Some SEO organizations are “pay to play,” meaning you pay their review site to feature your company and rate it well. This almost ensures that SEO companies with the biggest budget are going to dominate these review sites and get the bulk of the reviewers “love.” I don’t think that’s particularly fair to small to mid-size SEO agencies that are doing a great job, but don’t have an extra $5k lying around to purchase a favorable review. And that’s where SEO Approve steps in. SEO Approve levels the playing field for SEO companies, so the little guys who produce great work for their clients have just as much exposure as the big brands with the big budgets.

SEO Approve offers SEO companies 3 different profile tiers to choose from. The basic profile is free and looks something like a basic business card:

SEO companies can also opt to pay for the Member profile ($199.99 annually) or the Ambassador profile ($299.99 annually). The higher level profiles get premium profile placement and allow companies to post more information like links to their social profiles, their Google map location, and the opportunity to list their company in multiple categories on SEO Approve’s site. Possible company classification categories include: A/V Production, Contextual Advertising, Email Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Pay-Per-Click Management, Public Relations, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Web Development and Website Design.

One of the nice things about SEO Approve is that it is very easy for your SEO clients to rate and review your services. The don’t have to create an account to post a review, they just need to fill out a short form and rate your company in four different categories. For companies that have a hard time getting client testimonials, this is a quick and easy way to get their endorsement without taking up too much of their time. You can just email them the link of your listing and ask them to take 2 minutes to fill out the review form.

SEO Approve also lets SEO companies post their events. This is a great way to help spread the word about an upcoming workshop or training event you might be holding, as well as any conferences you are sponsoring. The site breaks down events into 5 different categories, making it easy for users to find the right event to suit their needs.

I would recommend that SEO companies give SEO Approve a try. It’s still a relatively new site which means there is a lot of room for growth. Even if you just set up the basic profile for now, you can always decide to upgrade your listing down the road.

Click here to submit your site to SEO Approve today!

Due to a family emergency, Nick Stamoulis will no longer be attending PubCon Las Vegas 2011. If you have any questions regarding the conference, please call 781-999-1222.

Next week, I am proud to announce that I will be speaking on an SEO panel at search and social media conference and expo PubCon Las Vegas 2011, November 8-10.

On Tuesday, November 8th, I will be a featured expert on the “Real World Winning Tactics for Content Creation and Marketing” panel beginning at 4:15 PM. I will be appearing alongside two other SEO and search marketing experts to offer session attendees even more valuable information. The panel is designed to offer PubCon attendees tips and strategies to develop a strong content marketing campaign to help with their SEO. Content marketing has become a critical component of any SEO strategy, yet many companies struggle with content creation and promotion. I hope this session will provide attendees with a practical strategy that they can implement for their own business.

I am also happy to announce that I will be conducting one-on-one interactive site reviews on November 8th from 1:30 PM to 2:45 PM. Attendees’ sites will be reviewed and critiqued for SEO techniques, focusing on improving organic SEO. Get a live site reviews from myself and other SEO experts and walk away with personalized recommendations to be implemented Monday morning!

Other SEO related sessions at PubCon Las Vegas include: SEO: Hot Topics and Trends, Keyword Research, Selection and Optimization, SEO Design & Organic Site Structure and more.

PubCon Las Vegas 2011 will feature up to 19 cutting-edge sessions that focus on social media, in-house SEO, search marketing, webmaster tech and more. Presentations always end with at least one specific takeaway.

PubCon is supported by leading businesses, speakers, exhibitors, and sponsors involved in social media, Internet marketing, search engines and online advertising.

Check out the PubCon speakers blog to see some of my latest guest posts!

Internet Summit supports web oriented entrepreneurial activity, innovation and the economic development of southeast and mid-atlantic regions.

Internet Summit brings together over 1500 Internet executives, senior marketers, digital professionals, entrepreneurs and investors for the largest digital event in the southeast. There will be over 120 professional speakers from some of today’s top brands including:
•Lynnette Montgomery, Director of eCommerce & Digital Marketing for Burt’s Bees
•Markus Renstrom, Head of SEO at Yahoo!
•Noah Everett, Founder of Twitpic
•Jack Krawczyk, Senior Product Marketing Manager of StumbleUpon
•and many more!

Internet Summit offers registrants two days of leading edge digital media, marketing and business technology content sessions guided by top thought leaders, interactive marketers, Internet execs, online professionals, entrepreneurs and digital strategists. Internet Summit is designed to maximize attendees’ time networking and meeting the people who are important to them and their business.

Hear over 75 presentations on social media trends, mobile presence, advanced SEO, paid search, usability and design and much more! Each of the scheduled sessions will feature 4 presentations on the best techniques and most advanced practices.

Internet Summit is a great way to stay educated on trending and emerging technologies that affect you and your company’s bottom line while paying a fraction of most other Internet marketing conferences’ registration fee.

The Internet Marketing Summit is expected to sell out. Attendees are encouraged to register early to ensure space availability.

Click here to reserve your spot today!

The revamped B2B Summit is taking a more hands-on approach to B2B marketing than ever before. This new format will give you key takeaways for immediate application Monday morning. Find out how to engage your ideal customer with relevant content, generate more high-quality leads, successfully integrate social media in your leads program and much more.

This year’s B2B Marketing Summit is designed to equip B2B marketers with proven strategies to conquer the most common B2B marketing challenges including:
1. Generating high quality leads
2. Marketing to a lengthening sales cycle
3. Generating public relations “buzz”
4. Competing in lead generation across multiple media

Learn how to engage your ideal customer with relevant content, generate high-quality leads, successfully integrate social media in your leads program and much more!

Check out this video invitation from keynote speaker Dr. Flint McGlaughlin!

Scheduled workshops and seminars include:
• How to Improve B2B Email Performance by Increasing Relevance
• Quick Hit Tactics to Boost Your Lead Gen
• Using Data to Boost B2B Marketing Results
• Destroying the 7 Myths of B2B Social Media
• and much more!

Whether you’re looking for intense how-to training, interactive panel discussions or real-life case studies, B2B Marketing Summit 2011 has it all. This year’s B2B Summit was designed so every session, every speaker and every piece of content help you in tangible ways to meet and exceed your goals.

One of the most valuable features of this year’s 2011 San Francisco B2B Summit is our one-to-one coaching clinics. This is your chance to get one-to-one advice about your marketing automation program, your lead generation efforts, your content production plan, and more. These clinics are designed to address your challenges and leave you with actionable ways to improve your marketing efforts. You won’t hear any sales pitches about companies or the services they provide – just the information you need to succeed.

One-to-one coaching clinics are conducted in half-hour sessions on a first-come, first- served basis.

On Wednesday, October 26th, the , San Francisco B2B Summit 2011 will feature a post-summit B2B certification workshop, which will teach you how to overcome the top challenges facing B2B marketers, implement B2B best tactics in content development, create and use buyer personas to target your ideal customers and take steps to create an effective webinar strategy. Once you have taken and passed the final exam, you will be designated as a Certified Professional in B2B Marketing!

Register for MarketingSherpa’s B2B Marketing Summit in San Francisco today!

Recently, each SEO tool has received brand-new SEO reports that were made cleaner, more eye-pleasing and more social-media focused than the older versions.

1. Rank Tracker

Rank Tracker is a powerful keyword research tool and an effective rank checker. While rank is by no means the end-all-be-all measurement of SEO success, it can still be a valuable benchmark to determine ROI. Keyword research is arguably the cornerstone of any SEO campaign, as the keywords you do and do not select will directly affect who can find your site in the search engines.

What’s really nice about Rank Tracker is that it has 20 methods of keyword research consolidate into one including: Google AdWords Keyword Tool, WordTracker, SEMRush, Google Suggest, misspellings and more. That way you know you’re getting the most accurate data to base your keyword selection off of.

After you select the most appropriate keywords for your web site on a page-by-page basis, it’s important to keep an eye on how well those keywords are performing. Using Google Analytics, Rank Tracker makes tracking a website’s actual traffic for select keywords very convenient. Having that information on hand makes it much easier to make snap decisions when it comes to your SEO. Plus, you get the security of knowing your decisions are being made based on real data and not speculation.

Features of Rank Tracker include:
•Each keyword’s KEI (keyword efficiency index) is calculated based on the amount of competition and monthly search volume.
•Shows the amount of Web traffic each keyword brings so you can clearly identify top performing keywords.
•Tracks rankings in 750 local and global search engines.

Rank Tracker also tracks the rankings of up to 10 competing sites, making it easier to keep a close eye on your top competitors and how well their own SEO is doing.

Rank Tracker Reports:
•Keyword Rankings Report (grouped by keyword)
•Keyword Rankings Report (grouped by search engine)
•Keyword Rankings and Visibility Report
•Competition Rankings Report
•Website Visitors (Traffic) Report
•Keyword Research Report

My Assessment of the Rank Tracker
One feature of Rank Tracker I find incredibly useful is the “Suggest Keywords” feature. Keyword research isn’t finite and site owners shouldn’t be afraid to incorporate new keywords into their SEO. There might be great opportunities for growth with keywords you haven’t considered before, but many site owners are hesitant to do the research again because it can be incredibly time consuming. “Suggest Keywords” can help you find other valuable keywords and keyword phrases that might actually be outperforming your current keywords without you having to spend the time digging. This can help you stay ahead of search trends so you can get an early jump on up-and-coming keywords.

2. WebSite Auditor

WebSite Auditor is an on page SEO Tool, as well as a site structure analyst and content optimization tool. WebSite Auditor is useful for site owners that are just beginning their on page SEO because it provides you with personal SEO reports and easy-to-follow step-by-step instructions on optimizing your website.

Features of the Website Auditor tool include:
•X-rays your site and exposes its architecture to help you improve site navigation and overall user-experience.
•Identifies broken links, HTML code errors, server response code errors and more.
•Shows duplicate page titles, Meta descriptions, anchor texts, etc. on your site, making it easier to identify and alter them before your site is penalized for duplicate content.
•Creates an XML sitemap for your site and pings major search engines to make sure your site is indexed properly.

WebSite Auditor Reports:
•Page Optimization Audit Report
•Page Structure Audit Report
•Search Engine View Report
•Website Structure Audit Report

My Assessment of the Website Auditor
Website Auditor is really good at identifying the less obvious issues that could negatively impact your SEO. For instance, a site with a lot of broken links is going to have a poor user-experience, which will ultimately affect your SEO and how well your site ranks. WebSite Auditor manages some of the more technical, site design aspects of SEO for you so you don’t have to worry about internal issues negatively affecting your site. It will identify problems early on so you have the chance to go in and fix them before the search engines penalize your site.

3. SEO SpyGlass

SEO SpyGlass is a backlink tool unique in its ability to find over 100,000 backlinks per site in real time. SEO SpyGlass not only identifies the backlinks of your site, but also gives you an in-depth look at backlink profile of the competition! This allows you to discover new linking opportunities for your own site.

Features of SEO SpyGlass include:
•Analyses each backlink from a variety of perspectives.
•Tells you each linking site’s PR, Compete and Alexa rank, IP address, domain age, etc. (over 60 parameters).

SEO SpyGlass Reports:
•Website Backlink Report
•Website Backlink Analysis Report

My Assessment of the SEO SpyGlass
You never want to directly copy the competition’s SEO (after all, what works for one site may not work for another) but there is nothing wrong with using the competition as a benchmark. Being able to identify where they are getting quality links from can help augment your own link building strategy. For instance, one of the most time consuming forms of link building is blog commenting because you have to research each and every blog. Since SEO SpyGlass shows you which blogs your competitors are commenting on and getting links from, half of the work is done for you.

4. LinkAssistant

Off-site link building is often the most time consuming part of the SEO process. What makes link building so time consuming is that it never really ends. A great link building campaign will continually grow and evolve and build upon itself. Links are the bread and butter of SEO, so the more quality links a site has the better it will rank in the search engines over time.

LinkAssistant, the last of the 4 SEO PowerSuite tools, is an
efficient link building tool and link building campaign manager.

Features of LinkAssistant include:
•Uses 6 methods of link partner search (by keyword, competitor’s URL, etc.)
•Finds you thousands of high-PR link partners, relevant to your niche
•Allows you to email potential link partners in a hit
•Has a built-in email client
•Verifies links and checks whether nofollow attributes, frames, robots.txt are used by the linking site

LinkAssistant Reports:
•Link Building Report
•Link Partner Management Report

My Assessment of the LinkAssistant
I can see a lot of potential with LinkAssistant when trying to build relationships with other site for guest blogging or promotional partnerships and so forth. Having a tool find the contact information for related sites would definitely streamline the process and leave a site owner with more time to actually contact and build relationships and potential cross promotions with those sites.

As a strictly white hat SEO professional, I personally would not use LinkAssistant to build a link exchange program as that is entering grey hat territory. However, for site owners that are comfortable using grey hat SEO methods, then LinkAssistant is a good tool to keep your links and link partners under a watchful eye.

Each tool has a scheduler that allows you to generate reports on auto-pilot.

Click here to see samples of all the SEO reports!

Check out this video to learn more about the SEO PowerSuite

SEO PowerSuite is available in English, Spanish, German, French, Dutch, Russian and Slovak.

The tools run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

My Final Assessment of the Link-Assistant.Com SEO PowerSuite

SEO PowerSuite is a great product that can stand up to most other SEO software tools on the market. It’s would be really useful for a DIY SEO site owner looking to streamline some of the more time consuming components of building, launching and managing an SEO campaign. Since The Link-Assistant.Com SEO PowerSuite can manage multiple URLs at once, it would be an incredibly useful tool for a site owner or SEO firm that needs to manage the SEO of multiple sites. It’s great to have all the information you could ever want to know about your site (and your top competitors) in one, easy-to-use management SEO tool.

Nick Stamoulis, President and Founder of Brick Marketing will be speaking on the Providence SEO panel at eMA’s Power of eMarketing Conference on October 12th, 2011 in Providence, RI. Nick Stamoulis will be speaking from 1-2 PM with other SEM panelist, Michael Briggs Vice President of Search Strategies at Website Publicity. The afternoon SEM session will focus on search marketing best practices.

The Power of eMarketing Conference will be held at the Providence Marriott Downtown on October 12th-13th. Online registration is open until October 11th. Attendees who are unable to register online are also allowed to register at the door on the day of the conference.

Click here to learn more about the Power of eMarketing Conference.

Over the course of two days, Power of eMarketing conference attendees will be able to choose from a variety of social marketing, search marketing and email marketing panels, discussions and presentations. The sessions are designed to provide attendees with the latest tools and techniques to insure a successful marketing program.

Scheduled sessions include:
•”Likes” are Worthless: Turn your Likes into Love
•How Social Can Improve Your Search Rankings
•eMail Database and CRM Management
•Google Adwords and Best Practices (PANEL)

eMA Conferences are designed for professional, experienced marketers.

Register for the Power of eMarketing Conference here!

Brick Marketing President Nick Stamoulis says, “Brick Marketing is very proud to be sponsoring the Digital East conference this year. It’s a great conference with a lot of information to be had by attendees. There is something for everyone to learn and take back to their office on Monday morning.”

The conference was designed to promote forward thinking and thought leadership on digital topics. Digital East supports digitally-oriented activity, innovation, and economic development of the mid-Atlantic region.

Attendees at the Digital East conference are often responsible for influencing the direction of their organization’s strategy, marketing and technology including executives, senior marketers, entrepreneurs, web strategists, bloggers, and investors. People come to Digital East to network and to learn about the latest solutions, innovations, technology and industry best practices.

Current speakers include:
•Simon Dumenco, Editor-at-large and “Media Guy” media columnist for Advertising Age and Executive Director of the Media Vanguard Awards
•Catherine Cook, Co-Founder of myYearbook
•Bryan Monroe, Editor for CNNPolitics.com

Digital East breakout sessions will focus on social media marketing, mobile marketing, SEO, e-mail marketing and much more. Currently scheduled sessions include:

Marketing through Facebook & Twitter
•Maximizing Earned Media through Social Engagement
•Using Tools to Extract Social Media Gold
•Mining Deep Social Media Strategy From Facebook & Twitter Data

Advanced SEO
•Social & SEO
•Content & SEO: Discover What Panda Has Meant to SEO and How to Discover Effective Content Ideas for Any Business
•State of Search
•Embracing Universal Search

Online Video
•Interactive Video
•Want More Views on Your YouTube Videos?
•Transforming Business with Video Communications

And much more!

Attendees can also sign up for Pre-Conference Intensive Programs for five hours of thorough, roll up your sleeves, drill-down educational experience on key Internet best practices. Pre-Conference Intensive programs include: Social Media, Search Marketing (includes SEO) and Analytics

Click here to reserve your spot at the Digital East Conference!