Today while reading some SEO blogs, I came across this excellent post on link building fundamentals and thought I should let you all know about it. The post was written by Adam Audette who is the founder of Audettemedia.com. This article does a great job at covering in detail the value of link building along with some helpful hints on creative ways to link bait. Any way, enjoy the read.

Click Here to Read Article

Back…It never left. I have read about eight blog posts and articles today on how the title tag is becoming really important again and that website owners should start including their keywords in their page titles again. I think it’s been good practice to optimize your title since I used Metacrawler to search the web. I mean really, what SEO would be able to tell their client that page titles are not important and keep a straight face.

Page titles are the most important element of onsite optimization and should be a focal point for every website owner that intends on creating traffic through search. I guess I’m just surprised, more than anything to see, that that many SEO’s are talking about how all the sudden the title is important again. To demonstrate in a clear way, I will give an example of a title used in offline guerrilla marketing…see the picture below.

Here’s a title, in a sense, from an offline service company that installs vinyl fencing in Utah. It’s their name and it says Vinyl Fencing on it; good keyword placement. It’s at the top of the fence and doesn’t include more than about 10 words. And, it’s clearly out there for all to see. I guess my point is, if you can make good use of a “title” when installing a vinyl fence offline, you might want to make sure you actually make use of an optimized title on each page of your site.

For the past year I have overseen my companies shopping network strategy for multiple sites including my memory foam mattress site www.rockymountainmattress.com. Believe it or not, there is strategy that goes into getting ranked well in a shopping comparison site such as shopping.com, shopzilla.com, and the like. The reality is you have to treat your product rankings at these sites just like you treat your site rankings at Google. And it’s worth it!

Over 100 million shoppers visit the shopping comparison engines per month, yet only 1 in 4 merchants use these engines to market themselves. The best news is that over 84% of those merchants state that they find it to be an extremely effective method of marketing for them.

Here are the top 8 things you need to do well for SEO in a shopping comparison engine.

1. Your product title is the biggest factor that will help you rank in most all of the shopping networks online. You generally have about 200 characters to make use of so make sure you use a relevant title and get your main keyword in it. Good example would be something like this: 14″ Rendezvous Memory Foam Mattress with I.C.U.

2 . Your product description should be complete and include good info along with keyword repetition. This goes back to content being king. You need to use the 200-1000 characters provided before truncation and make it convert as well. The first 50 chars are by far the most important so get your keyword(s) in at the front and then let em’ know that you offer free shipping or any other promo.

3. Products that are missing a picture will not do well. Make sure you include a picture that works well as thumb nail size. That is all they will see at the comparison site.

4. Get your product category right! If you are selling kitchen accessories and your products are listed in the auto category, you have missed the boat and your conversion will be zero. Make sure to follow the individual shopping networks category taxonomy when listing your products on their engine.

5. Include the model number or SKU when inputting your product. 38% of people who use shopping comparison sites use them to compare the same product offered by multiple etailers. Make it easy for them to compare your products with others.

6. Get customer surveys. Getting positive feedback through the customer surveys provided by the network will help you become a trusted store and increase your rankings in that engine. You need to use them, no matter how annoying they are.

7. Set your PPC price high enough to get you ranked…and higher if you really need the help. Most comparison engines will tell you that setting your PPC high won’t get you ranked highly on it’s own. I believe them a little, but I have noticed that if I jack my price I jack my rankings…use the rest of my tips though to heg your costs so you rank well naturally as well.

8. If you want to show up in product results on Google search make sure you select the product type as “product” in Google Base when setting up your products there. Don’t create your own or use one of the other defaults…only select the type of “product”.

If you have any suggestions on things I left off let me know so I can keep this updated.

As many of you know, I live in Sandy Utah. I have lived here most of my life and love it here. I did a stint in Washington and loved it there too, but there was far too much rain for my liking. Back in Utah I only have to deal with far too much snow for my liking…at times. However, I have learned to enjoy the snow and the seasons that I experience every year here in Utah.

As I was doing a little research for an SEO campaign I’m working on I came across a story talking about how Sandy city is the 26th safest city in America and I have to tell you that made me feel great. What a way to represent. For all of my friends (and others) that hate on Utah and Sandy…take that.

For those of you who just can’t seem to get away from your Mac because you have so much to do…finish a blog post, reply to 30 emails, send off a few unprofessional forwards, browse the web for the latest SEO news, process all your website orders, call 10-20 customers, etc. (that’s about my list today), I was introduced to a handy little install for my Mac that has helped me get a little faster. It’s called Quicksilver and you can find it at Blacktree.com.

Here is what you find as the description of Quicksilver at blacktree.com: A unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data. So I’m not really sure what that means, but here is what it has done for me so far.

I’m able to open MyDocs by pressing ctrl space and then start typing mydocs and then hit return. This is the biggest help it’s been so far in that fact that I don’t have to stop typing and use my mouse to get a file open that I need to access for some reason. That fact alone has sold me on keeping it and using it often. I’ll learn the rest as I go.

Here’s a little more of the description Blacktree.com offers: Quicksilver’s greatest strength, however, is not search. Any item you are able to find, drag, or otherwise pull into its universe is endowed with many potential uses. Hitting <tab> takes you to the action field, where you can use the same adaptive search to select what you would like to do. Among other things, files can be emailed, copied, compressed. Text can be modified, transmitted between programs, or searched for on the web. Some actions even support an indirect object, so you can send an item to a person, move files to another folder, or open files with a specific application.

Check it out if you are interested.

Posted by Andrew Melchior

In the last 30 days I have been approached by two different dentist concerning SEO for their practice. Both of them invited me in to sit down with them because they were excited about the opportunity having a ranked website affords them as a professional in the dental industry…I was surprised to find out that a few thousand dollars a month is “way out of their budget” for online marketing or “SEO” as I called it.

I’m not a dentist by any means; I brush my teeth night and day and floss once a day and call it good. I thought my few visits a year from me x 100’s of patients would put some money in their pockets, but I guess I was wrong. I thought Dentists were made of money, at least all the houses of Dentists that I’ve been too are. One of them told me that they are even reluctant to spend $200 a month for the SEO plan that GoDaddy offers. I couldn’t believe my ears. The quote I offered them was fair and the rankings they would have received would have been top 10 for sure.

Now I can handle being rejected. Every business owner has the right, and should have the ability, to choose what is best for their business. I respect someone who tells me, this sounds great and the price is right, but we are going to market through another means. However, having someone tell me they expect my services for less than $200 a month is plain ridiculous. Maybe I was being punked or something?

So, to answer my title question…YES. Most dentists rely on word-of-mouth referrals to grow their business. What they don’t realize is that tens of thousands of people are looking for dental services a month in their locations and most of them are using the web as a means of finding what they are looking for. So here are my top 3 reasons why every dentist should have a great site that is ranked.

1. New patient acquisition. Dentists are not selling a physical product, rather a service that targets local customers. They need to do all they can to find local customers to bring into their chairs to enjoy the laughing gas as I so do.

2. Patient interaction. A great dental website will allow patients to get information about the services they might consider so they can ask questions to their dentist about these services. This will increase a dentist’s dollar per patient revenue and grow their business. They can also offer features such as online scheduling to allow patients the opportunity to schedule and unschedule their appointments.

3. Reputation management. With all the news out there about dental malpractice and dentist’s molesting their patients every Dentist should be very interested in controlling their rep online so they don’t get dragged into any of that by accident.

Maybe I don’t understand their concerns, but I think my arguments are pretty strong.

Posted by Andrew Melchior