Minnesota SEO Services | Brent Rangen

We are pleased to offer free SEO tools for your optimization needs. There are nine tools in total. Like my mom always said, each tool is important in its own way. How you utilize the data collected is up to you. If you come across anything that does not seem like accurate data, send me a @BrentRangen message on Twitter.

Blog Search - First of all, this tool will make requests to multiple search engines, social bookmarking and other sites. Give them a few seconds to grab and analyze the data.

The Blog Search tool will allow you to see how much activity your site (or a competitors site) has on the web, or “web 2.0″ and gives you a better idea of what kind of activity a site has. Give it a shot!

On Google’s Search Option tools there are nine new search options to filter search by: a date range, past hour, more shopping sites, less shopping sites, visited pages, not yet visited, books, blogs and news.

These search options are visible right after Google’s preliminary search results or you can simply click on “show options” under the main Google logo.

The 9 search option functions:

Past hour and Specific date range – e. With the availability of real time searches using Twitter, Google has to act fast. Using the date range and time filter will allow you to see recently indexed pages. Need to look for an older page? No problem with the specific date range option.

More shopping sites and Fewer shopping sites: – “Selecting more shopping sites is a great feature if you shopping for a certain item through Google. Perhaps your looking for reviews or product info and do not want sales sites. Set the filter to “fewer shopping sites” and the result will be fewer commercial sites in the SERPs.

Visited pages and Not yet visited – This is probably my favorite new filter. I remember last week I was looking everywhere for a site that I was just at last week. The site was one that I meant to bookmark but forgot. I used this tool to find it. I knew it was a directory/article submission tool but wasn’t showing up in the regular search results for many keywords. I was able to find it right away with this new feature.

Books, Blogs and News – “You can search through just book, blogs and news. If you are looking for a specific headline or perhaps a blog for comment links. You will do well to utilize these filter settings.

Related articles

• Bigger Google Search Box (blogoscoped.com)
• Information overload: Google’s Wave technology panned by top bloggers (dailyfinance.com)
• Gmail Down Again: Apps Status Dashboard Fail (blippitt.com)
• More Video Coming to Google Search Ads (marketingpilgrim.com)
• Take advantage of Google’s search options and ‘Fresh’ results (browsermedia.co.uk)

Every website should set up an initial keyword research campaign. If you haven’t set one up you might not be visible to exactly the viewers you want to see you and your site. You could have the best website in the world and it wouldn’t matter since no one will see it.

You are most likely making a site for better visibility, to increase your audience, or to pull in targeted users.  If your site produces revenue or has a lot of traffic you will want to set up an active keyword campaign. With Google, Wordtracker, and the many other keyword tools, a good keyword campaign will stay updated with keyword research (trends, competition, etc). There are many things to consider when setting up your first keyword campaign. One thing you will want to do is select the optimal traffic producing keywords. In doing so there are a few things we need to consider,

Annabelle is a Realtor in Brainerd Minnesota. She has just finished her Realtor license exam and took on a few clients. She is looking for maximum online exposure and will do what is necessary to achieve the highest visibility for her website. The only way she can do that is to select the right keywords. You need to optimize your site for those keywords. Keyword selection in Real Estate raises a few questions and concerns,

What about surrounding cities?
Surrounding Brainerd is Baxter, Nisswa, Crosslake, Pequot Lakes and many others. The population of the city is a good indicator for search volume. As you can see,  ‘Brainerd Real Estate’ is searched for more than ‘Nisswa Real Estate’. You should check though, never rely on assumptions when it comes to SEO.  I have the SEOBOOK toolbar so I can just type the keyword into my toolbar. You can look at the keyword tool here. It links to the Insight and gives you daily estimates from the three big search engines. The results may vary depending on which lookup tool you use.  We would need to select the cities which has the highest searches and least amount of competition. From there figure out the second variable, the niche keyword. Check to see if ‘Brainerd’ + ‘buy home’, ‘real estate’, ‘realty’, and even sometimes ‘mls’.

How much competition is there and who is the competition?
If you don’t check into this you would never know that there is a Baxter County in Arkansas and it pulls it a lot more searches than Baxter, MN. So you may have to use a broader term (or a longer tail), Google Keyword Suggestion tool tells us when we type ‘Brainerd Minnesota Real Estate’ keyword (without quotes), there are a few other keyword variations we should look into. If your going against a corporate realty company or you city has a large number of companies actively promoting websites you will have your work cut out for you. Remember, your domain name, links, content all determine how well you rank. Keywords help search engines to better identify a page or site. Keywords should also be focused on for most of your content development.

This is what the 10th spot on the first SERP looks like. Interstingly enough, it has been said that #10 gets more clicks that #9.

SERP – Search Engine Results Page: A keyword query into a search engine, in non-technical terms when you “Google something”  the results you see is known as a SERP, or Search Engine Results Page. The three big search engine’s always display 10 results per page. Page one would then hold positions (or rank) #1-10. Chances are you have seen the term SERP before.  I often send ranking reports and talk about keyword ranks and I’m always using the term SERP.

This is a broad term and the term SERP applies to every search engine – not just Google. The positions on the SERP one are the one’s that everyone desires. More eyes (and scripts) are viewing the results on page one.  Nobody really knows what the CTR (click-thru rate) of each position actually is.

The last time that data was captured was from AOL Time-Warner in 2006 and AOL was not happy about the data being released. The interesting thing about that study was that position #10 (the last on page one) gets more action than position #9. Captain obvious states it must be clicked more because it’s the last one on the page (Remember, there are 10 results per page). Apparently being last isn’t always the worst!

Each search engine displays results differently and are not limited to one type of results. You may be familiar with image, map, and video searches and also paid, contextual, orgranic results. These are just the tip of the ice berg. When someone mentions SERP on the fly usually they are talking about organic search results.

Everywhere I look someone is saying “Content is King” on every SEO forum some kudos-craving kid is looking for enough post juice to get his signature links. Over and over on seo thread this is all they can add. If you find yourself saying this, Quit it! The buzzword is dead my friend.

Let’s break it down, first off it doesn’t make sense.

“Content is King”
The definition of king:
a male sovereign; ruler of a kingdom, a competitor who holds a preeminent position,
baron: a very wealthy or powerful businessman; “an oil baron”
(chess) the weakest but the most important piece

So everyone is saying content is a ruler of a kingdom, or, perhaps a baron? Content rules the Search Engine Kingdom? I disagree with that. The real ruler of the SE kingdom is Google. Google decided your fate, let’s you live or wither away and die, and can even place you in a special little place where you won’t rank at all.

Let’s say Dave has the domain IamArealtor.net and just like you Dave is desperatley trying to obtain Google ranking bliss. Dave doesn’t know everything. What he doesn’t knows is that without content your site can’t achieve good rankings. My thoughts were if Dave wants to have a listing feed pointed to his domain then he will have more content for the Search Engines to index. The content is from a feed and is probable posted somewhere else too. Now we are back to the question, Does Google Penalize for Duplicate Content? From what I have seen.. duplicate content is not penalized, and at worst is simply ignored.

Did anyone see that Google has started advertising in metropolitan areas? They are advertising web apps/services on billboards. This new (to google) marketing strategy makes me wonder if they are actually nervous about Bing.I don’t think they have ever had to do that kind of advertising to get their message to the users maybe it has something to with Google users being more active and loyal than bing or Yahoo users. Perhaps that is changing though..

Internet data firm StatCounter said Microsoft’s new Bing search engine had 9.41 percent of the U.S. market in July, up from 8.23 percent in June. Google’s share slipped to 77.54 percent from 78.48 percent. With Bing’s large advertising campaign and ever-so-slowly increasing search % increases, it will be interesting to see how it unwravels. I’m going to keep a sharp eye on these numbers. Unless I am mistaken this is the first time that the numbers have gone against Google. If that is the case you can believe that they aren’t sitting back idly.

Sergio Brins expert panel has even tweaked their algorithm and some SEO forums even suggest that the result is more like Bing.

Related articles on other sites:

• Did Bing’s Growth Spurt Come to a Halt in September? (readwriteweb.com)
• Google Recovers Search Share From Bing (techie-buzz.com)
• Microsoft Gains Slightly in Search Wars (marketingvox.com)
• Modest Share Gains for Bing Continue (battellemedia.com)

A super long list of FREE RSS Submit links and Places to Submit Your Blog!

That’s right, I took out all the ones that make you pay.
After a few finger-bleedin’ hours I present to you.. A list! Just like the other ones but this one doesn’t have 1/4 dead links. Plus, I added a few extra from a few other places. I went through all the lists I could find and took out the paid links, the free one’s that have switched to payment only, the broken links, and the one’s that just don’t work anymore, plus a few I found on my own.

The List:
Aspin
Submit Videocasts – RSS directory
BlogBurst
BlogBunch
Blo.gs
Chordata
2RSS
4GuysFromRolla
Syndic8
the Feed Directory
Itsmynews
Fyber Search
Feed24 – Temporarily Unavailable
Feedage
Feedbase
FeedBees
Feedbomb
Feedplex
Feedboy
FeedCat
FeedFury
Feedmailer
Feedmap
Feedmil
FeedNuts
FeedPlex
Feeds2Read – No longer maintained.
Feeds4all
Feedsee -
FeedShark
Flookie
Feedgy
Jordo Media
LeighRSS Dir
Millionrss
News-Feeds
News Gator
News Mob
NewsNow
NewsXS
Postami
Ping-O-Matic
Pingoat
Plazoo
PressRadar
RDF-Ticker
RedTram
Realty Feeds
RocketInfo
RSSbuffet - Submit function wasn’t working for me – /submit.php
RSS Clipping
RSSFees4you
RSSfeeds
rssHugger
Rss Mad
Rssmicro
RSSMountain
RSSMotron
Read A Blog
RSS-Specifications
Search // RSS //
SolarWarp
SourceForge
Twingly
Feed Burner
Golden Feed
Blog Digger
Bloogz Add Your Blog
EatonWeb
9Rules
Eponym
- User Land
WeBlog ALot
Wingee
Yahoo RSS Submit
Xmeta
Zimbio
[B>[I>
Blog Submits:[/I>[/B>
BiggerBlogger
BlawgRepublic - Blogs regarding industry laws and legislation
DMOZ
Blloggs
Blogarama
Super Blog Directory
Blog Catalog
BlogBunch
Blogoriffic
Blog Collector
Blogs-Collection
Blog-Directory
Blog-Folders
Blog Explosion
Blogged
Bloggernity
Blog Hints
Blogintro
5 Star Blogs
Bigger Blogger
Blawg Repub - Blog Must be Law Related
Blloggs
Blog Burst -
Super Blog Directory -
Bloggapedia
Blogger's Choice Awards
Blog Flux
Blog Hop
Bloglines
BlogListing
Seattle Weblogs
Bloggernow
BloGobbler
Blogotion
Blogs.com
Google BlogSearch
Blog-Search
Blogville
Blogz.in
Blogz
Blurt it
Boing Boing
Best Directory
Blog Pulse
FindingBlog
Grokodile
Gozoof
Genwi
Get Blogs
Globe of Blogs
Mozdex
MV Blogs
MyBlog2u
MyBlogDirectory
NItle
Outpost-Earth
Quick Blog Dir
RateitAll
Regator
SmallBusiness
SpicyPage
Strategic Board
Submitblognow
SuperBlogDirectory
The Blog Resource
SEO King
Small Business Blogs
Truth Laid Bear
Weblogs
Weblog Dir - No New Submissions At this Time -
Webloogle Blog Dir

Let me know if you find any dead links or any that have since switched to payment only.

Currently Testing – I recommend taking a look at searching for homes in Brainerd Minnesota. This is a great guide on how to search for real estate in Brainerd, MN.