Are you always on the go just like me? Use your iPhone to keep yourself updated on your current SEO. These 4 iPhone apps are easy to use, and very helpful for professionals who travel often but need to stay in the know.
Pokeseo
Pokeseo is a great app that lets you check Google PR (Page Rank) for any domain. You can also use this to check the number of Backlinks for Google, Yahoo, Bing and AOL. Use the “email this report” feature to save all your data.
iSEO Tools
iSEO Tools has three features. A SERP Analyzer, inbound links analyzer, and Web directories. The SERP Analyzer will tell you on what page your keyword is found on Google. The inbound links analyzer uses Yahoo Site Explorer service. A great way to analyze how many links you have for your domain. The last feature shows you a list of web directories. You can use this option to submit a link for your domain to increase your link popularity.
SEOIT
SEOIT will analyze a domains >page source elements, HTML source code, title, meta keywords, meta description, meta tags, body text, stop word ratio, word count, meta phrases, length of phrases, stop word removal, anchors and link text, complete link list, complete anchor tag, anchor inner text, images/alt tags, back links, inbound links from Google. This application is very easy to use, and keeps everything well organized.
SEO Search Ranking
SEO Search Ranking App uses a graph SERP Analyzer. This gives you the ability to monitor your current and past rankings. Being able to monitor the change in rankings on the go is very useful. This application also lets you monitor an unlimited number of keywords. You can organize each report by domain categories under “My Domains”.
Pricing:
SEO IT – .99 cents
SEO Search Ranking – $1.99
Pokeseo – .99 cents
iSEO Tools – .99 cents
We are consistently looking for new and inexpensive ways to market our E-commerce sites. Like many E-commerce sites, we operate on a shoestring budget, and are always looking for the least expensive ways to promote our site. We have found one of the best ways to market the site, with a very small budget is to partner up with the manufacturers that we represent on our sites. Here are three ways to utilize the skills and services that manufacturers offer to their dealers.
1) Print Advertisements-Many manufacturers will run print advertisements in trade publications. Ask the manufacturers that you work with if you can be involved with these publications, by paying a small fee to have your website listed on the print advertisements. Your website can be listed as a place that sells the manufacturers products. In return, this is also helping the manufacturer pay for the advertisement.
2) Website Listing on Manufacturer’s Site-If the manufacturer has a website with online retailers listed, typically a “where to buy this product online” or “online retailers” section, ensure your website is listed. This is a free link that the manufacturer should have no problem putting up. Some manufacturers will only put your link up on their site once you have reached a pre-set yearly sales number. Ask the manufacturer what the requirements are to have your link listed.
3) Promotions - Find out from your sales representative what promotions the manufacturer is running and when they will occur. Most of the time they will have it listed in a special area on their website, possibly homepage, or in a print publication. Ask to be involved in the promotion, to ensure that customers know they can take advantage of the promotion by purchasing from your website.
Manufacturers are always willing to work with you to help sell more products. Typically, they have a marketing team in place, and are more than helpful. Utilize the resources they provide to you for being their dealer. We have found the above three ideas are a great to start to working with manufacturers on the marketing of our sites.
A lot of people ask me which SEO’s they should follow on Twitter. I have constructed a list of 40 top notch individuals and loaded them into TweepML. So now you can auto follow them with once click! Simply click the link bellow to add them all at once.
These experts will keep you up to date with the latest and most cutting edge SEO. For those of you who enjoy monotony you can manually follow them the old fashion way from the list bellow.
I am certain that I have inadvertently left someone deserving off of this list. Feel free to suggest them in the comments bellow.
PS. Yes I included myself in the list..Shameless..I know right!
- Daron Babin
http://twitter.com/SEORockstars - Andy Beal
http://twitter.com/andybeal - Andy Beard
http://twitter.com/AndyBeard - Greg Boser
http://twitter.com/GregBoser - Jim Boykin
http://twitter.com/webuildpages - The Caveman
http://twitter.com/the_caveman - Christoph Cemper
http://twitter.com/cemper - Ryan Clark
http://twitter.com/linkbuildr - Brian Chappell
http://twitter.com/brianchappell - Bruce Clay
http://twitter.com/BruceClayInc - Matt Cutts
http://twitter.com/mattcutts - Rand Fishkin
http://twitter.com/randfish - Vanessa Fox
http://twitter.com/vanessafox - Todd Friesen
http://twitter.com/oilman - Patrick Gavin
http://twitter.com/PatrickGavin - AJ Ghergich
http://twitter.com/authoritydomain - Michael Gray
http://twitter.com/graywolf - Mike Grehan
http://twitter.com/mikegrehan - Gypsy
http://twitter.com/theGypsy - Halfdeck
http://twitter.com/Halfdeck - Rae Hoffman
http://twitter.com/sugarrae - Julie Joyce
http://twitter.com/juliejoyce - Todd Malicoat
http://twitter.com/stuntdubl - Lee Odden
http://twitter.com/leeodden - Melanie Nathan
http://twitter.com/melanienathan - Dave Naylor
http://twitter.com/DaveNaylor - Gyutae Park
http://twitter.com/Gyutae - Branko Rihtman
http://twitter.com/neyne - Jeremy Schoemaker
http://twitter.com/shoemoney/ - Barry Schwartz
http://twitter.com/rustybrick - Bill Slawski
http://twitter.com/bill_slawski - Ann Smarty
http://twitter.com/seosmarty - Danny Sullivan
http://twitter.com/dannysullivan - Brett Tabke
http://twitter.com/btabke - Ralph Tegtmeier
http://twitter.com/fantomaster - Dan Thies
http://twitter.com/danthies - Aaron Wall
http://twitter.com/aaronwall - Eric Ward
http://twitter.com/ericward - Gerald Weber
http://twitter.com/the_gman - Jill Whalen
http://twitter.com/jillwhalen
Update:
Laura Thieme
http://twitter.com/bizresearchlmt
Top SEO Experts On Twitter
(click link to auto follow them)
A client recently asked me to put together a cheat sheet to show to Social Media naysayers. As I was doing the research I started asking myself, why would any brand NOT engage? Have a gander at these 10 data points:
- According to a global Nielsen survey of 26,486 Internet users in 47 markets, consumer recommendations are the most credible form of advertising
- There were nearly 116 million US user-generated content consumers in 2008, along with 82.5 million content creators. Both numbers are set to climb significantly by 2013 (eMarketer, February 2009)
- 86.9% of respondents said they would trust a friend’s recommendation over a review by a critic, while 83.8% said they would trust user reviews over a critic. (Marketing Sherpa, July 2007)
- 81% of online holiday shoppers read online customer reviews (Nielson Online, December 2008)
- 74% agree-including 14% who strongly agree-that they choose companies and brands based on what others say online about their customer service experiences, the survey shows. (Society for New Communications Research, May 2008)
- Mobile user-generated content will generate $5.7 billion worldwide in 2012, up from $576 million in 2007. (“Mobile Social Networking: Opportunities & Forecasts 2008-2013,” Juniper Research, October 2008)
- By 2020, 84% of marketers agree that building customer trust will become marketing’s primary objective, and 82% agree that collaboration with customers will prevail over marketing. (1to1 Media survey of the 1to1 Xchange panel, April 2008)
- Online businesses lose as many as 67% of consumers due to a lack of online product information. (Allurent, January 2008)
- In a study of online UK retailers, 59% reported that the consumer-generated activity leads to better search engine optimization. (eMarketer, 2008)
- 75% of people don’t believe that companies tell the truth in advertisements. (Yankelovich)
among 78% of the study’s respondents. (Nielsen, “Word-of-Mouth the Most Powerful Selling Tool”, October 2007)
With this compelling data in mind, think about Social Media in regards helping your business fill these business objectives:
1. Market research and business intelligence
2. Customer/partner education
3. User groups
4. Product innovation
5. Competitive analysis
6. Peer‐based support, education and innovation/evolution
7. Company‐wide collaboration/learning solution
8. Thought leadership/leads
9. Workplace alignment, communication & training
10. Organic/White Hat SEO Link Building
Now think about the data points above and these 10 business drivers above. Is there any business that is lacking in at least one of those areas? Is your business lacking? Now think about this:
“Social Networking & Social Media Ad Spending to Rise 13.2% in 2010 to 1.3 Billion!”
-eMarketer
I came away from my task yesterday convinced, now more than ever, that all companies should be utilizing Social Media to some degree. I am not saying go full bore if you haven’t engaged yet, but if anything it is time to dip the toes in to the Social Media waters to see how warm it is. The data is saying now is the time, especially with the Wall Street Journal and CNN claiming the recession is at an end.
There are a few changes worth noting in the Search Engine world. The biggest piece of news is the possible merger of Yahoo and Microsoft.
It will take a while to iron out all the legal details, but the partnership looks promising. From the June 2009 comScore Report: Microsoft has 8.4% of the search market, and Yahoo has 19.6%. So combined they have a better chance at competing with Googles 65.0%.
Google also has some news to report. Its new search software “caffeine” is currently in beta testing.
You can preview it here. No cosmetic changes will be made, only the code for their search engine infrastructure has been re-written. This has been done to enhance indexing speed, size, and all around search accuracy. The release of Google Caffeine is well timed. What do you think?
Like everyone else you are probably writing unique high quality articles and submitting them to relevant sites and article directories. You’re done right? That’s all there really is to do right? Wrong!
There are a myriad of option for you to make your article stand out from the crowd and yes produce more links.
1) Reach out to the REAL websites who republish your articles.
At first blush, these seem simple and obvious- but think about the possibilities for just a second. Bear with me I promise it will be worth it. Right now you are submitting your quality articles to the same list of directories as everyone else. By contacting websites who already willingly republished your articles in the past you can establish a relationship with them.
The Idea is to give that website additional unique QUALITY content so long as they allow you to place a few links inside the article. In a short time you should be able to build up a really nice list of REAL websites that you can push content to in exchange for links while everyone else is playing in the same article directory sandbox.
Bonus Tip 1:
What’s that you say? You are new to this game and not a lot of REAL people have republished your articles yet? No worries. Simply head on over to Ezine Article’s expert authors section:
http://ezinearticles.com/?type=experts. Look at all those articles these authors are publishing! You can simply search for who is republishing their articles and contact that site to offer your unique content.
It gets even better. http://ezinearticles.com/?type=txcat&cat=Internet-and-Businesses-Online:SEO – You can actually go into any category on Ezine articles and see the top authors in that category. So now you can search for who is republishing articles in your niche.
Bonus Tip 2:
When searching for who is republishing articles? Simply search for “The title of the article” in quotes. You can also add in the author name in quotes as well. You will have the best luck with Yahoo usually but try Bing & Google as well.
2) Interlink Your Articles
Once you have a relationship with these site owners and are publishing articles consistently on their sites, be sure you link out to your other articles on different websites. By sending links to your articles from unique sites you make those pages much more powerful and therefore the links they give you more powerful.
3) Use Social Media
Make sure to setup a twitter account for your efforts. You can retweet each of your articles that a webmaster agrees to publish. Because your twitter post will be unique and relevant to your niche you should attract followers with similar interest. This can send traffic and links to the site who post your content. You can use this fact as leverage when trying to get content up. If you can send links and traffic to a site owner plus provide them with unique relevant content who would say no to that?
4) Turn your article into an RSS feed
Use sites like http://feedity.com/ or http://www.feed43.com/ to turn any webpage into an RSS feed. Then ping that RSS feed with http://pingomatic.com/ and submit to directories like http://www.feedagg.com/.
5) Create a podcast and a slideshow from your article
Turn your article into a podcast. Got a microphone handy? Then you can read your article and create a podcast. http://podcastingscout.com/ has some great tips to get started. Once you have a podcast you can submit it to tons of directories as well. As for the Slideshow, I would suggest using http://www.slideshare.net/. It is a fantastic tool, easy to use and could be a subject for later blog post.
6) Make a video from your article
Using free software like http://www.jingproject.com/ you can easily create a nice looking video using the slideshow you created with SlideShare or even PowerPoint .
7) Create an eBook out of your most popular articles.
This will be fairly easy to do as the content is already written and just needs to be repurposed into a 20 to 40 page eBook. You can then give the eBook away free on your site and use it as link bait.
Ping me on Twitter if you have any questions. Or post your comments below, we look forward to reading and commenting back. Also, feel free to share your ideas as well if I happened to be remiss and miss a glaring option.
Microsoft’s Bing.com has a few features that make searching more convenient. Especially for someone that uses Search Engines as much as I do.
When you scroll over a video result in Bing, the video will start playing in the same preview size. It performs very well, and so far has not buffered to begin. Searching for your favorite athletes in Bing is very convenient. It offers a great search result with a picture, team information, current game dates, and the player’s statistics.
When you need to get a contact phone number for a company, sometimes it takes a while to get to the right page. Bing will give you the number right on the search results page. No need to even visit the website:
If you want a preview of a web page without having to visit the website, Bing’s “Look before you leap” feature works great. When your mouse is scrolled over the desired search result a preview box will appear. The text will give a short description of the web page, and shows what other links appear on the page.
Microsoft has already spent a large amount of money on Television adverting for Bing.com. This might help Microsoft become a real competitor for Yahoo and Google. When Microsoft attempted to purchase Yahoo from Jerry Yang, their $31/share offer was declined. If Bing can gain enough market shares, it may put more pressure for yahoo to accept a deal with Microsoft. It would be nice to see a “real” Google competitor.
Will Microsoft’s Bing be able to compete?
Let’s face it, whether you love them or hate them, url shorteners are here to stay. However, all url shorteners are not created equal. The shortening service you choose to use can have a big impact on your site’s link building and rankings.
The problem with some of the services out there is that they don’t provide a clean 301 redirect to your content. 301 redirects tell search engines to permanently redirect to your content. Instead they provide a 302 redirect which tells search engines that this a temporary situation which causes a lot of issues with most search engines.
Even if you just use short urls on twitter which nofollows the links you post anyway, you still need to pick a url shortener that 301 redirects because once you post a link on twitter it can end up anywhere.
If your shortened url gets republished all over the web (and isn’t that the point) wouldn’t it be nice to get the credit?
Bellow are 4 sites you should never use because they do not provide a clean 301 redirect:
- twurl.nl – 303 redirect
- hex.io – 302 redirect
- eweri.com – 302 redirect
- fon.gs – 302 redirect
If you look around you will surely find more examples. (Please post any examples you find in the comment section) Also watch out for services that use a bar or frames to display ads etc. Besides being tacky they usually are not providing a clean redirect.
Good Examples: Each of these services provides a clean 301 redirect
- tinyurl.com
- bit.ly
- ff.im
- is.gd
In summary, make certain when you do use a url shortening service that you only use one that 301 redirects. When in doubt simply enter a shortened url in a header checker like http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp
Follow this simple advice and when your Twitter post hits the big time your content actually get the credit it deserves.
More and more people are turning to linkbaiting to create high-quality content while creating an adventure for the end user.
What is the value proposition of a link baiting adventure?
1) Diversifies a website’s link profile, which in turn helps to boost the site’s rankings.
2) You will gain links from authority, news, government and educational sites when executed correctly
3) You will need far fewer links in order to rank for ultra-competitive phrases
What exactly is Link Baiting?
Linkbaiting is an essential tool in improving a site’s search engine rankings and consists of various techniques which aim to attract links from various relevant websites on the internet. There are various methods to linkbaiting effectively, one of which is embedded tool links. Try it…
Quiz brought to you by
Tripbase – Vacation Ideas
Cool huh? If your organization would like to harness the value of link baiting, please feel free to email us at aj@authoritydomains.com with questions and we will be happy to work with you to create an adventure that will even put a smile on Google‘s face.
When you log into your Google Adwords account, Google has a surprise for you, a note that says:
“Vote on November 4th Democracy works best when we all participate. Please take time to vote on Election Day. Google’s 2008 Voter Info Map can help you find your local polling place. Find your local polling place.”
We found it particularly amusing that Google is messaging users via their AdWords accounts, but its still kinda cool. Just a tidbit for you to nibble on today:)
