November 20, 2010 By Mary Killelea

 SearchFest 2011

Portland’s Premier Search Marketing Conference
When: Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Where: The Governor Hotel (866) 979-7660

No matter what level of SEO skills you have this is a great event to attened.  There are great speakers scheduled, you can network with other SEO folks and potentially meet folks in need of SEO work .

Topics include Advanced Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Universal Search, Analytics, Paid Search Marketing and many more.

View the Agenda 

If you would like you can Register Here

I’ll see ya there…  I look forward to meeting new faces in the Portland search  community.

November 18,  21010 by Mary Killelea

This week I read a great article by Brad Fallin who interviewed Rand Fiskin SEOmoz CEO and Co-Founder. SEOmoz blog is now one of the most populare search engine forums in the world with readers numbering in the tens of thousands every day. BusinessWeek listed Fiskin as one of the 30 Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs Under 30 (Yep Under 30). Fiskin has written about SEO for the New York Times, Newsweek and in his book, The Art of SEO.

Like many in the late 90’s he had a struggling web design and development business but instead of scratching his head and letting his business dissolve he found that SEO could be the tool that could differenitate him from his competition. He was able to sell the value to his clients early on before people even knew what SEO was, which if you remember was a huge struggle for the industry at the beginning. After starting to offer SEO in 2020, then launching the SEOmoz blog in 2004 as a way of sharing his experiences, the site eventually grew into it’s own brand offering consulting until 2007. Now his model has grown into SEO software that very large to very small companies can take advantage of.

When asked what the most noticeable change in the SEO world is that he’s seen, his reponse didn’t surprise me. “SEO has become a much more accepted and standard for of web marketing. It’s  great to see organizations embrace SEO today like they never have before. ” Just in the past year he says he’s been able to speek  about SEO to the CTO of the United Nations, present ot hte group at the YCombinator event and even heard that the White House is doing some SEO! ”

His closing words of wisdom from the interview was “Don’t be discouraged - SEO is a slow, building process much of the time, but it’s the challenge and the obstacles that make it a competitive advantage for those who embrace it and do it well!”

I am happy to share I just saw that Rand Fiskin is gonna be one of the speakers at Search Fest 2011 discussing Advanced link building.

November 17, 2010 By Mary Killelea

Learn how to utilize and leverage LinkedIn Effectively to help grow your business!

1. Utilize the status updates - tell the world what innovative business ideas, skills and tips you have. (this is a platform to “Strut your stuff - so to speak… don’t be shy)
2. Create a company profile — make it good it’s your first impression in many occasions to potential clients, collegues and your competition. Put your best foot forward.
3. Spend time in your network, take the time to interact and engage with those with similiar interests and those looking for info or help in your industry.
4. Take the time to contribute info
5. Ask questions (don’t think you know it all — those that stop learning will fail)
6. Reach out to those you know or those you know thru friends of friends… it’s Networking 101 — But better you don’t have anything to loose by being active and involved.
7. Join groups try and focus on groups that have more than a 1000 members – Unless it’s in your own niche.
8. Login in and be active at least 3 times a week
9. Don’t get side tracked and waste a lot of valuable time, stay focused on your daily tasks and move on.
10.  Promote your LinkedIn Profile on your website, on facebook etc.. let people know you want to connect with them.  Grow your linked in presence.

by Mary Killelea Dec 8, 2009

1. Decide on the one search phrase you want your page to rank for.
2. Title your page with a variation of the phrase you want it to rank for.
3. Create a headline on your page that re-enforces the title of your page
4. Write your page content for consumers, but do also keep in mind it’s important to give the search engines what they need to rank you correctly for the terms you are targeting, so use the key word term phrases you are targeting in your content.
5. Create links to your page using link text that contains variation of your search phrase.
6. Get external links to your page that also use variations of your search phrase.
7. Continue to do this through out your site on each and ever page, targeting a unique key word phrase on each of the pages.

Good Luck!

by Mary Killelea November 8, 2009 Portland Web Design

Here is a list of 13 great sites/tools that are FREE to help you with online market research. Be smart and do your market research.

1. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
2. http://www.google.com/trends
3. http://www.google.com/insights/search/
4. http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
5. http://labs.wordtracker.com/keyword-questions 
6. http://technorati.com/search
7. http://www.google.com/alerts
8. http://www.spyfu.com/
9. http://www.nichewatch.com/
10. http://pulse.ebay.com/
11. http://new-pulse.ebay.com/
12. http://www.amazon.com/
13. http://www.shopping.com/top_searches

by Mary Killelea, September 14, 2009

You can now tag friends & Pages in status updates on Facebook Ex: tag your friend in your post. To tag Mary, start the post with @Mary (a drop down menu will appear so you can select which Mary - This is nice because if you use twitter you have to hope you remembered thier name correctly this feature helps you by providing choices.)

 Here’s how it works: when writing a status update in the publisher, users can tag connections by using the “@” symbol, just like on Twitter. Facebook pops up a dropdown menu that allows users to select any friend, Page, group, or event. When a friend, Page, etc, is tagged, that shows up on their wall. When you’re tagged, a notification is sent to you as well, and you can remove tags of yourself in others’ posts.

 What is great is that Facebook is enabling status tagging for all of a user’s Facebook connections – not just friends, but Pages, groups, and events as well. This means Page managers will now have a great new resource for tracking comments and feedback about their brand or business. Up until now, brands have been able to track posts and comments made on their Facebook Page directly by fans, as well as search public comments made by Facebook users through Facebook’s new real time search.

As of today, all @ tags will appear on the wall of the Page as well, even though users never visited the Page. The same applies to event and group administrators as well. That’s a big deal for Page administrators hoping to gain more insight into how they’re being talked about inside Facebook.

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by Mary Killelea, August 27, 2009

Origin of the name “Google”

In searchging the web for the story of the origin of the search engine and company name “Google” I have found this one by David Koller to  be the most intersting,  based on his understanding of the genesis of the name.

“The source of my information is my friends and colleagues from Wing 3B of the Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford University, where Google was born.

In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin called their initial search engine “BackRub,” named for its analysis of the web’s “back links.” Larry’s office was in room 360 of the Gates CS Building, which he shared with several other graduate students, including Sean Anderson, Tamara Munzner, and Lucas Pereira. In 1997, Larry and his officemates discussed a number of possible new names for the rapidly improving search technology. Sean recalls the final brainstorming session as occurring one day during September of that year.

Sean and Larry were in their office, using the whiteboard, trying to think up a good name - something that related to the indexing of an immense amount of data. Sean verbally suggested the word “googolplex,” and Larry responded verbally with the shortened form, “googol” (both words refer to specific large numbers). Sean was seated at his computer terminal, so he executed a search of the Internet domain name registry database to see if the newly suggested name was still available for registration and use. Sean is not an infallible speller, and he made the mistake of searching for the name spelled as “google.com,” which he found to be available. Larry liked the name, and within hours he took the step of registering the name “google.com” for himself and Sergey (the domain name registration record dates from September 15, 1997). ”

by Mary Killelea August 24, 2009 

Whether you are concentrating your seo on Local Search or not it is a very important segment of SEO that every business owner with or without a website should pay attention to if you want customers to find you.

Here is a link to David Mimh’s recent survey of several experts that gauged the factors most helpful for ranking well in the Google and Yahoo Local algorithms, as well as techniques to be avoided.  He has done a great job summarizing the survey and it’s a must read for anyone interested in gaining ranking in the local playing field. http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml#results

When reading his article there were a few terms that I felt needed to be better explained for those not in the local search market trenches.  

survey glossary:

HCard Microformat – hCard is a simple, open, distributed format for representing people, companies, organizations, and places, using a 1:1 representation of vCard (RFC2426) properties and values in semantic HTML or XHTML. hCard is one of several open microformat standards suitable for embedding in HTML, XHTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML.   Want to get started with writing an hCard? Use the hCard creator to write up some contact information and publish it, or follow the hCard authoring tips to add hCard markup to your current contact page.

KML File - You can create KML files with the Google Earth user interface, or you can use an XML or simple text editor to enter “raw” KML from scratch. KML files and their related images (if any) can be compressed using the ZIP format into KMZ archives. To share your KML and KMZ files, you can e-mail them, host them locally for sharing within a private internet, or host them publicly on a web server. Just as web browsers display HTML files, Earth browsers such as Google Earth display KML files. Once you’ve properly configured your server and shared the URL (address) of your KML files, anyone who’s installed Google Earth can view the KML files hosted on your public web server.

If you’re new to KML, begin by browsing the KML Tutorial, which presents short samples of KML code that you can view in Google Earth and Google Maps. The KML Reference provides detailed syntax for all KML elements, with explanations and diagrams of how to specify them.  The Developer’s Guide contains in-depth conceptual material and examples.

Citations: a short note recognizing a source of information or of a quoted passage; “the student’s essay failed to list several important citations”; “the acknowledgments are usually printed at the front of a book”; “the article includes mention of similar clinical cases”  Or in the case of online Citations are mentions from other online sources.

UGC - user generated content

LBC - local business center

IYP - internet yellow pages

LBL - local business listings

Great resources to have handy: 

Most Important Data Providers + IYP Sites

1. infoUSA
2. Superpages
3. Localeze
4. YellowPages
5. Yelp
6. InsiderPages
7. Niche Industry Sites (BBB, Vertical Directories)
8. Acxiom
9. Yahoo
10. Citysearch

Other sites receiving significant votes: Niche Civic/Municipal Sites (Chamber of Commerce, Local Directories), Merchant Circle, UniversalBusinessListing, Yellowbot.

Most Important Review Engines

1. Yelp
2. InsiderPages
3. Yahoo
4. CitySearch
5. Google
6. Superpages
7. Niche Industry Sites (BBB, Vertical Directories)
8. TripAdvisor
9. Judysbook
10. Kudzu

Other sites receiving significant votes: Yellowpages, Merchant Circle, AngiesList. 

Also if you don’t know about it check out your site’s local listing on www.getlisted.org