Tag: interactive whiteboards

SEO Tip: Great Search Engine Optimization Means Paying Attention

Great SEO Involves Fine Details
Great SEO Involves Fine Details


My SEO tip today is about paying attention and taking action. There are about a squillion things that influence good SEO, and even more things are required to achieve great SEO. Paying attention to details can sometimes make the difference between good SEO and great SEO. Do I have your attention yet?

You are not, I repeat NOT going to get the best results that you seek from this article if you do not pay attention to detail. Good SEO has a lot to do with very fine details, and it often means paying attention to the details that the rest of your industry neglects. Today I am going to give you some thought-candy about the links which point to your website, but first, I am going to be sure that I have your full attention and that you are ready for this brain-exploding tip.

I think a lot of people try to make SEO seem a lot harder than it actually is. Really good SEO is actually quite tricky and time consuming, but there are many things that are pretty simple and tedious, but just need to be implemented properly. Knowing all of those simple and tedious tasks, and how they fit into the big picture of your search engine optimization strategy, and using them properly to receive optimal benefit is why people hire a search engine optimizer.

Squillions of people write tens of thousands of tips each day about search engine optimization. The good search engine optimizers choose their topic carefully, title it just right, tag the information well, add it to their search optimized website, and are sure to address it to the proper audience using just the right keywords. Then they emphasize the call to action, and make it clear why you found the information.

Good SEO (search engine optimizers) write their tips similar to the way they will perform SEO for their clients. In fact, you can tell a lot about them by the tips they give you (it is one of my top reasons to blog). Further, they provide the tips in the same way they expect their readers to implement their suggestions for those who try to take the do-it-yourself (DIY) SEO method.

The Great SEO will take a little additional time to do all of the things the rest of the world can only call “magic”. I do not want to let you down today, but this SEO tip is not designed to make a do-it-yourselfer a great SEO. It is just another piece in the puzzle that will help you to understand good SEO. I will say, however, that it is a pretty damn good tip that can help you move just a little closer to great. I still have to keep you reading regularly, so I cannot just give you that “SEO magic” all at once. Your head would explode, and I cannot have that on my conscience. Yes, imagine that, a search engine optimizer with a conscience … I guess there is just magic in the air today! Besides, I still want to leave you some reason to call on me when you have pulled all your hair out and get sick of letting business pass you by.

Now, on with today’s SEO tip!

Who Links to Your Site and Why Should You Care?

Links are at the front line of search engine optimization. The more high-quality links that point to your website, the easier it will be to rank for the things your site is about. The text within those links makes a huge impact on your ranking for certain topics. This is why many links to my blog include the words SEO and social media marketing. Those things are a focus of my blog, so it only makes sense that the links reflect this.

When important websites with a lot of authority start linking to my blog, I want to know it. I also want to be sure that they continue to link to my blog. I can control this in a couple ways, and the best of which is to keep producing consistently useful content. You know, the stuff people want to link to. Thanking them is not such a bad idea, either.

Another way to be sure the link-love keeps coming is to watch what received good links and write more of that. For example, a useful tip about a given topic (in this case, SEO) will often find its way into a lot of good streams of content, including both automated and manual linking. The automatic ones are pretty easy to manage, but the links created by people are a bit more tricky. You have to really blow somebody’s hair back to make them take the action of creating a link to you in their blogroll, or to submit your content to Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and etcetera. If you want them to write about it and link to you in a blog post, you practically have to reinvent electricity or come up with something so amazing that they want to print it out and rub it all over themselves. Short of that you must at least write about things that people want to read, and present it in a fashion they will keep reading.

Finding Your Best Backlinks

You should know who is linking to your website. I don’t mean just the links that are being clicked on. I mean the links that make your site more visible and valuable to search engines. Here comes a big fat juicy SEO tip for you. It is called Open Site Explorer and the information it can tell you is more than you may see on the surface. Yes, this is where you have to pay attention to the details. For example, I just looked at an Open Site Explorer report for this blog and found the interesting facts as follows:

The Technorati tag “guerrilla-marketing” has produced a link pointing to my blog article titled “Marketing Without a Budget: Guerrilla Marketing Tips“, but the new content under this tag has moved my link off the page as newer articles arrived. So it seems to me that since that link is from a valuable source page, I should probably write something about guerrilla marketing and be sure to tag it with “guerrilla-marketing”. Oh yes, this article is kind of Guerrilla Marketing related … gosh, I am glad I was paying close attention. I am going to add that tag in this blog post.

I also noticed that there was a pretty nice link from the tag “whiteboards” that pointed to my article titled “Smart Slate, Smart Airliner, and Other Interactive Slates“. Perhaps I should write a follow-up to that piece and tag it appropriately.

My point is that if you pay close attention to the things which make your website rank well, there is a lot clearer path to success. Knowing that I am in the blogroll of great blogs like the ones listed below can give me a lot of reason to want to throw back some link-love to them and also keep reading their work.

These matter to me, and certainly deserve my attention (Thanks Guys). After all, they show faith in my work by linking to me. To some people, this is just a small detail, but to me it is a really important factor.

Paying attention to the sites linking to you, both automated and manually, can make a huge difference in your success. Now the question that remains is this: What will you do with this information? Were you paying attention and will you use what I have suggested? I want to guess the answer is “yes”, but there are a lot of people who do not pay attention. I hope those are your competitors and not you!

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Smart Slate, Smart Airliner, and Other Interactive Slates

Smart Slate Interactive Teaching Tool
Smart Slate Interactive Teaching Tool
You may be surprised what the Smart Slate WS200, the Smart Airliner wireless slate, and other interactive slates have in common. I will tell you a bit about these products, but what they share in common is more than you will likely see on the surface. First, I want to tell you about a couple of really useful technology tools that you may see more of in the future.

Smart Slate WS200 and Smart Airliner are each teaching tools by Smart Technologies which allow a teacher to work interactively with a classroom using a Smart Board interactive whiteboard. The Smart Board was introduced in 1991, but this product and other similar types of tools are still building steam as groups seek ways to work more interactively.

This is really neat technology that we did not have when I was a kid. The school can provide students with a wireless slate that allows students and teachers to interactively share things on a whiteboard at the front of the class. Smart Slate and Smart Board interactive whiteboards are designed to increase classroom productivity and allow for better interactive sharing of ideas and solutions.

Think of the possibilities for the Smart Slate. They can be used in boardrooms, think tanks, classrooms, and other places where simplified idea sharing and extra productivity are needed. We each have a limited amount of time, and tools that help to make our time in a group more productive are very worthwhile.

Commonalities of Smart Slate WS200 and Smart Airliner Wireless Slates

I said I would tell you what these things have in common, other than the obvious similarities of manufacturer (Smart Technologies), and their potential productivity enhancements. So here it is, the unseen commonality of these items is that each of them perform better with good SEO.

Come on, you should have seen that coming. This is an Internet marketing blog with a focus on search engine optimization and social media marketing. It was a natural conclusion, but why did I decide to blog about it? I will give you two reasons.

First Reason to Blog About Smart Technologies Interactive Smart Slates: I think the products are cool. They are not paying me, and I do not have any new or refurbished Smart Board whiteboards, Smart Slate WS200, or Smart Airliners to sell or rent. If my kids’ school PTO has a fundraiser to buy whiteboards, I may hit you up to buy some cookies or come to a school bake sale, but other than that, keep your wallet in your pocket … I am not selling you anything.

Second Reason to Blog About Smart Technologies Interactive Smart Slates: OK, I listed it as the second, but it ranks right up there somewhere above second. I realized that this is one of the many products offered by a company I will meet with in a few hours. As I started drilling into their offerings, I saw that this is one that I like, and one which is dreadfully under-represented in search results. The question this begs is not of whether this product line is good or not, but rather why in the name of everything good and wholesome did nobody really take this market seriously enough to get these in every classroom?

How Does Smart Slate Relate to SEO?

This is not so unlike things I have exclaimed in recent articles like “Topeka Kansas Car Dealer Social Media Case Study” which now has hundreds of readers searching for “car dealer social media”. It has a hint of what I said about “Cigar Prices Rising With Bad SEO and Social Media Marketing” which has caused cigar dealers to ring my phone off the hook wanting to know how I can market them better. It also has a good whiff of the article I wrote about Ethicon surgical sutures titled “Ethicon Sutures: Endo Surgical Sutures“.

Why did I need another one of these articles to show people that a good search engine optimizer with a boot full of piss standing in a puddle of vinegar can outrank a whole industry in search engines? Well, I suppose that it is because I have a boot full of piss and a puddle of vinegar all around me. I was full of these things, until I leaked. Sometimes I just want to scream at the top of my lungs when I find that somebody does not grasp the value of being able to type out an article and watch it start attracting search visitors within 5-10 minutes after clicking publish. What happens if a company did this often? Wouldn’t it seem that if they could top search engines for just five to ten search terms per day by providing relevant and useful information that it would eventually add up to something really big? Yes, I think so, too. That is why I will walk into a meeting in a few hours and be able to say “this is why you need SEO” and hope that the company CEO will trust that what I tell (and show) him are valuable.