SEO Checklist For BeginnersWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 23 of April , 2008 at 12:05 pm
Danny Dover wrote an interesting post at SEOmoz titled, “The Beginner’s Checklist For Small Business SEO.” I agree with a lot of his points, but one thing I’d like to add is that you don’t necessarily need to sign up for Google AdWords, as he suggests, to do your keyword research. Google AdWords has an external keyword tool.
Tags: Beginners, ChecklistFor years there have been a wide array of automated content creation solutions, from RSS recycling wordpress plugins, to open source content generators, to fake science paper generators, right on through to custom high end programming jobs used by financial firms like Thompson Financial.
The downfall of most automated content solutions is the perception that because it is automated it is spammy. But that perception may have changed recently, when the NYT published an article about Philip M. Parker. Mr. Parker created a sophisticated set of algorithms which has allowed him to automatically generate over 200,000 books.
Tags: Automated, Content, Effective, Generation, Scalable, StrategiesIn Social Marketing, It Pays To Know Your MarketWriting by Nick on Tuesday, 26 of June , 2007 at 10:21 pm
I found the following sentence tucked away into a Jordan McCollum blog post at Marketing Pilgrim:
MySpace users, according to the BBC, tend to be minorities and get jobs straight out of high school, while Facebookers tend to be white, go to college and come from wealthier homes, being part of a more “aspirational class.”
Tags: Know, Market, Pays, Social, YourPosted by rebecca
A couple weeks ago, just for the hell of it, I emailed several SEOs and asked them the question they’ve waited their entire careers to hear:
If you inherited SEOmoz, what would you do with it? Rand Fishkin is out of the picture (he left SEO to pursue his dream of becoming a master chef, he eloped with Mystery Guest, he got sued by Puma, whatever), leaving you to run SEOmoz and a team of five [I excluded Gillian because I wanted to make it more ragtag and entirely Fishkin-free]. What would you do with the site/company?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by great scott!
This past Friday Wetpaint hosted Lunch 2.0, and no, it wasn’t user generated food, but rather an informal gathering of Seattle area Web 2.0 companies, and Rand and I were fortunate enough to attend. It was a nice opportunity to meet and chat with a bunch of really great people and learn what everyone’s up to as well as enjoy some awesome food from the Batali family’s local deli, Salumi.
We mingled with the 50 or so attendees from such companies as Zillow, BuddyTV, Level 3, Payscale, TalentSpring and more while having some nosh and getting a live, sneak-peek at ZenZui’s awesome forthcoming mobile browser. After everyone ate and chatted, the presentation portion of the afternoon commenced.
Tags: Chows, Down, Lunch, SEOmozMany authoritative tool pages have gobs of link equity, but rank for few keywords beyond their official name because they offer little background information. Providing no background information not only wastes ranking opportunities, but also makes it hard for some people to use the tool.
In some cases it makes sense to keep documentation separated from the conversion process, especially if the tool is a for sale item, and especially if you are selling to people looking for an instant autopilot wealth generation system. But if your offering is of value and free, there is no need for the mystery card. You can make the download and/or usage instructions clear at the top of the landing page, and then get deeper into features and benefits as you go further down the page.
Tags: Authoritative, Content, Free, Keyword, Pages, Rich, Search, TrafficOne of my worst writing habits is writing filler text, the most common offense being passive verbs. Here are the 3 things that help me write clearer using fewer words:
Read every day. We emulate what we consume. When I go months without reading books I can feel my writing getting looser. Many great authors, like Stephen King, also offer free writing tutorials.Stylewriter highlights writing errors. It costs $150, but is cheap if you want to write for a living.Twitter offers 140 characters. Many 160 character messages fit in 140 characters when optimized.
Tags: Kill, Passive, Tips, Verbs, Wasted, WordsPosted by rebecca
Time to wham bam you all with a little roundup post of odds, ends, and miscellaneous news.
First off, Jane and I are guest blogging next Wednesday (5/9/07) on Sugarrae’s blog while she’s getting drunk and lifting up men’s kilts in Scotland. At this point, I don’t think either one of us knows exactly what we’ll blog about, but we both emphatically agree that we do not want Rae to gouge our eyes out with a spoon, so we better write something good.
Tags: Friday, Rebeccas, RoundupDave Winer, a popular blogger, gave a speech about blogging. The video is here and a reviewer said this:
Dave started by noting that it’s easier for the user to become a manufacturer than a manufacturer to become a user. What’s wrong with the manufacturers of the world? They come down from the mountain with their product for you to buy and worship, and then maybe two years later they return with the next product for you to buy and worship. Dave then asked the audience to think about how things have changed over the past ten, fifteen, twenty years, especially around travel and dealing with travel agents.
Imagine you are looking for fresh information, and are one of the hundreds of students searching for new scholarships each year. The top result Google shows you is a CNN news article for a $250 white’s only scholarship from 2004. It was a stunt to shock people and send a message, and as a side effect anyone searching for new scholarships on Google gets to see that message.
Does a speeding ticket make a driver a good driver? No, it just means that he was citation worthy. Some people do despicable things for links and make lots of money from it. It is a flaw of the current relevancy algorithms to assume that a citation makes a business trustworthy. On the commercial parts of the web, most links are an indication of is an ad budget, a public relations budget, nepotism, or controversy.
Tags: Creation, Information, Pollution, Promotes, Search