SEO News

Awhile back, I launched Coconut Headlines, a free news aggregator site (making available to everyone the same material I read to follow the world of SEO on a daily basis).

Naturally, over time, feeds change, break, or are discontinued – you may have noticed a few of these on the site in recent months.

I’ve done a bunch of work to update it, and all the existing feeds are now working.

What I could use some help on is, what sources should I consider adding?

Prominent ones that are already on my radar are:

• Jason Acidre
• Don Rhoades
• Seer Interactive
• State of Search
• WireBuzz
• Brick Marketing
• Sean (the 1′s and 0′s guy)
• Stuntdubl
• Martinibuster

Please take a look and give me any feedback on any others I should be considering – and thanks!
www.coconutheadlines.com

Provisioning a Server in The Good Old Days

SEO Tools, particularly website audit ones like Xenu Link Sleuth or PowerMapper SortSite, can sometimes take a long time to run when examining particularly large websites.  Occasionally you may even need to reboot your machine for some other reason, which then ruins some particular run of these tools, forcing you to start over.

I recently got frustrated with this (and my laptop hitting near-Fahrenheit-451*-levels when doing site audits) and began looking for cheap solutions for running Windows software remotely.

*R.I.P. Ray Bradbury!

Why Cheap “VPS” Services Seem Like a *Really* Bad Idea
My understanding of most VPS (virtual private server) services is, they aren’t necessarily virtual private servers in actuality – most are merely an *account* on a virtual private server, Read on »

SEO News

For some time now, I’ve been developing a personal news aggregation website focused completely on SEO.  I’ve decided to go ahead and make it available to the community at large.

Here’s the features:

Read on »

In ancient times, tens of years after the dawn of Google, lived a strange race of people...the SEOs. No one knows who they were, or what they were doing...but their legacy remains. Get out your stone calculators!

Doing some work for a client with a fairly new site recently, I noticed their home page has a toolbar PageRank of 7, and they achieved that almost entirely by having a site-wide link on a PageRank 9 website.  Finally, now that have I seen enough cases like this, I think it’s possible to estimate the answer to the question “How many links do I need?” for many situations.  This posting will detail the anecdotal data I’ve seen, and then give tables that can be used to estimate what a page’s toolbar PageRank will become if you obtain a link from a high-PageRank site, and also how many links of which type you need to move up one level of PageRank. Read on »

Bruce Clay's SEOToolset *click to enlarge*

In our recent post, High-End SEO on a Low-End Budget, we briefly mentioned Bruce Clay’s SEOToolSet®.  This is a great subscription service that has been around for a long time and has recently gone through a major upgrade – here we’ll take some more time to run through the service in detail.

Bruce is one of the original SEOs from back in the day, and his company provides a wide variety of training classes, SEO services, and even access to its proprietary optimization toolset.  In a nutshell, this subscription service contains Read on »

Monk-eying around with a PDF file

PDF files, just like web pages, can be optimized to rank highly on Google.  Many SEOs recommend steering away from PDF files as much as possible, but they are ranking all over the place on Google, so I wouldn’t particularly avoid using them.  In fact, if you’ve gone through some effort to make a professionally-formatted PDF file, one might argue it’s likely to be higher “quality” content than the average run-of-the-mill web page.  I would not rule out Google even slightly favoring PDF files for this reason Read on »

*** Click to enlarge ***

Tumblr is in a category of sites called “microblogging”, which, depending on who you talk to, may or may not include Twitter, but probably includes Posterous.

Essentially these sites allow you to rapidly create blog postings and can be thought of as “blogger 2.0″ websites.  It’s interesting that old ideas on the internet often come back around for a second, and better run. Read on »

YouTube SEO is Heavy, Man!

Optimizing for more YouTube views, and building a subscriber base, is something I must admit I have little experience with, but a friend of mine recently asked me for some advice on this, so I’ve done a pretty exhaustive survey of various material and postings. The following ideas look like sensible basic optimization tips.  There were so many ideas I had to break it into three postings – this one, an upcoming “Advanced Tips” posting, and an upcoming Read on »

Let’s say you were stranded on a desert island, as in our previous scenario, but luckily managed to land a number of marketing consulting gigs with your remote internet connection, so you could earn some money helping companies straighten out their marketing (and receive Dr. Pepper etc. via parachute drop by transferring money to some shipping company via PayPal).  And let’s say you could start out with only ONE book on marketing.

My choice would be Read on »

There are a ton of great free tools out there, but there comes a point where you need to actually shell out a little money for tools if you’d like to accomplish some substantial results from an SEO standpoint.  If you’re an in-house SEO doing it all, you’ll  need tools for the six major pieces of SEO – Keyword Research, Architecture Analysis, Performance Tracking, Content Optimization, Linking Analysis, and (optionally) Monetization.  For Monetization, Google AdSense is pretty hard to beat, at least if you have under 500,000 page views, and the AdWords Keyword tool does a great job on the Keyword Research front, so in this posting we’ll focus on the other four areas.

The following tools are great values and add up to well under $100.00 a month Read on »