SEO Consultant in San Diego

Over a month ago a friend sent me an email asking if his Link strategy was up to par with Google’s policies. He wanted to make sure that his site wouldn’t end up being penalized by Google.

It’s also important to determine if all the work you’re doing will actually bring you the “Link Power” you’re seeking. I often encounter business owners who still spend a lot of money and energy into builing link exchanges with other sites, and in the opinion of this humble SEO Consultant that’s the biggest waste of time! To have a relevant link exchange is one thing, but to blindly create reciprocal links from buried pages on a site about tires going back and forth to a site about candles won’t help. That’s just a ficticious example by the way.

Anyway, back to my buddy’s question… He asked if it would be ok to own 4 different websites, all using different hosting servers, then create links from three of them going to the main one. The thinking behind the different server is so they can have different IP addresses. The purpose behind that is so that it looks natural, not like you’re manipulating Google, even though that’s exactly what you’re doing.

That’s smart thinking and all, but there’s something else we need to consider, the Registrar information. If you’re buying all domain names as the same entity, then you end up having the same registrar information under your WHOIS record. Can Google look into that? You would be surprised with what they have access to! In February of 2005 Google became a registrar. What does it mean to become a registrar?

Registrars are resellers, any entity can become one and sell domains. There are different tiers of registrars. You could be a “middle man”, between the source and the client. You could even be the “middle man” between the original middle man and the client and so on. It only costs a few thousand dollars to sign up to different tiers, and for Google that’s small insignificant ash tray change. Do you think they acquired that so they could let you buy domain names from them? ——- No.

Disclosure: now we enter the area of speculation and SEO Survivor’s opinions

Google made this move so they could have greater access to domain information. That doesn’t mean that now Google has information to all domain names purchased. They would only have the information to the domain names registered under them, but now they have the edge they needed to get into the registrar databases. They may not get into the black and white information, but as registrars, they get benefits such as being able to carry out high volume of automated queries and many others. I won’t get too techincal here since there’s more information about Google as a registrar if you want.

If Google can reset the Search Engine Authority from domain names that expire, you can be sure that they can find that your domain names are owned by the same entity even if they are hosted in different servers. This remains to be tested though, so if you are currently doing this, let me know how it’s going. It could work out for a while, just keep in mind that it is a huge pain in the ass to get out of Google’s supplemental index, and that’s where you go when you do something naughty in Google’s eyes.

The best way to build links is to be active in the Social Media community, share and help others out. To have original and useful content on your site, to have an SEO friendly and user friendly site navigation. To personally contact other site owners that have relevant content to yours and offer to write something for them to post on their site and link to you, as well as other practices along those lines. Organic strategies may not produce results as fast as robotic strategies, but be sure that they are well worth the time and effort, and provide super valuable links to you. Also don’t be affraid to link to other relevant sites since you have to give if you want to receive. And remember, don’t panic if it’s organic.

I hope this helps out a bit! Stay tuned for more and don’t be affraid to comment people! Peace out…

Buenas tardes everyone,

It’s another perfect day in this perfect world we live in, and what better than some good updates from the Search Engine Marketing world to make everything fit right in? I can’t think of anything better… Below is a short list of some articles that captured my attention this week, nothing from the main news stream that you already heard about from reading major news sources. This is the good stuff you don’t find out from such sources, these are things that come from “a friend of a friend”. Today I am your friend’s friend, and here are the news I bring to you:

1. imnotadoctor exposed Big Local today. As he was doing the geek’s version of the daily muscle flexing in front of the mirror, which is googling keywords your site ranks well for, he found some major spamming going on. Not only that, but they have a fishy 302 redirect in place taking visitors from the target url (www.clovers.com) to their main site (www.BigLocal.com). You should read up on that story on Search Engine Land.
2. A Twitter Search engine is out. I found http://summize.com/ this week, but I’m not sure how new it is. Pretty interesting tool, and simple concept. It basically searches through people’s tweats and serves results. Here is the search result’s page for tweats related to the seosurvivor.
3. Google’s Porn problem seems to be far from over. In the last month there have been at least two instances where Google was spotted displaying explicit porno pictures in the universal search results box. When searching for “knuckles” and “Hot Celebrities” on regular search, with the “adult filter” on, you’d get a big old explicit image right there on the top of the results. Not cool Google, not cool at all. Granted, it’s freaking hard to keep those spamming porn sites out of the way.



4. Linda Phan, from eVisibility, wrote an awesome post about helping searchers find their way with local business ads. Amongst other things, Linda talks about how advertisers don’t get charged for people clicking to expand the plusbox, clicking on the actual map, or clicking to get directions to the business location, which is nice for all adwords users out there. A good read if your business is local and you use PPC.
5. The SEM industry still rocks! Danny DeMichele wrote a post on his blog talking about some recent studies showing that the Internet Marketing Industry is far from declining, it’s actually gaining more momentum! That’s a good thing to know for all those of us who are immersed in it 24/7.

I’m stirring the brain juice and crafting some fun posts for next week. Have a great weekend and pick up your trash

Today I’m going to write about a time when you should be turning off your SEO for Firefox tool.

I first noticed this anomaly while working on my own blog, and again when working on a client’s site who uses Drupal. (hey, they already had Drupal installed. Nothing wrong with it, but if you ask me I prefer other technologies)

Alright, back to the subject. For those of you who aren’t familiar with SEO for Firefox, it’s a Mozilla Firefox add-on that every SEO professional and enthusiast should have, along with SEO Quake. It’s a free resource. Read this post first, then after you subscribe to my blog (hint, hint), you can get yours here.

So, while writing my post about the DoubleClick purchase, I used <rel=”nofollow”> on some of my links cause I didn’t feel like giving Google any of my precious link authority :). (If you don’t know about “nofollow” tags, this post explains it, but finish reading first!!)

To add the <rel=”nofollow”> attribute to my link tag, I had to switch to the “Code” tab in my post editor.

Now that I was in there, I added the attribute as you can see below:

Then I switched back to the “Visual” tab to finish up my blog post. I switched and notice that my SEO for Firefox was picking up that link as a “nofollow”, and highlighting it red as it likes to do with all “nofollows”. I thought: “Alright, you go nofollow! I mean… ummm… You are actually going nowhere, you’re a nofollow..” It acted as a confirmation that it was in place.

So I continued on with my post and published it. Once it was all done, I checked the live site on all browsers I have installed on my machine, just to be extra anal. Firefox first, duh! Check… Next was Explorer… Check.. umm.. Wait! Something wasn’t right there. I don’t have SEO for Firefox installed on my Explorer and somehow it was picking it up and highlighting it.

I thought to myself… Weird! Specially because that was the only nofollow on my page being picked up. Very weird indeed! What to do? I went back to the code. Logged back into my admin area, went into my “Manage” tab and picked this post.

Everything looked ok, I still didn’t get it.. So I went into the “Code” tab and lo! and behold! Well, see for yourself:

Did you see what happened there? You probably did, but just in case you didn’t, I’ll help you out. When I first added the <rel=”nofollow”> attribute to the link tag, I had my SEO for Firefox turned on. Then I switched to “Visual” mode and the SEO for Firefox did what it does best, it highlighted the link red because it saw a “nofollow” on the code behind it. When it did that, my post editor read it as if I had highlighted that word in red myself, so it added the extra code <style=”background-color: #ff0000″> into the link tag. The end result was a link with the red highlight in the code, not something I wanted at all.

From that point on, I learned to turn my SEO for Firefox tool OFF before working on a post

I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, please don’t be shy, comment, share, subscribe!

Til next time!

Just another regular day of good old SEO ass kicking here at eVis… My office mate Fumi is on the phone with a client chatting away while I’m doing my unintended eves-dropping because we sit a few feet away from each other. Then I hear Fumi yelp a “Whaaaaaaat???” in mid-sentence and I had to look at his screen.

He’s already calling me over, and pointing at his screen while getting back into his conversation. I look at his screen and I see search results for “ftc” on his screen. I notice the usual Sitelinks and then, the unexpected:

WHOA!! What the heck is that “Search ftc.gov” doing there?

Is Google trying something new behind my back? I haven’t heard of any buzz about this new feature yet, so I can say I was truly surprised.

Is this something Google is awarding sites with extremely high authority, like ft.gov for example?

Is this something Google is just testing out but will be implemented to every site that is awarded Sitelinks?

Will we have any control over this tool through Google Webmaster?

There will be some researching here on my end, as I’m sure there are many other blogs writing about this right now, so let me figure this out write a bit more about it later.

Just wanted to share the new findings! Take care and please do comment about it with your thoughts.

As mentioned on my last entry, I wrote a post for the eVisibility Insider about the use of nofollow tags. That post has received awesome feedback, and I’m very happy to see that the SEO community embraced it the way they did.

We even made it to the homepage of Sphinn, check out the screenshot:

For a lot of the big players out there, that’s nothing to be bragging about. But being fairly new in the SEO industry, and holding a full time job that keeps me busy, I certainly see this as an accomplishment.

Thank you ImNotADoctor (I have links to this guy on my sidebar, so make sure you check his site out), for getting the word out and submitting that post!

SEO Roundtable’s Tamar also mentioned our post and that definitely put a smile in my face. My buddies who went to the SMX West last week were telling me that she’s great in person, and I’m grateful to receive good feedback from her

Have a great day everyone, and thank you for your support and readership!

As promised last Friday, I wrote a blog post on understanding what the “No Follow” tag can do for you.

The post was just published this morning and it has already received quite a bit of positive feedback from the Sphinn community.

If you have a website, need to explain “nofollow” tags to clients and don’t know how, or are interested in understanding more about how nofollow tags work, you must check this out at the eVisibility Insider.

Have a great week, and look forward to another post later this week.

Another week has gone by and I haven’t posted anything in my blog. I have had plenty of great ideas throughout the week, but having time to post them is a total different matter.

As an SEO/SEM Project Manager for a positively busy Internet Marketing Agency, I don’t have much time during the work day to develop personal projects. Then, at the end of the day, when I get home the last thing I want to do is work. My attention turns to some type of entertainment and relaxation. Although I do love this business, at a personal level, I also love other things… And believe it or not, I try to move my body every now and then

With all of this blah blah blah said, let’s talk about something interesting…. How about the last SMX West? Three of my boys just came back, and they had a blast!! SEO by Mike, OrganicSEOConsultant and ImNotADoctor. That’s right, I didn’t go and I AM going to talk about it!

By the way, look how awesome the shirts we made and passed around the conference are:

FRONT

BACK

I scored some schwag thanks to my peeps thinking of me while there, and my boy Fumi took care of the photoshoot with his blackberry. The photo below is showing off my new schwag as I’m writing this blog post! Right now you’re thinking “How awesome is that?”.

One good thing that we realized by having them go to SMX is that we definitely are on the cutting edge of the SEO industry. Almost nothing was news for our guys, and I’m not trying to be cocky at all by saying this, but the main thing for them was networking, which must have been awesome! Maybe I’ll go to the SES next, we’ll see.

We have posted some great stuff about the SMX on the eVisibility Insider blog, so if you’re interested in checking out our notes, you should definitely do so.

Besides that, I have a pretty cool blog post for next week that’s in the works, along with an overview on what “nofollow” tags can do for your site, which will be posted in the eVisibility Insider sometime next week.

Peace out my friends, have a wonderful weekend and I’m looking forward to sharing more with you next week.

Alright, this is no breaking news unless you don’t use Google Local on a daily basis, but Google Local Results now gives you TEN results rather than the usual three. For example, if you were to search for “dry cleaning san diego, ca”, you’d get the results on the screenshot below.

So yeah, wow Google, you really want to give more and more on page Real Estate to your awesome Local Database. No problem, I get it… I’m not complaning… yet!

When questioned about the “OneBox”, Google said “… the reason it’s showing more links is because usability testing revealed that many people didn’t realize there was additional local content available beyond the three listings, despite the ‘more results . . .’ prompt.”  Google said that with the 10 links people will hopefully realize that there are many other local results to be explored.

Noble answer, the only problem is that Google Local takes sooooo long to update its submissions. I’ve had to wait several months before to see a local listing go live. So, now we have a large area that responds very slowly to any optimization one might put in place while submitting a local listing.

I’ll follow up on this entry with more on Google Local listings optimization soon.

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines has the language to back that up. It has recently been changed with the following:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

This time Google is being pretty blunt about it, and it is coming out and saying it will penalize sites that sell links.

Just thought this would make an interesting entry. Things have been so busy this week that unfortunately I haven’t had time to keep up, but I’m working on a good Monday post, so be sure to check back.

Alright, so I have some juice to write this post since I have recently lost one of my great clients because of this.

My client’s company is located in the East Coast. I work out of Southern California, and ran both SEO and PPC campaigns for his company. My point of contact within the company decided to move on to bigger and better things, something that I highly respect and admire. Upon his departure, the company’s executives found out that they don’t know much about internet marketing. In fact, they looked at some of the reports I used to send to my old contact and realized they didn’t know anything about SEO and PPC. They couldn’t read the reports and couldn’t make decisions.

Without communicating with me first, they decided to hire an SEO company located a couple metro stops away from their main office. This company would be able to send one of their SEO consultants to their office due to the close proximity. According to them, this was the only thing this other company had that we didn’t. They were located close to my client’s main office.

After they made this decision, within a day or two after my contact left the cpmpany, my old contact got in touch with me and told me that “the decisions made there were purely to get someone that can walk across the street there and explain SEM/O to their staff and executives.” At the end of the day, with my contact leaving, they had “no one that could manage or even understand the hows and whys of what I was doing.” In the process, he was extremely nice in letting me know that they credit us with having helped their company achieve record breaking numbers during the course of their campaign with us. I was very grateful for that, and we’re actually building a case study about them now.

The question remains: Do you really need an SEO consultant in-house?

I can definitely agree that this has its advantages, but only if it’s the right person. I run across so many websites that have been “optimized” by their in-house webmaster/web designer/SEO expert person, and these sites have crappy SEO. As if these “SEO experts” went to a crappy SEO 101 course, didn’t pay attention to the class, and walked out to apply some basic concepts (like meta tags) and now they think the page is optimized. There’s so much more to SEO.

So, while an in-house person is a good way of having a face-to-face interaction with your consultant, a team that’s working hard from a distance can be 1,000 times better if they actually know what they’re doing and know how to communicate what they’re doing.

My advice, don’t think that just because you can get you local little SEO dude in-house, you’re doing better off than hiring a robust internet marketing company to back your SEO efforts. Phone and email allow for excellent communication, and if needed, internet video conferencing is super easy to be done today as well. Your local SEO person might be the right person, but do talk to different companies and make sure you don’t hire the local person just because they’re local and it may seem easier. It could cost your business thousands upon thousands of dollars in the end, not to mention the potential untapped business.