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It’s going to be a long, but very productive weekend as I work on the new SEOStandards.org website. Bookmark and check it out on Monday. Your feedback and participation is extremely appreciated and definitely welcomed.
The site will feature an SEO Audit Checklist, links to free SEO tools, and discussions on popular SEO topics. Hope you’ll come check it out on Monday, January 4th.
Above is a video of an interview from Search Engine Strategies in San Jose 2009. I attended SES West with the Local Splash team to help promote their new brand and local search engine optimization and marketing products.
If you haven’t been to SES, I definitely recommend it. Go Platinum and get to all the sessions. Challenge vendors to prove themselves with case studies, metrics and references. But most of all, enjoy the great after-parties!
In a recent post at ActiveRain.com, Dave Keys challenged me to get my position back for the keyword Orange County SEO Expert, for which I use to rank very well across all the search engines. Here’s the extract:
Dave – thanks for all the great compliments. I use to own “orange county seo expert” before I migrated to seosteve.com from ocseoexpert.com. For fun, I’ll take your challenge. Let’s create a benchmark on this post and I’ll outline what I’m going to do to get the rank again, then we’ll measure it (assuming they keep this post live).
Current Positions:
- Google: #1 (I thought you said I was #2?)
- Yahoo! #2
- Bing: #14
Actions:
- I’m going to add the keyword to title and to a link on the homepage
- I’m going to create a post targeting the keyword (/orange-county-seo-expert.html)
- I’m going to insure that my title, meta, h1 and page copy contain the keyword without appearing spammy
- I’m going utilize StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, and Twitter to create backlinks
- I’m going to create a link on two 3rd party web pages relating to SEO
If I don’t see an improvement in ranking within 6 weeks, I’ll create additional actions and post them here.
Cheers,
Steve
So let’s give this a shot and see if I still have what it takes. Want to help? Create a link back to this page from any or all of your own SEO-related web pages and add a comment of “done”. I’ll give those who participate first access to my new SEO in a Day eBook (which is being edited by half a dozen people and has me pacing like crazy). I’ll also give those who participate a complimentary mini-Obstacle Analysis Report (OAR) for a website of your choice.
Let’s see if I can’t that spot back for the term Orange County SEO Expert with a little help from social media, a little on-page SEO best practices and your participation.
Added 12/26/09
Here’s an email I just to my friend Dave with an update and a screenshot of a Google Alert I received after my post went out:
Hi Dave,
See it’s not the on-page calibrations that ultimately create long-term results in terms of ranking, it’s producing and syndicating content people want to consume. In Phase II (next month) if I don’t see the ranking improvement, I’m going to stimulate CTR slightly by doing a number of organic tasks that involve user engagement. The number of searches for “orange county seo expert” shouldn’t deviate too much or we’ll get filtered out, but the slight ‘normal’ increase in CTR will be to our benefit because we’ll be influencing search and clicks by sharing free info.
We’ll combat the bounce-back rate by putting a video together showing people how I did it visually. The video campaign will include syndication with video networks so that between blog search, video search, and organic search we’ll be kicking some butt in Universal Search and really get some saturation in the search results.
Before I became an SEO Expert, I was an Internet Services Coordinator, an SEM Account Manager, a Project Coordinator, and a Mobius View Direct Web Migration Specialist. I was also a webmaster and health freak, but those two started way before I decided to get my degree at Westwood College of Technology in E-Business Management.
Five years and many awards later, I still believe that Westwood is awesome, and I return (FREE) whenever I need a fresher on a newly updated topic. Be it programming, graphic design, network administration, web design, systems administration, or ecommerce application development, I’m set for life with up-to-date materials available to me whenever I need them.
Recently, and quite unfortunately, Westwood College has been under a lot of fire from some lawyers and a few bickering dropouts that are aggressively attacking the company for attention and greed. So I just wanted to put something out there to let potential Westwood College students know that I’m not just the top “SEO Expert” in Google, I’m also a major supporter of the college and am here if you’d like to hear more about my experience with the school.
Just because an idea makes money, doesn’t make the idea a good one. I’m fairly sure our friends at Enron and Big Tobacco might agree. So if we’ve been building a relationship together on a social network and I suddenly decide to send you a direct message (DM) on Twitter to take an online IQ or EQ quiz, chances are you’re going to check it out. If you then take that quiz, but have to enter your mobile number to get to the answer, and then later discover a recurring $9.95/mo. charge on your account, what does that do to our relationship?
Ethics and belief in your product or service are the most important reasons to share or promote your business, not money. A client of mine had been following and been followed by a local resident on Twitter. For those people in Westminster who follow him, he sends a special offer as an auto-response using SocialOomph.com.
Today he gets a direct message from Sandy Bielinski-Rice (@SandyBR325, also seen on Facebook) with the following message:
Curious, I checked out the quiz, seemed harmless enough. Spent 4 minutes and answered all the questions. Upon reaching the final page after answering all 10 questions, I get to a message stating that I must enter my mobile number to get my results. Below the form (in small gray print) is the catch: $9.95 per month will be billed to my cell phone carrier account. Hey gee thanks Sandy Bielinski-Rice, some friend you are.
Based on the tracking URL: http://www.geniusinspiration.org/s/us_iqme_122_30e67/index.php?ref4=4914&ref5=6505&link_type=site&ref2=link&ref3=sh_usper_link&keyword=103452&od=pja23c, one can make a safe assumption that Sandy was trying to make a buck on an affiliate program. One DM and she completely destroyed all trust and now even worse, the whole world will know that she’s a spammer.
Now, let’s expose these frauds who have absolutely no affiliate marketing ethics. I popped the domain name into whois.sc and a few other registrars only to find out that they are hiding their names using private registration. I’d hide too if I knew thousands of people would come looking for me after I ripped them off. Here’s what I came up with:
According to Quantcast, nearly 10k visitors per month are falling to prey to this IQ Me scam! The name server hosting these con sites is Stroobl.com hosting the following websites:
The server is based in Phoenix, Arizona, by a hosting company named “Atjeu Publishing”. The ONLY domain on the IP that is NOT a private registration is cellfoneguru.com . In fact, it’s ran by a “Dale Carr” in Los Angeles, California with an email of domains@365adsolutions.com. Address: 600/1800 Century Park East, Los Angeles, California 90027. So now the question comes, “what’s the correlation between Dale Carr and Sandy Bielinski-Rice?”. Besides the fact that they are both in Southern California, I’m really not sure.
Sad part is that there are now dozens of other domains and hosts serving this garbage:
I’ve notified the hosting company and encourage you to do the same. Whether you’re doing SEO or Affiliate Marketing, think twice about what you’re serving. If your content helps fill a need at a fair price, heck, I might even share the information for you. If not, if you are being unethical to make a buck, it might be your name cached in Google like this post for the rest of your life.
Ethics = Think About It.
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