Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

The rules of search engine optimization change and evolve. Google, Bing and Yahoo are constantly working towards delivering better search results. Here are some resources that will help you keep up with this field and help you achieve greater success in your marketing efforts.

1. SEOmoz Blog – SEOmoz has become the gold standard for SEO information and how-to articles. Its team of contributors offers an article per day to help expand your SEO knowledge.
2. Marketing Pilgrim – Andy Beal and his team of talented writers break search engine and internet marketing news and discuss major industry trends impacting marketers.
3. Search Engine Land – This is one of the best search engine blogs for in-depth news and analysis of the search marketing industry.
4. Search Engine Journal – From link building to the newest changes from Google, Search Engine Journal covers news and tactics related to the search engine marketing industry.
5. Search Engine Roundtable – For detailed discussion and explanations of the fine details of search engine marketing, Search Engine Roundtable has you covered.
6. SEO Book – For reviews of the newest SEO tools to analysis of search engine changes, check our SEO Book.
7. ReelSEO – ReelSEO is a resource for marketers looking to learn more about online video’s impact on on search engine marketing.
8. Yoast – Yoast is a how-to focused blog that covers tactics for improving SEO as well as user experience for your website.
9. aimClear – The aimClear blog includes articles about a wide range of search marketing topics, including SEO and PPC.
10. Biznology – This blog discusses many SEO-related issues but has recently focused on content marketing and its connection to SEO.
11. Blue Glass Blog – The talented team over at Blue Glass discusses important industry issues as well as tools.
12. CanuckSEO – Jim Rudnick provides tips and tricks for improving search engine optimization as well as other search engine marketing related topics.
13. Daily SEO Tip – Are you a fan of sites that provide a tip per day? Then this might be the blog for you, offering tips and tricks to help support your search engine marketing strategies.
14. Distilled Blog – The team at Distilled provides insights and musings about the intersection of search and social media.
15. GeoLocalSEO – If local and mobile search is your interest, then the GeoLocalSEO blog is a resource you should check out for tips and tricks related to the local and mobile search industry.
16. Google Webmaster Central Blog – When working in the search marketing industry, you must know what the search engines are doing. Google’s webmaster blog gives search marketers insights into the changes and updates to Google.
17. Graywolf’s SEO Blog – Michael Gray shares SEO-related commentary and advice in his blog.
18. Industrial Search Engine Marketing – If you are a B2B company looking for search engine marketing guidance, then this is a great resource for you.
19. John Battelle’s Search Blog – A co-founder of Wired magazine and a search engine marketing pioneer, Battelle’s musings cover search and much more.
20. Junta42 Blog – Content marketing is critical to SEO success. The team at Junta42 shares insights and tips for successful content marketing.
21. Matt Cutts – Matt is Google’s most famous search engine engineer who shares his thoughts and insights on search engine optimization.
22. Outspoken Media – This team of bloggers discusses all aspects of search engine marketing while providing tactical information and industry commentary.
23. SEO Copywriting – Copy is a critical part of SEO success. This blog goes into more detail than most about the best practices of SEO copywriting.
24. Search Engine Watch – This multi-author blog was reccomended by several readers and covers a wide variety of search marketing issues.

Read more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/6482/23-Awesome-SEO-Blogs-Everyone-Should-Read.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HubSpot+%28HubSpot%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher#ixzz0xiss3xMX

Does this sound familiar? You’ve read the books, blogs like this one and attended the webinars/conferences. You get it. Online content is important. You understand we are entering a huge shift in marketing and promotion going from product pushers to trusted resources and that drive, creativity and passion count more than a big budget, especially with all the amazing tools available online.

Trusted resources like you create valuable, interesting, educational and/or entertaining content.

This might be in the form of a blog, web show, online magazine, webinar series, ebook and the list goes on.

So, you decide to hop on the content train for your business either by creating or curating the best content in your niche.

But it isn’t spreading. Nobody is commenting. Nothing is really happening. You start to get nervous. “Is this worth it?” you begin to ask yourself.

Why isn’t it spreading? Sort of like looking in the mirror and saying, “Is it me or is it you?”

Normally there isn’t just one answer and it isn’t black and white. Some things directly matter and others go a little bit deeper with more abstract, yet equally important ideas like trust and authority. But, everything adds up.

Here are a few reasons why your content is lonely and how to get back on the right track with a few hundred or thousand friends:

1. Bad Web Design

If you website looks stuck in 1997 with a construction guy digging and music playing or like a run of the mill template, there is a lack of credibility and trust. Do you share content from sites that you don’t trust?

I wish it wasn’t true, but looks matter. Think about first impressions. It is worth investing in a site that is functional and reflects your personality and brand.

2. Lacking Ease Of Sharing

The best content is like peanut butter, easily spreadable. Easily spreadable doesn’t mean that it takes a scholar to find how to share easily via social networks, email, etc.

Enabling your community, no matter how big or small to share with ease can make a huge difference.

Do you have one click sharing?

3. Product Focused Content

The best content isn’t about your product. The harsh reality is nobody cares about any of our products. People do care about interests, passions, hobbies, solving their problems, getting answer to key questions, learning etc.

For example, let’s pretend you sell dog food. A mistake is to make the content about the food. Meaning features and benefits.

The fix here is to focus on an interest or passion. People aren’t passionate about dog food. Instead, I bet there are plenty of people passionate about dogs. Training dogs, dog health, etc. A better play is for the content to focus on the bigger picture and not just the product.

4. Not-You Focused Content

Injecting personality, passion and quirks into your content? Always a good thing. Making it about you and how amazing you are. Yikes.

Make it about them, not you. It will do better. Trust me.

5. Lack Of Passion

If you aren’t passionate about your content, it will show and will hinder progress. Nobody spreads half-baked material. If you can’t get excited and pumped up about your content, how can you expect anyone else to be?

6. Unclear, Boring Or Ridiculously Long Titles

I get it. Don’t judge a book by its cover or a piece of content by its title. Fair enough. However, the reality of the matter is titles matter, a lot. They matter for search engines and humans. When you have 50 titles in front of you, which ones jump out? Why?

Spending time on titles is worth the time.

7. Oops, I Forgot My Marketing

We have all fell into this trap. You spend all the time creating the content and posting it and then no time is left topromote it. You can have the greatest content in the world, but if you don’t spend time marketing and promoting it, then it will be the loneliest, saddest, greatest most useful content in the world.

My recommendation, especially when getting rolling is to spend 80% of total “content time” marketing and promoting.

This means creating one-on-one connections on social media sites, expanding your network, digital schmoozing, perhaps hosting an event or meet up. Often the best online marketing happens offline.   Content plus connections equals success. You have to give to get.

One bonus fun fact: Time. Trust, influence, authority and community isn’t built with just one post or overnight. It takes blood, sweat and tears.  While the opportunity to create has been democratized, that means you have to work hard to stick out. Keep at it, experiment, refine brick by brick, click by click, over time you might be the ruler of the next content empire.

What has been your experience? What would you add to the list?

This was a guest post by David Siteman Garland. Garland is the Founder of The Rise To The Top, The #1 Non-Boring Resource For Building Your Business Smarter, Faster, Cheaper.

By Bill Mcintosh
Every computer on the Internet has an IP address. Your computer, your web enabled phone and the server that hosts your websites all have IP addresses. They usually look something like this:

67.45.123.87

As you see above, there are 4 sets of numbers separated by dots.

The first set of numbers is the ‘A’ class
The second set is the ‘B’ class
The third set of numbers the ‘C’ class
And finally the fourth set is the ‘D’ class

Something a bit like this:

A.B.C.D

Inside data centers where your server is located related servers or websites are often hosted by servers with the same ‘C’ class of ips. So their ips might look something like this:

67.45.123.87
67.45.123.79

The search engines know this and can spot when related sites cross link to each other from within the same class C ip address. These links are often filtered out of the ranking algorithms. If your site has too many of these types of links it can even bring a penalty to your site.

That’s why a few companies came up with the idea of “SEO Hosting”. This is where they will sell you hosting on completely different sets of class C ip addresses. People often use this to hide their mini site networks, blog “farms” or cross linking networks.

Keep in mind that Google can also see your contact information for your domain.

Every webmaster wishes his website to be on top of search engines. This is not impossible as it can be achieved easily by following ethical search engine optimization rules. In these rules search engines clearly counts backlinks to a website with particular anchor text to improve its ranking with that keyword. Webmasters tend to achieve these backlinks in any way but here quality of the links matters a lot.

Here a question arises; how the quality of backlinks will be determined? Answer is very clear from search engines as they focus on natural backlinks for which a common term of white hat seo technique is used by seo gurus. Normally linking pattern depends on the competition of a specific keyword for which strength of the websites giving backlinks is most important. Another issue is the continuity of links so your competitors never beat you. To ensure this webmasters tend to get in content links from blogs on regular basis and finally achieve their goal to be on the road of success for rankings.

In recent times webmasters found a way to make a cluster of their own sites and started getting links to their major site. Search engines especially Google do not like this method as it was unethical too. In this situation it was almost difficult for webmasters to have multiple web hosts for different websites. This problem was solved by the introduction of seo hosting in the industry.

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Posted by valeri

What is seo hosting? SEO hosting is a type of hosting primarily introduced for seo purposes. In this type of web hosting, companies provide the facility of different c class IPs with separate cpanel and name servers for each of your website. Even some web hosting companies offer their c class IPs on those data centers which are located in different locations. This helps webmasters to ensure the privacy of different websites owned by them. This way they succeed in following the rule of search engine optimization to get backlinks from websites that are not on same IP address or not owned by same webmaster.

Now what are these c class IPs? Every website has an IP address. Some have dedicated IPs while other share their IPs. In shared IPs your website can be with a bad neighbor website which is not appreciated in terms of SEO. Lets check an IP address 216.235.79.13. This IP has 4 blocks a,b,c,d. Here third block which is represented by “79” is the c block. This determines the location and thus two websites hosted on 2 different c class IPs are always considered as 2 different websites. This is the basic idea of this seo web hosting. In this way webmasters get cheap solution to the cluster of their website and thus easily manage to get backlinks from different websites.

Well, apart from what this all, no one knows how search engines will treat if they trace these sets of c block IPs by different web hosting companies and mark them as spam. Still one thing is for sure webmasters have been able to produce good results with this seo hosting technique.

Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective. This is what Orange Snowman got. Test your site, we can drastically increase the effectiveness of your site.