Let me restate the obvious, building links between your website and other high quality websites in your niche, is an essential aspect of your search engine optimization (SEO) campaign.  I am assuming your link building campaign is well on its way, you have reached out to the professional associations in your niche, you have guest blogged on websites in your industry, you have hopefully formed partnerships with other websites, and your social media efforts have been met.  Great.  But now what?  All the basics have been covered, so you have to dig a little deeper.  This blog will cover my favorite tools for the inevitable wall that all link builders run into, and how to get momentum again with your new link building prospects. Wordtracker is a tool that I have been using for about a week now with much success.  You can try it out with a free seven day trial.  They provide a great tutorial about their Link Builder tool, which outlines the steps to get started and the available capabilities.  Wordtracker generates a list of websites that are relevant to your website by collecting your website’s targeted key terms or websites that are already linking to you.  I am still getting used to this one, but overall it does a great job of finding not only websites that would be a good link prospect, but also the exact page that would be most appropriate for hosting your link. I wouldn’t be able to bring up great link Continue reading…

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Today at at 9am PST USA’s Women’s Soccer team will be playing in the semi-finals against France for the Women’s World Cup.  USA arrives at this semi-finals game after defeating one of the world’s favored teams in women’s soccer, Brazil.  USA battled back to defeat Brazil after red cards, penalty shots, and questionable calls left USA down one player, and behind by one goal with only minutes left to play.  Solo, USA’s goal keeper, summarized the last few moments of their match against Brazil well with this quote, “Even when we were a player down and a goal behind in extra time, you sensed that something was going to happen, the team kept fighting.” If you want to stay up to the moment with insights from soccer analysts, team members, and fans log on to Twitter.  Twitter will be a great place to begin your search for experts in the field of Women’s soccer.  Use the “Who To Follow” function on Twitter, type in searches like “Women’s World Cup” to follow influential tweeters like karalang15, and alexilalas22.  If you want to follow key terms, or hash tags on twitter, but you are not entirely sure how to find relevant hash tags, go on to HashTags.org, or search on Twitter.  My favorite hash tag to follow so far is #USAWNT, those are some fired up fans.  If following updates from twitter is not enough log on to ESPN 3 for live coverage online. Twitter can be a great tool for SEO as well.  All of Continue reading…

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If getting free quality links for your website was easy I would be writing this blog post from Bali. Obtaining free quality links does require hard work, but it is not impossible if you are using the right tools. In this blog I will be giving you a few relatively easy steps and great tools to jump start your SEO for free. I hate to start with such an obvious SEO step, but just about every company should have a blog, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube account.  You can set up these four properties in under two hours, and if you set aside an hour a week to contribute to each of them, their function will be met.  All these do is establish your company as a viable entity that Google and other search engines can use to confirm that you are a real person.  If you skip these beyond simple steps, you are missing out on some very low hanging fruit. Now for a few not so obvious free link building tools.  Create an account on social question & answer sites, with your website’s name and URL associated to it.  Answer questions relevant to your niche on Quora, Yahoo Answers, Wiki Answer, Wiki How, AllExperts, AnswerBag, Yedda/AOL Answers, Mahalo Answers.  These links will usually only get you no-follow links, which have slightly less link juice than a link from a relevant website, but they can definitely contribute to your overall SEO efforts. Social Bookmarks are definitely a term that any Continue reading…

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Here are sixteen SEO tips that have been cultivated from experts around the web. After these suggestions have been completed, rest assured that they will not be taken down, don’t stress over rankings flying up and down the SERPs, hand these links to clients in confidence, because these tips are all white hat.   1.) Earn authentic tweets for your content.  In addition to creating outstanding content/experiences/resources/products that are worth sharing, you can go through Twitter’s paid tweet services to hire someone to tweet your company’s latest news.  If you want to educate popular tweeters in a desired niche about your incredible content use FollowerWonk to find them. 2.) Become a go-to resource in your industry.  Offer unique research, intelligent opinions, be a resource for news and trend analysis, and provide a platform for great discussions.  Find conversations on forums and websites that you can contribute to with BoardReader.com. 3.) You know that interesting, well done videos are popular, and will continue to attribute to link acquisition. Having a video XML site map on your site will enhance the chances of videos from your site to appear in the SERPs.  Go optimize your video XML site map right now. 4.) Visual Media and infographics are easily shared, they have not lost their link luster yet. 5.) A type of link bait that is quickly gaining on visual media and infographics is web based tools and software.  If your company can develop a tool that saves people time, it will be shared. 6.) Content with Continue reading…

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Typically the Webby Awards announces a large array of the best websites the internet has to offer. This year, highlighting the best of the best once was not enough, now they have provided an email service named Netted, which sends out a new amazing website each day.  Since signing up with Netted I have found a handful of helpful sites, apps and web based tools that are extremely helpful and practical.  Here are Netted’s top 10 web based tools and sites from the last 6 months. 10. With Summer coming up I need to start thinking about a vacation spot, luckily Tripalertz.com will keep me in the loop about great new deals on trips around the world.  Signing up is easy, it just takes an email address and 10 seconds of your time.  The site provides at least 10 deals at one time, but users have to act quickly because deals are constantly added and rotated out. 9. Daytum.com is a website and app that allows its users to track their habits and achievements throughout the day.  Users track things like smoking habits, work out goals, dietary intake, chore completion and a ton of other random acts during their day.  This app could either help people get organized by realizing where they are spending all their time, or become another consumer of valuable time.  This site generates some great looking personal analytics, but constantly recording my daily habits could become a task in itself. 8. Have you ever gone out Continue reading…

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Google Analytics is a free tool that aggregates information about a website’s visitors. The information that is collected by Google Analytics covers such topics as how many people visited a website, how long a visitor stayed, which pages they viewed, how they found the website, how often they have visited the site, what browser they were using, even the screen resolution they viewed the site with, and much more.  All of this information can be used to increase the functionality of a website, and give insights into how people are interacting with any website.  Because the capabilities of Google Analytics are extensive I will only be focusing on the essential tools that are utilized when performing initial SEO for a website.  Those tools will include: Monitoring key terms Overseeing visited pages Analyzing bounce rates Studying user’s reaction to landing pages And keeping track of where users are coming from, which is also known as referral sources It also just so happens that an updated version of Google Analytics has recently been made available, so I will also be providing a brief overview of its new layout and functionality. The picture above is the login page.  If this is your first time seeing this page you will need to create an account and install the Google Analytics (GA) coding on each of your website’s pages.  Adding the code to each of your pages is not that complicated, as long as you have admin capabilities for your site, and you can follow Continue reading…

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