When you search on Google for phrases like "SEO Minneapolis" there are approximately 373,000 search results. That's pretty amazing considering there are so few search engine optimization blogs being published in the Twin Cities.

A search for "SEO Minneapolis" on Google Blog search returns over 4,000 results but most of them are scraped content from a much smaller number of actual blogs about SEO.

Undoubtedly, there are many search engine optimization practitioners in Minnesota. I would speculate that most are individuals working as independent consultants or promoting their own networks of content sites, on staff SEOs at web dev shops, interactive firms, ad agencies or PR firms where search engine optimization is a complimentary service but not a specialty.

What's interesting is that many web sites that rank for "SEO Minneapolis" (like ours) are not companies with offices in Minneapolis but rather a company with offices in the suburbs. For the most part, clients don't really care about that since they're just trying to find a local company they can trust.

Whether the SEO consultant or one of the few pure SEO agencies is in Eden Prairie, Wayzata or White Bear Lake - doesn't matter. Besides, the queries for SEO plus a suburb name are so low, it hardly makes sense to optimize for them.

Using KeywordDiscovery.com, reinforces there's not much demand for specific geo-targeted queries for SEO companies in Minnesota or Minneapolis. Below is a list of phrases with the number of times each phrase appeared in the Keyword Discovery Global Premium database in the past 12 months. Not very exciting.

minneapolis seo - 3
seo minneapolis - n/a
seo minnesota - n/a
minnesota seo - n/a
search engine optimization minneapolis - n/a
minneapolis search engine optimization - n/a
search engine optimization minnesota - n/a
minnesota search engine optimization - n/a
internet marketing minneapolis - n/a
internet marketing minnesota - n/a
minnesota internet marketing - n/a
minneapolis internet marketing - n/a

Sometimes I get asked why we don't focus on more local and geographically targeted content optimization and you can see why above. Besides, ranking well for both general terms like "search engine optimization firms", "search engine optimization consultants" or "search engine optimization services" and local versions creates the kind of credibility that inspires companies to pick up the phone and call about your services. Much more than relying purely on geo-targeted phrases like "SEO minneapolis".

Labels: minneapolis seo, search engine optimization minneapolis, SEO minneapolis, toprank

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Here's an article on link building that originally ran over 3 years ago. It's amazing how much has changed since then. Enjoy:

Link Building
Here are tips for effective link building:

Reasons to link:
a) To drive traffic directly to your site
b) For search engine rankings

A) Linking to drive traffic to your site

Location Location Location
Identify high traffic sites that would be visited by your target audience. These include: publications, buyer's guides, product review sites, shopping sites and guides

Low Hanging Fruit
Look for a links like: "submit site" "add url" "submit product" or "contact us" to contact the site editor to see if they will list your web site or product. Some of the sites will have a form for you to fill out. When it asks for the site name, use a name that includes your keywords.

Keep your message short, simple, keyword rich and accurate. If the site does not have a form for you to fill out but provides a contact email address, be sure to include how you want the site to link to your site. Point out the benefit to the site editor of why they should add a link to your site. Typically this format works best:

Link Title: Site Name (add keyword here)
Link URL: http://www.domainname.com
Link Description: Site name keyword keyword offers: keyword, keyword, keyword and keyword.

You could also provide this as HTML code to make it even easier for the webmaster to just copy and paste your link onto their web site. An example:

DomainName.com - Keyword - Site name keyword keyword offers: keyword, keyword, keyword and keyword.

You might also consider paid listings on high traffic web sites. Some sites charge a one-time fee and some charge by the month. Ads that appear near the top of the page are best.


B) Linking for search engine rankings

Search engines rank pages of web sites based on many different factors and each major search engine uses unique algorithms for determining relevancy and ranking of web sites. One factor that all major search engines use to some degree is link popularity. If two sites are have equally relevant content, but one has more high quality links to it than another, the site with more links will rank higher.

Your task is to find "quality" sites and get them to link to you using text links that include your keywords. Try to avoid reciprocal linking or link exchanges. Many, many sites are abusing this method of linking and search engines will soon discount the value of any links shared directly between two sites that do not match certain criteria.

Quality is better than quantity.
By "quality" I mean sites that you need links from need to be considered authority sites on topics related to your own site. These include subject matter resource sites, publications, etc. Sites with .org, .edu are great. Chances are, there are many, many web sites out there with a theme similar to your site. Most that explicitly offer links require you to link back. When this happens, ask yourself if you would like to this type of site anyway - even without a link back.

Also, is the page where your site will be listed related directly to your site? The page that is linking to your site should have less than 40 links on it to other sites. 40 is not a hard number, but the lower the number of outgoing links the better.

The links to other sites should be to sites related to yours. If the links go to all different types of sites, that is of little value for you. If the links page has many, many links it may be of any value. The smaller the number of links to other web sites, the better for you if that page links to you. But the topic of the site should be related to your site.

How to find links.
Go to google.com and do a search for one of your keywords. Check each of the top 20 sites to see if there are opportunities for you to get a link back to your site.

You could also search Google and Yahoo using your keywords plus phrases like, "add site". Example: keyword phrase" add site" or keyword "submit site". This might result in sites that are open to accepting links.

There are many other ways to find links and will be included in a future, more in-depth article.

Remember, when you get links from other sites to yours, it is important that they are text links and that the text includes your keywords. Also, you don't always need to use the same keywords and you don't have to always link to your home page. You can get links from other sites to your specific product or services pages as well as your home page. Example:

Link Title: Product Keyword
Link URL: http://www.domainname.com/product-keyword.htm
Link Description: Order your product keyword online from domainname.com

By doing this you can build the link popularity to specific web pages of your site as well as your home page.

To Reciprocal Link or Not?
Avoid reciprocal links. Focus on one-way inbound links. It's good to have a resources page pre-populated with links to authority sites in your industry. These would be one-way links out to other industry, association or resources web sites. Try to keep the number of links you have going out to other sites to a minimum compared to the number of links coming in. If it really makes sense to trade links with another site, you can use your resources page to link to them.

Building links to drive traffic directly to your site can also help build your link popularity. Just keep in mind that text links are ideal and they should include keywords relevant to the page you're linking to. Set aside a few hours per week to research new links for your web site and mix up the links between your home page and the major category pages of your web site. Over time you'll build link popularity across your entire site and rankings will follow.

More resources on link building are available at:

http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/2160301

http://www.ericward.com/press/wilson/

http://www.linking101.com/articles.htm

http://www.linkbuilding.info/

Labels: link building, linking, seo

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This SEO blog is retired.

Be sure to subscribe to the new feed at:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/onlinemarketingseoblog

For daily updates on search marketing industry events, interviews, tips, tactics and the most comprehensive list of SEO blogs on the web, be sure to visit Online Marketing Blog!

Need SEO in Minneapolis? Contact TopRank at 1-877-872-6628.

Labels: seo blog

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What's a "clean crawlable link"? It's one that is not blocked with Robots NoIndex meta tag, JavaScript redirect, blocked with robots.txt or a NoFollow tag.

If you in the business of SEO and still involved with begging for links, article submissions or other high labor, low impact tactics, then you'll want to make sure the links you actually do get are good.

Here are a few things to check for:

1. To check the robots meta tag, look at the page source code. If there is no robots tag, that's good.

If it looks like this,
meta name = "robots" content = "index, follow"
that's good.

If it looks like this:
OR

that's not good.

2. To see if there is a JavaScript redirect, put your cursor over the link and look at the url that appears in the status bar at the bottom of your browser. If it shows you the correct link url, then in most cases, it's ok.

3. To see if robots.txt is blocking, then visit the article site. For example:
URL http://www.articleblast.com/robots.txt
Will show:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /editor/
Disallow: /help/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /mambots/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /installation/

What the "disallow" instruction does above is to tell search engine spiders not to crawl the designated directories. If articles are located in one of these directories, then the links within those articles to our client sites are no good.

4. To see if there is a no follow tag, right click on the link URL and a window pops up. See if there is an attribute called:

rel = nofollow.
If that's there, it's no good.

If it's not there at all or has another value besides "nofollow" then it's ok.

You only have to do this once in most cases on any page of a article hosting site. The reason sites will do any of these 4 things is to hoard their site's PageRank. There is a belief that linking out to other web sites, leaks PageRank from the link source.

Labels: clean links, link building

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While I was at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York, the Minneapolis Star Tribune published a profile of our companies, TopRank Online Marketing and Misukanis Odden Public Relations. The story, "Learning how to climb the web" was written by the very talented Jenna Ross.

Like the coverage we received in The Economist, "Dancing with Google's Spiders" treatment of TopRank was very generous. Besides giving examples of our own successful online marketing efforts and the types of clients we work with, there were very positive quotes from SEO pioneer Jill Whalen and one of our big brand clients, Michael Brito of Hewlett Packard.

Most of our previous media coverage came as a result of journalists researching stories and finding TopRank on the web. However, this story is a result of our very persistent and enterprising media relations guy, William Arnovich. Bill's going to be writing for us over at Media Relations Blog.

Labels: lee odden, misukanis odden, star tribune, toprank

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A client's site is being completely overhauled by a new web dev agency from scratch because the existing agency has locked down the CMS as proprietary. These are questions put to the new agency web dev team:

1. "Can we manually or dynamically populate the title tags so they're not all the same?"
No

2. "If we map the old urls to the new urls with 301 redirects can you implement on the server?"
No

3. "Can you add this snippet of code to the templates so we can capture and report web analytics data?"
No

This kind of thing leaves me scratching my head why SEO gets such a bad rap and web dev shops come across as squeaky clean.

Labels: search engine optimization, seo, web development

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Last week I was a speaker at SES New York on a panel called "Bookmarking Strategies". I was tasked fairly specifically, to talk about the very basics of social bookmarking. On the panel with me were Todd Malicoat, Michael Gray and Neil Patel. Alex Bennert was moderator.

It was a particularly niche topic for an entire session, but I was glad and appreciative that Danny Sullivan asked me to do a presentation. I've been the 4th wheel at several SES Chicago shows in the past to answer questions, but no presentation.

The focus on the session was mostly del.icio.us and of course, social media optimization ala Digg, Netscape and StumbleUpon snuck in there a bit. My part introduced the major players, did a walkthrough and share some of the tools that make it easy to add bookmark links to web content including our own social bookmarking tool.

Despite such a niche topic and competition from other sessions, the room was nearly full and was covered by quite a few prominent bloggers. Here's a list of posts I've found so far:

• Pandia - Bookmark Strategies for Search Engine Optimization
• Lisa Barone from Bruce Clay - Bookmark Strategies
• Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable - Social Bookmark Strategies
• Matt McGee from Small Business SEM - SES New York Bookmark Strategies
• Allen Stern from CenterNetworks - SES 2007 Social Bookmarking Strategies

I think it's interesting how each blogger titled their post something slightly different. I am writing a longer post about the basics of social bookmarking over at Online Marketing Blog and will also embed a copy of my presentation there.

Labels: ses new york, social bookmarks, social media optimization

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So, apparently Digg unbanned certain domains from having stories submitted but feedback I've been getting and direct observations show that any stories submitted from these allegedly non-banned sites are quickly "buried".

Connected Internet shows how the "Digg mafia" buried a story within minutes from their site. Pronet Advertising found evidence of a Digg "bury brigade". It's all childish nonsense and pretty much relfects the user base of Digg.

I understand the rush from getting thousands of new visitors within a few hours but it's nothing more than Digg crack and can hardly be taken as a serious marketing channel any more than playing poker in Vegas is a viable career.

Labels: digg

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Today I noticed on a trackback link from Pronet Advertising that Digg has decided to un-ban a number of domain names. Neil Patel's name is listed as the author of the blog post and he lists Online Marketing Blog at the top. I appreciate the heads up.

I suspect there are people wondering what the owners of the sites that are not on Digg have to say about this.

Here's my reply: Sigh.

We weren't relying on traffic before toprankblog.com was banned and certainly haven't missed it since. In fact, our visitors, RSS subscribers and page views are up by 30%.

What I do appreciate about being "unbanned" is that if someone submits a story from our site to Digg, they will no longer get the "This domain name has been banned from submissions" type of message.

More importantly than re-including sites, I hope Digg implements policies similar to search engines as far as identifying and dealing with spam along with re-inclusion. I understand as well as anyone that mistakes can be made on both sides. But without a better process, Digg will alienate itself from growing its user base.

Labels: digg

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