularly run reports using Web [...]
In a recent post on the performance of MWI’s search engine optimization page a commenter brought up the point that MWI’s page has underscores in it vs dashes or hyphens, and that he had heard that dashes or hyphens are better for SEO than underscores. An article by SEO expert Matt Cutts from August 2005 [...]
Sometimes you have to laugh at the thing you do that don’t work out as planned. Case in point, MWI just ran an ad in Connect Magazine that says “MWI does search engine optmization. Go to Google and search for ‘utah search engine optimization‘ and then come get a proposal from us.” The idea is [...]
I’ve revised my ten top search engine optimization tips and created a search engine optimization whitepaper for MWI’s website. Full content available below.
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 [...]
We’ll be announcing this promotion officially through the MWI newsletter (yes, we’re going to start sending it out again), but I figured why not get things started right now. Without further ado, I announce the MWI Free iPod SEO Referral Program. It’s a simple program. You refer a client to MWI who signs up for [...]
If you were searching for a search engine optimization (SEO) company what keyword search terms would you search for in a search engine? Could I use the word “search” once more? Most people feel more comfortable dealing with businesses that located within the same geographic area. This is because it facilitates face-to-face interaction, and there’s [...]
Need suggestions for keywords and you wish you knew what people were searching for? Yes, to anyone who’s involved with SEO this is very basic, but for those starting out this is still a helpful tool. Simple go over to http://inventory.overture.com and type in a keyword. It will give you a list of keyword combinations [...]
I don’t mean to brag, but search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the funnest things I’ve ever been involved with, and MWI is doing a fairly good job at it. I believe a SEO firm isn’t worth much if they don’t rank anywhere themselves, the same way a design firm isn’t doing a good [...]
As a small business owner you’re already swamped with more things to do than you have time for, and yet whenever someone says they can tell you how to sell more, be more profitable, and generally make more money, you feel obligated to pay attention. You’ve got bills to pay, and anything that can help [...]
I like the MovableType platform for blogging, now that I’ve learned it. It sure was a pain to set up though. I wouldn’t recommend it for people who aren’t technically inclined. But now that I’ve learned it I can’t use anything else because I’ve made this huge investment of time. Anyway, I just learned something [...]
