search engine optimization Archives - Page 8 of 16 by Mark Murnahan

Is Squidoo Good for SEO? Likely More Than You Think!

Is Squidoo good for search engine optimization (SEO)? The short answer is “Yes!” The longer answer involves how Squidoo can help to improve your search engine ranking.

First, for the uninitiated, I will explain that Squidoo is a service which allows for creation of topical pages. Squidoo calls each of these pages a “lens”, and the lenses you can find on Squidoo cover a great deal of useful information. Your lens (or lenses) can include any topic you like, and in fact, I have a Squidoo lens just for that. It is titled “SEO, Social Media, and Other Stuff Murnahan Likes“, and it includes RSS feeds from some of my blogs. That means more syndication of my content. This is a good thing, although the RSS links are not very useful from a search engine optimization standpoint. It also includes RSS feeds for commenting services I use, such as my Disqus profile and Intense Debate profile so people can see things I am commenting about on other blogs. It makes a nice aggregation of things I like and things I am up to. The possibilities are vast, and Squidoo has a lot of nice modules that are easy to customize.

Squidoo Helps SEO, But Not How Others May Tell You!

There is a whole lot of speculation and contention regarding the SEO value of Squidoo. Just as with most services with any search engine optimization value, there are many dirty attempts at SEO using Squidoo. This does not mean it is overrun by spammers or that it is not still valuable. I simply point this out because I do not suggest tagging yourself as the next great SEO expert by trying to make Squidoo your platform. It is just another tool, and I recommend being respectful of the Squidoo community.

You may think I try to make the very best use of each tool to improve my SEO. I do enough that people often ask me if I ever sleep, but I do not hold any tool in high enough regard that I would call it my “silver bullet.” There are some social media and social bookmarking sites that I see more benefit from than others, but each of them will have some degree of importance. Squidoo is one of the services I like very much. However, I will openly admit to shamefully under-utilizing Squidoo. Like my father told me, “do as I say and not as I do.” I do as much as my days and nights will allow. As time runs short, we are each guilty of neglecting to do some of the things we know we should be doing. In my opinion, Squidoo is one of those things we should both be doing, and doing better.

Squidoo Backlinks Help SEO

One benefit to Squidoo for your search engine optimization is incoming links to your website (backlinks) from your Squidoo lens (or lenses). I know very well that Squidoo links are valuable for SEO, but in case you are skeptical, I will show you just one way to measure them. I invite you to check the incoming links to this very blog, using SEOmoz Open Site Explorer. If you check my incoming links (yes, click this), you can see that Squidoo is listed with a “Page Authority” of 63 and a “Domain Authority” of 87. That is a worthwhile link, and one which should not be ignored. In the link above, I narrowed the report down to where you can easily find Squidoo in the results. It will look like the image below.

With enough links, such as I have explained here, it does not take long to start seeing better results in search engine results and more link authority for your site.

My SEO tip for you today is this:

Squidoo should not fall into that list of things you neglect. Take the time, today, to give a closer look at Squidoo and judge for yourself.

Squidoo Lenses Rank Well in Search Engines

Another example of the usefulness of Squidoo is of course how well the lenses (pages) rank. There is little mystery about the potential for making a Squidoo lens rank well for a target search phrase. You can often find popular lenses among the top results for popular searches. Although I do not use Squidoo for this in my own internal SEO, I have done so for client projects and witnessed a reasonable level of value in it.

I do not rely on any single SEO tool too heavily, and I do not recommend that you do that, either. There is not a short list of SEO tools and tricks that will make you famously successful with search engines. No, I am sorry, but that list of important SEO tools is long … very long. You should never place all of your SEO energy in only a few places, but instead use a wide range of resources. At the same time, I would submit to you that even if it took you the rest of the day to set up your Squidoo account or to add another Squidoo lens to your existing lenses, your day would not be wasted. By the end of the day, you will have become more efficient using another SEO tool that can give you more visibility to your Squidoo lens, and additional relevant links from Squidoo to your website.

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Do You Know What You Are Worth? Your Critics Seem to Know!

Do you ever impress yourself? Maybe you should!

A question came up today while I was talking with my wife as she created a masterpiece before my eyes. I asked her “do you ever impress yourself?” The natural answer that most people will give is “No, that sounds too arrogant.” She was not too off the mark from the popular answer, but based on her level of mastery, it puzzled me. It made me think deeper about a conversation that has taken place between myself and many clients in their boardrooms.

I want to explain that my wife is indeed a master at the work she does. She has many years of experience as an artist, and she deserves all of the kudos she receives for her work. In the instance of my question to her today, it involved her work in our cakes and confections business. She was creating flowers from scratch. She took sugar and turned it into flowers. I do not mean flowers like the average iron worker or Internet geek would make from sugar. She was creating lifelike flowers with petals, pistols, stamen, sepal, and other parts that many of us do not even realize flowers have. They are really delicate … like a flower.

I had to ponder why she would ever feel like she was not doing something spectacular. I mean, how many people do you know who can make a flower petal from sugar? Can they put it together with a whole bunch of other sugar petals and all of those other hard to pronounce flower parts and make them look like a real flower, and then sell them to people for the cake served on their wedding day?

This got me to thinking about the many times I have witnessed clients from my standpoint in my field of marketing who just don’t have a good handle on their value proposition. Their fear is often not so unlike Peggy’s concerns that she would seem arrogant, cocky, conceited, too confident, or whatever strangely negative twist you can put on doing something amazing that other people can see so clearly.

I think a lot of people have felt a bit kneecapped by the fine line between confidence and the point where it is distasteful to others. In the case of Peggy, just like so many others, they draw back so far from that line that modesty comes to take away their hopes and dreams. Modesty, when taken too far, can be devastating in a marketing campaign. I see it all the time that out of some deep-seated sense of modesty, a company culture will make it seem nearly impossible to reflect the true quality of their product.

In the course of this lengthy inner conversation, I had to confront myself. I am a race car driver, and in racing, I have always felt a bit shy with the flattering things people say when I come off the track. I know that other drivers are trying very hard to drive fast, and I want them to feel great about themselves. I don’t want to be the jerk to take away their glory, so I kind of hunker away and forget how well I drive.

YourNew.com Racing Corvette Z06: Driver Mark Aaron Murnahan

Confidence Perceived and Confidence Worth Stealing

I am a wickedly badass search engine optimizer and marketer … I can let that fly freely here on my marketing blog. I can whip the best of them, and I can quantify it in real numbers. Yes, I can back it up! What is profound to me is how the things where we seek the greatest gain in life is where we feel the most doubt. I love my work as a search engine optimizer and marketing consultant, so don’t get me wrong. I have done it for many years, and earned a handsome living following that passion. However, in my inner thoughts, I still feel that my big accomplishment will come from racing cars. I feel a confidence by driving fast, just as much as I do in the business which makes me money. In fact, before I lost millions of dollars in contracts during 2009 (and most of my ass with them), I was planning to retire next year and create a racing school to follow my passion.

How Money Changes Perception

It seems confusing and downright wrong how business endeavors make people more self-conscious than something perceived as a hobby. Noting that I am considering driving as my ultimate business endeavor, it really only makes sense when you examine how our modern society will criticize you more by things they perceive will matter to you or benefit you. What I mean is that I can tell you I am a badass race car driver and you do not feel threatened, because I am not trying to sell you a ticket to my next race or recruit you to my racing school. Racing does not pay me at this point. It actually has a cost to me of about $250,000 per race season, and a scheduled squillion-bazillion dollars to open a race school if I am done with this wicked-badass marketing gig before I am 300 years old.

You have no perception of loss just because I am fast, and I can even tell you I am fast. I am not a bad guy for being fast. Now if I told you that I am a badass at something which pays me money and feeds my family, you will be far more likely to take me to the ropes and beat me until I beg for mercy. How screwy does that sound, really?

Passion + Profit = Critics

This has all forced me to question how the things we feel the most passionate about are the easiest things to become modest about, and it is magnified if we actually receive a perceived benefit. I love racing. If I had to put this in terms for the average race fan without showing my modesty, I am one of the fastest men around a track you will ever meet in your lifetime. I have driven at speeds you will never comprehend and pulled off split-second saves, just inches from disaster that would have killed 99.9999 percent of people behind that wheel when the brakes got weak at 170 miles per hour. Now, if I tell you I have done the same thing and it helped me to buy a bag of groceries to feed my kids, it is strangely easier to criticize. OK, leaving the groceries and the kids out, if I said it makes me money, I am just a bit more of a bad guy. Don’t deny it … you see what a bastard I am if I charge money for my talents compared to doing something equally as passionate, but doing it for free.

Now then, why should Peggy feel awkward to express confidence about work done exceptionally well? Why is it easier for you to accept confidence about her work when the message comes from me rather than from her? Why is it even more exciting and acceptable to enjoy her mastery if you are far outside of her market area and you know she cannot sell you a cake? By the way, cakes are very hard to ship!

Why should I be so modest about the fact that I can own, manage, and drive for a race team that can take a track record on the first visit to a track? Why should I be so modest about the fact that I wrote three really good books in just three months during 2009? One of them (“Living in the Storm“) was written as my ass was falling off in business, but I completed it because I sincerely believed it would benefit others. Why should I be modest about the fact that more people read my work each month than reside in the city of Topeka, Kansas, where I live? Why should I be modest about the fact that I can rank my clients at the top of search engines for things which 99.9999 percent of the world’s competitors cannot achieve?

Well, I suppose that our reasons are not so unlike yours. Sometimes we just have to accept the talents we have developed and stop downgrading ourselves with the fear of the few jealous antagonists who will call us wrong for it while our fans are still waving our checkered flag and reveling in our winning the race.

I asked a few questions here, but what I really want to know is what you propose to do to stop acting like a Mark or Peggy? Maybe I can help. If this is the case, I will admire you for being uncommonly able to see beyond the perception of somebody having to lose just because somebody else gains.

If you like what I have to say here, please share it with others, regardless of whether I gain or do not gain. Your sharing of this line of thought with others may make a difference in not only the bag of groceries I bring home for my kids, but perhaps it could really help somebody else to gain a better view of their marketplace as well. Besides, if it helps you feel better, the vast majority of people it can help cannot afford to hire my services … marketing, racing, or shipping a four tier wedding cake. Oh, and I did not even mention the cost to have me write a book, but if I mentioned buying one for ten bucks, it would be even easier to see me as a bad guy. You see, that sounds kind of silly to not recognize your own contributions, right?

Corvette Z06 Photo Courtesy Pixx By Tango Photography

SEO Tip: Great Search Engine Optimization Means Paying Attention

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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Websites As Low As $175,000 + $25,000 Monthly Maintenance

Are you in need of a real bargain for your next website? I have a great deal for you today, and it starts at just $175,000 and $25,000 per month maintenance cost. But wait! There’s more!

It sounds like a great bargain, right? Well, maybe and maybe not.

I wish I had recorded the conversation I had with a woman desperately in need of an answer about website pricing. She just wanted to hear the answer that agreed with her. She did not have any desire at all to hear the right answer. I do have the urgent voicemail message she left for me, and I will include it in the podcast.

Listen Here:

After hearing the voicemail message, I promptly returned her call and she was even more frazzled in real-time. The purpose for her call was that she was frantically seeking some way to sway her business partners from an offer made by a website development company for what she believed was astronomically high. The part she could not answer was why it was too high, or how much too high it was. All she knew was that it was too high, and she wanted ammunition to fire back at the developer and her business partners.

I agreed with her that the $175,000 plus $25,000 was extremely high for a “basic website” or “simple website”. It is funny, but from a customer’s standpoint, they usually are just “very simple”. That is, unless you take them to the mat and have them show you just how damn simple it is by telling them to do it themselves.

I did my best to calmly and logically address the woman’s concerns and told her that this amount of money should indeed buy a substantially complex website with a lot of functionality, or otherwise be justified with some really fantastic marketing services. I expressed that there was very possibly a lot of fat to trim from the price, and that I would be delighted to review her requirements and provide a competitive bid for the project. To my amazement, she really had no clue about the site’s details. She did not have a project scope laid out with details of her needs. All she knew is that she was getting the shaft from some development firm, and she needed proof that the quote was many times too high. For all I knew, the pricing she had received was the bargain of the century. She wanted to hear nothing of the truth, and instead, she hung up the phone when I told her I needed more information to determine whether it was a good deal or a bad deal.

The point is that if you are shopping for technology or marketing services, the cost is really never too high or too low without the missing variable of what you are getting for the money. There was really no way I could tell her if the quotation she had received was ten times too high or one tenth of the cost it should be. Did it require two developers or two hundred? Did it involve tens of hours or thousands of hours? Did it include software licensing and a cluster of dedicated servers, or a shared hosting account?

The trouble I see with this is that it has become far too common that people who are non-technical and have little or no understanding of an industry to seek something based on cost and not on value. These are the people who get screwed to the wall with bad results and then blame an industry instead of pointing the finger back where it really belongs, which is at themselves for making fast assumptions based on cost of things they know.

Now, if you really want to know how much a website should cost, or how to determine website development or SEO rates, I invite you to read the articles as follows:

“How Much does a Website Cost?“
“SEO and Web Development Hourly Rates“

Of course, I could write all day about different pricing models and how to determine the cost of a website project, but in short, I will just say that if the price is all you look at, you are a sucker!

I would also like to add that if you are in such a rush to get your website launched that you do not have time to hear the professional’s answers to your questions, you may be a jackass, too!

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Find Good SEO: Why Good SEO Don’t Seek Your Business

Being ranked at the top of search listings on Google, Bing, and etcetera, for the things that make companies money is a very competitive endeavor. The SEO who can produce really fantastic results are few and far between. The demand is high, and the supply is comparatively low. SEO is a tricky business, and to find good SEO is kind of like finding a needle in a haystack. What makes it even harder to find good SEO (search engine optimization), is that the best SEO (search engine optimizers) are not seeking you.

Unless you sell fish milkshakes or garlic scented breath spray, you have probably noticed that there are a lot of others trying to attract the same customers as you. I should not need to explain all the reasons for wanting to be at the top of search listings, but I will say that being there is very valuable. I don’t just mean being there for your few “important” search phrases like your company name. I mean being there for the right search phrases, with the right marketing message, and a website that will convert lookers into buyers. I mean being listed for thousands of searches and maximizing your lateral keyword effectiveness. This is a job of the SEO, and we are paid to do the work that makes most people want to pull their hair out and scream at their computer. We do what others cannot do. In fact, maybe we are just a little more like Superman than we like to let on. You know, we try to be pretty humble (even though it is difficult).

Good SEO Are Not Salespeople

It has often been said that a good SEO does not need to seek business. If they are skilled at search engine optimization, there are many great opportunities open to them. This does not mean they do not want your business, but only that they are probably not banging down your door, ringing your phone off the hook, or filling your email inbox with offers of cheap SEO services. Now, I should explain that I don’t mean the ho-hum average SEO, but the ones who really deserve to carry the title of Search Engine Optimizer. There are a lot of fakes, but I have already explained how to tell the difference between good SEO and bad SEO. If you missed that article, you should make time to read and find out.

Why do I think that good SEO are not salepeople? Well, I think most SEO can probably sell SEO if they have to, but for most of us I think it gets pretty aggravating to answer salesy questions that people do not actually even care to know anyway. I mean, do you really think a client needs to know each detail of the work to be performed? Do they need to know everything the SEO knows? If that was the case, they would do it themselves. They just need to know that the SEO is good at what they do, and that they will receive quantifiable benefit from the work. Hell, I hate selling SEO, but I love performing the work. Go ahead and search Google for sell SEO and see if you find me there (Hint: Don’t look down). To me, proof should be all the selling I need to do. If somebody wants more than that, I guess I can take my shirt off and show them my sexy chest, because that would likely mean more to them than my in-depth SEO lesson that will go right over their head anyway.

Good SEO Are Quirky, But Entrepreneurial

As people, the best SEO (search engine optimizers) tend to be a little bit quirky, opinionated, eccentric, clever, and above all, entrepreneurial. SEO do not choose this work just because all the other jobs down at the 7-Eleven were taken. We do it because we have a passion for success, a competitive spirit, and often something to prove … call it a Napoleon complex if you like. SEO is a field filled with some truly astonishing marketing talent that is honed every day by constant studying of people, trends, facts, figures, and of course, the “secret ingredient” that we will never share with you because after all, you are not “in the club”.

Why SEO Don’t Seek Your Business

So, you may still wonder why I say that “good SEO don’t seek your business”, and that is something I am here to answer. The reason is this: A good search engine optimizer can take their skills to any industry, at any time, and invest themselves in that industry and earn a fortune. This is not a myth, and a good SEO can back it up. I would say that it is even true that a “pretty good SEO” can achieve a high level of success if they put enough time, study, and patience into their work in a given industry. In my case, I earned millions of dollars selling wholesale Internet services over the past decade. That did not happen because I was passionate about selling dial-up Internet access and web hosting services to ISPs. It happened because I was passionate about SEO, and I kicked that market in the ass hard enough to amass up to 2,000 resellers. It would have been even easier if I could have just been the SEO all along and not had to work as the CEO, too.

You may wonder why, if a search engine optimizer is good, they would choose to work with clients’ projects instead of selling their own product or service. This is where some people just don’t understand the required focus of SEO work. If I wanted to sell cigars online, you can bet I would corner the cigar market. I am already well listed in Google for cigar related search terms, and I am not even a cigar retailer. I don’t want to sell cigars. I do not want the hassles of operating another business … I just want to sell other people’s cigars. That is why I am a search engine optimizer. As you may have noticed, my blog is “a Web Guy” and not “a Cigar Guy”. I want to focus on making products and services successful with better SEO, and not deal with all the operational headaches of the business.

Good SEO Seek Opportunity

The reasons freelance or agency SEO consulting is so attractive to a good search engine optimizer has a lot to do with our entrepreneurial drive, and our passion for success. In order to be a really great SEO, it takes a lot of focus and love for the work. I will speak for a group when I say that most of us love wielding our success tools and reaching the top of search results and making more business happen. We think like a Mount Everest climber. We have one overall goal in mind, and that is to reach the peak.

SEO will often turn away business for reasons that you may not understand. This is not entirely about money, either. We seek opportunity, and much of the time, the client simply does not have the opportunity we are seeking.

Another reason good SEO do not seek your business is because until you understand the value of our work enough to come to us, you would never pay us more than a small fraction of what our work is worth. Unless you understand that we pay you more in increased business and brand recognition than you will ever pay us, you are just not ready.

Consider how you would react to a qualified SEO with a track record of success and a proposal that he or she will work tirelessly over the next year to make your product or service offering more visible, with better brand recognition, higher conversion of lookers to buyers, higher profit margin, and they can back it up with real numbers. They even come to you with legitimate SEO guarantees that make sense to you. How do you answer to that? Do you say “No, I am totally happy where I am … I don’t really want more customers.” If that is the case, which sometimes really is the case, then why in the name of all things intelligent are you reading this blog? You want more business or you should be reading something a whole lot more suitable to sitting in a rocking chair or moving to Florida to play golf. No, instead, you want more business, and you want to know ways to make that happen.

Once you accept this, the only obstacle left is for you to get up off your wallet and push your marketing “Go” button. Just don’t ask a qualified SEO to start begging for your business or offering you discounts while you are getting more out of the transaction than they are.

Summary: The best SEO are the ones you find, and not the ones who found you.

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