The Most Disappointing Part of My Career

I posted a question to twitter weeks ago for stories from other SEOs about what they believed to be the worst or most disappointing moments of their careers. I got no responses. In retrospect, this isn’t surprising. Much of what we consider disappointing we also consider embarrassing. In my case though, I am willing to share. nTopic I spent years and thousands of my own dollars along side huge investments from Virante working with an amazing statistician Andrew Cron on building out a content relevancy tool and API. We then did extensive research into its effectiveness and literally proved that following nTopic’s simply recommendations would increase organic search traffic from Google. We called it nTopic. It was my silver bullet. A proven technique,...

How BrokenLinkBuilding.com Uses nTopic and Contact Finding for Awesome Broken Link Building

So, hopefully you know of some of Virante’s pretty awesome APIs like nTopic for content relevancy. I wanted to show to you a novel integration of nTopic and a brand new API that you will see coming from Virante soon, our contact finder, in Garrett French’s Broken Link Building tool. What I do is go through an entire prospecting campaign from keywords to opportunities to contact information in 11 minutes and 30 seconds. It is pretty awesome to see just how powerful the tool is for scaling one of the few remaining truly white hat link building techniques. So go ahead and take a look! The contact finding API is what I am most excited about. The most recent campaign I ran found… 76.4% of prospected domains have at least 1 contact 54.5% of prospected...

Writer’s Block for WordPress

Hey folks, some of you probably noticed two lower quality articles that I published earlier this month to the Frequently Asked Questions section of the site. No, my fingers weren’t taken over by a wizard who is terrible at SEO, rather I was fooling around with a new wordpress plugin that I had recently created, Writer’s Block. Writer’s Block is a very simple WordPress Plugin that allows you to get recommendations for content to write on your blog when you are just having one of those days without inspiration. You type in a keyword you are interested in and it delivers questions that people are searching for on Google related to that topic. If you were to ask about Gardening, it would likely return questions like “which gardening zone am I...

What is search engine optimization?

Search engines are the primary entry point with which most of us reach the web. Whenever we want something on the internet, we go straight to Google, Bing, Yahoo or one of many other search engines to find what we are looking for. Search engine optimization is a series of marketing and technical techniques employed by webmasters or SEO (search engine optimization) professionals to improve their rankings and theirby increase their traffic from search engines. There are myrad factors that go into seeing an increase in rankings for any business. Some of these include… Increasing Pagerank: increase the number of links (backlinks) to your website from other websites to improve results. An HTML link is essentially a vote. Improving Design: An aesthetic, usable...

What is one way link building?

A link is the construction of the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) where a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is set in the SRC attribute of an A HREF tag. Link building is generally considered one of the most important parts of search engine optimization or SEO as Google and other search engines have long considered linking as an important part of their rankings algorithm . Historically, search engine marketers have attempted to manipulate links by finding ways to convince other webmasters to link building to them, thereby increasing the total number of links. One of the original methods of acquiring links was called reciprocal link building. This meant that one webmaster would build links to your site in exchange for you to build a link to their landing page....