The Best SEO Tool is SEO Power Suite!

Everyday I go to work and find myself buried in “what ifs”. What if I had more time, what if I had more staff…

I work with a company who owns 30+ websites, and I am only one person doing the best I can to follow the best practice I know how of going after linking opportunities, creating compelling optimized copy, and monitoring all the sites to ensure we are staying on track with increasing traffic that will benefit the organization. Now granted I probably need a couple more people to help, but I also need good tools that will help streamline all strategies.

There are many free tools out there that can help with watching your rankings, help build a link strategy, analyze your on-site optimization efforts and determine if your content is relevant for keywords you wish to rank for, but many of these free tools are limited.

Lots of SEO folks find that the paid tools are worthless. Why should I pay for a tool when I can get information like that for free? I know you can get it for free but how much time do you have to invest? I am a busy person and I cannot afford to take too much time to search for links, run ranking reports and constantly keep up with what my competitors are doing. So I did some research on paid tools and I found software that has made my life SO much easier. The software is called SEO Power Suite. It is one of the best ones I have seen on the market so far. I have used Web CEO, IBP, and SEO Elite and this software by far has so much more to offer. It has several tools in one suite:

Rank Tracker - this tool allows you to customize ranking reports so you can monitor what is going on with your search results. You can automate it so that it will run when you need it to run.

Website Auditor - this tool will allow you to view what your competitors have done to their web pages to rank well in search engines. After analyzing the data you can use the same techniques and apply them to your site. Brilliant!

SEO Spyglass - this tool alone was the reason I bought the entire SEO Power Suite! The one tool I felt was a tremendous asset. You can literally spy on your top competitors and see what linking strategies they have employed. You can run customized reports easily and the tool will tell you what links they have, where they came from, what their PR is, and even if they actually purchased the link or not! Amazing!! If you are tired of doing the tedious work searching for links yourself this tool is amazing and completely assists in the time factor that is involved of doing this research.

Link Assistant - helps you find additional link partners and assists in providing you with their contact information so you can establish a relationship and hopeful earn that link partnership as well as monitor your link popularity over time.

I would recommend the entire suite of tools, but if you cannot get the entire suite then at the very least try the SEO Spyglass and Link Assistant, you won’t be sorry you did. But if you do decide on the SEO Power Suite, for a small business owner they offer a Professional license. But if you are a Search Marketing Firm or a large organization that hosts many websites then the Enterprise license is for you. Now there is a way to manage your clients or your own websites easily and stress free and gain more insight than you may have in the past as well as cut costs with effective time saving methods that work.

Feel free to leave a comment if you have purchased the tool and let me know what you think of it.

Small Business Owners - Trust Your SEO Professional

Small businesses are always challenged by finding the right folks to help them improve their search engine visibility. Most small business are starting off with limited capital and therefore are challenged by the price tag that comes along with either hiring an SEO professional or outsourcing a reputable SEO professional who can assist them. What often happens is they end up finding someone who will “cut them a deal” and sometimes you get what you pay for. So what is a small business supposed to do? If you are a small business owner you need to get educated. Try reading some blogs from places like, search engine land to get up to speed, or sign up for Mediapost to read articles related to building an internet strategy. But most of all if you hire a consultant make sure they have not told you any of the following will help to increase your ranking in the search engines.

Here are a few SEO “I Don’t Think So’s”:

You Must Submit Your URL to Google, Yahoo!, and MSN On a Monthly Basis
While that might have been the case many years ago it is definitely not the case now. Once you register your domain name these search engines will find you. So don’t let someone tell you that you need to submit to over 5,000 search engines and directories just stop right there and say, No Thank You!

Organic Rankings Are Affected by Pay Per Click Campaigns with Google Adwords
This one always makes me laugh, but quite honestly there are many people out there who actually believe that if they run a pay per click campaign with Adwords they will get organic benefits from it, and believe it or not I actually spoke with someone who even thought that when they stopped running their pay per click campaigns with Google that their natural search results would disappear. Now come on, this is just simply not true. Paid search campaigns are an absolute benefit for many types of businesses, it helps to expand your exposure online and increases the chances of getting that prospect to your website where you can convince them to become a customer, but in no way will a paid search campaign positively or negatively influence your organic positioning.

Update Your Website’s Content Regularly to Gain Higher Rankings
While I am not against updating website content/copy and keeping it fresh this does not mean you need to go in every month and add a word or two, it simply is not going to affect your overall ranking the search engines. The only time you should update your content is when you have something of value to add that not only your potential customers will benefit from but also the search engines. Think about becoming a resource to your customers and a source of relevant information for the search engines to index and you will find that the spiders will crawl your site more often, but still no guarantee here on higher ranking.

Google Will Ban My Website if I Buy Paid Links!
You know this one is the worst, in my opinion. Not only is it not true but I am quite annoyed by this comment. Part of building a good solid online strategy may include at times purchasing paid link to increase traffic flow to your website. Google will not “ban” your site, if they feel the links are not relevant to your website’s content they may “discount” those links but they certainly will not “ban” your website, that’s just silly. Now I will say that when purchasing links one should absolutely be cautious of those strategies and ensure they will benefit your website’s overall website traffic. You will also need to be sure the site linking to you provides relevant information related to what your website offers, and finally try to stay away from those sites that are obviously adding tons of outbound links from their website. Just be smart about it and stop worrying everything will be ok.

Now I can probably go on forever here but I won’t. Here are a couple more thoughts:

Use of the Meta Keywords Tag for Higher Ranking
Do you need it? Well some might yes, and some might say no. Google does not really pay attention to it but it does not hurt you to have it, as long as you do not over do it. Keep it to about 5-7 relevant keywords and leave it alone.

Adding a Google XML Sitemap for Higher Ranking
The idea of adding the good ole Google XML site map is to let Google know about pages within your site that it may not have recognized already. Go ahead and create it you can easily do so by using a tool like XML Site Maps, and make sure you do not forget to add to Google's Webmaster Tools. While you are at it you can also submit it to Yahoo! Site Explorer and check out the Live.com Webmaster Tools as well - although the Live.com one is still in beta but worth a shot.

To wrap things up let me just quickly remind you not to use submission tools, and never believe an SEO “professional” who tells you they will guarantee you top listings in Google because to be real honest NO ONE can, how could they, even their top Web Spam Strategist Matt Cutts says you can never guarantee a #1 position in Google.

There are many consultants out there and some are willing to train you instead of tell you what they think you need to do. If you decide to hire an Internet Marketing Executive who can help with your internet strategies try to choose one that will not only be honest but one who is willing to share their strategies that will help you succeed online.

Vocus and Hostway Corporation Announce New SEO

Vocus, Inc (NASDAQ: VOCS), a leading provider of on-demand software for public relations management, and Hostway Corporation, the global hosting and web services leader, announced today that they will enable Hostway's customers to distribute press releases via Vocus' PRWeb.

For those of you that don't know Vocus acquired PRWeb in August of 2006. The acquisition of PRWeb positions Vocus as a very large player in the world of online Public Relations. The partnership between PRWeb/Vocus and Hostway is an interesting one and has been long awaited, as it was heavily pursued by the FORMER EXECUTIVE TEAM of Affinity Internet, mainly by William Toll previous Director of Product Management, PRIOR to the acquisition of Affinity Internet by Hostway in April 2007.

I am glad to see that my previous employer was finally able to make this partnership work. Their clients will be pleasantly surprised by how well this can work for their search engine optimization efforts. It's too bad that the Press Release they created to announce the program was not optimized as well as it could have been for keywords that should have linked to their SEO Services, such as, SEO, Search Engine Optimization Services or SEO Consulting, just my opinion.

Check out the story anyway it was a good read and the service is definitely one that everyone should incorporate in their strategic internet initiatives.

read more digg story

What Happens at PubCon Shouldn't Stay at PubCon

Over a year ago (August 2006 to be exact) I hired a young girl from a Craig's List ad to join my staff at Hostway as an Online Marketing Analyst. She was straight out of college and green with experience related to the search industry. Well recently I received a blog that she wrote for the South Florida Interactive Marketing Association titled, "What Happens at PubCon…shouldn’t stay at PubCon: The Top 10 Takeaways " She was invited to go to one of the most popular conferences of the year PubCon. I should have been there this year and actually speak on a Pubcon panel but I decided to move my family to a new state for a new and exciting opportunity.

Back to the subject, Stephanie Faskow is her name and she wrote a blog about what happened at PubCon, while I wanted more and hope to soon hear from her all about it in more detail, I thought I would share with you her Top 1o PubCon Takeaways:

10. Some SEOs still use black hat techniques– you shouldn’t.

9. Sub domains will soon be treated the same as sub directories in Google.

8. A directory that provides listings to all websites that submit to the directory is not a one that you want to be in. Human editors are the key to a good directory.

7. Everyone should have a blog. Corporate or personal, just remember that there is a fine line with transparency. How much do you really want people to know about your personal life?

6. According to Webuildpages’ Jim Boyken the best way to gain entry into DMOZ is prayer…and to closely follow all of the guidelines provided. Don’t spam and use the real title of your website.

5. Do NOT buy links – at least not openly.The ultimate goal of the search engines is to have the results be (or at least look) natural.

4. Find small and relevant directories: they may not bring the most traffic, but they are more likely to convert.

3. The ‘No follow’ tag is one of your best friends.Especially when you are using paid advertising, or feel that one of your links may be connected to a bad neighborhood.

2. Linkbait: Create it. This was one subject that was discussed over and over again throughout many of the sessions. Create articles and contests (or top 10 lists): any sort of content that will attract other users to link to you.

1. Do not expect to be successful on all link bait attempts. If you fail, try try again.
Hint: Diggers are techies; write for them and your target audience.

Well if she passes me more information about this event I will certainly return the favor! Thanks Stephanie you make me proud! :)