Do You Need SEO, or Do You Need a Better Website?
As a Denver SEO consultant, every so often a potential client with a poorly converting website asks for SEO services. I want to give people what they ask for, but I know that finding a way to bring more visitors to a poorly converting website isn’t going to help. The conundrum for me is simple: I have to tell these people that they shouldn’t buy SEO services from me (or anyone else) until we can get the website working better. As you can imagine, this doesn’t always go well! 
Sometimes the problem isn’t that people aren’t finding your website on the search engines – it’s that the website doesn’t work. Read More
Two Minute Guide to SEO Title Tags
The HTML title tag <title> is arguably the most important element of on-site search engine optimization (SEO). A good tag is both descriptive of the content on a web page AND keyword-sensitive. Here’s how you can write a decent title tag in less than two minutes. Read More
SEO Quake Firefox Plugin For Beginners
After reading Tony Writes blog post about FireFTP, it got me thinking: what are my most useful Firefox Plugins…and why don’t I share them with the world? From the sound of his blog post, Tony didn’t know about FireFTP until a few weeks ago. That’s on me I think – I’ve been using it for more than a year without telling a soul. Shame on me for not sharing the knowledge – until today. I’m going to try and write a few posts on my favorite Firefox plugins, starting today with SEOQuake. Read More
Sloppy SEO on NBC.com – Learning From Others Mistakes
I’d like to start this post with two very important notes:
- To the people responsible for SEO on NBC.com, my apologies. Please don’t read my critique as an indictment of your efforts – I can appreciate the difficulty of your task and I realize that some things are likely beyond your control.
- This is a fantastic illustration of one basic fact – when it comes to SEO, the “little guy” always has a chance. For all their advantages, big companies often fail to accomplish the basics.
Here’s the story. Read More
SEO and YouTube – Link Building On The Web’s 2nd Biggest Search Engine
Just in case you didn’t see this elsewhere on our website, YouTube is the 2nd biggest search engine on the Internet with more than 1.6 billion searches per month. Obviously, there’s a big opportunity in placing and optimizing videos for YouTube…but that’s not the only reason that businesses should get involved. YouTube is also a nice source of links that can help your website rank for organic terms, making it a slam dunk in terms of SEO.
Put another way: Not only can placing videos on YouTube get you noticed, it can also help your website rank.
Here’s how you can build your presence on YouTube and get some links too:
Google’s Advice On Hiring An SEO Consultant
Some people think that Google dislikes search engine optimization (SEO) consultants. This is a half-truth – Google does dislike some SEO consultants, but only because these people try to abuse or manipulate Google’s system. When it comes to SEO consultants that follow Google’s rules, Google has the following suggestions: Read More
Google’s Custom Search Results Will Trick You
Are you logged into your Gmail account right now? What about another one of Google’s accounts – like Docs, Picasa, or AdWords?
Whatever it is, if you’re logged into Google’s system, they’re probably tracking your search behavior.
Please understand – this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Google tracks user behavior in a non-specific way – i.e. Google’s computers aren’t noting that “Jason Lancaster of Littleton Colorado searched for ‘acid reflux’ on June 13th at 3:13pm.” Google assures us that they’re not tracking personal info – mostly just using your behavior to determine the best way to help you.
In any case, unless you’ve opted out of their tracking system, anytime you interact with Google.com while logged into one of Google’s systems, your search engine results are going to be skewed. Badly. Here’s an example: Read More
30 Second SEO Competitive Assessment
As a Denver search engine expert, I’m often asked “How hard will it be for my website to rank for blank?” When I say “rank,” I’m talking about appearing in the natural or organic search engine results (here’s an explanation of natural/organic results vs. paid placement). “Blank” can be anything – from “blog writing service” to “Denver home theater.”
Whatever “blank” is, the level of competition is usually the determining factor. More competition means more difficulty ranking for that term, and whenever I come up with an SEO estimate I need to have a good idea of the competitiveness to see if the term is something I can deliver.
Here’s how I make an educated assessment about the relative competitiveness of a search term in 30 seconds or less: Read More
Sometimes SEO’s Place Too Much Emphasis on Technical Details
As a search engine optimizer, I find myself spending two or three hours a day reading blog posts and news articles about search engines. More specifically, I find myself reading highly technical information about a) how search engines “see” the internet and b) how the search engines determine what websites should be ranked first. This technical information is interesting to me, and quite frankly I could read it all day every day with a smile on my face.
However, when I speak with a client (especially a client that hasn’t done any sort of optimization to their website), I try as hard as I can to refrain from discussing all the technical aspects of SEO. The reason? Read More
Yelp How-To Guide From Spork Marketing
I can’t help but crack a smile when someone compliments the work my company performs. Call it pride or call it vanity, but I love it. Compliments energize me and the people I work with, and the benefits don’t stop there. Compliments from satisfied customers also help us sell our services. So, when we get a good compliment, we really like to publicize it on our website.
But like everything else, praise needs to be transparent to be truly effective. While we can publish all our great compliments on our website, how can we expect to trust all the nice compliments they find on our website?
That’s where Yelp.com comes in. Read More