September, 2008

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SEO is Dead in St. Louis

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

There’s a very huge untapped SEO market in St. Louis. It’s sitting just under the surface, waiting to boil over. Can you find it?

Every time a potential client from the Saint Louis area calls me, I’m honestly baffled by the lack of SEO – both on their part and that of their competitors.

I was recently approached by a local manufacturer of a certain product. They asked me to do an SEO audit on their website and I was blown away by the potential that they had online. There are NO other local businesses building their website in any search engine-friendly way. Most of their competitors (and you’d know their names if I said them) have very archaic websites, some still with splash pages and graphic-based navigation on most sites. It’s pathetic. This smaller business has a huge advantage if they start SEOing their site now.

Nearly two years ago I met a nice guy who’s Dad owns a retail business in the St Louis area. He had taken one of my free classes I teach at the local library on online marketing. He and his dad hired me to rebuild their website in a more SEO-friendly manner, and in early October 2007 we launched their new site. By November they were receiving more traffic than they’d ever had before, and then the record months started. This (literally) Dad-and-son shop has now had ten record months of sales – and they are not afraid to admit most of this is attributed to their local SEO efforts. These guys are outranking some big chain stores for moderate to high-priced products.

Even an industry like real estate is mostly untapped. Sure, the real estate market isn’t exactly teeming with extra funds for marketing efforts, but that’s just the point. This down economy is the best time to get strongly positioned online for ‘real estate town‘. And when the market swings around (and we all know it will), some real estate agent is going to be so damn busy they won’t know what hit them. Why are no real estate agents in Saint Louis doing SEO?

One last thought – perhaps the reason no Saint Louis business is really putting money into online efforts is because they think there is a big lack of people (customers) online in the local area. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Just because we don’t have the population numbers of towns like San Francisco and New York doesn’t mean we don’t exist. Saint Louis is strong with bloggers, business leaders and online searchers. These people buy your products and will tell others about them.

The recent InterPlay festival – while it isn’t yet rivalling festivals like SXSW – will soon be a major event based in the Saint Louis area. There are some very active bloggers who like to talk about your products.

There is so much potential for local industry leaders to move into online but no one is doing it. I see it a lot and I’m still blown away by it. If you own a local St Louis business, no matter how small, you’re missing a golden opportunity to steal business from your larger competitors.

Posted in Interplay STL, SEO, St Louis, local marketing | 2 Responses »

InterPlay STL Blogging/SEO Resource Sheet

Friday, September 19th, 2008

Here’s a link to the resource sheet for tonights session.

Posted in Interplay STL | No Responses »

How to Find Sploggers Who Have Stolen Your Work

Friday, September 19th, 2008

The readers who frequent this blog often know I’m a big fan of Google Alerts, and I use it often to build links and keep track of a few other things.  Google Alerts is a free service from Google that emails you whenever something new has shown up on the Internets with a search query you’ve specified.

Since I’m sitting on an SEO panel tonight covering blogging, splogging and SEO, I thought I’d post a quick little ditty that you can do to keep track of who’s stealing your content (without permission).

When you blog, there are certain things that you have control over, besides the ‘meat’ of the post.  For most blogging software, you can modify other things, such as posted-by, date formatting and tagging. Somewhere you need to find something that you can make unique to your blog – a phrase, a set of random numbers, or a weird tag.  For this example I’ll use a number/letter combo: 68wcrada72

Once you’ve decided on something, make sure you incorporate it into every post as you write (as I just did).
Then head over to Google Alerts and set up your trap.


(Click to see larger image)

Make sure you add the -domain.com or else you’ll get an alert every time you post.

Now when someone steals your content and posts it on their website, you’ll get an email showing you the link to the splog.  Take appropriate action – ask the author to take down your content.  If they don’t, or won’t answer, take further steps such as flagging inappropriate/spam posts on Blogger or reporting the splog to WHOIS (if appropriate).

People are out there to steal your content.  Since we can’t stop a copy/paste, at least we can still keep tabs on what’s happening.  Don’t let people use your content freely!

Posted in Google Alerts, blogging, business blogging, content | 1 Response »

Does Your Lead Generation Website Have an Expediter?

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

Starbucks has a whole crew of people who do nothing but study their customers.  They study the obligatory demographics, as should any business.  They step a little further and study things such as:

  • Do customers buy more when there are certain colors near the register
  • Do customers tend to shy away from certain products during certain times?

…and so on.

But they also try to get into the customers mind (and mess with it a little bit). Click to continue »

Posted in affiliate marketing | No Responses »

Got Me Some New Biz Cards

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

I ordered some new business cards for the big festival this weekend.  My old ones didn’t mention my Missouri SEO website, and I kinda want to start promoting that more than the hosting one.

What do you think, too girly?

Posted in conferences, free stuff, local marketing | No Responses »

Saint Louis SEO Meetup

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

Hey St Louis – Anyone interested in starting a Meetup group in Saint Louis for SEO gurus?  Currently there isn’t one.

Posted in Marketing | 1 Response »

Bloggers Need to (at least) Understand SEO

Friday, September 12th, 2008

Tonight I had the pleasure of speaking with Jaelithe Judy, the writer who will be moderating the upcoming SEO panel that I’ll be sitting on (along with Ellen Gooch) next week.  She has great charisma and I can tell this is going to be a fun session.  Since we are expecting a crowd of mostly personal, professional and corporate bloggers, the session will focus around that audience.  Without giving away all the topics we’ll discuss, here is a “10,000ft view” of what is to come.

  • How understanding SEO basics can increase your readership numbers
  • Why sploggers want to steal your content (and how it can affect your bottom line)
  • Why businesses are hiring full-time bloggers
  • What the long tail is (and how knowing what it is can increase your blogs revenue)
  • Some of the latest changes Google has made and how they can affect your rankings

Oh, we’ve got lots more, including a nice list of resources that will help our audience get more traffic, more effectively promote their blog, or make more money from their website.  And we’ll be taking questions from the audience!

The panel will be just one of many Interactive sessions to attend this week in St. Louis at the Play:StL festival. Some of the other sessions (some of which sound pretty cool to me) include Cyberbullying, Business and Social Media, and even one on the dreaded CSS (yukk!)

Get a wristband for the festival at a host of local places, and half your money will go to LiveFeed.  If you come the SEO panel, please take a moment to introduce yourself, I’d love to meet you!

Posted in SEO, St Louis, blogging, conferences, networking, seminars | No Responses »

SEO Millionaires

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

I watch a lot of CNBC.  I’m not in to the whole financial scene, nor am I into stocks.  But I do love to watch those shows about rich people, how they live, and most importantly how they got rich.

I read a lot, too.  I’ve read all the ‘Rich Dad’ books, even bought one for my son.  I’ve read Tim Ferris’ 4 Hour Workweek (loved it) and many more.  Now I’m reading a great book called The Millionaire Next Door.

You could say I’m obsessed with being rich.

But I don’t think I am.  I do think that money is an awesome tool, and there are plenty of people out there who could use more, me included.  I’m not a believer in lotteries or unexpected windfalls.  Sure, that’d be nice, but I’d prefer to earn it myself.

(There’s a saying in the custom auto industry – build it or buy it.  I prefer build it.  A little old fashioned hard work never hurt anyone.)

Anyway, I pay attention to how these people make their money.  The guy on Untold Wealth: The Rise of the Super Rich made his money doing what he loved: mortgages.  There’s another guy on there who is in to leveraged buyouts of undervalued companies.  Most of these guys grew up in an average middle-class family, started working in an industry that interested them, and soon thereafter started their own companies doing the same thing.

It’s no secret that you’ll most likely never get ‘rich’ working for someone else.  Most all millionaires in the US are self-made, and they did it by starting their own company.  So I guess I’m on the right track.

Can an SEO firm make a millionaire? I don’t know, but I’ll let you know :)

Posted in SEO, money | 1 Response »

99c Domains Today at GoDaddy

Friday, September 5th, 2008

My buddy just called and said that GoDaddy had 99c domains.  I went and checked it out.  Looks like you can only register one domain at this price, but what the heck.  I reg’d one and then tried a second time, but it wouldn’t work at the 99c price.

Nonetheless cruise over there and getchaself a domain name.  .com too!

Use the code ‘test99′ at checkout.  Now, where is that dang affiliate link?

Posted in Marketing | No Responses »

URL Ranking Ethics

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

I stumbled upon this post a few weeks back thanks to a friend and found it quite interesting. I was intrigued, so I tried it out and sure enough, it’s rather easy to rank for someone else’s URL. You’ll probably never get top spot, but I’ve got a few #2′s.

If you read through the post that inspired me, you’ll see that the SEO community is divided about how to handle these types of rankings. Are they ethical? Is it black/gray hat? Or is it just helping out your client in any way possible? Is it “just another keyword” that you and your competition rank for? Or is it hijacking?

I think I’ll continue to do it for my personal sites (affiliate sites, etc), but I’m not real sure if I want to do this for my clients. I’d love to hear what you think.

Posted in competition, domain names, keywords | No Responses »