Minnesota SEO Services | Brent Rangen

First off, let me start by saying that I am not selling any product here. I am not an affiliate nor will I ever use this site to sell other products. However, because of the increased number of requests I have recently been receiving on rank tracker software, I decided to write this post to help users in the community looking for a decent solution. Those of us who have been around know that many rank trackers are not worth time or money.

An API Keyword Tool Built into Ranking Software Shows the Caliber of this Ranking Software

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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.

CMS - Revolution!

Considering a blog or website?

That’s right.. we are answering the question Blog vs. Website, which one will prevail? You might be in for a surprise! The way we understood a blog to function, arguably like humans,  has adapted and improved. WordPress, Joomla and Drupal make driving and delivering data to a site a breeze. But doesn’t everyone has a website and not everyone has a blog. So you would think that there is a reason why you would want a website instead of a blog, right? Well, let’s explore.

Over time things can change especially when your talking about a technological term. We all know that a blog is usually defined as a weblog, what many sites fail to mention is that a blog is also a way to create frequent, chronological entries. Usually the blog is published in a reverse chronological order. In order to compare the two we need to really understand what a blog is and what it is now capable of.

Sites like marketingterms.com aren’t helping the reputation of blogs. They have no mention in the definition of a blog anything beyond personal use. It’s kind of like saying Facebook isn’t for businesses. We know that’s just not the case anymore. With the ability to use static pages just as easily as dynamic, blogs are popping up everywhere. From the offical conception of Wordpress in mid-2005 to now has gone to 9,000,000 blogs on personal domains.

Over 7 million blogs on WordPress. It is unclear how many WordPress blogs are actually out there. To give you an idea continue reading   »

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.

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)