We Do Search Engine Optimization.

If you need to get accurate keyword data for your search engine optimization project, use KeyCompete. Their advantage over services such as Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery is the use of realtime data from major search engines. KeyCompete
also provides the unique opportunity to see your direct competitors and download a list of the keywords they use.

Their motto is Download Competitors Keywords and Adwords and it is accurate. I have found no better service for the price.

This service uses the API’s from the big 4 search engines: Google, MSN, Yahoo and Ask.

Below is an example of a keyword report for the phrase “search engine optimization”

The best results come from multiple searches, as they only have data on a subset of websites. So if you do a search for only 1 company website, the chances of getting a lot of high quality data are low. Also, some industries have more information than others. E-commerce and product sellers have the most amount of PPC activity hence the most keyword data.

One great feature of KeyCompete is the service. They have a skype button on the website, email and phone support. If a keyword report is unavailable or too large to generate (think ebay, amazon, etc.) they will generate it on site and email it to you. I spoke to their support department on several occasions and they were very helpful and knowledgeable. The company really goes out of their way to share their enormous amouns of data.

This is not a paid review, I just find KeyCompete extremely useful.

It is very rare that I write blatant plugs for fellow marketers, but Shoemoney is a very compelling blogger, and writes engaging and informative posts. This was done for the SEO lyrics contest sponsored by Search Engine People.
Here is the Shoemoney rap, sung to the tune of Dopeman from NWA:

You know my name is shoemoney and i’m the dope man
gettin’ paid top dollar through affiliate programs

If you need some hip music to pimp your cellphone
Call on the man who’ the king of ringtones

Rappin’ on an online radio show
Talkin’ bout the web and dissin’ SEO’s

Don’t hate on me thinkin’ i’m so bad
I got a check for 500G from Azoogleads

A master at creatin’ controversy
Kicks back to chill and watch the UFC

Creating high conversions that I share with you
Rollin’ through the heartland in a Hummer H2

Keyword to your mother

Writing good title tags is an art that SEO’s perfect over time. Expert title tag writers can charge premium rates for their service and are in high demand. Merely having perfect title tags on a site can mean the difference between position 1 and position 51.

Its best to write in complete sentences or phrases. It must be readable text that a human would easily be able to understand. Use a subject + object + verb style. Place the most important words at the beginning, since people read from left to right. The page title does not need to be a complete sentence and should have minimal punctuation and no period.

Clearly state your topic and use words a user can understand. As an example, if you’re a scientist talking about “paleoclimates in the pleistocene epoch”, use more common terms such as “past global climate change”.

A good way to write a compelling title is to think of Jeopardy, and provide the question to an answer. The answer and explanation is the body content of the page, and the title tag needs to be the welcome message that introduces the topic and leads a user/spider into the content.

Keep your titles short. As Strunk & White would demand, brevity is rewarded. Omit needless words and grammar articles. Search engines ignore these anyway: a, the, and, with, at. The more words you use, the more the keywords will be diluted. Titles above 60 characters are cutoff in Search Engine Results Pages, and merely clutter the browser window chrome.

You have 3 audiences: human users, search engines, and social sites such as digg.com. I do not recommend page cloaking to present different title tags to each group. Instead take a balanced approach and write something you would want to click on yourself. If you can see your title being interesting and relevant in 10 years, it’s likely a winner.

A common rant online is that SEO’s are too expensive, and are no good. I know many individuals and firms who provide search engine optimization services, and ther is an enormous range of quality between them. In this field, you get what you pay for – however paying exorbitant amounts does not necessarily equate to better results.

The most common problem of working with an SEO firm, is the company executive or slick salesman will sell you an optimization package, promise the world and show real world results. Then they stick an intern or inexperienced employee on your project and you aren’t getting the quality you are paying for.

While researching an SEO firm it is best to ask a lot of questions to determine the experience level of the people who will be working your site.

Questons For Your SEO Provider:

1. Who exactly will be working on my site
2. Have you spoken at industry events
3. How many years experience does the person working on my site have
4. Are you a member of any ratings organizations such as seoconsultants.com
5. Review examples of several current site rankings for competitive keywords
6. Can you do css or web programming

Asking the right questions can help determine the economics of an SEO job.Hiring an individual SEO or an extremely small company will generally return much better results, but the price could be higher. The benefit of using a respected individual SEO is the knowledge base and massive amount of experience.

SEO Consulting Costs:

• Hourly consulting: $150-1000/hr
• Project rates $3,000-50,000
• Monthly maintenance $300-10,000

When looking for a quality SEO firm I recommend starting with quality directories. SEOconsultants, Marketing Sherpa and SEMPO offer peer reviewed listings of search marketing firms who have a good track record. Rand (who is at the upper end of the fee schedule) offers some analysis of SEO consultants fees as they relate to economics and market fluctuation.

Redirects are an essential part of any website, and it is crucial to understand how they work. Redirects allow specific content to be viewed by users and search engines, and there are valid reasons for each.

A permanent redirect is specified in the httpd documentation as a 301 redirect. Temporary redirects use the code 302.

A valid reason to use a permanent 301 redirect is to solve cannonical problems with domain names. Cannonical problems are subdomains such as www.site.com site.com. Some companies need multiple domain names to protect trademarks and managee potential legal requirements. Having multiple domains for one website will definitely get you into trouble.

You must choose one version of your site to display to search engines, and this is the method I use on a Linux OS running the Apache web server.

.htaccess file contents

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^my-trademark-protection.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.my-trademark-protection.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mainsite.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mainsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Temporary 302 redirects are good to use if you don’t wish to pass value to the referring link. A good use of a temporary redirect is linking to an affiliate site. This redirect tells search engines that the link is temporary and should not be given the same value as a 301 link.

.htaccess file contents

Redirect 301 /affiliatelink http://www.affiliatesite.com

When in doubt, use a 301 redirect as there have been problems with unscrupulous webmasters using 302 redirects to hijack website content and spam the search engines.

Happy redirecting!

Google adwords are positioned by a value they call quality score. We have a list of factors influencing position of pay per click ads.

Quality Score Variables

• Max CPC – amount you are willing to spend per click
• CTR – click through rate
• Keyword to Ad copy relevance – does your ad match the search term?
• Keyword to Search relevance – similar to keyword matching, influences long tail keyword searches
• Bounce Rate (amount of people who immediately click back from your site)

Variables that set minimum CPC

• CTR
• Keyword relevance to your landing page
• Keyword relevance to ad copy
• Bounce Rate

Minimum cost per click is also set by trademark terms. If you try to bid on any company name, the CPC is likely to be over $1. Google will allow you to bid on company names and trademarks, but forbids them in your ad text.

Old campaigns with a poor quality score is a tough situation to be in. If the account has a very bad history and low quality scores, it may be better to close that account and start from scratch rather than spend an exorbitant amount of time reviving an old account.

In this instance, Google uses your account history against you.

Read more on the SE Roundtable.

This is a hilarious cartoon showing a company offering a share in profits and employee stock plan. Does this remind you of Enron? Managers gleefully offering employees ownership of a company they secretly know is going bankrupt?

This cartoon has particular significance to me as I was involved in a similar arrangement. The company had great potential, but was unable to break the final barriers to become truly successful.

Worldcom, Adelphia and the entire workforce of the internet bubble, I feel for you.

Sending mass emails is always a comforting experience – what better way to reinforce your website and generate more sales? While it is self gratifying to send out informative emails, be careful you aren’t innundating your customers’ inboxes.

Could your emails actually be costing you sales? Emails are often used to build relationships with your customers. So, how is that relationship going? Are you talking about yourself and what you care about more than what your customers care about? Are you using verbiage full of hype, cliches and vague promises?

Will Turner at Dancing Elephants talks about two more cardinal mistakes in e-mail marketing:

• Applying pressure
• Making Assumptions

Read more from Holly Buchanan.

Links are the nerve center of the pulsating web. Links create the internet and add value to your site. Links to you improve your natural search engine placement, and links you create to others enhances your value as an authority on your subject.

When linking to external websites it is best to use meaningful keywords as the anchor text instead of a generic “click here”. Also using the title element gives the link more weight.

How to code a regular text link:

Where to find a quality <a href=”http://fruitcompany.com/” title=”company fruit”>Apple Distributor</a> that can deliver tasty fresh fruit.

How to create a powerful image link:

<a href=”http://fruitcompany.com/” title=”company fruit”><img src=”images/apples.jpg” alt=”green apples on a tree”>Apple Tree</a>

When linking an image, always try to have anchor text associated with the image. This will give the image much more authority and virtually guarantee it will be included in image searches, which can drive huge volumes of traffic. Alt tags are always nice, but they are only effective if the image is linked. Search engines (rightly so) ignore alt text if the image is not linked.

The new iPhone from Apple will be released on June 29, and it is going to be a huge hit. This is such a revolutionary device it almost wants to make me cancel my long term Verizon contract to make a break for AT&T. Leaving Verizon, which has the best call quality, most competent support technicians, and system that just works for a shaky company with horrible telephone support and awful product support is a huge undertaking.

But the reason I am seriously considering moving to the aforementioned disaster that is AT&T is because the new iPhone ecosystem is controlled entirely by Apple.

Before the iPhone, cellphone companies did everything in their power to reduce the usefulness of your phone. Cellphone companies make money by requiring you to use their network for any type of data transfer. Want to save a copy of your priceless photo? That will be $.50. Oh, and you want to download your wallpaper – please pay $.25. Want to use the tetris game you paid $9.99 for? Oh sorry, you can’t use this on any other phone or computing device.

The cellphone companies created a money pit that is your cellphone device and up until now there was nothing we could do about it.

Apple has created a device that will bypass the cellphone monopoly and let you use your phone as a true data device. Apple has freed your music, games, podcasts and programs so you can take your essential data and entertainment with you.

It shouldn’t be revolutionary to be able to have truly portable data, but it was pre-iphone.

Verizon won’t know what hit them, and will be scrambling to license a device that interacts with your computer.

So this summer, all tech talk will revolve around the iPhone and most non techies won’t know why.