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Are You a Warrior?

I admit that I’ve always been a “hermit SEO”. I do most of my work alone and figure out what works and what doesn’t through trial and error rather than taking other people’s word for it. As of late, I’ve been hanging out on the Warrior Forum more often to offer advice to beginners and read the heated debate among the SEO experts.

I’ve picked up several unique ideas and had a chance to mentor some up-and-comers. All in all being an active member of the discussion forum has been quite positive. If you are following this blog to improve your own SEO skills, I’d highly encourage you to join the conversation.

One word of warning…be careful to set a timer for yourself when you first enter the forum. The conversations and debate is so engaging you can easily lose an entire day and not have made any progress.

My username on Warrior Forum is NumbersJunkie. Hope to see some of you there!

Categories Online Marketing Advice
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I just started working with a new chiropractic clinic building some backlinks and had a chance to give some feedback to the owner about a website he had had constructed by another company. One of the things that struck me was the fact that most of his URL names used underscores and not hyphens. I knew from experience that hyphens were IN and underscores were OUT, but I had never really investigated why. Here is a quick synopsis of what I found…

Take a look at the URL for this page. If you are viewing it on the original post page then the URL is http://andreakropp.com/underscores-versus-hyphens-in-webpage-urls. Why not http://andreakropp.com/underscores_versus_hyphens_in_webpage_urls? It seems just as legible, so is this a matter of personal preference?

No. Search engines actually treat them differently.

The hyphen is viewed as a space between words, while the underscore is its own character such as the letter U.

When the search engine sees http://andreakropp.com/underscores-versus-hyphens-in-webpage-urls, it sees the distinct words “underscore”, “versus”, “hyphen”, “webpages” and “urls”. “In” is ingored. (Sorry Indiana).

When the search engine sees http://andreakropp.com/underscores_versus_hyphens_in_webpage_urls it is as if it sees “underscoresUversusUhyphensUinUwebpageUurls”. The underscore is treated like a text character that mashes the words into a indecipherable mess.

Google and other search engines have release statements about this and seem to working toward making the underscore on par with the hyphen, but it hasn’t happened yet. You only need to look at the actual search results for the queries “little_red_riding_hood” vs “little-red-riding-hood” vs “little red riding hood”. The version with underscores has only about 1/10th the number of results returned.

The final verdict…when in doubt hypenate!

Categories Copywriting
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Links, links and more links. There isn’t an SEO expert, manual or guru alive that isn’t recommending that you get more quality backlinks for your website. But what exactly is the definition of a quality backlink? How will you know one when you see one? This video explains exactly what to look for when judging link quality…

If you learned something from this video, pay it forward to someone else by sharing it…

Categories Search Engine Optimization
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What is a Citation?

Anyone trying to optimize a local business website has probably run across the them citation. But what exactly is a citation and what makes it different from a link? The simple answer is that a citation is a full or partial match for your Business Name, Address or Phone mentioned on another webpage. Confused? Watch the video…

If you learned something from this video, pay it forward to someone else by sharing it…

Categories Search Engine Optimization
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I was having lunch yesterday with a great local dentist buddy and we were discussing his website. During a napkin drawing of backlinking we talked about getting links from high page rank pages. That’s when the question “how do I check the page rank of my website or blog?” came up. Great question. This is how it’s done…

If you learned something from this video, pay it forward to someone else by sharing it…

Categories Search Engine Optimization
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Have you ever looked at the images on your website the way a search engine does? They don’t see smiling faces, the see only text. Text is the heart of on-page SEO…so your image names can gives you a boost.

  1. You must describe what is in the picture. No keyword stuffing.
  2. Use hyphens between words
  3. Keep search terms in mind
  4. Keep relative search volumes in mind
  5. At most, add 1 geographic modifier or other tangential keyword term. Make sure you vary this if there are a lot of images on a page

If you learned something new, please pay it forward using any of the share buttons.

Categories Search Engine Optimization
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If you like Yahoo Site Explorer and SEOQuake to reverse engineer your competitors’ online footprints, then you are going to love Advanced Link Manager.

advanced link manager software

Rather than tell you about Advanced Link Manager’s features and benefits in this review, instead I’m going to teach you how to use the information it provides to out-SEO your competition. After all, tools are about getting the job done. In this case, intelligent link building is the job and Advanced Link Manager is the tool. Here we go…
The single most important phrase I’ve read or heard about SEO is “match and exceed your competition” which I originally heard from Chad. Applied to linking, this means that if you can figure out the link profile of your competition and get a link from all the same sources – plus a couple extra – you should outrank that competitor. (Assuming for simplicity that site content quality in comparable). The key to putting this strategy into practice is successfully reverse engineering the link profile.

That is where Advanced Link Manager comes in.

  • First, load your competitors’ URLs into the software and watch it track down every inbound link. (This first step is similar to what you get from Yahoo Site Explorer).
  • Second, ask for the anchor text of each inbound link. Soon you’ll have a nifty pie chart showing you the distribution of anchor text used to form the inbound links! I’ve never seen another link manager with this capability.

advanced link manager anchor text chart

  • Third, ask for page rank information. The software will retrieve the Page Rank of the domain and the particular page where the link appears. For example a forum profile link on TV.com would have a PR 9 associated with the domain, but a much lower 0 or 1 associated with any one user’s profile. (You are welcome for the tip).

advanced link manager referrersNow you have a complete link profile in front of you. You know:

  • Quantity
  • Location
  • Anchor text
  • PR of page containing the inbound link
  • PR of domain containing the inbound link

It’s time to set to work matching this footprint.

Obviously you should start with the high PR pages (not domains) uncovered in the analysis. See if those specific pages will allow you to place a link. Next move on to high PR domains. If you are doing local optimization, scan the list for any sites that are hyperlocal blogs or local business directories. Also, be sure to run Advanced Link Manager against a couple different competitor’s sites to study their link popularity and see where the commonalities are. If several competitors have inbound links from a particular site, you should go there also.

It goes without saying that you should run Advanced Link Manager against your own domain. Tracking quantity of links is nice, but what you really want to monitor is your anchor text variety and the disappearance of any high PR links you worked hard to get.

I never used to participate in link requests from other webmasters before Advanced Link Manager. I was always afraid that they would remove my link after a few months and I would never know about it. With the Advanced Link Manager software, you’ll be notified of any links that disappear. Once the system finds a links, it will report each time whether the link is still intact. Pretty cool huh?

To sum up, this little piece of software makes big promises and delivers on them. Together with Advanced Web Ranking, the companion software to monitor rankings, this is the core of my SEO ‘intelligence gathering’. I couldn’t run my business correctly without it.

Categories Product Reviews
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Advanced Web Ranking Review

Thirty days ago, I downloaded the Advanced Web Ranking software to test on my own ~70 websites and several client sites. The trial has worked out famously, and I wanted to be sure to share this excellent resource piece of seo software with you.

advanced web ranking boxEven in thirty days, I wasn’t able to test and fully utilize every aspect of the software. It is an incredibly robust, industrial-strength solution for the serious do-it-yourselfer or SEO professional. Rather than try to share all the features and benefits with you, I thought I’d explain exactly what problem I was hoping to solve and the solution I was able to work out.

Client Rank Tracking Over Time

The Need:

My number one need was to be able to track the rank of client websites over time and prepare intelligent reports. As an SEO provider, my service is judged largely on week-to-week and month-to-month changes in rankings. Because I believe in generating traffic from hundreds of long-tail keywords in addition to the ‘obvious’ main keywords, I need to track rankings on hundreds of keywords for each client.

The Problem:

Before finding the Advanced Web Ranking software I tried two other approaches. First, I tried the free Rank Checker from SEOBook. This allowed me to gather rankings and store the results for one day in one CSV file. I then manually stitched together the CSV files to create time trends. This would have been fine for 2 or 3 sites checked once a month, but was really labor intensive given the volume of sites. Then, I tried using the tracking feature built into LinxBoss (which is one of my main backlink providers). They have a great interface and nice visuals for tracking rankings over time. The problem was that if I took any of my clients out of the LinxBoss program even for a day, I would lose all the site ranking history stored in their database. I wanted the ability to rotate clients through different link providers without losing the rank history. I needed a solution that gave me trend data stored on my own computer and independent of any link provider.

The Solution:

Advanced Web Ranking allows me to:

  1. Load hundreds of keywords
  2. Check ranks on all major search engines for each keyword/URL combination on a defined schedule
  3. Save all the results to my hard drive, server or cloud storage.
  4. Produce professional client-facing reports on demand branded with my company’s logo and contact information.
  5. Schedule the delivery of reports to clients automatically by email.

advanced web ranking screenshots

It was exactly what I needed, when I needed it.

Now that my main problem is solved, I’m delving into the other capabilities. I’m still setting up all the schedules. I need to learn how to use the proxy feature to protect my IP address and get better localized results. I’m also still configuring exactly what I want in my client reports from all the options and I’ve only briefly looked at the keyword research tool that is built it.

As I said before, Advanced Web Ranking did so much more than just solve my main problem. Instead of talking about all the cool features, I decided to write my review in this way to remind folks that all purchases are solution driven. If you can solve the customers’ problem at a fair price they will be loyal to you. Across my 30 day trial Advanced Web Rankings solved my #1 problem and I intend to be loyal to them and their sister product Advanced Link Manager. The fact that my client reports look better and are easier to produce is a bonus in my opinion.

Categories Product Reviews
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Get More Website Traffic

About two days ago I bought a course called Traffic Evolution…and boy am I glad. Here’s the skinny in a nutshell…

If you have been doing any advertising on Google via pay-per-click across that last 3 years then you know that prices are skyrocketing. One chiropractic pay-per-click management client I have has seen prices go up from ~$2 per click to over $12 for the same keywords. Ouch! Facebook is still in the sub $2 range for nearly every niche, but I don’t expect that will last beyond the end of 2011.

Google and Facebook are the ‘well known’ ad inventory that is easy for a beginner to access. But is it really beginner friendly to pay over $10 per click? What if there was a traffic source that delivered just as many visitors but was 1/10 the price at under 50 cents per visitor? Too good to be true?

That’s what I thought. I read every word of the sales letter to Traffic Evolution looking for the catch. You see, as I’ve been working on my taxes for 2010 I vowed not to buy any more “online marketing information products”. I’m a sucker for a good sales page and my bank account reflects that. Most of the courses I buy these days are duplicating stuff I already know, so I vowed to stay away.

This one drew me in and is the real deal.

A word of warning. This is not for beginners. This is for marketers with a solid offer to promote (as an affiliate or distributor) or an entrepreneur/small business owner with their own products and services to offer.

If you need more traffic, check out Jonathan Mizel’s Traffic Evolution. Even if you have also vowed to not buy any more ‘info products’ this year, check out the sales letter – it is a masterpiece and definitely one to bookmark and learn from.

Click to check it out. You’ll be glad you did;)

P.S. Isn’t this a great banner ad?

I was at the local Peets Coffee yesterday enjoying a sugar-free vanilla latte with friend and realtor Dave Dumas when the conversation turned toward outsourcing. The change in my voice and posture must have been striking to everyone around. Why? I love talking about extreme outsourcing (aka getting rid of everything in your life that you hate to a skilled assistant that costs you $300 per month full time).

My goal is not to get into a discussion of job loss in America or the lack of competitiveness of the American workforce, so please don’t leave comments like that. My goal is to demonstrate how small business owners can use overseas outsourcing to grow their businesses locally and free up their time for more recreation! [Note that both of these represent greater consumer spending in the US]

Ever considered having your mailing lists scrubbed overseas for $2.50 an hour? What about customer support? Perhaps your accounting? At the very least get rid of your web design and management. Add on top of that shopping for Christmas gifts for nieces and nephews, sending your best clients a gift for their birthday and the typical entrepreneur can buy back 20-30 hours per week of time for less than a dinner for two.

Interested enough to see if this is for real or not? Here is where to start…

  1. Get a copy of  The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. Read it cover to cover. Twice.
  2. Watch this free 2 hour webinar from John Jonas to learn the details of hiring FULL-TIME people overseas for less than $250/month.

I read the book and subscribed to John’s mailing list about 9 months ago and have never looked back. My outsourcers do SEO work, banner design, link building, article writing and more. If there is a specific question I can help with, please leave a comment below.

Also, please share this with any overworked small business owners that you know. HINT: That should be about 95% of all small business owners that have NO LIFE outside of their company. Do them a favor and share this chance to reclaim time.

Categories Outsourcing
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