Just a halfway (1/4 way) notification of our progress toward our goal of being listed in the top three positions of Google for the term "Minneapolis SEO".
Google's a black box and it's easy to jump to conclusions. That's exactly what I did regarding Google's Local Business Results. Watch and judge for yourself.
YouTube is a great tool for SEO. Just follow the simple directions that I give you in this video and start "webcamming" your way to the top of the search engines. It doesn't hurt that Google owns YouTube - I'm just saying that Google DOESN'T BUY JUNK!
Did you know that understanding Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is imperative to being effective with Pay-Per-Click (PPC)? Due to Google Adword's Quality score, optimizing your pages to the keywords you elected keeps per-click costs down and positioning up. Hover over the magnifying glass in the keyword area of your Adword ads and check out your Quality Score.
Nielsen/NetRatings has provided January's search engine metrics. There is significant growth in volume of searches for Google and to a lesser extent for Yahoo!. Order has not changed in the top five.
A New SEO Measuring Stick
I thought I'd illumine the world with the process of how I came up with the idea of SEO Rank. If this really gets your juices flowing, later we can calculate the value of Pi to 10,000 decimal places.
I was thinking the other day that we need a better way to track our SEO progress. We need to find one measuring stick that we can use to measure all the hard work we do to improve site positions for any given keyword across all the top search engines. So I created one.
I call it SEO Rank (I hope I didn't step on anyone's toes there) and it measures the effectiveness of your SEO efforts...
Announcing SEO Rank Calculator Version 1.1
I found a couple of problems in the SEO Rank Calculator 1.0 that I fixed in SEO Rank Calculator 1.1. This new version fixed a bug that prevented Google from parsing properly which occasionally dropped a site from it's position. The SEO Rank Calculator tool calculates SEO rank by assigning weight to the top five search engines according to overall U.S. search volume and returns a number between one and 100. You can still get the source code when you register for free at the site. The SEO Rank Calculator tool and an explanation of the calculation can be found at http://www.danwegner.com/content/view/69/31/.
SEO TRAINING: Be A Partner In Google's Success
You're probably thinking "I really doubt Google needs my help." And you're right. Google will do fine without you. But if you choose to partner in Google's success, Google will reward you with traffic. How do you partner in Google's success? You begin by aligning yourself with Google's goals. One of Google's main goals is to provide useful search results. The better their search results, the more likely the Internet user base that provides Google with 53% of Web searches will keep coming back and using their tool. Then Google can continue to deliver ads to those people and generate humongous amounts of money - like the $2.7 billion they generated last quarter.
So drop the sneaky SEO crap like cloaking (they'll find out anyway and then say goodbye to seeing that site in Google for a long time), link spamming (it's loosing it's effectiveness), keyword stuffing (it so 2005!), and the like. Instead you need to start creating real value. Identify your core value or find an under-represented niche (use this KEI Calculator. KEI calculates the ratio of search results to number of searches [note: KEI itself is intended only as a starting point]) and start writing useful content or find someone to write it for you (try elance.com or IdeaMarketers.com). Now make sure your page title, meta tags and headers accurately portray your focus on your chosen niche. And finally, don't forget to link to other useful information and add new content regularly. This is not "pie in the sky" suggestions. I did this for a couple of months and see how I rank in Google for SEO Video against a whole lot of competition. You can do it too by following this simple strategy of seeing Google as a partner.
Now Featuring SEO Tools!
Ive added scads (that's a lot) of SEO tools to the site. Just check under SEO Tools in the menu area. These are hand-picked for SEO value by me.
