Minnesota SEO Services | Brent Rangen

Bruce Clay, Inc  – I respect this man. I respect this brand.

Bruce Clay and Brent Rangen at the Bruce Clay, Inc Booth - SES San Francisco 2010

Back in 2001, I remember reading bruceclay.com for the latest SEO tips and strategies. Someone could have told me back then that I would be on one of his podcasts and I would have probably called you were insane.

This just goes to show you that you need to capitalize on opportunities and be active in the community. Practice what you preach and good things will come to you. The whole experience was unbelievable and the tips taken away from the past week have been something we will use for quite some time.

Without further adieu, here is the SEM Synergy interview and let me know what you think!

We discussed the SES San Francisco experience and also talked a bit about performing SEO services for small businesses.

What is a High Quality Link?

Chances are if you own a website or blog, the phrase “high quality backlink” is not a new concept. Most of the articles surrounding this topic are outdated. The main concepts remain the same, for the most part, but some of the minor details have changed.

This question does come up a lot in SEO forums, but they get buried fast and the majority of them give bad WRONG advice, because the people responding have ulterior motives; selling you these bitter bad links! Just because people sell social bookmarking, forum, or directory links, they will tell you that they work better than anything else. This is not the case.

The common question:

We just purchased 2,000 back links and our rankings haven’t changed much yet? We are not showing up for long-tail keywords either. What’s the deal? continue reading   »

The Basics on Increasing Google Visibility.

So here he is again, the ruler of the web, and the face of Google, Matt Cutts, Google’s Spam czar answers a few questions on visibility. One thing to note: Google rewards sites that follow along with the SEO guide they published a few months ago, almost a new standards body in himself. Webmasters and SEO professionals alike all watch Matt’s web activity under a microscope even speculating at nick names he may use of forums.

Now Matt Cutts is the undisputed golden boy of the web 2.0 era, in fact, one could even say that he never does anything wrong, but we all remember this. Hey, nobody is perfect!

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Rising Trends in Minnesota Real Estate Search over the last 12 months. Way to go Google! It would be nice to see Bing and Yahoo offering the same data.

We recommend following the battle plan of niche marketer’s, find hot buzz words and adjust your keyword campaign accordingly. Use tools like Google Insights, Google Trends, weekly/monthly reports, and social media trending tools from Twitter. Capitalize on any new “buzz” keywords, or keywords which can have an Oprah Effect. Sometimes you may be the only site going after an industry buzzword and can achieve mass amounts of traffic while expending minimum time and effort.

Current events and real time search create a lot of new keywords on a regular basis. Sometimes those keywords can come about by a celebrity (like Oprah Winfrey) and many major players are competing in current events. With real estate you may find such keywords by analyzing users search behavior and by tracking data from your MLS and IDX sites.

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Every real estate webmaster knows about Google’s two main basic functions:

1. Returning results for a basic search query (ie. Brainerd Real Estate) .
2. Serving highly targeted ads by sponsored ads on SERPs, mobile, and the content network.

Did you know that there is more though?

Sign up for a verified Google Profile, add a business listing (which can be linked to your Adwords campaign), use Google Maps to the full extent, Google Earth for ‘listing fly-overs’ , market and sell homes in 3d, and of course the ARMY of Google Apps can help streamline your path to web success.

• Google can generate real estate leads and referrals.
• Google has more real estate searches than other search engines combined, and more unique visitors than all real estate specific web sites.
• Google is the most-used search engine for researching and purchasing real estate information and services.
• The Google Network reaches over 80% of U.S. Internet users.

When we say, “Google offers highly targeted ads” we mean: “Over 56% of all Internet searches on “real estate” and related terms are conducted on Google and our partner sites, and the majority of those searchers are actively looking for listings or referrals to brokers and agents.”

Read the Google Article on Achieving Real Estate Success on the Web

Bob Rains is an expert in SEO. He has been a leader in gaming SEO and is now VP or marketing at Affiliate Media Inc. His view on Caffeine is similar to what we have posted in the past. Let’s watch the video.

Click “read more” to see the video continue reading   »

Today we are introducing SEO Tool #2 which is a scanner. What does it scan for you ask? Well my friend, it searches for industry related backlinking opportunities. This is not intended as a way to totally bypass searching manually for linking opportunities, no. It is meant to assist you in your link building campaign and hopefully will speed up the process.

1. Enter your keyword(s)
2. Enter captcha
3. Wait for results

Now you have your results in hand and can exhaust every opportunity for ranking success and king of the SERPs.

Twitter for the Professional

Twitter can be a great source of traffic, leads, and ultimately more conversions. The secret to reaching success on Twitter is followers. Thousands of followers is the goal all the while keeping the number of people you follow low, a good ratio between followers to following. Because of the popularity of Twitter many third-parties are developing useful applications everyday. Let’s explore what works, what doesn’t, and the best third-party tools available today.

Demystifying the Myth
If you still are one of the many who think Twitter is too personal, think again. Facebook is much more personal than Twitter. Dropping links in tweets is a common thing to do. You don’t get much SEO benefits from using links in tweets, but you do get traffic and the potential for more links as you are increasing your visibility.

Setting Up Your First Account

First, go to Twitter.com and click on the green “Sign Up Now” button and enter every field. The more profile information you utilize, the better. I recommend reading “Best Practices for Setting up a Twitter Account by the Numbers” before you pick a name and bio line. Remember, you can always go back and change your bio later. If a person was to click on your username they would end up on your profile page. Because so many other professionals have customized their profile page, you’d better get on the bandwagon now. Customized profiles are a great way to extend your brand and site as well. See Mashable’s post on Custom Twitter backgrounds for directions.

All About the Numbers (followers)

Now you should have your profile complete. The next step is finding those finicky followers! How do you go about doing that? This is probably the most frequently talked about subject by Twitter users looking to get more traffic. You simply need followers to get more traffic. The best strategy is to buddy up with industry leaders that have a good ratio of followers to following. You can go around the web and look for authorities in your field, chances are they are on Twitter too. You can also you the search feature in Twitter and search by username or by keywords. Being active is important. Other users will not find you through searches unless you are tweeting regularly, engaging industry leaders in conversations, and both retweeting others and getting your tweets retweeted. You should be producing keyword-rich tweets on a regular basis to stay visible to those who are interested in your subject.

the Hashtag

#keyword is a common method for showcasing certain keywords. Check through searches which hashtag keywords are being used frequently. If you are a Realtor you may want to use #citynames and #realestate in your tweets frequently.

Lists

Lists are relatively new to Twitter. Many people still don’t know how to properly use lists. It is a way to group users together. You can subscribe to other lists, make your own, and even share them on sites. Perhaps you want to make a list of all Realtors in Minnesota, you can do that, and then other local Realtors would use your list. Remember, you can list users without following them. Think of lists as a way to recommend a group to other users who might find this information useful.

Twitter Tools

Mr. Tweet – Is not the answer to all your problems, but it is an answer to most of your Twitter problems. Do not let the name fool you, Mr. Tweet is uses a complex algorithm for ranking users. This tool will scan your profile and take suggestions (as “communities”) for what niche or industry you are in. From there Mr. Tweet will find the highest ranking industry-related users and present them in a list on their website. You simply click “follow” and can even send them a tweet from the site. It’s so simple and effective, everyone should be using Mr. Tweet. Another feature of Mr. Tweet is recommendations. You can make a lot of friends by recommending them to Mr. Tweet. Be sure you tweet about it to let them know you nominated them.

Directories

Because Twitter doesn’t use links that search engines count you might as well put your Twitter profile on Twitter directories. There are new directories rolling out every month. Many utilize location and will list you based on a) popularity b) location c) interests. You can not only list yourself for free in these directories, it’s also a good way to find ideal people that are worth following.

Wefollow – Digg’s new directory that uses “Dofollow” or crawlable links. You get ranked by your profession and influence. Even though you may not be on the top of the list, it’s always good to have links, and setting your Twitter profile up here takes just a few seconds. Be certain to deselect the “Update my twitter url to be my WeFollow profile” box before submitting the form. No one in their right mind wants to show a directory as their homepage, right?

Twellow Pages - This is just like the Yellow Pages. Simple and quick. Browse users by keywords, location, or “Twellowhood” and you can even find suggested users here. Feel free to link to your stuff as these are not “nofollow” links and the search engines will count these links.

Geofollow – As the name states this is a location-only directory. Not much to mention with this one other than it takes just two seconds to set your profile listing up.

Tweetfind – Following suit of normal web directories, these guys say submission approval could take 2-4 weeks. Obviously they are wanting people to pay for “featured listings” and my take is there are too many free ones to be paying for featured listings. If anyone has paid and can prove me wrong, post it in the comments section. I would love to hear that I am wrong.

Twitr – Self-proclaimed as the “Number 1″ Twitter directory. Twitr can give you stats on your tweeting history.

Because many people search tweets for keywords you can obtain new followers by tweeting consistently. A great way to do this is by using a feed to utilize content from other sources. You can use an account through Flickr, YouTube, a Blog, Friendfeed, or anywhere you are creating content. If the site does not have a feed you can create one through the many html to rss converting services available. Once you have your feed, copy the address of the feed, then simply paste it into your RSS2Twitter or Twitterfeed account. This is so simple and is essential for anyone who wants to get more followers. Set up a ‘#keyword’ as a prefix to all tweets from your RSS feed.

A good RSS to Twitter application will include monitoring and analytical data on clicks. You should also be able to set up multiple Twitter accounts for a feed.

Since other sites have already done the heavy lifting, all we have to do is refer you to their site. Here is a list of OVER 760 Twitter tools.

Keep a Cool Head

If you are using Twitter for work be sure to always keep your goals in mind. You should never say anything too personal. Never get into heated arguments and always be aware that someone is watching your tweets and ask continue reading   »

rel=”canonical”

The canonical tag is a way to tell the search engines “Hey, I’m a duplicate content page.”

When
Say you have four index pages. All are the same version of the one page. You would use the canonical tag on three of the four. This would tell the search engine which one it should index. Canonical is not a new tag, as “rel” has been around the block, and has been used for the highly disputed rel=”nofollow”.

Why
Search engines have nothing to benefit from indexing multiple copies of one page, and you can most definitely reap the benefits by using rel=”canonical”  on internal pages with duplicate content. We know for a fact that Google does penalize for duplicate content across your site, usually the cases I have seen where site has been penalized  is because it looks very spammy.

Because
You may not even realize that your site too may have duplicate content. There are many times your CMS (content management system) or blogging platform will spit out duplicate pages. Other pages used for tracking, gateways, e-commerce sites often have ascending and descending features that will have duplicate pages too.

• Was first introduced at SMX West early in 2009.
• Used by many sites.
• Can be used on multiple domains.

Multiple Domains – ** As of December, 17th, 2009 – Google is the only one of the big three search engines accepting the use of rel=”canonical” across multiple domains.

Caffeine is Near Here

Google’s new Algorithm, Caffeine, a new uber-beefy infrastructure that includes a new rewrite of their data storage technology, that means while compiling SERPs Google will have more speed and flexibility, and is said to be on at least one of the seven Google data centers as of this very morning.

Beanstalkseo gets most of the credit for having the first full length post on the topic. As BSS states,

As of this morning we were starting to see Caffeine results off at least one Google Datacenter. Last week we reported that we’d let you know as soon as we started seeing Caffeine results and where that location is. Interestingly – it is out of a location that contains one of our servers – Seattle. The IP is 74.125.67.100.

Now the interesting thing is that on SE Roundtable they’re reporting (and confirmed by users there) that the IP is 66.102.7.18.

Caffeine is just one of the many new features now being implemented by Google. You may have already noticed certain keyword-related Twitter profile tweets being displayed on the SERPs and breadcrumbs replacing URLs on certain sites. Google’s superhero Matt Cutts confirmed Caffeine on one data center at least 50% of the time.