Whats the difference between a "SEO Consultant" and

Whats the difference between a "SEO Consultant" and a used car salesman? Answer: The used car salesman knows when he's lying. First, let me apologize to those of you have have taken offense at that seo joke. Many used car salesman have been calling to complain ..... (be da ding!) Yes, that second seo joke was bad. Sadly, the seo industry includes many bad jokes.... (be da ding! be da ding!) Seriously folks, I've receive alot of calls from SEO sales people and frankly, it would be hard to find a more-misguided group of people. And it's not that they mean to lie, its' just that they "get confused" and carried away and don't seem to really understand much. My impression is that many of them were part of a SEO effort that resulted in some site coming out number one on some search engine for some keyphrase at some time. At the time, they might have just been the secretary at the advertising agency that worked with the client. But, in the course of time, these details got lost. Through the course of exxageration and confusion, they lost track of what their actual role was and what was actually accomplished. Many of them are now boasting: "My last client used this technique and got to number 1 in 3 days!!!!" When they explain to me what they are planning to do, it seems to me to be very unlikely. And now, they are "SEO Consultants" (salepeople) peddling long term contracts with monthly payments. They act like that they really do know how to do SEO cost-effectively, that they really can take any site and make it do well in all the search engines, and that we should be gratified that they "prepared a customer analysis for you for free" (ie ran a few keyphrases thru some sort of analysis). Then, this is a true recent story, I found myself at a lunch with the firm president (saleguy) pushing for a signature on a contract for $5,000 month with no cancellation clause and no "level of effort" commitment or reporting by the contractor?" If you think I'm exaggerating, I'll show you such a contract. The SEO company that I was meeting with was the one pushed by a hosting firm(Webstream) at that time and they were promoting them on the phone and across their site. The company pushed the contract to me repeatedly and really expected me to sign. yick.... ***** In reality, there are really only two people who actually understand how the search engines work. Of course, they disagree....(yes, thats part of the show....) ******* My directory of SEO Jokes, Jokes about SEO, and Jokes about Search Engine Optimizers (OK. That one was a subtle. Did you miss the keyphrase threepeat? Are you paying attention?) Here's a few that I've found from around the web...with bylines and links.... www.stuntdubl.com/2006/03/24/seos-and-lawyers-its-a-joke/ including: - SEOs are safe from the threat of automation taking over their professions. No one would build a robot to do nothing. - If it weren’t for SEOs, we wouldn’t need them. - Talk is cheap…until SEOs get involved. ba ba bing... they just keep coming... Do you know an SEO's definition of SPAM? (thanks to http://www.webnauts.net/) S = SITES P = PLACED A = ABOVE M = MINE sad - this seo joke made me laugh out loud - from http://www.threadwatch.org/node/7134 SEO Anonymous Meeting Hi, My name is Michael and in the past 5 years the longest I've gone without checking stats or email messages is 3 days ..

SEO Article - Funny! - Relevancy vs Popularity

Link Popularity vs. Relevancy

I was contacted recently by an online directory. The woman who phoned me began by telling me that they didn't have a web designer listed in my area and they had 20-30 people every week who were looking for a web designer and were unable to find one. As I listened to this sad story tears started to form in my eyes as I began to realise that in the 21st century there are still people in the world who are having to go without a web designer.

Of course I quickly realised that this sob story was intended to soften me up in an attempt to sell me something, so I interjected by saying: "So you're looking for someone to advertise on your website?"

"Oh no it's not advertising," she said, "We're looking for one exclusive web designer in your area to handle all the enquiries we are getting..."

She went on to tell me that this fantastic opportunity would only cost me £1 per day and that they would be able to get me listed on the first page of search results in all the major search engines.

Now there's one thing I don't like and that is when people use a promise to try and sell you something knowing full well they cannot deliver on that promise.

"So if I go to Google and type in web design wiltshire, will I find your company?" I asked.

To my amusement she replied with one of the funniest lines I have ever heard in telephone marketing: "Oh no," she said, "we don't use Google anymore - we use Yahoo instead."
(this is the second best SEO joke that I know - for the best seo joke...)

Once I had stopped laughing I pointed out to her that nearly 60% of all Internet searches were made through Google and if you were in business online you would not deliberately 'stop using Google'. What she was saying of course was that it was harder to get a top ten listing in Google than it was with Yahoo.

Now the point of all this is that when she was busy making excuses for not being listed in Google she did say something rather interesting and that was that 'Google does not always show you the websites that are the most relevant to your search phrase'.

Now this is quite interesting. Because Google uses a different formula from Yahoo and MSN when calculating search results, you get a different set of results from each search engine for the same search query.

MSN appears to give more weight to keywords than they do to link popularity, whereas Google places a high importance on the quality and quantity of incoming links but also takes into account a whole host of other factors.

The more success I had with getting top ten search engine results the more I advertised those successes on the SEO page of my website. Every so often I would check the results to see if I was still on the first page. What I began to notice was that on MSN the SEO page of my website was getting to number one for a phrase that I had listed on that page.

For example, I built a website for an acupuncturist in Swindon, Wiltshire and wanted to advertise the fact that I had secured a number one slot in Google for the search phrase 'acupuncture treatment wiltshire', so I listed it on the SEO page of my website. A week or so later when I went to check the MSN rankings for the acupuncture site I noticed that the SEO page of my site was at number one for the search phrase 'acupuncture treatment wiltshire'.

Now the problem with this of course is that the search phrase is not relevant to that website. So in terms of relevancy MSN has failed: it has not delivered the most relevant websites for that search phrase because it has put a web design company at the top instead of an acupuncture website. This is one of the pitfalls of placing too much emphasis on keywords.

But why was my site at the top instead of the acupuncture site (which was coming in at number 2 or 3)? Presumably because my site is more established, has more incoming links and a higher Page Rank. Presumably, although not definitely.

So do these problems occur with Google? The answer to that is yes and no.

Google does get irrelevant sites mixed up in it's top ten from time to time but they are more likely to be there because of Page Rank than because of keywords. An article about SEO and linking strategies that I published on a high ranking website turned up in the top ten for a completely unrelated search phrase because I had mentioned that phrase once in the article. The reason was that Google placed more importance on the PR of the site the article was on than the keyword density of that particular phrase.

As Page Rank is based largely on link popularity the end result in this case was that link popularity beat relevancy hands-down. This is the main bone of contention that many webmasters have about Google: link popularity does not necessarily equate to relevancy and ultimately it is relevancy that is most important to the user.

Some may argue that a more popular site is more relevant. But if you were looking for a web designer in Marlborough you wouldn't want to find a listing for a hotel in the top ten just because it had more incoming links and a higher page rank than the site of a local web designer and happened to have a link to another web designer at the bottom of the page.

Part of the problem of course is that whatever system is in place some people will try to cheat the system. That leads to companies like Google having to change the way they evaluate the web pages that their robots crawl. This inadvertently leads to some website owners finding that their sites have been devalued because they have accidentally done something with their site that is frowned upon by Google because it was once used by the cheats to artificially boost their search engine rankings.

Until such time as a telepathic search engine is invented it seems unlikely that such problems will be eliminated. Perhaps in the coming years some kind of global directory will be used in conjunction with domain name registration, whereby each website could be registered in a maximum of two categories (web design and SEO for example) and some kind of system could be used to make sure that websites could only show up in search results for search phrases related to those categories. It would probably be too expensive and labour intensive to implement but I'm sure if someone could find a way of making money from it we might well see it happen!


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Quoted greatfully from the EntireWeb newsletter. Those people publish the absolute best SEO newsletter for beginner intermediate SEO people.

About the Author: Rob Butler is a web designer in Marlborough Wiltshire and specialises in securing top ten search engine rankings for small to medium sized companies.

Of course, my interest is in seo for my own site where you can Learn Reading Math Online
through Educational Teaching Games providing both Special Needs Learning and Gifted Education.

SEO Directories, Honey Pots, & Google - Are they smarter than the local cops?

I was jsut on a well-trafficked directory where scads of people are talking about how important it is to get listed in directories for seo purposes.  It makes no sense to me since directories, created for seo purposes, are probably of NO value. Here's how I think think about.

Wouldn't Google monitor the lists of directories created for SEO purposes and demote the value of their links to zero. Or, if they are asking people to buy links for seo purposes, to actually have them count negative?

Put yourself in the shoes of Google, why wouldn't you maintain a list of directories that only exist for seo purposes and NOT consider those links?

 Better yet, create you own directory for seo purposes, keep track of who submits to them, then consider those sites as potentially spammy sites. Your local cops create these honeypots by leaving purses in parked cars with videotapes to catch would-be thieves.  Isn't google at least that smart?

SEO Tools - My Education Continues

SEO tools - this was updated August 2015 since it continues to get traffic but the info is out of date.

There are so many different types of SEO tools.  Learning about them and stayin gcurrent on them is an endless exercise. Many of the most useful and insightful tools that dominated have become unavailable over the last decade.  Here's a quick glance at the current SEO tools that I use, organized by what they do.

Find out my site's position by keyword - Google webmaster tools. Webmaster tools also provides vital info on site status as far as Google is concerned. It say if the sitemap has been set up right, if there's dead links, and what searches the site is placing well for and how many searches there. Also, the position and click thrus.

Find out my site's incoming links - Google webmaster tools

Find out my sites incoming traffic my keyword - Google analytics

Find out other sites' position by keyword - none. I use to use many tools for this such as Spyfu. Now I don't. 

Find out other site's incoming links - there's many. For instance: http://www.seo-forensics.com/

Find out other sites' incoming traffic - http://searchanalytics.compete.com/site_referrals/ And this is the point of this post. This is an interesting tool that I'd never seen before. I learned from it that someone else is doing well on math assessment and educational software blog and phonemic awareness lesson, both being terms that I'd like to dominate.

Long gone are the detailed kayword data that Google Analytics use to provide. Overture, which gave the volume of searches by keyword, also gone.  The Cool SEO Tool was one of my long term SEO Tool favorites. It's gone. sight.

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Due Diligence of SEO Techniques

SEO Due Diligence for Acquisitions

In acquiring a firm whose marketing is primarily online, the acquirer needs to enter a whole new type of due diligence of seo.

This might sound esoteric but imagine this:

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Company B gets 5K visitors/day to their site prior to the acquisition. Following the acquisition, in the first month, the number drops in month 2 to less than a thousand visitors. The revenues decline proportionately to under 20% of the pre acquisition number.

When the new management reviews the historical traffic records, they discover that most of the traffic traditionally came from three domains. Despite the info in the whois database, there is no way to contact these domains and no traffic coming from them.

The sellers of the company have moved on and are not available to answer questions.
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What happened? In this case, it's likely that the original owners had a number of sites that they owned. The traffic and revenues of Company B were based on traffic delivered from other sites which Company B was not visibly paying for. Thus it appeared that the traffic was based on success in natural search. When the original owners sold the company, they redirected the traffic flow elsewhere. Since they own the sites in ways that are difficult to trace, it is impossible to prove. The buyers acquisition agreement did not address this possibility in the declarations or "representations and warranties". The origin of the traffic was not analysed in the preacquisition due diligence seo process but, if they were important traffic contributors, they should have been analyzed.

Here's a much harder scenario to detect and track...

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Company C gets 5K visitors/day to their site prior to the acquisition about 90% of it from the search engines through "natural search". Following the acquisition, in the second through sixth month, the number drops to less than five hundred visitors. The revenues decline to under 10% of the pre acquisition number. When the new management reviews the historical links, they discover that there used to be about 1000 links in and there are still about 1000 links in, there is no detailed analysis of the links.
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What happened? This is a nearly untrackable problem. The original owners had built a large link count of mostly junky links. However, amongsth the 1000 links, there might have been 5-10 that were controlled by the owners which had significant page rank and were, prior to the acquisition, pointing all of their link power to the website that was about to be sold. Following the acquisition, these sites were redirected and the result is that over a few months, the new owners observed a fall in page rank but they could not track the high page rank back to the sites that disappeared.
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If online marketing systems and traffic are a component of the value of your acquistion, get an expert to do your analysis.

Good due diligence SEO issues:

- where is the expertise in SEO? Check it out. Interview? Writing? Training?
- What mechanisms are used?
- is the traffic really from 3rd party sites - check it
- are the techniques white hat or black hat (with a limited shelf-life)?
- where does the traffic come from?
- is the seo success due to links pointing to the site which are truly 3rd party or related?
- history of links & traffic patterns. Understand it...
- involvement with buying traffic thru PPC, network marketing, email marketing etc etc
- etc etc


This post sponsored by Time4Learning providing homeschool resources , summer school , and after school learning for gifted kids or special needs or mainstream.

SEO Quake

I'm a little out of my depth here so once again, I'm returning to the roots of this blog. As I study different issues and tools, I write about them trying to build some understanding. Blog readers can learn with me. Hopefully, some of you have some info to contribute which will help me build my understanding. Todays topic:

SEO Quake

Seoquake is a powerful tool for Mozilla Firefox and for Internet Explorer, aimed at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization and internet promotion of web sites. Seoquake allows user to obtain and investigate many important SEO parameters of the internet project under study on the fly. This is from their site and I find it vague.

SEO Quake seems to be a plugin or addon to the browser. It provides an array of information about a webpage.

I think a portion of AdSpy is provided as part of SEO Quake. When you see a google advertisement, it tells you how many other websites have google ads from that same account! But, to get the list of sites, you must subscribe to AdSpy. The AdSpy site is not that helpful in terms of figuring out the price. If you go into the sales funnel, you find out that it's $67. It's never said whether this is for a month, a year, or forever or what is included. The user agreement is a standard doc with T&Cs about payment & refunds without any of these details.

SEO Quake provides the following information right on screen for each website or webpage: Google PR rank, Google links, Yahoo links to the page, Yahoo links to the domain, Alexa rank, date of listing of domain, delicious rating, whois info, and internal and external links to (or is it from?) this page.

It's an incredible tool which would be more useful if it was a little better documented and so easier to get started with. With one page of explanation of what we are looking at and why it's important, this "insiders" tool could become widely useful.
.


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Learning SEO - Keyword density....and other BS...

One of my colleagues, studying and learning about SEO, asked me about keyword density. He'd been speaking to an SEO expert who talked about his great results by focusing on 4.5% (or something) keyword density. He wanted to know what my opinion was.

My opinion is that it's bunk. Or at least, learning about and focusing on something like keyword density, is a million miles away from my understanding of and approach to placing well in the search engine. It's technical and finicky and dumb to interest.

I take the view that google has a constantly shifting algorithm. And to figure out what to do, start by trying to put yourself in google's shoes. How does Mr Google decide who to rank for a given term?

First, google looks for pages that are relevant which are pages that use that term alot. Say the term was "learning games", google starts by finding pages that talk about learning games. Specifically, gooogle considers (in this order);
- Do incoming links to that page use "learning games" as anchor text?
- Is the page's title: "learning games"?
- Is "learning games" in the URL, particularly in the domain name?

Then,
- are there H1 and H2 titles that are "learning games"?
- Are there at least a few uses of the term "learning games" on the page? Lets guess that google gives you top marks for this criteria if you have between 1% and 8% keyword density on the page. Below 1%, you might not really be about learning games. Above 8%, it's probably a stuffed spammy page.
- Do the links to your page come from pages that are full of learning games?
- Does your site in general have lots of learning games?
- Are other terms, that are statistically and semantically linked to learning games, such as "an educational game", showing up in on the page, on the domain, on the pages and domains from which your links come from, and on the pages that this page points to.

My point is this. For relevancy, there is no magic percentage that is better than another. The difference between a keyword density of 3.4% and 5.3% makes no logic as a focal point for google's ranking or for an SEO's effort. It might have worked but going forward, it can't be part of the plan.....

After finding some relevant pages, google then ranks them by links. They count the links. Do all links count and do they all count the same? That folks, is a story for another day

This is my $.02 on understanding and learning and educating myself about SEO. And my effort at promoting what I care about: learning, education, fun, and games. Like this one. Learning & teaching seo.



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Love the Net - Heres How To....

Happy New Year.

I admit, I'm having a little love affair with google, SEO, and the net in general. I mean really, how cool is this amazing network! And I've always liked puzzles and working. SEO & Google together present an opportunity for one of the great ongoing puzzles of all time and I get to earn my living while playing! Frankly, I'm in love with it and I'm very grateful. And to help out the others, here's a simple how to which explains the steps in the creation of a new page.

Lets track the intro of a new page.

1. I did a little keyword research (see the article on free seo tools to figure out how) and figured out that I had overlooked the word homeschooling.
   
2. On December 31, I woke early in the morning and created a new page on my site about homeschooling. I optimized it for an array of keywords. For a howto optimize-the-on-page issues.
   
3. I put articles in a few of my blogs (see blogging for seo) which had references to homeschooling and a link to the new page on homeschooling.
   
4. Today (at 12:30), I picked an obscure line of text and put it into google in quotes and found that the page had been spidered by google. Google said: This is G o o g l e's cache of http://www.time4learning.com/homeSchool/homeschooling.shtml as retrieved on Dec 31, 2006 08:50:54 GMT.
   
5. I looked at the position of this new page in the search engines with the incredibly cool SEO tool by Jim (one of the great free seo tools that I have found) and found that so far, my homeschooling page does not yet rate. And my site is only 59th on google for homeschooling. The page that rates focuses on homeschool curriculum and shows that google has not yet updated its cache with the new version of this page which is moree tightly focused on homeschool and homeschool curriculum. BTW - this illustrates one of the weaknesses of google - the lack of semantic understanding - and google's need to evolve.
   
6. It's now Jan 6th and so far, the homeschooling page has not done much other than be spidered. However, my standard "homeschool" page has moved from 65th for this term to 41st. I attribute this to some increased advertising that I did in December. Essentially, I devoted December to buying my paid advertising for 2007. January is focused on increasing the conversion rate by a number of planned changes including adding the BBBOnline member logo to my payment page.
   
7. ( Stay tuned as track the progress of my site with the "homeschooling" term, hopefully to the top of the search engines.....

Free Online SEO Tools Review

Here's my favorite free online seo tools ....They each have a distinguishing or unique feature to make this list....

1. Find out the number of searches on a keyphrase - Yahoo-Overture Tool

2. Find out how a page does for a certain keyphrase. Plus who is doing well and why. Amazing!!!!! http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool . Jim's company has the BEST free tools. For instance: see the list of backlinks with anchor text

3. Tells you how many links a domain has totalling the different engines. Has the additive feature of tracking history and "categorizing you" (unknown vs 900 lb gorilla - great marketing!) http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop

4. Start with a phrase and find out which pages on your website are doing the best: http://tools.morevisibility.com/ranking/index.php

5. A range of tools that highlight the source of page rank and how its "used" across the number of outgoing links http://www.rustybrick.com/tools.php

6. A great tool that reminds you of your outgoing (and internal) links - http://www.dead-links.com/ . My new favorite link/html checker is: http://www.elsop.com/quick/

7. Find out the number of .edu or .gov links (considered to be "authority" sites) . go to yahoo search - http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=linkdomain%3Ahomeschoolfun.com+site%3A.edu&ei=UTF-8&fr=slv1-&x=wrt and search for: linkdomain:webdomain.com site:.edu

8. Want some keywords to consider? Put in your phrase and get a list of choices: https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox

Note that the google search engine - www.google.com - itself is perhaps the greatest free seo tool. To find out how recently google spidered a site, search on google in a way that finds the site (if you must, you can always put the url into google) and then clicked on "cached" to see when it was last spidered. Do this regularly and see what schedule you are on. To see how google is viewing your keywords on a page, search with those keywords so that it comes up and look at the cached version for the highlighting (example: to see whether google recognizes homeschool on a search for home school, type into google: home school domain name and look at the results. Lastly, the "similiar sites" choice in google reveals google's concept of relevance. And, google is pretty upfront about their approach, you can read their summary or their actual patent filings)

To find out your page rank, if you don't want to install toolbars, use http://www.checkpagerank.com/ for google page rank (a primitive view of your incoming links, the higher the better, 1-10) or http://www.alexa.com for alexa page rank (a ranking of user time on the site measured by users with the alexa toolbar instatlled, the lower the better, starting at 3.5M and working down to the most popular site which is #1 - its yahoo followed by google.

Paid tools - This is not the focus of this article but of note....
- www.wordtracker.com - Great site for info on searches, they have a repeatable "2 hour" free trial.
- Web position Gold - Great software that automates alot of the above. Its also full of "BS" in terms of suggesting that you follow the formula for word density etc that the leaders in your category are doing.
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Below - some details & feedback on a few of these tools and some other near-favorites:

2. Find out how a page does for a certain keyphrase. Plus who is doing well and why. Amazing!!!!! http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool
- enter a page and a keyphrase to find out how and why that page does well on the phrase.
- On a single chart, you get the top 10 sites for that phrase for google, msn, yahoo compaged with your page in terms of:
- rank, Pages Indexed (google/yahoo), Backlinks to that page, backlinks to the domain, Allinanchor rank, Domain Age, & Phrase count
- Desired features: add in the Yahoo analysis of number of searches for that term last month

3. http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop
- Provides for up to 3 domains at once, a "total" count of links from google, msn, yahoo, hotbot.- Has the very addictive feature of maintaining your history of searches so you can see progress.
- Also a very motivating but silly set of categories: Limited, average, above average, contender, player, 900 pound gorilla.
Should I admist that I celebrated when I became "average" and then "above average"

4. http://tools.morevisibility.com/ranking/index.php
- For a single word or phrase at time, provides which page (or pages) on your site are in the top 50
- the good feature is finding multiple pages which are doing well for a given term
- Request: it would be great if we could submit multiple phrases at once


6. I started with this tool while I was checking my site for dead links. Amongst other great features, for SEO purposes, it analyses the links out of each page. http://www.dead-links.com/Theres also a reciprocal link checker.

What other free tools do you find useful?
WOW - jsut found the motherload - try a google search on free seo tools.....

Also of note:http://www.dnsstuff.com/ This is a great collection of cool stuff, some too sophisticated for me to appreciate yet. I did find out how to get my dns number and other useful free info.....

Heres one that evaluates the "quality" of your links - http://198.68.180.60/cgi-bin/link-reputation-tool.cgi

http://www.mcdar.net/KeywordTool/keywordtool.asp - another link popularity check. this one gives, for a keyphrase, your rank on google, the leaders, plus the link count (G&Y), Google PR, and allinanchor for you and the leaders...Not as good as cooloh

www.globalpromoter.com has a buncho tools but nothing special has jumped out at me... they have a tool which searches the Yahoo tool and another which supposedly will run a batch thru yahoo...but it didn't work for me.

SEO Resources, Directions, Issues

The last five months have for this blog and a number of related sites, been a Google SEO disaster. I have many examples of it. For instance, this blog had a page rank of 4 as of August 2008. This rank and the associated SERP had been systematically earned over three years as I wrote, build relationships with other bloggers, and got cited. This fall/ winter, my PR dropped to Zero. Why? Did I lose links? Does it now take a lot more links to do well? More likely, I've done something wrong. I transgressed. Woops. But.....

What have I done wrong? Where have I done anything that's not strictly kosher? Below are my two best guesses of why this blog was dinged. I'll go fix them immediately and see if in the next round of updates, Google forgives or reinstates me.

1. I experimented with parking domains. And on this blog, on an array of posts, I documented that I had parked domains (at Godaddy, TrafficClub, and Namedrive) and I linked to them. It had a dodgy feel to it for me. I knew that I probably shouldn't have. But even Google has some sort of parking service so I thought it would be OK. I have two choices of how to clean this up:
A Go thru all my old posts and remove or "no follow" the links.
B. Unpark all my domains and just forward them to other domains.

2. I recently learned that you are not supposed to share any info about your adsense account. I had not known this (YES, I should have actually read the T&Cs of the Adsense service agreement when I signed up and reviewed them periodically). I learned this when I was chatting with a lady and asked her about her clickthru rate and she said, "I wouldn't mind sharing the info with you but Google strictly forbids it.". Seemed weird at the time but now that I'm looking at a PR move from 4 to 0, I wonder if what I've done wrong is that I actually blogged about my Adsense rates. It seemed harmless but Google has many many eyes and a big big big big stick. I'll find these mentions and delete them. I promise. I only hope it was on this blog and not some forum some place.

Is there someway to ask Google? Sadly not especially since this blog doesn't have the webmaster or analytics tools installed. If I did, I might find a hint in there. Instead, I start with a big info disadvantage.

Reading to Research this stuff
1 Matt Cutts. Esepcially his Google/SEO category. His PageRank post
2. Google's official stuff: Analytics, Webmaster blog, etc
3. Spinn .

Tools
Googles Free SEO Tools
SEO Harvester

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Best free seo tools

Google, as I've written before, is the best free SEO tool (analytics, webmaster tools, adwords, search etc). The second best is yahoo. And the plugins to Firefox are amazing. In terms of third party websites:

SEO Tools - Specifically:
Search Analytics Tools - establish your marketing goals and establish a baseline for where you are at right now.
Keyword Research Tools - discover the keywords your customers are searching for right now.
Competitive Research Tools - see what keywords your competitors are targeting.
PPC Tools - buy important keywords and track the results to understand how well they convert,which helps you focus you organic SEO strategy on the most profitable keywords. Save money using these free Yahoo! Search Marketing & Microsoft adCenter Coupons.
Link Analysis Tools - start building your link profile and track your progress compared to competing websites.
Search Engine Ranking Checkers - determine how effective your marketing is by watching your search engine rankings improve.

SEO Digger - Provides great info but you really need a premium account to go to work.

SEOAnalytic.com -

Free Wordtracker - This is much like the old Yahoo/overture tool that we all liked - - I wonder where they get their data? Answer is from dogpile and metacrawler which accounts for .63% of the searches. But, their searches are not by typical or mainstream users. A big problem. I mean like what sort of person in 2008 uses dogpile? If you met someone who used dogpile to search with, what sort of person do you think it would be? Would it be someone like Joe Sixpack? Or someone really weird and fringy...Maybe from Hawaii or Alaska...

BTW - there is a decent thread on this at digitalpoint.com

silly silly silly sales people

I went on a rant for no particular reason this morning but it's got me to thinking about an interesting test.

 I'm trying to see whether my post on silly silly silly sales people Heh, wait a day and then google: "silly silly silly seo salespeople" and you'll find that we just got to the top of Google for it! 

Want to pay me $3K to do the same for your site? That'll be $3K monthly please. (Yes, I built the google link right in so that I don't have to keep typing it - who is a lazy boy?...And a technical note: I put the google link in without the quotes) 

Now, I have met and worked with a number of very diligent thorough seo professionals but, and here's where I get cynical, to grow their business, they need to keep having the senior guys doing the selling and new junior guys doing the work. 

 Bottom line: they wanted to do my seo work in a very mechanical way by people who had not been in on any of the meetings when we discussed the trade-offs and nuances of what I wanted with my site.

 Wouldn't have mattered since the new guys were not rocket-scientists and didn't have the experience to appreciate the issues anyway. In short, my experience with seo is that I can do it alot better in house by spending a day-week on it. Two hours of reading on the web, six hours of prostituting myself for links. Heh, I meant positioning my site for links. sorry. I guess I should lay off the strong coffee in the morning. 

 The other choice is to find firms just starting that are trying to establish their reputation or sole practioners that are not caught in the "need to grow and build profitability dyanamic" where you can get value for money. Also, my advice would be to think really long term. 

  What will I find: 

1. Maybe the RSS feed wins 

2. Maybe this post wins but I've not resubmitted it twice since I made too many typos the first time. 

3. Since this is a silly silly post, I've backdated is to that my much better post: "Use the right tools for the right job" stays front and center (Am I the only want who would like a sticky option on blogger?) 

BTW - the term "the right tools for the right job" is pretty competitive. I'm not even in top 30 for google on it. Whereas I'm about to reign on "silly silly silly seo salespeople" 

4. When I backdate a post, does it go out on the rss feed? Do the ping services only look at the most recent post? Anybody know? And so what? Well, it will prove nothing per se but it will keep me thinking

Open SEO Questions

I was drawn to an seo firm's site by a comment on a recent post. I started to write her some questions. Here they are. I'll give her a few days and if no response, Imight put this out into the forums....

1. page name - I'm hoping in the next few months to do well on the search term: homeschool. Should I use this page: www.Time4Learning.com/homeschool-curriculum.htm? I have finally gotten this page onto the first page for google "homeschool curriculum". It has the advantage that it already has alot of links. It has the disadvantage of having the name: "homeschool-curriculum" Or, should I create a new page with name: www.Time4Learning.com/homeschool.htm ?

2. SEO tool. So far, I've done all of my seo work using free tools on the web (check out the free SEO tools article) but I'm finding keeping track of the hundreds of terms to be a little overwhelming.

3. Webanalytics. I'm about to install some sort of analytics beyond the free stuff that my host provides to help me track where people go and which term or referrer gives the best conversions. Is Google analytics the way to go? I just wrote them for an invite and then told me that it was too late. No more invites. (ie It's free for all now).

Link Power - New terms & measures needed

We spend so much time on SEO and trying to build our position, I think we need a better vocabulary for the essense of what we are building and transmitting.

Page rank is a weak term. Are there better terms? Has anyone yet come up with an industry standard for measuring it?

I saw a post where the question was about whether 301 redirects transmit their "SEO Juice". Its better than page rank but not catchy enough.

What about?

- SEO Force
- Page Rank Power
- SEO PowerUps
- SEO Kharma (does have the idea of passing on....)
- Its a type of link energy - a food
- Link calories.
- Link Power.

We could have a way of measuring a page's Link Power (say, put up a standard test page about on a website with a single link from a page. That page's link power could be defined as the inverse of your rank on google for the test page after 45 days)

This post sponsored by those goofy people providing homeschool resources over at Time4Learning.

Technical SEO issues on my mind

1. Do html code errors materially affect site from an SEO point of view?
Only so far as it impedes rapid spidering and link following....
Discussion: http://forums.devshed.com/search-engine-optimization-108/html-code-errors-seo-361845.html#post1536774 .

2. Impact of caps and comments in seo page names. Whats up with this?
this page - http://www.time4learning.com/homeschool-curriculum.htm - shows a 5 google page rank. This is the exact url of the page.
but this url (same page) http://www.time4learning.com/Homeschool-curriculum.htm - shows a zero page rank.
I have a link that has a comment: http://www.time4learning.com/homeschool-curriculum.htm#topchoice This url takes the user to the right page but the page rank indicator says zero.
I'm assuming that the instant google toolbar page rank indicator is not indicative in this case of the underlying reality in google. Anybody know different?

3. Transmission of page rank. I'm trying to quantify the value of links. Assume the purpose of the link is google seo. Is a page with rank 6 and 1 link twice as valuable as a link from that same page with two outgoing links? Has anyone ever seen a discussion of this point? I think the answer to this is a basic understanding of the google principle which is that a page's power to transmit its page rank is a function of some damper effect with the remainder divided among the number of outgoing links from that page. But, the related and interesting questions are:
- value of a link as a function of number of outgoing links from that page
- value of page rank: 7 vs 6 vs 5 vs 4 vs 3 etc

4. Best use of blog links & social networking - I suspect that I'm doing this the hard way.
http://marketingdefined.com/blog/2006/05/tagnping-using-social-bookmarks-instantly-increases-inbound-links.html

Great list of directories - http://marketingdefined.com/dir/main_directories.htm

SEO 2016: What's Hot?

These six points are worth remembering as we write for SEO on our resource and game pages:

http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2016/29906/six-top-seo-factors-in-2016

I'll summarize;

1. Be thorough, write a lot. 1900 words is the average page winning on Google. Put lots of paragraphs on SEO pages, perhaps folded into open/closing paragraphs.

2. Links are key. Keep getting them.  I think anchor text pointing to the page matters a lot.

3.  Schema: minor, don't worry about it.

4.  Don't stuff. I'm adding: DO write with content vocabulary.

Bad description: "While sometimes confusing, figurative language can often be powerful and illustrative" - Google won't find much here to go on.

Good meta description: "Figurative language, such as metaphors and similes and personifications, can make your writing more powerful"  - Lots of contet vocabulary there and it starts with the keyword!

I'm also adding: each page gets a unique meta description and meta keywords

5. Site speed matters!!!!

6.  Reduce your bounce rate, increase time on site.

I'm adding:

- responsive matters

- local addresses matter

- social media matters

- grouping of pages into a cluster on a common topic matters. And google can think in n dimensions. A figurative language page can be part of multiple clusters by both linking and content such as:

    - literary writing: similes, metaphors, reading, writing, personification

     - education and standards, classes, schools, students, teachers, grades, educational standards, CCSS etc

   - grade level 

 

Online Marketing & SEO Consultants

I am a small company trying to build a good profitable stable niche. When I started, I need nothing about online marketing and couldn't have told you what PPC or SEO stood for. I was in a hurry so I used consultants to get educated. It was clearly not the only way. I could (probably should) have gone to the "boot camps" for a few days of intensive online marketing training that are often offered around the seo and other conferences.

I started with a consultant who ran some marketing tests on ppc on yahoo and google. I learned the basics of how it worked and spent some money running tests on moving traffic around. I found that there was alot of traffic and concluded (along with some other research) that I should launch.

After I'd been in business for half a year, I hired Ten Golden Rules (Jay Berkowitz and Maria et al) to help me improve my online marketing. They were good in that they had the capability inhouse to work on several types of project so we refined and rebuilt my sales funnel, created a new template for my webpages, and created ten pages designed for SEO purposes. I learned alot from working with them, paid them promptly, and asked them more questions that they could answer. It was a six month project.

I've used consultants intermittently since then. I had the "copy surgeon" work on some copy for me at one point. I had Ken help with some projects (get a domain transfered over to me) and I've worked with Juliana of Infineight Web Design intermittently for four years now.

I use lots of outside writers to help generate articles, web pages, or newsletters. I tend more towards people with real subject matter expertise (reading skills, homeschooling, math, educational curriculum etc) rather than marketing people.

I recently used the Hits Doctor to update my Google PPC campaign recently. He found that it was hard to improve on the performance since it was very well-tuned already but he did add Yahoo & MSN. Most importantly, he took a fresh look at the sales funnel and got us back to working on how to refine it.

Overall, the consulting firms are a little too pricy for me. I am basically a marketing firm living on a tight margin so we need to cost-effectively do our marketing.

For instance, adding a $1500 monthly marketing management fee on to a $4000 a month PPC budget means moving our cost per customer from $36 to $50. It would make sense if they could do alot more than we could but instead, I spent the money on some training sessions for our staff inhouse and now, on a much more cost effective basis, we're up and running.

Google SEO Updates 2013

These are just notes from recent conversations.

Nov 2012 - Google update devaluing sites from an SEO pooint of view with "too many" ads above the fold.  Generally accepted that some ads are OK but there needs to be real content above the fold.

Exact Name Domains were also devalued in Oct/Nov 2012.  So shoes.com, watch out, I'm coming after you with blogger.shoesforyou.com. Right!

Penguin 2.0 started to rollout May 22.  Huge emphasis on devaluaing sites, even warning the with unnatural links and text links ads.   People are warned somehow to get rid of unnatural links.  So a perfect linking strategy is unnatural, be careful. Be sure to do more rotation and sloppy work.  For instance, for more info, click here. Surely, anybody pointing towards their sie with the term here is not doing any SEO. Maybe, ut stop calling be Shirley.  (It's still funny!).

Authors's rank - big dal. Determined by the number of people in your Google PLus circle. On guest posts, pu in the author link as in <  "rel author = jojo">blah blah
.
Two types of authorship.
- author tag
- publisher tag
An excellent example of this is Erika Thomas' fashion blog....

Structured Data Testin g Tool.  SDTT.

VSC
- school pages should have proper breadcrumb, not just linked address. Add phone and URL.  Use schema for schema.or/school

SEO on linked in, G+, & PInerest are over important since G is desperate for social clues.
Last question, how come some blogs do so well (ie Stories About Homeschoolers) and some do so poorly (homeschooling scope and sequence), is it all in the URL?

Adsense - Trying to Help with Context

I'm involved in a very large website which runs Google Adsense. I've noticed that on same pages, we don't succeed at getting contextual ads.  I'm trying to figure out what to do about this since I think the non-contextual ones earn less (less dollar per click, lower click through rate).  OFten, I don't even get an ad served up on these pages. 

List page not getting contextual ads!

 There are three reasons that I can think of that this"list"  page is not getting enough context. Some are easily solved, some are not.

1. The URL is not SEO-friendly. (see A) All the other pages on the site have SEO friendly URLS but on this huge site, 50 million monthly page views and over a million pages or word lists, we designed to manage our resources and did not implement a look up table for SEO friendly URLs. This is unlikely to get solved.

2. The text on the page, especially near the top, does not give much context.  In fact, looking at the code, I see:
We're  using some sort of standard text for the meta keyword and description. It's probably the same across all one million list pages.  It's really long too. The title tag seems to be picking up proper context by providing the grade level, school name, teacher name, city, and state.

I guess that this could be fixed by putting the words: "vocabulary list", "teacher", and "school" into the title tag. And the keyword and description should also be customized for these pages with this data. On the other hand, the page does have the school name and teacher name on it. This is not really less contextual custom text than are found on the other school pages, it's just that the balance is different since these pages have these long word lists which to a search engine, are so much gibberish. 



3.  The page is marked "do follow, don't index."  I wonder if that affects contextual ads?

School Page: Good success with Contextual Ads

In contrast, the teacher and school pages do have more relevant custom text on the page, they have SEO-friendly titles, and they are "do follow, do index".  For example, here are examples of teacher and school pages both of which have very nice and appropriate ads.

Another mid-term potential project is to allow teachers, parents, and students to put up more comments on their pages which would ultimately provide more original text (user generated) which would endear us to the search engines.

Or, if I let kids put up too much graffiti, I might get in heap of trouble.

Teacher Page, Getting Contexual Ads!

DMOZ doesn't count...says google...no duh

Remember, you heard it here first. Long ago, I said that all those directories that only seem to get any attention for SEO purposes, are not worth wasting time on. (Lets retire DMOZ and DMOZ Yahoo Link Stupidity and others from further back...)

SEO geek insiders continued to tell me that directories were important. I said no. It's common sense. Google knows that nobody has used DMOZ since 2005, there's no reason that they would take that link seriously....

Google has just said about the same thing....

Google Devaluing DMOZ and Yahoo! Links? Chris Crum Staff Writer

Google is no longer suggesting that you should be listed in relevant directories. In fact, they've even removed the suggestion from their webmaster guidelines, as Brian Ussery noticed. The page used to have a bullet point for:
- Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

This point is now gone in what would appear to be a slap in the face of directories, but SEO folks are the ones really irritated. Google doesn't appear to see it as a slap in the face so much, but more of simply a non-needed guideline.

I think Google knows that these links and directories primarily exist and service the SEO industry. Their links do not provide any real guidance to Google on the real value of these sites. So they're not really counting them. And removing their old suggestion that people pay attention to them.