SEO Approve – Review Top SEO Companies
SEO Approve is a brand new SEO company review and comparison site that I feel has a lot of potential specifically because it is brand new. I’ve made no attempts to hide my gripes with parts of the SEO industry, specifically at how cliquey it can be. Older and established SEO industry sites are fairly set in their ways and it’s not easy for those new to SEO to break in and gain any traction. While I understand there is a fair amount of competition between SEO consultants and SEO firms, I don’t think that means we have to give the cold shoulder to those just entering our profession. 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 CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
5 Questions to Ask Before Creating an Infographic
Infographics are a great way to inject new life into both your content marketing and link building campaigns. They are a fun and unique way to present hard data in a more manageable form, allow your brand personality to shine through and (hopefully) generate a lot of links for your site! But before you jump on the infographic bandwagon, here are 5 questions you should ask yourself: 1. Is my brand established enough? Infographics are great forms of link bait, but they shouldn’t be the go-to link building technique for a new site. If you don’t have a strong online presence (something that takes a long time), how will anyone find your infographic in the first place? If your website isn’t ranking well, how do you CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Don’t Let Your Web Developer Hijack Your SEO
Here at Brick Marketing we have an in-house developer that we turn to when the time comes for implementing our SEO recommendations on a client’s site. While I know a fair amount about web development and am comfortable making minor changes to my site and to our clients’ sites, I know that I’m not an expert in web development and I leave the heavy lifting to the pros. Even though we have the capabilities in-house, sometimes clients prefer to implement the SEO recommendations themselves. Either they have an in-house web developer of their own or they are working with a 3rd party to build their site. I’m fine with any of the options. However, I have had clients that choose to stick with their 3rd CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How Many Links in an Online Press Release? – SEO Video Tip
A good rule of thumb to follow is one link for every 100 words. This lets you get both full http links (like your full web address) into the press release, as well as a few anchor text links that target your top keywords. If you try to stuff too many links into your online press release, it might get flagged as spam by the online PR distribution site and they won't publish it. For more Internet marketing video tips and lessons from Nick Stamoulis, check out the Brick Marketing Internet marketing video lesson archive . CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google Is Focused On Site Speed
Google freely admits they use site speed as a ranking factor. That right there should be enough of a reason to make you care about the speed of your site. While site speed doesn’t carry as much weight as some of the other 200 odd signals Google takes into account when ranking your site, the fact that the search giant has bothered to let us mortal site owners know tells me it’s worth focusing on. Check out this video from Google about making the web faster: Even though the video is a few years old (and some of their predictions have already come true!), it still has some valuable information to think about. One point in particular sticks out to me: like CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
What’s New in SEO for November 22, 2011
We have compiled the latest news and updates from the big three, Google, Bing and Yahoo as it relates to SEO and the search engines overall. WHAT'S NEW THIS WEEK WITH GOOGLE: Ten recent algorithm changes Google provides a highlight list of many of the improvements it has made over the past couple weeks. WHAT'S NEW THIS WEEK WITH YAHOO: Site Explorer Reminder Yahoo! Site Explorer has merged into Bing Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer services are no longer available starting November 21, 2011. WHAT'S NEW THIS WEEK WITH BING: Introducing Bing Editors’ Picks: A Guide to Great Sites Bing Editors’ Picks were designed to enhance Bing results by bringing editorially selected sites to your search experience. So there you have it, the latest news in search CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How Will Encrypted Search Data Impact SEO?
In late October, Google announced that, in order to make search more secure for their users, they were “enhancing our default search experience…when you’re signed in to your Google Account. This change encrypts your search queries and Google’s results page.” Basically, Google is no longer passing data about users’ search behavior (like what keywords they used) over the site they clicked on from the SERP. So what does this mean for website owners? Google spelled it out in the same blog post What does this mean for sites that receive clicks from Google search results? When you search from https://www.google.com, websites you visit from our organic search listings will still know that you came from Google, but won't receive information about CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
3 Changes to Help Increase Your Conversion Rate
All the off-site link building in the world doesn’t mean anything if your site doesn’t convert the targeted traffic being delivered to your site. At the end of the day it is your site that is going to convince a visitor to act. If your site isn’t seeing an increase conversion rate like you had hoped, consider making these three changes: Break up blocks of content Ever heard the phrase “too long, didn’t read?” It means that someone found a piece of content (blog, article, webpage, etc) but didn’t bother to actually read the whole thing because it looked like it was too long to bother. Huge blocks of text can be very intimidating to your visitors, and it may turn them off from further exploring CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is Your SEO Ready for Cyber Monday?
I’ve spoken with more than a few e-commerce site owners who freely admit that more than half of their annual PPC budget is going to be spent in the next few weeks, as sites prepare for the onslaught of shoppers that begin with Cyber Monday and carry through to just before Christmas. Just like Black Friday is supposed to put brick and mortar retailers “back in the black” for their year, the Monday after Thanksgiving has become the same source of revenue for etailers. The profits that stand to be gained on Cyber Monday are astronomical, is your site’s SEO prepared to earn your piece of the pie? Here are 3 quick things you can do to get your site ready for Cyber Monday: 1. Schedule out CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Blog Posts to Read for November 17, 2011
Below you will find our favorite blog posts that are related to SEO, search engine marketing and social media marketing from this past week. Please feel free to visit each, we hope you find them as helpful as we do! When in a Rush, Better to Not Blog than to Blog with Mistakes If you want to build a strong community and following, you have to get it right. You can’t have a post littered with spelling or grammatical errors. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE How to Turn your Web Traffic into Loyal Readers This post includes four ways to transform website traffic into loyal readers. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE New Info on How Social Affects Search This post discusses Google’s encrypted search for users that are CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
What Does A Declining CTR Mean For Your SEO?
CTR, or click-through-rate, is one of the most studied and reported numbers in the SEO industry. The CTR refers to what percentages of clicks are garnered by a specific ranking position in the SERP. Obviously, the higher the click-through-rate the more valuable that position is. Most studies indicate that the first position gets the lion’s share of clicks, including this recent study released by SlingshotSEO. However, what makes SlingShotSEO’s findings interesting is not the percentage of clicks the first, second and third spots get, but how those percentages have dramatically dropped over the last 5 years. Take a look at this graph: The four different studies conducted since 2006 show a dramatic decline in click-through-rates across the board. So what does this CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Recent Panda Update—What Does This Mean for Small Business SEO Efforts?
This is a guest post written by Amanda DiSilvestro of Business.com There has been a lot of buzz about one of the latest Google Panda update, so naturally many bloggers are writing about the importance of content and how to better the content on your website. For those who are unfamiliar, on September 28th, the Panda update (known as Panda 2.5) put a stricter emphasis on unique content and caused many small businesses traffic results to lower. Although some businesses such as FoxNews.com and YouTube benefited from the change, the complaints from small companies have not declined. Content has always been important, and Google has always valued good content and tried to keep the unique content ranking high. This makes sense, and most would agree that CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Sample B2B Content Recyling Strategy – SEO Video Lesson
Want to learn how you can create an entire content marketing campaign from a single piece of content? Check out this real world B2B content recycling strategy example. The trick to content recycling is to re-purpose the content so it makes sense for the platform being used. You aren't just submitting the same piece of content again and again, but the messaging has to remain consistent. Watch this week's SEO video lesson here! For more content marketing video tips and lessons from Nick Stamoulis, check out the Brick Marketing content marketing video lesson archive . CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Content Promotion with LinkedIn Groups
As I’ve said before, creating great content is only half the battle. It doesn’t matter how well-written, informational or engaging your content is if no one sees it. If no one reads your content then no one will link to your content, which means the blog post/article/video/etc isn’t doing much good for your SEO. Content promotion is just as important as content creation! There are multiple platforms you can promote your content on including: •Social networking sites •Social bookmarking sites •Industry sites •E-newsletters •Document sharing sites •and more Personally, I am a huge fan of using social networking sites, such as LinkedIN for content promotion. Not only do social networking sites present your content in front of a vast audience of potential customers, the search engines are also using social signals as a CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
What’s New in SEO for November 15, 2011
We have compiled the latest news and updates from the big three, Google, Bing and Yahoo as it relates to SEO and the search engines overall. WHAT'S NEW THIS WEEK WITH GOOGLE: Google+ Pages: connect with all the things you care about Google+ has rolled out Pages worldwide so that users can build relationships with all of the things that they care about, including local businesses and global brands. WHAT'S NEW THIS WEEK WITH YAHOO: Yahoo! Search Trends: Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week November 13 is the beginning of Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week and people are going online to learn about challenges Americans are facing in a post-recession economy and to get information on assistance programs. WHAT'S NEW THIS WEEK WITH BING: Bing Webmaster CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
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Nick Stamoulis:
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