It’s been a busy past week or so as I’ve been scheduled for more speaking opportunities. It will be a nice busy winter as I get to do some traveling and meeting new people. What could be better?

If you’re interested in hearing me speak, come attend any of the fabulous conferences/seminars below.

PubCon Las Vegas – November 10-13, 2009
Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada
www.pubcon.com
SEO Design & Organic Site Structure – November 11, 2009

Affiliate Summit West – January 17-19, 2010
Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada
www.affiliatesummit.com
Site Clinic by the Women of SEO – January 19, 2010  Read more...

If you read my earlier post about the implications of not having done search engine optimization, you’re familiar with my anecdote about looking for an auto body shop to fix my car.

I did want to look into the franchise shop I mentioned, Boyd Autobody. So, I did a search in Google and here’s what came up.

Wait, what?

Yikes!!  Read more...

Warning: I’m about to ramble which means this could turn into a rant.

Sometimes I think that being a search engine optimization specialist works against me. Sometimes I wish I was ignorant about how indexing and ranking happens.

Let’s take an example.

I hurt my car (pause for tears – anyone who knows me knows how much I love my car). It’s going to require some body work.  Now, I know a few places in the city from driving around and seeing them. Especially the franchise shops like Boyd Autobody (who, by the way, could stand a new web site and some marketing and online reputation management help – but I’ll save that for another post).  Read more...

One of the common misconceptions about search engine optimization is that it cannot be geotargeted. While it’s not as simple as paid search, where you can go into your AdWords settings and say “I want my ads to appear only for people in these geographical areas”, it is still very possible to narrow down your organic market.

Think of your own search behaviours. If you’re looking for a locksmith and you live in Winnipeg, you’re probably going to going to type “locksmith winnipeg” to ensure that the results you get are in fact located in Winnipeg.  Read more...

Continued from Part 1 last week.

Don’t try to get hundreds or thousands of links at once (especially paid or automated)
Nothing says “I’m a brand new site trying to rank really fast” by gathering a ton of links at once. The important thing to note here is intent. If you’ve got something that’s got viral and are getting tons of links in a natural state, you’re not going to have a problem. But if you’ve gone after a bunch of links from “easy” places, chances are the search engines know about them and aren’t going to assign any value anyway.  Read more...