TopRank published a list of the top SEO blogs by RSS membership back in April of this year. And while RSS membership is a great indicator of how powerful a blog is, there are few other factors to measure the power and reach of a blog. So, for the purposes of this post, we will list the top SEO blogs based on several criteria:

Continue reading Top SEO blogs: The Ultimate Rank

Tags: seo blogs, top seo blogs
Posted in SEO, Social media

**Thank you for all the wonderful comments and suggestions of analytics tools. This is an update of our last post with 5 more more great tools to add to your list.

Never undermine the importance of testing and analyzing your site. On the most basic level, analytics data will help ensure whether or not you’re on the right track. And if the data is reviewed and utilized on the site it will help you increase conversion rates. Who doesn’t use analytic tools these days? You’d be surprised. We have come across ecommerce site marketing VP’s that can barely tell us the number of visitors, conversion rates, or results and rankings for paid and unpaid traffic. Now, for those of you who are familiar with analytics data and tools, I thought this was a fun little blog that may pique your interest to what’s new out there.

We’ve worked with these 15 tools that can be found on Techlicous’s to help analyze and gain a better understanding of your site’s traffic.

Continue reading Top 20 Site Analytics Tools to Help Optimize Your Site

Tags: analytics tools, Conversion Optimization, Ecommerce, software
Posted in Conversion Optimization, SEO, Technology

There are thousands of tools out there that will simplify your life one way or another. This is a list of tools I find myself using on weekly basis. Some of these tools are technical in nature, others are very easy to use.

1. Beyond compare

There are many instances where you have to compare two different versions of a particular file or different directories. Beyond compare is a file and directory comparison and synchronization utility all wrapped in one. The tool compares text files, folders, zip archives, and FTP sites. Beyond compare is available for a 30-day free trial.

Continue reading 19 Tools every online entrepreneur should know and use

Tags: Agent Ransack, Beyond compare, entrepreneur, FileZilla, online tools, online-marketing, SQuirreL SQL Client, textpad, utilities, XAT image optimizer
Posted in Business, SEO, Technology

Let’s face it. Everyone is trying to add the latest and greatest online marketing tools to their site. It is a way to generate traffic, get some link love and become well known within the online community. But I reached a point where I rarely used any new services because I felt that everyone is copying the same ideas. Well, for the last few weeks I have been using one of the most useful SEO software tools available. Sheerseo offers a service that I am sure will become one of the most popular services online.

I know that every online site spends quite a bit of time trying to improve their ranking for site keywords. Of course, one of the first things everyone does is figuring out where the site ranks for these keywords. That generally involved using different tools that will help place a keyword and check your site ranking through these tools.

The problem:

• Most small sites will target between 50-200 keywords. Larger sites, can target thousands of keywords. That means that you have to check hundreds of keywords for hundreds of pages.
• There was no way to track historical position for site for certain keywords. Most sites end up using a manual process of tracking site progress.

Basically, the process was very labor intensive.

The solution

Sheerseo solves each of these problems.

The site allows you to add up to 200 keywords to check for your site ranking: The interface to add the words is straight forward to use. The current number of keywords sheerseo tracks is 200 but I am sure they will be expanding this in the future.

•    You can run the query for either Google or Yahoo

•    It also allows you to view your progress

• Current & historical referrers
• Word density
• Indexed pages

Overall, I was very happy with the service. I am sure we will be hearing a lot about Sheerseo in the next months.

Tags: keyword ranking, seo software, seo tools, sheerseo
Posted in SEO

Although I was an SEO practice lead for one of Chicago leading consulting companies, I do not claim to be an seo expert. I come from a software background with close to 10 years of enterprise software architecture experience. As a software architect you can charge between $125 to upwards of $175 per hour for your work. Of course software architecture is not an entry level position. It takes years to get to that level.

Now let’s compare that with the pay of an SEO consultant. Please bear in mind that yes, I do think that some seo experts are worth every dime they demand. However some I would not let them touch my site even if they paid me!

The story

I was in a meeting with a VP of marketing for a company that has annual revenue of $50 million. We were discussing our upcoming project. As the discussions moved forward, it became obvious that he is very concerned about SEO and achieving high ranking in several competitive key words. It was also obvious that he did have someone who handles all of their seo work.  I will never argue against the need for organic placement and its importance for a company’s bottom line. As I got to know the staff of the company a little more, I asked them about their SEO consultant. I was eager to meet the guy who directs all of their efforts. After all, I can always learn one or two tricks. I also learned that the consultant charges $350 per hour. If you do the math, that is close to 700k per year. Not a bad deal if you ask me.

As part of the selection process, our team had to meet with the SEO consultant to discuss some aspects of the platform we are recommending to install. The purpose of the meeting was to ensure that the platform is search engine friendly. I expected a lot of tough questions. But as the meeting with the expensive SEO guy continued, it became obvious to me that my client was being duped!

All the $350/hour consultant was concerned with the entire 20 minutes he held them meeting was whether or not we can insert meta-keywords into the different pages of the site. Mind you, we were talking about a site that will have close to 50,000 live pages in it. Of course the fact that search engines do not rely on meta-keywords anymore for ranking seemed to escape our genius consultant. As he continued to ask about meta-keywords and meta-descriptions, I asked him how he intended to enter these keywords into the site or database. I mean the task of entering that much data will take high amounts of time. His idea was to outsource the task to some company in India to handle all of that.

Wow! The guy really thought this one through. I suggested that the software can create these keywords from the product names and description and he got fairly upset with my suggestion. I remember Rand Fishken mentioning once to me that enterprise sites with thousands of pages should let search engines handle meta description as opposed to trying to handle that themselves. I tried to suggest that but this SEO guy got even more upset.

Finally, he asked to see a sample site where we installed the platform. I told him to check out BestBuy.com. He goes there and his first comments were, “hey, they have a PR of 7. Your platform must be really good.”

Excuse me, but is that how you judge if a platform is SEO friendly or not?

I am not sure what is more shocking. Is it that someone like this guy can claim to be a consultant, that he is able to charge $350 for a bunch of BS, or is it the ignorance of the client to be willing to pay that much money for absolutely nothing! They are paying this guy for things that I could out-perform, and I am NOT an SEO EXPERT!!!!!!

Guys like this one are the biggest problem with the SEO industry. He’s obviously savvy enough and can really sell a bunch of BS! The truth is, no one besides engineers working in search engines companies knows what algorithm these SE utilize to index pages. We are able to make educated guesses based on observations but no one knows the details for sure. As far as we are concerned, a software developer in Google or Yahoo might change a small piece of their code tomorrow which can impact the ranking of many sites and it can take forever to discover the reason.

So, what do you think I should do? Should I tell them the truth about their SEO guy? Or should I keep quiet and let things be?

Tags: seo-experts, seo-pay
Posted in Business, SEO

Small and medium businesses with active websites most commonly generate traffic in two ways - through SEO, which is usually managed haphazardly and ineffectively, and with a PPC campaign, which is usually managed haphazardly and ineffectively. Whereas most articles about SEO and PPC discuss them separately or as comparisons, the purpose of this article is to help you use them together more effectively. You will find that using them together more effectively will help you use them more effective individually as well.

What SEO & PPC Do For You

SEO and PPC are both excellent tools to generate sales leads and help your business grow but each needs to be managed actively as your efforts in each area tend to lose their effectiveness over time when left unattended. Strategically, you can separate them like this:

SEO = long term, free, continuous traffic you can affect but not necessarily control. Effectively managed SEO usually has an excellent ROI, depending largely upon the online competitiveness of your industry or niche and how well you convert traffic into sales.

PPC = immediate paid traffic you can control. The ROI depends on how well you create your PPC ads, choose keywords, understand the dynamics of PPC bidding, and how well you convert your traffic into sales.

Using SEO and PPC Apart

Search engine optimization (SEO) should be included in your overall design and content generation strategy. It is your long term design strategy and the details of your SEO should be tweaked often. A site well designed for SEO will achieve placements near the top of many search engine results pages (SERPs) and thus generate free targeted traffic.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is a marketing method you can use to immediately generate traffic for any specific page of your website which makes it especially effective at generating sales for new products or for boosting sales for existing products. Beginning a PPC campaign is like opening the gate for the on-ramp of a toll road to your site on which you pay the toll for each traveler in hopes that many of them will buy something from you when they arrive at the destination (your landing page). PPC campaigns are also great for testing demand for new products before investing heavily in promotion of a website or product.

Using SEO and PPC Together

How you use your SEO and PPC efforts together depends upon how much online coverage you want for a given product and much time and money you are willing to spend generating your desired results. Generating the most profit from your SEO efforts and PPC campaigns requires knowing your positions in SERPs for each and how much traffic each is generating for you. This can be detailed work so you should focus on your most costly PPC terms first. Let’s walk through an example of using SEO and PPC campaigns together (or not). It is a simple example but I think it is the best way to explain the logic.

Orange You Bananas for SEO and PPC?

Let’s say you invented and sell orange-flavored bananas. They keep well for weeks and are completely shippable. Some of your customers quickly discovered that they make excellent smoothies and the requests for smoothie-related products is flowing in like crazy. You do a little research and find that people are starting to search for orange bananas smoothie mix. So, you decide to create and market “orange bananas smoothie mix.”

You optimize a new page of your site around this keyword and begin a PPC campaign on Google for the keyword phrase “orange bananas smoothie mix” on which you spend $20 per day and immediately receive sales of $300 per day. Great! Luckily, you are still the only seller of this product and because there is no competition for “orange bananas smoothie mix” you reach the number one spot on the Google SERP in only 3 days. Other listings appear but they don’t actually have much to do with smoothie mix or orange flavored bananas.

So, now you you have the top PPC position and the top free-listing positions. Curiously, your daily sales only increase $25 to $325 when you reach the top spot in the free-listings but you also notice that your Google expense drops to $8 per day. As a test, you pause the PPC ad and leave yourself with only the free-listing in the top spot. Your sales drop back to $300 per day but your marketing for that keyword is completely free. It is up to you to decide if you want the extra $25 in sales per day but in this case it is probably better just to stick with your SEO results and avoid the expense and hassle of managing the PPC campaign.

Tossing in a Monkey-Wrench

Two existing online sellers of smoothie mixes hear about your success and the popularity (and profitability) of orange bananas smoothie mix and decide to go after the same key phrase that has brought you so such steady sales. They each create content optimized for “orange bananas smoothie mix” and within days take listings two and three on the SERPs. Each competitor also begins a PPC campaign to take more traffic. Luckily, there are more links to your site because of all the blogger buzz around your interesting invention and product so you get to keep your number one spot in the SERPs (for now) but both competitors have two listings (one free and one sponsored ad). Your sales immediately drop to $100 per day. Ugh!

This means war so you un-pause your PPC campaign but because of the competition for your keywords your price per click costs twice as much as before so you are spending $40 day to be at the top of the sponsored ads. Your sales increase to $175 per day but it is tough to justify spending an additional $40 per day for another $77 in sales. You cut back your PPC spending and take second place. Luckily, the competitor in the number three spot was only willing to pay the minimum so you get spot number two for a bargain. You are now spending $22 per day for your PPC campaign and your sales settle in at $155 per day, which you can live with. In this case, keeping your SEO and your PPC campaign is better than using only one.

It’s About Attention

The more competition you have for a given product or keyword phrase the faster your positions on SERPs and paid listings can change. You can almost always end a sentence about your SEO or PPC positions with “for now.” Further, effectively managing how you use your SEO and PPC campaigns together requires you have excellent data and information about each individual concern - from competition to the profitability of a product and its impact on the sales of other complimentary. It takes work but using your SEO and PPC together effectively should help you maximize the ROI of your marketing budget and the sales of your most profitable items.

Tags: online-marketing, online-sales, SEO-&-PPC
Posted in SEO, Sales & Marketing

Many beginner SEOs are being misled about search terms by forums and blog posts focusing on traffic.

Yes, of course, traffic is important, but only the right traffic.

The standard advice is to find keywords that are searched often but there is lower competition for. Seems like reasonable advice, right? Actually this advice is too simplistic, it is missing a vital ingredient.

While you can rank and get some nice traffic flow from these terms, if there is little competition it probably means the term is harder to monetize.

Now there is a big difference between terms that you monetize by selling a product and terms that you monetize with Adsense or any other arbitrage play.

On my own blog I have several terms that I rank for to attract people to my content, from the generic “New Media Consultant” through to specific terms like “Blog Meme“. Each term functions in a different way. Conversions for me though are RSS signups, I know from analysis that I rarely get consultancy work from a first visit.

My search terms are research, informational, “interest”. They are not purchasing terms, people on a mission.

What is on your prospects mind? Which terms match your prospects mission? That is the key to knowing which terms to optimize for.

The Invesp site is mostly about a problem facing businesses, increasing conversion rates. Invesp prospects will be looking for reasons why their conversion rate is poor or looking for advice on boosting conversions.

By contrast take a look at one of my favourite clients who I always pick on, Cogniview. Their products are very much in the “on a mission” category. People don’t look for PDF to Excel conversion software without being very serious. They have a problem and need to fix it.

Don’t optimize for traffic, optimize for psychology. Find people who are in the right mode that matches your offer, buying mode, research mode, conversational mode. 

With the right optimization you can make more conversions with lower traffic, making your job much easier and your business way more profitable.

Tags: conversions, keyword-tools, sales-leads, SEO
Posted in SEO

Traffic is the fuel of a web property. Without traffic you just have potential. No traffic, no sales, ad clicks, leads, feedback, community.

It is easy to understand why webmasters are obsessed with it.

Now as you know, there various sources of traffic, from free to way expensive. All have their place, and the less budget you have the more work you are likely to have to put in.

Small business operators seem to be getting the idea more recently. Larger businesses seem fixated on three tactics; Adwords, banners and SEO.

I am going to let you in on five “secret” sources of traffic. In fact they are common sense, but because common sense is rarely common practice they might seem like secret traffic sources to your clients …

1. Expired Domains - Old domains can be picked up when expired really rather cheaply. What many people do not realize is a lot of them have links pointing to them, or even garner some type-in hits. For a real snip of a price you can find some real bargains. Buy a whole bunch of them and funnel the search juice and hits to your main property.
2. Site Purchases - It’s not just expired domains that you can pick up on the cheap. Look out for sites for sale that have inbound links and steady traffic. Avoid the pumped and pimped sites from savvy sellers, what you want are the sites that can attract visits from a variety of sources naturally already but with a bit of tweaking can really perform. Again this traffic can be funneled, 301-redirected or just used as is.
3. OPT - Other Peoples Traffic. This is the heart of the Squidoo, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace etc tactics. Find a location that naturally attracts attention and leach off it. Another route is to build something attractive that friendly blogs will want to link to. I could even put guest posting under this heading!
4. Huge and Influential Lists - This is the oldest tactic in the book. It’s so old it makes people overlook it in favor of Social Media Marketing and any other recent buzzword. People forget, but you know it works, right? The key is how it is presented, and absolutely not spam. Call it a Joint Venture, an advertisement, a friendly mention, whatever, getting on a powerful list with a glowing endorsement can be the best converting traffic you have seen. The challenge is getting the right deal on the right list.
5. Hitching a Ride - Let someone else worry where the traffic is going to come from and just tag along for the ride. This is related to the last point in a way but it stands on its own. Think about the last big promotion in your niche. The PR, the advertising, the fanfare. While you might only be able to siphon off a small percentage of that attention, you will also pay little or nothing to get it. There are two versions of this tactic; partnering or freeloading. When you partner you actually give the main event some of your value, be it as a bonus, a prize or some other service. For example a big product launch might get a free pass to your seminar or ebook. When you freeload what you are doing is finding a bandwagon that is about to start rolling and jump on it. So you look for a story that is about to break big and you do all you can to suck down on some of that traffic.

Those are my lesser known traffic sources, what are yours? Share your secrets in the comments …

Tags: increase-website-traffic, link-building, sales-leads, viral-marketing
Posted in SEO

Everybody’s looking for that quick fix to increase their traffic.  So is there something out there that’s really fast and effective?  Well, there’s an option of signing up with sites that will most likely scam you  out of your money, or you can implement any of the following tips:

• Get with the program: start blogging!  So if you haven’t noticed yet, everyone is blogging.  Big companies, small companies, and professionals at every level have taken on blogging, and so should you.  Don’t think that your line of work or your organization doesn’t require a blog; if you have a website, you need to blog! It’s such a great way to drive a natural traffic to your site.  People will begin to link back to beneficial posts and may refer friends to check out your site.  Don’t underestimate the power of a blog.

• Don’t write regular posts:  Too many bloggers think that posting short 100 words blogs is enough to get readers interested and to keep them coming back. I have to admit I was guilty of that when I first started blogging. Although there are no rules about the length of a post, what matters is that your posts are intriguing enough to create a faithful reader base. Most successful blogs will publish at least one lengthy and well researched post per week. Some call these lengthier posts “pillar posts” because they are a pillar to establish a great blog.

• Establish Strong Social Media Connections:  Well there isn’t much point to blogging if you haven’t established strong connections with other bloggers, forum members, and users of social media sites.  Why is this so crucial?  Because great content is not enough; you have to market that content. And social media marketing is probably when of the best ways to market your content online. So remember:

• The more you comment on someone else’s blog, the more likely it is that they will comment on yours. 
• The more you participate in forums, the more you encourage people to visit. 
• The more you link to other blogs within your own entries, the more bloggers will link-back to you, thus helping you generate more and more traffic to your site.

• What about Articles?  Usually blogs can range from 200 words – 1500 words. Those entries are very valuable for ranking well within search engines because of the new content you’re offering.  However, writing SEO articles is a valuable technique as well.  SEO articles are keyword rich, useful content that can be designed to target specific words and phrases that you would like to rank for within search engine queries.  This can help generate a lot of natural traffic for you.  Additionally, you don’t always have to publish these articles on your site: consider article submissions or notable online magazines.  The amount of link-backs you will receive, in addition to the recognition of publishing on a worthy site will help double and triple your traffic in no time.  Article publishing sites use to work very well couple of years back but I believe that search engines discount the authority of these sites to a great extent nowadays. So the real value is not in these sites themselves; it is one someone picks up an article from these sites and publishes it on his own site or forum. I know we got couple of good clients when our articles were published on web pro world. 

• Make it easy to subscribe:  Once you have an RSS feed to your site, you can easily expect people to subscribe to your blog, thus generating more traffic. Of course, be weary of partial vs. full feed  because this will impact whether or not people will continue to subscribe to your blog.

• Give them a reason to come back:  Offering a valuable resource such as a whitepaper is a great incentive to get people coming back and referring others to your site. If you have the capability to write a whitepaper that is going to offer valuable information to your community and/or client base; than write one and offer it as a download.  If you are just starting out, offer your whitepapers for free. Most websites require visitors to subscribe to your site before downloading whitepapers. That can work very well in building up a mailing list.

• Can I trust you?  Nobody likes to subscribe to, our visit a site that seems fishy.  If you want to get more people coming to your site, you need to show that them that you value their privacy.  This can happen through simply stating the importance of their privacy, become a member of authentic groups, and placing the icons of your memberships throughout the site.

• Winning something:  If you want a surefire way to get you publicity throughout the web, then hold a contest and offer prize money or some material reward.  Our $400 blog contest generated tons of link backs from other bloggers as well as a ton of traffic to the site. People love it and will come flocking to your site, write about you, and give you lots of link love.

• Widgets and more…:  There’s no secret that if you offer something valuable on your site, traffic will come. And online tools do just that! You’re offering something free and useful to online visitors, and as a result you become bookmarked, referred to, linked to, and even mentioned throughout the web. But please, no more calculators and calendars.  If you want good ideas for tools, visit any forums and see what people are actually looking for!

So, let’s come up with an action plan:

1. If you have not started blogging, then plan on installing a blogging software in the next three days!
2. Come up with a list of 20 blog topics that you can write about. At least 5 topics from your list will be lengthier posts of 1200 words or more.
3. Select two online forums which you will start participating in regularly. At a minimum, you should post in each forum once a day. Your comments should be meaningful and enhance the discussion on the forum.
4. Select 10 different blogs that write about something that interest you and start reading and commenting on them regularly. Just like forums, no spammy comments. The goal is to establish real relationships with bloggers.
5. Come up with a list of lengthy articles that will be of interest to your client base. Plan on publishing one article per month.
6. Come up with a list of authority sites in your field that accept article submission. Contact these site to understand what editorial guidelines they have for publishing articles
7. As you go through forums and blogs, be on the look out for ways to create tools. If someone is complaining about a problem that does not have a real solution, that might your first tool.

There are more ways to get traffic, but these ways will help you significantly see growth in less than 60 days. What other great techniques do you implement?

Tags: generate-traffic, increase-readership, increase-website-traffic
Posted in SEO, Sales & Marketing

Tim Daly’s article stirred a bit of discussion at INVESP. It is suggesting that the days of organic search methods are numbered. Since sites, such as Wikipedia, aren’t necessarily the authorities on a topic but are at the top of the lists because of user-generated linking farms. Does this mean that our days of organic SEO methods are truly limited?

Not necessarily; according to many authentic sources such as Google and other search engines, eventually their algorithms will stop sites such as Wikipedia to rise if the substance is unauthentic and irrelevant. It’s actually happened several times where sites are banned and move from page ranking 8 to 0 because of unauthentic link farming methods and so forth. Don’t give up on the organic methods, and trust me; the more you rely on other methods to move up in the search engine rankings, the greater risk you are running of becoming completely eliminated and penalized by big search engines.

So what can we do to help avoid being this? We’ve worked with clients and actually helped them move up the page rankings in Google from 0 to 6 in a span of 6 months. All of it through authentic, organic methods such as adding content, optimizing the site, frame-working, article submissions, and site community building. It isn’t impossible, but maybe this article is suggesting that we work a little harder on getting results through organic methods. 

What do you think?

Tags: SEO
Posted in SEO