lurksteraz on January 8th, 2008
Wordze has decided to do something crazy for the new year. They’re giving away 30 days Free!
This promo is only good for 7 days, so if you’re looking for a great keyword research tools, I’d suggest checking it out.
lurksteraz on December 5th, 2007
I’m sitting in my hotel room at in Vegas right now, and decided it would be a perfect time to write about PubCon. Today was day 1, and there were a lot of exciting conferences going on. Here is my list of do’s and don’ts on day 1. I’ll post on the following days.
Day 1 Do’s:
1. Wear comfortable shows. I added insoles, but I’m not sure it was enough.
2. Take notes. There is alot of good information.
3. Make sure to attend a session early or else you stuck in the back and have to listen to people talking the whole time.
4. Bring water with your or whatever you want to drink. The vending machines are expensive.
5. Try to talk to others around you. You’d be amazed at some of the connections you can make.
Don’ts
1. Don’t bring an over sized laptop, or else you will be stuck lugging the thing around with you everywhere.
2. Don’t wear uncomfortable clothes. Although there is no real dress code that I could see, you still don’t want to dress like a slob.
3. Don’t try to attend too many sessions, it’s real easy to get burnt out.
This is all of the don’ts I can think of right now. As the days roll on, I’ll be able to post more.
Overall Day 1 Impressions:
There is some good information out there, but at the same time, some of the presenters are a little dry. I won’t name any names, but I would probably leave the session to go to another next time.
On the other hand, I will name some of the really good speakers, Rand Fishkin, Neil Patel, Andy Hagan and Todd Malicoat. I thoroughly enjoyed their presentations. Specifically Social Media, Link Buying and Link Baiting. Very good stuff and I see myself executing some new tactics in the near future.
lurksteraz on November 17th, 2007
I’m sure everyone has had this happen to them.
You research a niche to find that it’s untapped, great pay, and a gem waiting to be polished to make some money. Well, I signed up for some affiliate accounts(can’t say which yet), register the perfect domain name and start to build out the website.
After the site is built, I like to launch with no ads and let marinate for a while. Get the site indexed, build some links and wait about a month before really pushing anything on it. So, the site does better than I thought with natural rankings and starts to compete with the main affiliate site.
Within a month, I get an email and also a letter from a lawyer stating that the domain I registered infringes on a trademark and I need to ‘cease and desist’ while turning over the domain name. But the weird thing was that in the letter, it seemed to mainly speak of ‘Unfair Competition’. I’m sure there is a bunch of legal mambo-jambo that I don’t understand, but fuck it.
The last time I checked, the purpose of offering an affiliate program is to create more sales for the company and for the affiliate… This kind of crap pisses me off, especially since the site was ranking great naturally.
In the end, I lose no matter what. I removed the site, and have to turn over the domain name. If I ever hear of anyone promoting this particular site or mentioning anything about it, I will do my best to sway them against promoting the at all costs.
I would have thought that a business would want to be promoted to make money, I guess not.
lurksteraz on October 4th, 2007
Been busy lately. In a push to make more money, have time to spend with my kid and also fund moving to Bend, Oregon, I’ve decided to leave the Search Marketing Agency I have been working at for the past 3 years. It’s a little freaky leaving a job, especially when the least amount time I’ve ever been at a job is at least 3 years.
I took a new position as online marketing director at a small start-up. So I hope this also opens doors for me to pursue more opportunities.
So, I wanted to make a quick post about SEO and re-designing an established website. Here are some of the key elements I’ve preached when someone wants to do a complete overhaul of any site. Some of these are basic, but again, worth mentioning.
1. Keep the same domain name if possible. Domain equity is important when it comes to being an authority site. Longevity plays a key role in helping you rank.
2. 301 redirect old URLs to the new corresponding URLs. This helps pass page link popularity and links to the new pages and also lets the search engines know you have new pages to index.
3. Always plan to incorporate optimization into your site. This is important since you don’t want your company to have to go back do double work. Always plan you attack to make your time as efficient as possible.
4. Update your backlinks. Go through your backlinks and see if anyone will allow you to update the anchor text. This is great for applying new keywords that you want to rank for.
5. Always build content into your site. Many times I’ve witnessed businesses rebuild a site only to use text that’s built into the images, Flash movies, ect. You should always build content.
Anyways, I just wanted to throw those out there. They’re basic, but you’d be amazed at the kinds of companies don’t do this.
lurksteraz on September 16th, 2007
I’ve decided to write a little post about keyword research tools that I’ve used. I ran into a couple people that thought they were gods gift to the SEO world and everything they talked about were solid gold and they would never be wrong. When we talked about researching keywords, they were only using one tools, Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool. Well, I didn’t have the heart to tell them as this gave me an edge, but if you didn’t know, Yahoo hasn’t supported this tool in a long time. I think it’s been since January for an update. So this makes the counts a little skewed as well as seasonality being reflected.
These guys also tried to convince me that the counts were for natural search only. I had to laugh and walk away for a second. YST uses paid numbers and inflated a little to get people to buy more keywords for PPC. Although the numbers are a good reflection of a particular market, they shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Next we had talked about the Trellian keyword tool. If you have ever used this tool, it’s pretty good but limited. Anyways, these guys were trash talking the service to no ends. From the search counts being not accurate to they charge too much yet they still used it. Personally, I like this service, but everyone has their opinions. This service gathers their keywords from ISPs. One important element though is the search counts are from about 2 million users. So, do the math on 2 million users compared to however many internet users…. I think I forgot to tell these about this factor…ooops!
Now I didn’t really try to argue or attempt to correct these guys, only for the fact that they thought they were the hottest shit since sliced bread and offered no real knowledge and were just negative. These kind of people drive me nuts. I may not be the best SEO blue ribbon winner of the universe, but damn, common sense has to play a role sometime.
lurksteraz on September 6th, 2007
So, since my background and profession is in Natural Search Marketing. I thought I would share some of the problems I see when people are “SEOing’ their websites and offer some suggestions on what has worked for me on my websites (not this blog).
1. Targeting 40 keywords for one web page: This is just stupid. For one, your keyword density is going to be all out of whack. Second, hos are you going to fit all of these keywords on one page? My tip: Target anywhere from 3 - 5 keywords per page. This allows you focus on one main keyword and find derivatives of the same term while keeping in mind they are terms people are actually searching for. Remember, you won’t get traffic from terms nobody is looking for.
2. Placing all of your keywords above the sites’ main body: Ugh! don’t you hate it when you visit a site that has a ton of keywords all stacked on top of the main page body. Normally these are in Bold and separated by hyphens. My Tip: actually try to work these keywords into the body copy and also into header tags. There is some importance to these.
3. Tiny little text at the bottom of pages and same color as background: Oh Brother! Although this isn’t as intrusive as the keywords above the body, but this is also annoying. When you visit a site and the page you’re on looks like it’s a million miles long and when you scroll down and there appears to be nothing there. CTRL+A reveals alot!
Well, these are just a few of the annoyances I see on some sites and I’ll post more later. Feel free to comment on some of the stupid things you’ve seen.
lurksteraz on September 6th, 2007
Thought I’d share this with you. Derek B has hit another home run with one his posts about Building An Authority Affiliate Site .
I do have to say one thing though. I’ve been reading alot of blogs about affiliate marketing there is alot of crap out there. I think DB’s site is one of the most informative I’ve read and will continue to read. I’ve noticed that there are blogs out there that all they mention is how good they do with affiliate marketing and how they have every toy known to man, yet offer nothing really informative. “I went here, I bought this” kind of posts are inspiring, but at the same time offer no substance for truly learning the craft of affiliate marketing.
Anyways, that’s my rant for the moment.
lurksteraz on August 28th, 2007
Have you ever started a project, completed halfway only to never return to it and finish? That’s the story of my life. I have so many projects that are just sitting out there in cyber space collecting dust. Here is what happens to me:
1. Think of something that has the potential to make some cash.
2. Start researching the market and collecting keywords
3. Start working on a layout for the website
4. Think of a new domain or niche
5. Launch the new site
6. Searching for a new domain name from line 4
7. Find a few links to the newly launched website
8. Start another new layout for domain I just bought
9. and so on
You can kind of see a pattern in the way I’ve been doing it. Work on one thing and think of something else that could be better and start working on that, and the vicious cycle continues. I call this affiliate er-web-tile dysfunction. I just can’t get it going.
Solution:
I’ve started to focus on just a few niches. Starting with building a site and then further building it out. Obviously I’ll shoot for natural rankings as this is the easiest to start with, then when the time(and money) are available I can start to throw PPC advertising at some offers. I’m sure people reading this are saying, ‘go for the ppc advertising first, instant traffic’, well unless you want to deposit some cash into my paypal, I would do it. But when money is tight, I have to shoot for natural rankings.
To start, I have 3 websites I’m focusing my effort on and are ranking already for some keywords but the high traffic keywords haven;t surfaced yet. I’ll try to post some progress reports on these, so stay tuned.
lurksteraz on August 14th, 2007
I just wanted to give a quick update on what I’ve been doing. I have been building more and more websites. In the past week I’ve added an additional 5 complete websites all in different industries. That brings my count to, well, a lot of damn sites to maintain. I’ve also resorted back to my roots of implementing many black hat techniques for natural rankings. I tried to go legit and not do any shady stuff, but when it’s easy to do it, why not.
Anyways, I’ve decided to also set up a few sites specifically for drop shipping products. I was able to work out a few deals with some vendors for unique products to drop ship. I figure this would be good for wife to at least process orders as they come through.
Unfortunately, I have to wait for payday to relaunch more PPC ads. Went broke on the first run of campaigns that hadn’t produced any conversions. When payday rolls around again, I’ll relaunch the campaigns with some tweaks that include a tests I’d like to run and see what happens. If these tests don’t pan out, I need to wait again for another paycheck just to fund them. That sucks! Luckily Adsense will be depositing in a week or so.
In other news, I seemed to have built up about 6 weeks of vacation and decided to take off. I’ve been planning my attack for building out an additional 25 domains. Shouldn’t take too long if I plan accordingly.
Well, I’ll make another post in a day or so, I’m typing this from my cube and don’t want the boss to what I’m doing.
