The Click Depot Blog

Archive for May, 2008

There are several search engine optimization books in the market. But this field is so volatile that no book can remain current for longer than about 6 months. Hence the best choices are the ebooks that keep releasing new versions regularly. Here are our choices.

3. Brad Callen’s Search Engine Optimization Made Easy: If you are new to SEO and just need the basics, this FREE ebook is the way to go. The ideas are presented in a clear concise manner and Brad Callen is a known name in Search Engine Optimization. He tries to promote his SEO Elite and Keyword Elite software with this book. Both are excellend tools for SEO, though these days there are other tools such as Aaron Wall’s Backlink Analyzer and the Wordtracker account which are cheaper and almost offer the same functionality. He also has a similar Ebook called Adwords Made Easy for Google Adwords Pay per Click marketing.

2. SEO Insites - Unfair Advantage eBook: Great ebook. Discusses some pretty interesting techniques. GREAT for amateurs. Even professionals may find some new ideas, but not too many. Their http://www.seoinsites.com membership is much more useful but expensive at $150/month. The book costs $97 and is included in the membership if you get that instead.

1. Aaron Wall’s SEO Book: This is the most popular SEO Ebook on the Internet. He updates it and relases new versions periodically. Aaron Wall is an intelligent SEO and a smart business peson. This book at $79 is worth the money if you are serious about SEO for your website or looking to establish an SEO business.

If you have an online or offline business that has never used the Internet for marketing on a large scale, there are a lof of things you can do to start on that journey TODAY, NOW, not later, not next week. By the time you end reading this short post, you will have the knowldge to start promoting yourself online.

STEP 1: Google Local/Maps: Go to http://www.maps.google.com and search for your business in your location. If you find that your business is already listed, great; if not, create one. You simply need to log in using your google/gmail account (create one in 2 minutes if you don’t have one) and complete the entire profile. This helps in a big way. A lot of people search Google or Google Local to look for businesses and the information that you enter is what gets searched. Make sure that you enter all your information in detail and upload pictures if possible.

STEP 2: Reviews: Send email to 10-25 friends/customers and ask them to write a review on Google against your business. This will help your business rise to the top of the listings. Here you go, you have a secret from us now!

STEP 3: Local Directories: Think about what your potential customers would search on the net to find your business. For instance, for a florist in Raliegh, it would be “Raleigh Florist directory” or “Raleigh Red Roses directory” or something similar. Search for those terms and observe the results. Usually, there should be at least a few listings of sites that you can submit your business too. These are called diretory sites and are like free Yellow Pages. You can list your business there and increase your brand’s prensence on the ‘Net.

After you are done with these steps, now that your business is online, the next step is to consult with a web designer or a Raleigh Internet Marketing firm to get a simple website. You should be able to get a basic one for about $500-$700. Make sure that the website is developed to be friendly to the Search Engines. You can find more information about this at http://www.theclickdepot.com

We work with people from around the world - customers, vendors, freelancers, partners, colleagues, trainers, Etc. In the past, communicating with people over the Internet was limited. Email and phone only goes so far. But recently, screen sharing applications have really reduced this communication gap. And what does this have anything to do with SEO? It doesn’t. Except that if you have a website and are trying to hire an SEO or a freelancer to do your work, you should be considering the use of one of these tools and ask them to explain what they are doing on your website.

Often times, SEO’s do work that is cryptic to you as webmasters. These tools will help your SEO’s explain what they are doing to you. It will also ensure better accountability.

So what are these great tools that I am talking about?

1. http://www.Webex.com - Bought by Cisco recently. They are THE best screen sharing application. Period. They are miles ahead of everyone else in this game. Their screen/application/desktop sharing is almost realtime and their features are the most advanced. Ease of use is amazing. Interface is really well thought out. However, they are the most expensive one too. As you add more meetings, the cost of using Webex can pile up. Starts at $35/month.

2. http://www.GoToMeeting.com: Like Webex. just a little less sophisticated than Webex though. In Screencast software, the compression/decompression algortihms are the key. GoToMeeting is second only to Webex in this case. Slightly cheaper than Webex as well.

3. http://DimDim.com - FREE: Now, this is my favorite. They were launched in late 2007 in Beta and recently launched themselves fully. Actually, one of the senior members of this team is a good friend of mine. The best part about this software - It’s FREE. Yes, they are the only ones that offer this functionality for free. They are still behind the paid users as far as features are concerned but their screen sharing seems to be flawless. I had some trouble using the audio and the screencast at the same time. No big deal. I used Yahoo Messenger Chat for Audio and DimDim for desktop screenshare. Smart huh?

On the same lines, another great software tool is Camtasia Studio. It helps you create quick videos of your screen activity. I can totally see this become the standard for documenting user manuals/guides in the future (already I see video demos of most software) everywhere.

Good luck sharing your desktops and collaborating with your team. Now you have no excuse not to try them out!

Thanks,

Srini

There are hundreds of things you can do to promote your blog. These 3 are the easiest ones that you can do within 5 minutes. So for something that can be done in 5 minutes, including reading this post!

3. Ping Site Update Services

Login to your wordpress backend. Go to Settings > Writing (in v2.5), and copy-paste this list

http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/b…ter/ping.php
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

Every time you post, your blog will automatically ping these sites and they will know that you posted and their readers will know that you posted. How cool is that!

2. Ensure your URL’s are SEO friendly

Go to Settings > Permalinks, Select Custom Structure and past /%category%/%postname%/ in there. Your URL’s are now SEO friendly. Ensure that your .htaccess is writeable.

1. Install the Headspace2 plugin

Headspace2 is THE best SEO plugin out there in my opinion. It offers a TON of functionality. Even if you can’t do it all in 5 minutes, just installing it on your blog and knowing that it is THE way to go is half the battle won. Next when you get a chance, visit their site - http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/headspace2/ and watch their videos. Get started, it it worth the time. They got Google Analtics integration, Meta tags optimization, Etc. all in one place.

Hope this post was worth your 5 minutes!

Whether you do SEO for your one website or manage an entire portfolio, you know two things. 1 - Quality backlinks are the number 1 way to achieve a higher search engine rank. 2 - You need tools to quickly identify quality backlinks and rapidly implement your link building campaign.

Now there are hundreds of SEO tools out there. I am not going to try and cover everything, just the top five seo tools that will get you everything you need to get started on a link building campaign without spending a penny.

5. Mike’s Free Search Engine Rankings Tool

If you don’t have a tool yet, please get one. It is way too time consuming to keep going back the the search interface and search for where your site shows up on the results. There are several free and paid tools out there that can make your life easier. This is one thing in which the paid professional tools do seem to offer much better functionality than the free ones. The paid ones like IBP 9 and Web CEO provide the ability to run the rankings at one shot for over a hundred key phrases and then compare today’s results with results from the past. This is very useful. Mike’s rankings tool does offer limited ‘memory’. It remembers your last 20 key phrases and their rankings. Anything beyond 20 is forgotten. Also, the memory comes from cookies. If you clear your cookies, the history is lost. Despite that, this tool provides the best of the free ones. I usually take snapshots of the results using SnagIT and so I can compare with results from the past.

4. Onlywire.com

Social Media sites are THE in thing these days. Between social networking sites (like myspace.com, http://www.facebook.com, http://www.orkut.com, http://www.linkedin.com) and social bookmarking sites (like http://digg.com, http://del.icio.us, http://stumbleupon.com, etc.) that’s where people hang out. For most niches, you will benefit immensely by participating in these networks and intelligently using them to your advantage. Onlywire.com allows you to submit to 15-20 of these sites at once. That saves you a ton of time and is a really useful handy tool that comes for free. Hats off to them. They have been able to scale as well. The tool has been on for months now and still performs, each and every time.

3. Brad Callen’s Article Submitter and Directory Submitter

Brad Callen is almost a celebrity SEO consultant. He has been around for almost 5 years now. His products are widely used. His paid tool SEO Elite is ranked as one of the best SEO tools around. His free tools, however, Article Submiter and Directory Submitter, make it into my list. Article Submitter allows you to submit your article to hundreds of article directories and directory submitter submits your sites to link directories. These can help you get much needed backlinks to prep up your page rank. However, remember that the overuse of this technique can actually hurt your SEO campaign. Only about 10-20% of your total backlinks should be from Article and lInk directories.

2. Yahoo SIte Explorer

This is a great tool, period. Google is a great company. But one thing I don’t like about them is that they don’ reveal search stats to you as openly as Yahoo does. This site basically shows you the number of backlinks pointing to a specific website. A great way to gauge the progress your link building campaign and to see whether your link building campaign is getting results.

1. Aaron Wall’s Backlink Analyzer Tool

This is my #1 seo tool. This is a brand new tool and it’s totally crazy that it is available for free. It allows you to look at the backlinks pointing to a site, and then look at their anchor text. You can also enter a keyword and get all the top sites for that keyword and then appraoch them for backlinks or link exchanges. A great great tool that you should be using.

At http://www.theClickDepot.com, we use all these tools and several other paid tools to optimize your campaign for you.

Pricing Search Engine Optimization campaigns has always been a touchy subject. Even though this field is almost a decade old now, there are almost no standards or regulating bodies. No certifications and no way to differentiate the best from the amateur other than their own claims. Given that, pricing often tends to be the differentiator. Most SEO businesses do not reveal their pricing. And I am not just saying that. A simple google search for “best seo companies” results in several companies. I just picked the first five sponsored ads. Let’s look at these sites -

http://www.rankforsales.com/seo-company.html

http://www.yourwebgurus.com/contact.html

http://www.949inc.com/lp/SEO/Search-Engine-Optimization-Orange-County.php

http://www.clickresponse.net/search-engine-optimization-service.htm

http://www.evisionworldwide.com/

Based on the fact that they show up on the top sponsored ads on Google, you would think that they are on top of their work, right? Well, don’t be so sure. NOT ONE of them provides their pricing information online. When you send them a request for a quote, they almost NEVER return with a $$$ number. It will only be more questions, a sales person calling you and after the same old “we can make you a million” sales pitch, they reveal a quote based on how much you can afford. NOT based on the results that they are promising. That’s what’s so bad about this market.

Based on experience, I can tell you that there are way too many so-called Top SEO companies out there that don’t know what they are doing. This market changes on a daily basis. Most SEO companies don’t take the time to learn, to experiment. They simply lack the passion to stay on top. When it comes to SEO, it is a war out there. #1 on search results is everything. You cannot afford to be with SEO companies that do not realize that.

At The Click Depot, we are trying to level the field. We are trying to make it easy for anyone to KNOW what their online spending is going to be. Our pricing is on our website. It is the same whether you are a millionaire with a hundred websites or a newbie turning to Internet Marketing for the first time. Take a look. If you are an SEO reading this, I would love to hear your thoughts about our pricing and my comments. I invite heated debate.

We at The Click Depot are attempting to mak

The Internet is an interesting place. We all know that it is expaning constantly (how many new websites do you browse to in a week?). But did you know that it is also constantly changing? It started off as more of a communication and information source sort of place in the late 90’s. Email was the eighth wonder of the world. Y2K brought with it the dotcom boom and everything from buying books to shoes to PC’s went online. The early twenty first century further made the Internet easier to use but there were still way too many technologies, few standards anda growth so fast that most people were’nt sure where to get started.

All that has changed today. This blog that I am writing on was installed on very affordable ($10/month) shared hosting, on free blog software (Wordpress) without a single line of code, without any IT person’s help, in less than 10 minutes. No kidding. This means a lot. The last 2-3 years have seen businesses, and I am not talking about the Walmarts and the Amazons. I am talking about the salons, the little soccer-apparel store, the neighborhood chinese market AND yes, your neighbor himself, create websites. So what does that mean for us and wait a minute, I thought this was going to be about local marketing!

You are right. More and more business have their websites. More websites means more competition and that’s what is changing the landscape. I run an SEO firm. A small one at present, and still, I see at least 10 businesses moving their advertising and marketing spending from direct mail and traditional methods to online marketing. Your customers are not looking at the thick Yellow Pages book anymore. I throw mine into the trash the day it arrives. I look only one place, that’s the Internet for all my business needs.

If you are not capitalizing on this market, WAKE UP! On the Internet, getting in early is too important. From getting a good domain name, to gradually building traffic from a variety of sources, it takes time to grab a piece of your market that’s searching for you online. All that competition (which is multiplying on a daily basis) means that it is getting harder and harder to do that.

No BS and sugar coating this message. Get in before it is too late.