Enter your information below – and we will hold the drawing in a couple of weeks!

Good luck – enter before the contest fills up! Only 1,000 Entries MAX!

Also – remember to check out the SEOiQ Test and see how your website ranks compared to the competition!

Shoutout – I wanted to personally thank Shoemoney for his featuring of our T-shirt…if you don’t already read ShoeMoney.com daily – I HIGHLY suggest you start! He’s one of the TOP Internet PPC and Affiliate Marketers on the web today.

One of the main reasons search engine optimization marketing is being used by more companies these days is because of the price. For beginners, they may think the price of SEO is expensive, well – it doesn’t have to be perceived that way! On the other hand, the cost of running one advertisement in a newspaper continues to rise – with less effectiveness. That price is for the ad to run once (lame). Companies have realized it is pointless to pay large amounts of their budget for something that will be seen once and then thrown in the recycling bin. SEO ranking effects are cumulative and traffic lasts much longer – it’s a no brainer.

Search engine optimization also is becoming more popular with SMB businesses because of the shrinking number of print media readers. There once was a time where the only place to advertise was print media. That was because literally everyone read the newspaper on a daily basis. That is far from the case in today’s fast-paced online “fast media consumption” society. There isn’t a point for companies to waste money on promotions that will be seen by such a small number of people. On the contrary, the online available audience is much larger than print media’s ever was. Companies are able to reach a larger amount of people without spending their entire marketing budget.

Because of the changing times and the rising costs of competitor’s marketing prices, search engine optimization marketing has become a staple in the business marketing world. Companies have realized the potential it holds for them.

There are so many consumers searching online for the best products and SEO tools – we think SEOintelligence is the best SEO Toolset available. This is a marketing tactic that every business, regardless of the size, can afford. They won’t have to skimp on quality in order to use this type of marketing. SEOintelligence is the clear choice of marketing over print media for many companies.

Link building is a great way to improve search engine rankings because you will be bringing in the traffic you wanted but didn’t know how to find. By linking your site to a related site has the potential to double your traffic. That site’s readers could be looking for exactly what your site offers, but they didn’t know where to find it. By linking there, you will tap into an entire targeted audience. Many search engines calculate the number of links your site has so it is important to build quality links. In order for this to be beneficial, you have to investigate the sites before you link to them. Search engines use sophisticated calculations, so any old link on any old site won’t cut it.

Link building in order to improve search engine rankings doesn’t mean that you have to spend all day looking for potential link sites. You do have to take your time and be selective. Having links to relevant sites not only will be appreciated by your readers, but the search engines as well. Because search engines are able to measure the quality of links, the tactic of linking to every site you can find won’t work. It will take work finding the right sites for linking, but the results will be worth it. You will see noticeable results in your rankings, so you shouldn’t mind spending some time finding these sites.

The more high quality links you have to your site is one of the best ways to improve search engine rankings. Linking is one of the ways in which search engines formulate their rankings. If you looking for ways to improve your rankings, then using links could be the answer for which you are looking. By focusing on one aspect of search rankings, you’ll be able to complete it better. This will make your results better.

Check out SEOintelligence today – SEO plans starting at $9.95 a month!

The best way to get affordable search engine optimization is by doing it yourself with SEOintelligence, there are a few easy tips to follow. One of the easiest ways to do this is by organizing your Web site folders/structure properly. Of course you want your site to be sophisticated, but that doesn’t mean it should be confusing. Most often, sophistication means simplicity. Take out any unnecessary graphs or charts your site might have because this can confuse the search engines. Another way to do cheap SEO yourself is by updating your domain name. If it is your company name and your company isn’t well known, then select another one that is related to the products you provide.

This connects to the keywords used in your page titles. If there aren’t any in there, then you need some. Don’t overdo it, but make sure there are keywords in each title. This will help better navigate the search engines to your site. Another way to get affordable search engine optimization is with linking. If you are doing it yourself, the best way to do so is simply asking. Put a link of a relevant company’s site on your page and ask them if they will reciprocate the favor. Most often they will.

Doing it yourself is a great way to get affordable search engine optimization. It can be time consuming, but the results are well worth it. If it starts to get too difficult or confusing, just try to keep it simple. You don’t have to do every search engine optimization technique out there because that would take a lifetime. Doing a few of them will get your site noticed more. Just remember that it is the key to getting recognized online, so something is always better than nothing.

Check out the new pricing plans now!:

I wanted to thank the entire SEOintelligence Dev. Team for their hard work, our developers are dedicated and incredibly good at what they do (mad respect to the DB crew!) – Special shout outs to Fernando and Chris – all three did a fantastic job on this release!

Cheers,
Jeremy and Kyle

This is a very simple yet effective SEO tip for local businesses & regional brick and mortar stores, especially if you’re looking to rebrand or start a business from the ground up.

Make sure to make and brand your business name with your main keywords in it if possible. This is important for communicating what your business does along with achieving organic search results (and making sure your incoming links are using relevant anchor text, so when people link to you, they automatically link using relevant keywords).

Remember the days when every business was naming themselves “AAA Mechanics” or “1st American Modeling” to rank highly in the Yellow Pages’ alphabetical order listings? Well those days are long gone! Now it’s time to rank for organic local search results.

For example, if you have a modeling studio in say Florida. You can name the company Florida Modeling Studios. Rather than something like ABC Inc. that has no keywords. (Hopefully you can get a domain with similar keywords as well, which will assist with ranking.)

The advantage of this is you can easily use keywords in your content while referring to your company name. This will enable you to use keywords for on page optimization without sounding ridiculous or unnaturally forcing keywords into your copy.

This fabulous group of Twitter using SEO’s replied back with some excellent tips for us to start up our TGIF Tips, where on Fridays DailySEOTip.com turns over our SEO tip of the day to you, the reader. Today’s goal is to build a grand list of simple and useful SEO Tips, which can be contributed by anyone interested in the project.

All you have to do is comment in the comment field below this blogpost. Our goal is to have over 100 cool tips and replies in the comments by the end of the day! So get Commenting (remember, comments include DoFollow links and can link to your latest blog post!)

So, to get this party with this list of juicy SEO tips as Twittered by our friends! And be sure to follow all of these great people on Twitter.

joehall @lorenbaker SEO TIP: start using microformats, they are going to be important in the future for identifying important content.

weboptimist @lorenbaker When an image and a text link point to the same URL, nofollow the image link to give link credit to the keyword rich text link.

askbillmitchell @lorenbaker use inurl: blog, .gov, edu in Google to find blogs hosted on .edu .gov TLD participate in their discussion to get quality back links

kalena @lorenbaker SEO Rule 1 – ask the client what goal they want to achieve. If unrealistic convince them to change goal. If realistic, exceed it

Burnsie_SEO @lorenbaker: SEO Tip. Always have a site map. Be sure it is in the root directory and has a text link to it from all pages of the site

Burnsie_SEO @lorenbaker SEO Tip. Ne sure your title tag is different for each page. Use you keywords in title tag that are relevant to that page

Burnsie_SEO @lorenbaker:SEO Tip. Use your page focus keywords as your page URL name. Keyword-keyword-keyword. HTML

OneChicBoutique @lorenbaker SEO Tip/websites take a long time to show in Google Search/Make a myspace for your website/Google crawls Myspace with in days!

kristyann @lorenbaker Don’t forget the visitor. You can optimize for the SERP’s all you want, but if the content isn’t there the visitors won’t return

sitemost @lorenbaker Before embarking on any SEO campaign, set clear goals and perform a usability audit. Otherwise all the traffic and exposure you get from your SEO campaign will be wasted

Skitzzo @lorenbaker my tip would be… make it easy for people to link to you the way you want (with optimized anchor tags).

sizzler_chetan @lorenbaker Put keywords or key phrases in Image ALT attributes to make your images rank better in Search engines.

Remember to leave your SEO Tip (or more than one) in the comments below!

Note : If you check out Andrew’s comment below you’ll see that he just summarized one of his blog posts and dropped a link to it. You can do that too!

Steven Arnold wrote “Gaming search engines for fun or profit is of zero interest to me as are those who practice these dark arts,” and he wrote that content was the secret. “SEO is a way for content free sites to game the indexing systems. Content, Aaron Wall, content. Not tricks, spoofs, and carnival tricks.” That is the mindset of a guy who has probably spent thousands of hours researching search. Bizarre.

Sure SEO can be used to temporarily promote garbage, but it is also used to make quality publishing business models profitable.

It is no secret that many publishing business models are no longer effective. Mainstream publishing businesses are going bankrupt. They have nearly limitless content, but even with their huge online archives, it does not create enough traffic and profit to effectively subsidize the cost of new content production.

The New York Times recently shared their profitable publishing strategy – waiting for many competitors to go bankrupt, and hoping they get enough inventory to become profitable.

So here is a publishing company with a strong brand, tons of content, losing money, and their growth strategy is hoping that competitors go bankrupt before they do. These newspapers get direct promotion in the search results through the Google News OneBox (a rankings boost subsidy), and yet they still can’t turn a profit. That really shows the flaw of the “content” mindset in the age of the internet.

As Robert Thomson, the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal explains:

But one of the — Google — I mean, the harsh way of just defining it, Google devalues everything it touches. Google is great for Google, but it’s terrible for content providers, because it divides that content quantitatively rather than qualitatively. And if you are going to get people to pay for content, you have to encourage them to make qualitative decisions about that content.

Relevancy algorithms are built around making sure the search ad network makes money (even while many publishers do not). Some people run businesses. Others are bankrupt, but are just not aware of it yet.

• I have sites with great content that went nowhere.
• I had a few sites with sub-par content that got tons of rankings and exposure.
• Some of our sites make good money.
• Other projects have lost more than I care to mention.
• And we have sites at just about every level in between.

What is the difference between all of them? Marketing. SEO is a subset of marketing. It can be done effectively or ineffectively. It just depends on how healthy the target market is, who is doing the work, and how much they care for the project.

Many businesses struggle for survival or flourish based on a tiny couple percent change in profit margins. If you routinely rank #5 in the search results then it is pretty easy to see the potential upside from a #1 ranking.

Google’s eye tracking research highlight this distribution trend as well.

Based on eye-tracking studies, we know that people tend to scan the search results in order. They start from the first result and continue down the list until they find a result they consider helpful and click it — or until they decide to refine their query. The heatmap below shows the activity of 34 usability study participants scanning a typical Google results page. The darker the pattern, the more time they spent looking at that part of the page. This pattern suggests that the order in which Google returned the results was successful; most users found what they were looking for among the first two results and they never needed to go further down the page.

Last year Google’s Peter Norvig stated that Google did not use usage data directly in their relevancy algorithms because it is not very sensitive to new ranking models. When the order of search results are changed, people will still have a strong tendency to click inferior result if it appears at the top of the search results.

Like people, businesses are born, grow, then die. A solid SEO strategy can be the difference between a solid company and a company that no longer exists.

As many of the newspaper companies go bankrupt with tons of “content,” our sites (and profits) will keep growing. Not because of “content” but because we leverage marketing & SEO to ensure our content garners enough exposure to turn a profit.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has turned into a big business, and from what I can tell it’s the modern version of snake oil. The unproven nonsense spewed by so-called “SEO experts” simply doesn’t work. And worse, it’s screwing up the elegance of the Web.

How did John come to these results? Well he changed his URLs based on “free” advice, and he got what he paid for. People who expect the world handed to them for free are always disappointed with the results, and expect a steady paycheck for bitching about and externalizing their own character flaws & ignorance.

A person can claim that SEO is ineffective if they are clueless about it, but if it were actually ineffective snake oil would…

• Many of the media outlets that publicly dismiss SEO have an in house SEO team? (On multiple ocassions I have been called or emailed – the same day – with questions from an in house SEO at a publishing company that just published a piece denouncing SEO)
• I still be writing this blog for over 5 years?
• My income have doubled (or more) every year?
• People have spent over ,000,000 buying my ebook?
• A headhunter working for Microsoft try to offer me a job paying 6 figures a year?
• Google have hired more than 10,000 remote quality raters?
• Google’s Matt Cutts spend so much time going to SEO conferences?
• Yahoo! have a patent for automating SEO based on their proprietary user data?

As I mentioned to Chris Crum from Web Pro News:

“It is not surprising that search engines know the value of SEO. The only thing I find surprising is them openly admitting it,” Aaron Wall of SEOBook tells me. “Google always tries to shape, control, and minimize the scope of the field of SEO. And here Yahoo! is trying to expand it. Exciting stuff!”

Now SEO is constantly changing. Search engine crawlers are getting more sophisticated. Mechanical SEO is practiced by many people, and so it may not offer a sustainable competitive advantage. But SEO is not just a mechanical process as it draws upon market research, psychology, sociology, public relations, branding, advertising, and both online and offline marketing.

Outbound links show up in referral logs and act as a marketing tool. Plus they help establish & develop social relationships, such that when you have important news to share, some of those people might be willing to reference your works. There is a cumulative advantage effect.

Getting just an extra little bit of coverage on a few more channels leads to many additional citations (hey everyone is talking about this, so it must be important). For every publisher that is an original thinker there are dozens (maybe hundreds?) of followers. Many of those followers also write blogs, bookmark resources on Delicious, use Twitter, promote stories on social news sites. Some latent links come from ignorant journalists that are too lazy to do real research and just quote from whatever sources are easily accessible via a Google search.

When you get new links into key parts of your site, they not only pass PageRank, but also pass anchor text. Having inlinks from a variety of trusted domains with targeted anchor text pointing at relevant pages is MUCH more valuable than raw PageRank score.

When people link at you in editorial channels, they not only link, but in many cases leave behind an endorsement. Assuming they are writing to a relevant targeted audience then you just gained a bunch of social proof of value and reached a wider audience in a means that is much cheaper and more effective than traditional advertising.

Unlike John Dvorak, professional SEOs do not need to lie and pull sleazy tricks to get “hits”… we rank for high value keywords and turn that traffic stream into real business. His publishing strategy is so inauthentic and cheesy that he writes by number:

One Youtube comment on the above video says “What a clown. Journalist? Snake oil salesman more like.” Funny, that sounds familiar.

Bolt on Publicity

Some companies give exclusives to people willing to syndicate their misinformation, but that is not without cost. It is getting harder to push stories without merit via public relations because things are becoming more transparent and media outlets are outing each other – a trend that will only increase as the media business models get squeezed.

Consider Daniel Lyons take on the media and Apple’s public relations: “It’s one thing for PR flacks to tell lies. That is, after all, what they get paid to do. But it’s another thing for the media to join in on the action.” He was (at least temporarily) booted of MSNBC for his bluntness.

Blogging as a Tough Business Model

That same Daniel Lyons wrote about how he couldn’t make serious money blogging:

I blogged from cabs, using my BlackBerry. I blogged in the middle of the night, having awakened with an idea. I rationalized this insane behavior by telling myself that at the end of this rainbow I would find a huge pot of gold. But reality kept interfering with this fantasy. My first epiphany occurred in August 2007, when The New York Times ran a story revealing my identity, which until then I’d kept secret. On that day more than 500,000 people hit my site—by far the biggest day I’d ever had—and through Google’s AdSense program I earned about a hundred bucks. Over the course of that entire month, in which my site was visited by 1.5 million people, I earned a whopping total of ,039.81

Making Blogging Work?

The traditional blog ad network model is not doing so well. But some are much better at monetizing blogs. Federated Media’s John Battelle mentioned that brand advertisers using their ad network were mostly interested in their ability to buy ads that influenced the media and were integrated into the media. You can read about how the human network became a Wikipedia page here (or here), and see Federated Media’s renewed focus here:

Over the past year, it became increasingly clear that the majority of our business was in the execution of these more complex media programs. So when the economy began its nose-dive last Fall, we reached out to our marketing and publishing partners to ask what they wanted from us. Most told us that they need us now more than ever. They value above all else our ability to create highly engaging, cost effective media experiences that allow marketers to connect with their customers. It’s high-impact marketing, but it’s also time-intensive and nuanced work. We are realigning much of our staff to support the marketers and content creators who make these programs sing by expanding our Strategic Programs and Major Accounts teams. Unfortunately, it also means that we need to lose some staff in our more traditional advertising support business.

Google Uses Pay Per Post Marketing Strategy

Not only are upstart ad networks focusing on interactive media ad buys, but even Google is using paid blog postings to market their search engine in Japan:

the Japanese blogosphere today is filled with reports about Google hiring Cyberbuzz, a Tokyo-based Internet marketing company to promote the keyword feature (its widget version) with a pay-per-post campaign. And in fact, the search string “Google Hot Keywords Ranking+Blog Widget+CyberBuzz” in Japanese in Google’s own Blog Search leads to a few dozen results, indicating the reports aren’t made up of thin air. This blogger, for example, integrated the keyword widget and praises the list as being very useful to be kept up-to-date on what is going on in the world. This one says the keywords change every 20 minutes and that the new Google feature once quickly helped in obtaining information on a Japanese TV star. All postings end with a disclosure that says: “I am taking part in the Cyberbuzz campaign”.

Apparently Google’s view of organic marketing changes when they are not a market leading monopoly.

The Pollution of the Commons

Companies that realize Google likes reviews have been hard at work encouraging reviews – with Belkin paying 65 cents per fake review.

Advertiser Bias Limits Value

As Seth Godin rightfully notes, when newspapers disappear we won’t miss much. If taken at face value, and compared against historical accuracy, some media is worth less than nothing due to the need for advertiser bias:

The bull-biased business press is financed with advertising by financial services firms that primarily sell equities-based mutual funds and stock index funds products, stock brokerage firms that sell stock brokerage services, and stock trading firms that sell trading platforms and tools. It plays up greed-fear in bull markets with the message that you can’t afford to stay out of the rising market, and never mind the bubble. During bear markets they play down loss-fear with the message that if you stay out of the market you’ll miss the big rally.

The Rise of Disinformation

Worse yet, media does not only have an advertiser bias, but some advertisers push cultural ignorance to mask the flaws of their business models:

“People always assume that if someone doesn’t know something, it’s because they haven’t paid attention or haven’t yet figured it out,” Proctor says. “But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing truth—or drowning it out—or trying to make it so confusing that people stop caring about what’s true and what’s not.”

After years of celebrating the information revolution, we need to focus on the countervailing force: The disinformation revolution. The ur-example of what Proctor calls an agnotological campaign is the funding of bogus studies by cigarette companies trying to link lung cancer to baldness, viruses—anything but their product.

Niche magazines in fields ranging from tech to business are see sharp drops in ad revenues. Traditional advertising is not working as well as it once did, forcing traditional media outlets to cater to advertiser interests.

Mass Pollution Erodes Trust

With the web getting polluted with machine generated personalization, slick infomercials, fake information, crowd-sourced recycled incorrect information, spyware, reverse billing fraud, and fake reviews our general trust for the medium will go down. The barrier to conversion will increase…requiring more steps in the conversion process.

The Value of a Known Trustworthy Voice & Bias

When compared with the advertiser bias of most large media outfits, personalized media with a known friendly voice and bias like this and this become more welcoming, more appealing, and easier to trust.

Ad supported journalism will remain possible, but typically only if you focus on a niche, maintain a small editorial team, and/or are advertising your own products and services. It is not likely that you will be able to charge a subscription fee for general news.

Search Engine Land started out with ads for other services on their site, but now they push co-branded ads, their conferences, and subscription area…once a business publishing brand is known well enough, it should be able to get more value out of its traffic than it can get by selling that attention to third parties…giving its offerings premium positions and selling backfill / remnant inventory to the highest bidder.

How to Build Attention

If you want to have a sustained marketing advantage then renting the media is not going to be as easy as it once was. The better strategy is to make content accessible, participate in the conversation, host the conversation, win marketshare through exclusives, ride current news & marketing trends, and give away that which others are selling. That is how you build the mindshare needed to get people seeing you as the market default, and to cultivate linking without thinking.

Sell Yourself

Figure out how to build attention and a brand, and all you need to do is create something that is better than free, and start selling it to your legions of loyal followers.