Linking To Your Tags
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 7, 2009
Earlier today I was checking out one of the many blogs that I follow called Online Social Networking. I’m not sure where I originally met Larry online, but we started our blogs around the same time.
I was reading this one particular post, which was pretty good, but that’s not what caught my eye. For the first time, I noticed that Larry has a lot of links in each post. I’d never really paid much attention to it, though I’d clicked on a link from time to time, but tonight it really drew my attention. I decided to hover over some of them, and what I discovered has lit something in my mind.
Before I tell you what, let me mention these couple of things. Larry’s blog has a PR of 4; as I always say, I don’t overly care about page rank, but it’s a number so we’ll use it for the moment. He has an Alexa rank of 52,170. He has 703 RSS subscribers. He doesn’t write as often as I do, his posts aren’t as long as some of my posts are, and he has very little in the way of marketing items.
What he does have, though are those links. And what I noticed today was that many of those links aren’t just internal links, but are links to his tags.
As I’ve said, I’m relatively new to tags. I’ve done more tagging on my finance blog than I’ve ever done here. I have categories here, but not as many tags. Still, I could recognize the importance of the internal linking even more than I have up to this point. I link to much of my content when I think about it. However, there’s nothing wrong with doing some of that internal linking to either tags or categories. As a matter of fact, that’s one of the smartest things I’ve ever seen, and I wish I had thought of it before now.
Of course, I don’t think that’s the only reason his blog is ranked better than mine. He sticks to his one particular topic, which is pretty much anything that has to do with social networking and social media, while I kind of dabble in, well, pretty much whatever I want to dabble in. But one of those things we all need to remember with our blogging is internal linking and SEO, and this is one brilliant step that I’m going to start doing, just as I hope to start tagging some of my missives a little bit more also.
Oh, I still won’t have PR for awhile, but I’ve been wondering if there might be ways to increase my Alexa rank, since they still like me, and this might be the next step in helping to put me over. Also, something else I’m going to start doing is paying more attention to other articles I’m reading on other blogs, and if something fits an old post of mine, I’m going to link to it. Anchor links are important to do, even if the content isn’t on your own site. And other people deserve some love also, as I got this week from Kristi’s Fetching Friday post.
Something to important and yet to simple; oy! 
GoogleRankings Is Dead; For The Most Part
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Oct 9, 2009
One of those little inside things I’ve always had going for my SEO business is that I had a Google API so that I could use GoogleRankings. This little tool allowed me to put in keywords and see where I was ranked for those keywords (SERPS); that was wonderful. When I wrote a post about this little SEO Project I undertook, which actually ended up working pretty well but took longer than I had expected, the way I was able to check my rankings was through GoogleRankings.
Now, why I was ahead of a lot of people is that Google had stopped giving out APIs some time in 2006. They said they weren’t really going to support it anymore, but would continue running the service. I thought that was great since I had my number.
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Suddenly, it stopped working. I had thought that maybe there was a glitch somewhere, so I didn’t worry about it. However, when I checked again today, now I was wondering what was up. So I did my search on Google, and lo and behold I learned that they’ve totally shut down my SOAP API service. This meant I could basically check GoogleRankings for Yahoo and MSN, but nothing else. Because they weren’t updating it, they weren’t ever going to add Bing, and actually MSN had pretty much shut down, as well as Ask. And then, just after midnight, they shut down the site totally; GoogleRankings is no more.
So, what will I use next? I’m kind of at a loss. I found a couple other sites, but none of them worked. And I mean that literally; it’s not that they didn’t give me what I wanted, they just decided they didn’t want to play. I will find something, though; I have to have my information. Anyone have any ideas out there?
SEO & Common Business Sense
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on May 29, 2009
A couple of weeks ago, I was having a conversation with someone about some of the things I did. I told him that one of my careers was being an internet marketing consultant for small businesses. He of course asked me what I meant, and I told him.
At that point he said “I have a website, but I’ve never done anything with it, and it hasn’t done anything for me.”
I said “Well, if you haven’t done anything with it, what were you expecting it do for you?”
He said “I don’t know; I thought I’d have people calling me for business, but it’s never happened.”
This is very common in business across the board, but especially for small businesses. I do okay with my main business website, and I’ve at least gotten some work through my SEO, though I’m working on things, as I talked about in my posts on my update (which, by the way, I hope you saw my last comment on, which mention that things may have gone better than I’d thought). I asked him if we could take a look at his website, and since we were in a place with internet access, we did.
I looked at his site, then I asked him what he did, though I knew what he did. He said “I offer business solutions for people and help them solve their efficiency issues.”
I said “No, that’s a result of what you do. What do you do?”
He thought about it for a moment, then told me exactly what he did. I asked him where that was on his main page, and he looked; nowhere. I asked him where he did his business, and where was it on the site; nowhere. We pulled up my main business site for comparison; with some stuff hidden, since I’m not in advertising mode for that business today, I showed him my first line: “XXXXX, is a health care revenue cycle and management consulting company based in Syracuse, NY.”
Right from the beginning, you know my business name, which, of course, is in the top logo. One should always put it into their content on their main site because search engines can’t read images. You know exactly what I do if you’re in my industry and are looking at the site; if you’re not in health care this means nothing to you, but at least you know. And you know where I’m based, which many businesses omit. Sometimes it’s contained on the contact page, which you know I hate; I’m going to have to write an article on that one of these days.
We looked at a couple more pages, and he was starting to get the picture. I told him this was a free consultation, but to mention it to friends and other business owners if he got something out of it. After all, I need to get the word spread on what I do for local businesses.
The thing is, this can be perceived as just SEO stuff to help someone’s search position on the internet. Sure, it’s a part of that, but in reality, this is a business concept. If you don’t tell people what you do, then they won’t know. If people have to drag it out of you, then things may never get to that point, and they’ll never know if they could have used your services. This happens at networking meetings, and it happens with websites.
It’s probably the reason why I hate most sales pages I see online. Sometimes you read what could be 5 to 10 pages of sales stuff, and never get to just what the product is for. Sometimes you only have a few words, and you either get a video that usually says nothing or you’re being asked for your name and email address so you can receive some report.
Once again, not selling (as proven by no link here), but on the site with my website marketing book, I first ask the probing questions (which is also a good way to handle advertising; find the pain), show the product, then tell exactly what it is. After that, I use some testimonials and the like, but I get to the point immediately. If that doesn’t intrigue people, then nothing else I saw is going to be seen; if it does, then the rest may help to enhance the sale.
Take another look at your website, if you have a business site other than your blog, and see if you’re really telling people what you do, and how soon. Who knows, it could help increase your business overall.
SEO Project – The Update
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on May 7, 2009
For those of you who remember, I wrote a post on April 7th titled An SEO Project I’m Undertaking. I was going to try to raise my search engine ranking for three websites using traditional SEO techniques for certain keyword phrases.
A brief history first. I decided to undertake this after Khaled wrote me and had an idea on how I could do this. I figured I was ahead of the game generally, since one of my businesses is SEO related, but usually I work on sites that have pretty much nothing going for them at all, or brand new sites. I don’t do a lot with sites that, for the most part, are optimized for their own reasons.
In any case, I decided to try. Here are the results of that trial; they’re not pretty.
Starting with this blog, I said I was going to try to get ranked for the term “affiliate internet marketing.” At the time, I was only showing on MSN search, and in position 825. Now I’m only showing on Yahoo, dropping off MSN altogether, but in 231st position. That’s interesting, but not quite what I was shooting for, as I’m still nowhere in Google’s top 1,000.
What did I do? I went back through all my posts, all 400+, looking for everything in categories related to “affiliates”, “internet”, and “marketing”. Then I started all my internal linking, using the search term I wanted by slightly rewriting some copy, and linking to articles that helped support that term. This was the longest part of the project. It didn’t end up working, but at least if people decide to read any of the old stuff they’ll be linked to newer stuff also.
Next, for my SEO site, I wanted to get ranked for the term “internet marketing consultant.” Before I started, I came up 54th on MSN and 14th on Yahoo. Right now, I only come up on Yahoo, in 479th position. Man, that’s a royal drag. How the heck did I drop so far? No real idea on this one.
What did I do? I first wrote an article on what I thought an internet marketing consultant was. Then I went through my pages and added that search term to them, linking back to the article. That was pretty much it; I added the term to maybe 1/3rd of the pages on that site, including the meta descriptions and in meta keywords, which supposedly work better on other search engines than Google; nope, nada. Now, oddly enough, my Alexa ranking did go up, so it wasn’t a total loss.
The final attempt was for one of my monthly clients. I was hoping to move his rank up for the term food doctor I didn’t think I was going to be able to do much for him, since he doesn’t have a lot of pages, but I slightly rewrote his copy to fit that in better. Initially he was 106 on Google, 45th on Yahoo, and 60th on MSN. Now he’s at 110 on Google and 54th on Yahoo; MSN stayed the same.
So, what does this tell us about SEO? I’m not quite sure. Well, I am, and I’m not.
One, trying to change things with a blog that hasn’t been geared towards a certain topic in the past is difficult, and could actually be impossible, without some drastic rewrites and possibly killing some older posts; that’s just not going to happen.
Two, SEO onto itself isn’t always enough to start ranking for something new, something you’ve never tried to rank before. In this case, for my SEO site, I either needed to write more things about being a consultant and the internet in general than I actually have on the site.
Three, I also probably should have run an Adwords campaign, not necessarily to drive traffic to the site, although that’s a big part of it, but those impressions showing up on other sites with my link couldn’t have hurt.
Four, I didn’t have the time to try to incorporate a link building strategy into all of this, which might have helped. I tried doing it all with internal linking and changing copy; I think this experiment shows that’s not enough to conquer the world.
Anyway, that was a lot of work for a lot of nothing, and I don’t see myself trying anything like that again around here. Oh yeah; my Alexa ranking here stayed pretty much the same, as it did for my client’s site.
An SEO Project I’m Undertaking
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Apr 7, 2009
As some of you know, I also have a SEO business, SEO Xcellence. From this business, I handle a few clients on a monthly basis, working on getting them up higher on the search engines for certain terms.
Well, I’ve decided that it’s time to see how good or bad I am with some of this stuff. So, putting it out here for the masses, I’m about to undertake a project to see if I can increase my ranking on the major search engine for some search terms for three websites. Two are mine, the aforementioned above, and this blog. The other is one of my clients, Srim Enterprises, whom I introduced with my post on Nutritional Questions Answered.
Here’s the deal. I’m not shooting for the stars, although those would be nice. What I want to see is if I can affect, in some fashion, where each of these sites will be ranked in a month for certain terms. Here are those terms, as well as where we sit right now:
The term: “Food Doctor”
Present rankings: Google – 106
Yahoo – 45
MSN – 60
The term: “Internet Marketing Consultant”
Present Rankings: MSN – 54
Yahoo – 14
The term: “Affiliate Internet Marketing”
Present rankings: MSN – 825
So, those are the terms I’m going to shoot for. As you notice, on my two I have no Google ranking whatsoever; that’s a shame. And, for clarification, for my main business, “internet marketing consultant” isn’t what we usually talk about around here as far as trying to make money on the internet. It’s about internet presence for small businesses and how to use their websites for their business, which relates to my ebook Using Your Website As A Marketing Tool, a copy of which Mirjam just won as a prize on one of Dennis’ contests.
How am I going to do it? I’m not telling; yeah, that’s a shame, but I’m not telling up front. However, I expect to write about this in about a month, the follow up, and if what I hope happens does, and I increase each site for the terms we’re shooting for, I’ll tell it then. And, now that I’ve written this here, I can’t take it back. Well, I could, but I won’t; wish me luck. Maybe if I show improvement and tell you how I did it, y’all will gift me with some love in that Top Spots area there, eh?
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