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  • SEO Factor » Blog Archive » » The Other ROI: The Risk Of Ignoring Social Media

    23 October 2008 2 Comments

    While at the SMX East this year, I heard a panelist say this. I really wish I could remember who it was because I would like to give credit to said person. It was said in regard to social media marketing, and how there is still this dis-belief of its use and power. Executives often get hung up on Return On Investment, ignoring the other ROI; the Risk Of Ignoring.

    I was reminded of this today when I had a short conversation on Twitter:

    seofactor @PearlyWrites HoJo Microsite is getting there! We are almost done, or at least that is what we keep saying…

    seofactor @PearlyWrites Hey, you’re doing a HoJo site?

    PearlyWrites @seofactor Yes, we have been working on Organic SEO w/ their internal department & they asked us if we can develop a site&database.

    PearlyWrites @seofactor So we have been as well as finished up Organic SEO for all the Wyndham Hotel brands&doing final proofs on 160 pages.

    seofactor @PearlyWrites Cool. I work for a hotel Internet marketing agency. Nice to know someone else out there gets to feel the pain of hotel seo.

    PearlyWrites @seofactor haha I find it fun but I am known for being a little odd

    seofactor @PearlyWrites Fun, yes. Easy, no. Requires sleep deprivation when you manage 90+ hotels, certainly. I like it too though. Especially the

    seofactor @PearlyWrites hard ones. Like Orlando. It is difficult to shine when your job is too easy.

    PearlyWrites @seofactor YES I totally agree with you! Lots of travel sites tend to take over the rankings vs the true hotels. Challenges are fun…

    seofactor @PearlyWrites Ah yes…stupid TripAdvisor. Let me know if you ever hit a stump. I might have some ammo for you.

    PearlyWrites @seofactor Def. and the same for you!

    What does all this mean? At first glance, not much for a big company. However, for the independent SEO, conversations like this mean the difference between steak and Ramen noodles. At it’s core, these few short sentences have created a connection that may prove valuable one day.

    You see, I work for an agency that deals primarily in the hospitality industry. It turns out that my Twitter friend is working in this segment currently. Without this conversation, we were not likely to ever meet or speak. But, now we are fully aware of each other.

    Perhaps one day she needs an SEO. Maybe one day she has a question about hotel SEO (a segment in which I am very comfortable calling myself an expert), and I will be there to answer it. Maybe vice versa. Maybe she will post a job opening, and I am in need. Well, she will at the very least know that I’m a hotel SEO genius (maybe that’s a bit much).

    Either way. I can directly attribute Twitter for 6 job offers (one of which sounds incredibly nice), and 3 of my current clients. what if I had ignored it all together? I might very well be eating Ramen noodles tonight (I’m having steak, by the way).

  • SEO Factor » Blog Archive » » Be Careful With Similarities In Potential SEO Clients

    29 October 2008 One Comment

    So, a sales guy walks over to me with a URL in hand. He asks that I give him a brief overview of some of the SEO points he should go over for a sales call, and what we can do for this potential client. I pull the site up, give it a few minutes to sink in, and I start typing some notes (I can’t tell you how boring a sales guys finds this whole process).

    A few minutes later, I turn my complete attention to my notes so that I may convey the points to my buddy. I start a sentence “it seems that there wasn’t any really keyword research performed as I can see…” when he interrupts. “Yeah, because of the title tag and the content, right?” I reply “well, yeah, that’s right.” This theme is repeated for about 10 minutes when I realize, we have this same conversation a lot.

    You see, when you work for an agency, you get to take note of a lot of sites that have never even given SEO a thought. Not in the slightest. And this is a big problem. Not because these sites do not have an online marketing strategy (though that is a problem), but because it creates a habit that can become self-destructive.

    When you see so many new sites with a vast number of similar problems, you fall into the habit of always pointing at those problems. After a while, sites come in and you wave your magic “it is all these things, just like the others” wand at it, and you are likely to miss something else. This can become even more of a problem when you start to optimize mass quantities of sites with the same outlook. There’s a really good chance you are going to miss some glaring issues. So what do we do about all this?

    Check That List
    I find it best to run the sites I’m about to optimize through a checklist. This is a list of all of the most common problems we see, and the most common steps to resolving them. This way, I don’t give much of my brain attention to getting to those. Just run down the list, and get them done.

    Get Out of Your Box
    At the end of my checklist, there is a step to “use your noggin now.” This means that “hey, all the common stuff has been taken care of now, Josh. Put the list down without thinking about it, and do what you do best.” This way I can concentrate on finding all those little weird things that may be holding the site back.

    Take A Break
    This is one of those old tricks that your college professor would advise when studying; or writing that huge paper on how incredibly ridiculous the military strategies of the civil war really were. Take a moment to get your mind off of the project, and come back with a fresh outlook. This will keep you from falling into a rut, and from burning out too quickly.

    The Buddy System
    Have a colleague or peer take a look at things when you’re all done. Give them what you already have. Share ideas. Some of the most successful campaigns I’ve ever been involved with were the direct result of a casual (as casual as SEO can be) conversation with another SEO. A new set of eyes are more likely to see something differently than the pair you’ve been using to lull over the site for hours on end.

    At the end, just remember that sure, there are a lot of common mistakes made by website creators but do your best to look at each case as a different one. When we starting lumping all these sites into one view, we end up offering the same package to everyone where different levels of service are needed.

  • Save A Leg. Save A Li

    This is the test groups for the Jacksonville chapter.

    This is a test group for the Hollywood, CA chapter of Save a Leg, Save a Life.

    Subscribe now for Save A Leg. Save A Li newsletter to receive news, updates, photos of top rated members, feedback, tips and articles to your e-mail.

    Write your e-mail here:

    No profile polls available.

  • SEO Factor » Blog Archive » » Check Your Tweets For Workplace Safety

    9 December 2008 No Comment

    With so many users, both corporate and ‘civilian,’ it’s almost odd to walk into an office without at least one person on Twitter. Tons of people are using Twitter to share their dinner plans or promote their new product or compose customer feedback (at a hugely decreased cost I might add). But with so many users, it needs to be said: Be careful with what you say.

    The advent of blogger firings was only a short few years ago, but seems to have been all but forgotten (it’s not juicy anymore), and though I haven’t heard too many stories, I do see it as something that will happen to Twitter users in the future.

    Take some of this advice, and be mindful of the comments you make on Twitter.

    Don’t Share Confidential Information
    It’s probably common sense that confidential information about your company shouldn’t be shared with your Twitter followers. This was probably the number one reason for blogger firings when that was hot news. Telling the world about a new cost saving, proprietary process could easily be picked up by a competitor, and for some reason employers don’t like that. Pfft…employers.

    Censor Internal Gripes
    Aside from confidential stuff, companies also don’t like it when you complain about internal policies, people, etc. I know we do it on our smoke breaks and at lunches, but news travels fast on the Interwebs and it is usually within a companies legal rights to terminate an employee in order to protect it’s reputation. Complaining employees can easily be seen as a reflection of a companies internal instability. For some reason employers don’t like that either. They are a fickle bunch, yeah?

    Bad-Mouthing The Competition
    This one is tricky. Especially in a market dealing with Internet services, it’s easy to cross paths with a competitor, client of a competitor or potential client of a competitor. Do yourself a favor and try not to speak with ill regard to said competitor. It may be the truth, your boss may even agree, but it looks unprofessional and can indeed lead to legal problems down the road. Why employers don’t like being sued is beyond me.

    Opinions vs. Official Stance
    I recently consulted with an attorney making use of Twitter. And she is really working it. Tons of followers, it gets tons of her attention and she is getting a ton of rewards. The very first thing I noticed about her account was the way in which she connected with people. She was very personal and easy to approach. She responded to people consistently and held great conversations. “awesome” I said. “But stop doing that.”

    Obviously I didn’t want her to stop completely, but we had to define some lines. When you are speaking as a lawyer, personally or not, your opinions could be construed as official stance. No matter your industry, take care to note your opinions vs. advice and define them clearly.

    Don’t Get Too Personal
    If you are working with a company’s Twitter account it’s important that you come across as a person and not a sales pitch. This is the essence of social media. However, it’s not a good idea to share those intimate pictures of you and your boyfriend while Tweeting on your employer’s profile. Rule of thumb: if you wouldn’t show your mother, don’t show your followers.

    I’m sure that’s not it, but that should get you going. In the end, use your noggin. That’s the best tool we have anyway, might as well put it to work.

  • SEO Factor » Blog Archive » » Calling SEOs, What Can You Handle? [POLL]

    Home » SEO, The Working SEO

    16 December 2008 5 Comments

    I just want to put something to rest. All things being equal (they never are) I can usually handle about 10 – 15 small to medium sized clients at one time. To be honest, that’s just about pushing actually. No, it may be closer to 10 than 15.

    I’ve gone from only 1 (extremely large client) to 19 (which were nothing more than audits and keyword research).

    So my question. Let’s play in a hypothetical world where you cater to small to medium business websites, which will generally be local-focused, how many of those sites do you think you can handle at one time without sacrificing quality or integrity?

    n How Many SEO Accounts Can You Handle at One Time?

  • SEO Factor such and such














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  • SEO Factor » Blog Archive » Online Reputation Management with Trackur

    12 December 2008 4 Comments

    This review on Trackur will be a little different than others out there. Mostly because those have done a good job, and there’s no sense in duplicating that stuff.

    I did approach the idea for this post in order to review Trackur, but found that I liked it a lot right off. Instead, I’ll briefly go over a quick setup, then discuss a few reasons why you would want to use it.

    What Is Trackur?
    Taken directly from their site:

    “Trackur is an online reputation monitoring tool designed to assist you in tracking what is said about you on the internet. Trackur scans hundreds of millions of web pages–including news, blogs, video, images, and forums–and lets you know if it discovers anything that matches the keywords that interest you.”

    Basically, Trackur will scan the Interwebs to find any mentions of the keywords you select. This way, you won’t have to rely on Google alerts or basic searching on your own time.

    Setup
    Once you sign up for your free trial of Trackur, you will be presented a simple form where you will input a keyword, filters, excluded words and excluded domains.

    Look, there are much better walkthroughs than what I could provide. I will link to the areas of Trackur’s site at the end of this post, along with some other reviews.

    So, let’s look at a quick real-world use.

    I’m Wal-Mart. I know that there are a ton of stories out there about the way I treat my employees and suppliers. This negative perception of my business is starting to get a lot of attention, and as a smart company I want to take action to help clear it up.

    I’ll look for mentions of my name, and include some filters to look for some related words. I’ll also exclude mentions of these words and names from within my own domain. Like so:

    We will be presented a number of results that match my search criteria:

    By clicking on one of these results, I can get a snippet of the story, see the date that it was posted and view the original story as needed (this is important, so remember that).

    So, let’s say I see a ton of stories relating to a topic that I’ve already taken care of. In this hypothetical case, I see the $54+ million settlement story all over the place (remember this too).

    I took care of that and I don’t want to see those stories right now. Also, there are some mentions of positive information that I’m not concerned with on this go-around. Let us now make use of some of the exclusion words.

    Running this again, I am now left with just a few negative mentions that I will want to take care of.

    Now, let’s save this run so that we can keep up and track trends related to this search.

    I named this ‘Personal/Personnel’ because I want to watch any personal blogs/stories out there about personnel (catchy).

    Very Interesting Update:
    So, along with setting up the saved tracking, you can also setup alerts via email or RSS. Obviously Andy Beal (creator of Trackur) would keep tabs on one of his own products. He notified me via Twitter that he got the alert. It was seriously within 30 minutes of posting this. How’s that for real-time monitoring?

    Ok, so that is a quick and dirty setup. You can get a lot more involved and really get some good information about your company or brand and manage your online reputation. Now, let’s talk about some reasons someone like Wal-Mart would want to use this tool.

    The Why

    Let’s imagine for just a moment that I was really involved in managing my reputation. The example above returned several complaints about employees for my stores using their phones and texting while ringing my customers up.

    This was mentioned too many times. Perhaps I would want to initiate a company wide policy that cell phones are prohibited from certain areas or that certain uses would be grounds for disciplinary action (no…not Wal-Mart).

    On a grander scale, do you remember all those posts and stories about the $54 million settlement? Of course you do, I asked you to remember. It’s safe to say that those stories give the option for their visitors to leave comments. Those are going to be pretty bad. That’s OK.

    Get with legal, tell them to draft a response. Then get with someone with a brain, and tell them to make the response caring and friendly. You can quickly access a ton of those stories through Trackur and leave a nice comment to set things at ease. You may be surprised the impact a simple official response can have on your reputation. It let’s people know that you are at least listening.

    Finally, there are still a ton of people that see my company as the “nice, saving you money” kind of place. I would like to keep it that way. A big reason they see this is due to the millions of dollars I put into branding in the form of a simple smiley face. I need to protect that little face thingy.

    With this search alone, I would have seen a ton of uses of that face that are very obviously in violation of the law. Some of them I’m not so sure about, but I should at least take a look at it. Actually, instead of looking at it that way, I should probably take part in the making fun of myself. This would help to restore that “hey, we are cool people just like you” perception my company used to have.

    So there you have it. I set this up and ran a report in just under 10 minutes. Give me a few hours and just a bit of time every week, and I could really get a detailed look at mentions of my name, brand and reputation online.

    Resources
    You won’t find any better resources than those available on the Trackur website. Videos and turorials galore:

    There are also several reviews online that all say the same thing, mostly. Get Trackur. I can’t wait to really get into it. As a matter of fact, I’m discussing it’s use for all of my clients to enhance the value I give them.

    Oh and a disclaimer: I mentioned previously that I was going to gradually monetize this site. I have strong opinions about blindly taking money for reviews, so I won’t do that. Instead, I’ll review things and if I like it enough to warrant a promotion, I’ll do that. If they have an affiliate, I’ll put some links in that manner in there. Warning though, if I don’t like your stuff, not only will I say so, but any links will be nofollowed; so don’t email me with junk….or else.

  • Untitled Document

    by Ann Smarty

    I recently had a conversation with Rae Hoffman via Twitter about the use of my posts here on SEJ. To clear things up, my posts are really meant specifically for SEJ readers as a recap of news, forum threads, tools, etc. to induce a conversation in a centralized atmosphere. We feel that this helps to culminate a lot of the going-ons in the SEO community, and share thoughts and ideas on those subjects.

    It was brought to my attention by Rae that she didn’t appreciate that these types of posts made it to Sphinn and in her opinion they went “Hot” all too often.

    If you were a spectator of the Twitter conversation, please be aware that Rae is very strong minded and fights for her beleifs (rumored to the death, even), and you have to respect that in a person. Things may have seemed heated, but that’s what happens when people disagree. We certainly don’t blame her for voicing her thoughts.

    That being said, we strive to make SEJ a one-stop destination for simple SEO tips, news and information. We want to do our best to appeal to as wide a groups as possible. As such, we would like your opinion on the posts that recap the news or posts from other sources.

    Please take this poll, then send SEO Factor $10 for the “buy an SEO a new hat” fund.

    Should SEJ Remove the Ability to Sphinn a post on certain topics?

    – vote – Nah, I like that stuff and find it on Sphinn usually?

    – vote – Please, remove the Sphinn button from those posts.

    – vote – What’s a “Rae?”

    – vote – It makes no difference to me.

    – vote – Apple Sauce does NOT belong in brownies

    (or something like that. Why not let the community decide?)

  • SEO Factor » Blog Archive » » Effective SEO Software

    13 April 2009 No Comment

    When my consulting gig was in full swing, this was the topic I was asked most about; SEO software. I find it especially intersting when this question is posed by the owner of an agency. Scary indeed.

    Everyone wants a quick and easy way of doing things these days. And who can blame them? In a world where you can find your friend’s location via their iPhone while talking to your wife and ordering a pizza on the same device, coming up against something that doesn’t offer an immediate gratification is something of an oddity. Add to that the prevelance of the use of the words “SEO software,” it’s no wonder people are put off when I say “there isn’t any.”

    So, maybe I should clear this up a bit, and offer something of a solution for those looking for the real SEO software.

    My common “no” response is to the most literal question. There isn’t an effective software that you can set, forget then rank. There’s no magic application to build quality content or links to your site. And you will be hard pressed to find an executable to convince Digg users to promote your submission.

    No, sir. When we say “SEO software,” we are talking about applications that make quick work of the common tasks we need to complete in order to gain insight to a page and it’s elements, which will in turn help us to decide on our SEO tactics moving forward.

    Effective SEO Software Resources

    I’ll be happy to point you in the direction of a few of the more common tools of the trade. Please note that I don’t necessarily put the SEO Factor Seal of Approval on any one of these, but have used them in the past. I’m saying they are effective, but I’m not saying they are 100% accurate.

    Instead of writing reviews on any of these, I’ll point you to other lists of tools from sources that I can at least say I trust. There are a ton of reviews out there, so I would suggest that before you put too much faith in any of them, do a few searches yourself and see what others have to say.

    http://tools.seobook.com/
    http://www.seomoz.org/dp/the-internet-marketing-handbook

    I would also like to point you to a “tool professional.” If you need software to complete some SEO task, Ann Smarty probably has a solution. Even further, she has probably tested a solution and several other options and written a review herself. You should really be reading her posts at Search Engine Journal.