Permanent One Way Linking Service Review

Here is a review from a company I tried out to get some one way permanent links. Their website promised ‘high quality’ links and the results were almost negative, links from very spammy websites. I guess you get what you pay for, but at least I know now it is not a good option to use.

The website is http://www.linking-service.com/. I ordered just 20 links to test their service. The website I was getting links for was focused around web design services.

This service promises “…When you buy links from us, you are getting quality; this is more than most services can say. If your website is important to you, rely on the quality one way links and permanent links that we offer.” Well that is pretty much blashemy on their part. The link quality was absolutely horrible; most on pages that had not relation at all to web design.

Keep in mind the website I was getting links for was a ‘web design’ business. Some of the websites they obtained links on were related to oil careers, anti-aging products, printing, die casting, and more unspeakable unrelated industries. I could not find one website that was really relevant to our industry.

They also promise “All of our text links come from different website markets from relevant pages that have less than 50 outgoing links. While this may not sound important to you, when it comes to search engine results this is beneficial. It goes along with the high quality that we offer every customer.” Yet many of the pages where we had obtained links from had hundreds or more of outgoing links, not less than 50. They also were not ‘relevant’ websites in contradiction to their website text.

Bottom line, don’t try this service out, its a total waste of money. I didn’t expect much from them considering the cost, but it was worth a shot! Too bad it was ‘too good to be true’.

Here is a sample list of websites they obtained links on:

http://www.rss-to-javascript.com/p/Our-Partners___147,,,Categories-14.html

http://www.webmaster-link-exchange.com/sublistings-cat-7-page-1.html

http://home.nestor.minsk.by/build/links/interiordesign.html

http://www.printfellas.com/links/Graphic_Design.html

http://www.oilcareer.com/lma/directory.php/Other_Amazing_Sites/Other_Amazing_Sites.html

http://www.geld-links.de/sub_29_1

http://beyondthesidewalks.com/directory/books.html

http://www.kineticdiecasting.com/resources/browse.php?id=19

http://www.anti-aging-revolution.net/p/Resources___155,,,Categories-24.html

If there are any services out there you were thinking about trying let me know and I may try them out and post a public review on it.

Posted in Link Building Strategies | 1 Comment »

PPC Management Software

Today was a very busy day, as Mondays usually are. I spent some time reviewing and searching for some PPC management software tools. I found a few good ones but nothing really stood out to me except for one in particular called Speed PPC. There are several others who have ranted and raved about it; and if it really can save me 50-70% of my ppc management time it would be well worth the money, around $500. I am hoping to get my employer to approve it so I can try it out and see how well it works; but I don’t have much more information than that.

I also spent a lot of time working on SEO and PPC proposals for potential clients for my work, Twelve Horses. We sure have been very busy lately with lots going on, which is a good thing. There are so many directions I want to take with getting things going at Twelve Horses that sometimes its hard to prioritize what is most important to focus on first, but I have been making some tremendous progress.

I did some research on some good SEO related plugins for wordpress as well and found some good ones, but that will have to be a post for another day.

Posted in Pay Per Click | No Comments »

Utah Tech Spotlight

Today a bulk of my day was spent at the Utah Tech Spotlight. They featured UNSPAM, a Utah based company that is a non-profit organization that is combating spam among other things. It was an interesting topic but the networking was even better. I met up with Jordan and Jacob from wiworks, they are also in the SEO industry; I have read Jordan’s blog on occassion so it was very good to meet him in person. I also met Sheri from Myriad Genetics, she is their webmaster. And Jacob from WordPress.

It was good meeting some new faces in Utah, talking about SEO and learning about email spam and what some organizations are doing to try to prevent it. I also was able to have a long conference call with several from my company to work out some pricing on offering clients PPC landing pages so we don’t have to get a custom quote every time. This will make it much easier to tell a potential client how much it will costs to get some customized landing pages up for their PPC campaign; which I must say is invaluable and I hate to manage PPC campaigns that do not have landing pages involved in the equation. The conversion is SO much better when you have custom landing pages with information that the searcher is looking for.

I also started my first posts on this new blog. I doubt anyone is reading this yet, but my goal is to start having 20 or so visits within one month from now. Hopefully I can accomplish this. Since I was in the process of setting up this blog I also was looking into some good plugins for SEO purposes and found some good ones but didn’t have the time to integrate them yet. That will most likely be another post maybe early next week.

All in all it was a very busy day; glad its over so I can relax for a while. At least tomorrow is Friday

Posted in Networking | No Comments »

Title Tags & Meta Data – Back to the Basics

Yesterday I worked on my employer’s website for SEO purposes. We have a PHP based CMS system so I can’t edit the title tags or meta tags directly, I have to do it through the CMS. This is excellent for companies who don’t have a HTML developer or designer who knows HTML and wans their marketing folks to update their website for SEO purposes, but it was more time consuming for me, mainly because I was not used to the system.

Nevertheless after several hours I went through every page on our website updating the HTML code to make sure our keywords were appearing in them where necessary. We are focusing on two geographic markets right now: Utah and Reno, Nevada. As for services we are trying to focus on web design, web development, search engine optimization, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing, email tracking, cms, and data replication or customization.

It still surprises me how many people now know that title tags are important as well as ‘meta keywords’ tags and ‘meta description’ tags; yet they are still used improperly most of the time. I almost prefer not to use the keyword tag at all anymore as i don’t think search engines really place any weight or value on them anymore. Here are some quick tips to remember when updating your own title and meta information:

Title Tags – remember they should try to be under 60 characters long. They should accurately describe the page. i.e .if you have a page about search engine optimization the title tag should not be ‘web design’. Its really as simple as that. Of course there are more advanced title tag strategies such as not using stop words, keeping your company name out of every title tag, etc. but if you follow those two above rules you will be far better off than 80% of the websites out there. Oh, and don’t have the same title tag on every page of your website. This is the most common problem I see and it amazes me how many people do it. Mainly because of laziness or lack of time I think.

Meta Description Tags – a few simple rules for description tags are to keep them under 150 characters; including spaces. Keep in mind whatever you put here may appear in the search engine results page as the actual description of the webpage, so have the copywriting in such a fashion it will encourage someone to click on your ranking. Make sure it accurately describes the page it is about and thats about it. Way easy huh!

Meta Keywords Tag – this one is also fairly easy to implement on your website. The real key is to ensure every word you have in this tag appears somewhere in the text of the website content. Don’t have the same keyword list on every page of your website. Try to keep the meta description tag to under 150 characters, including spaces. Lastly, make sure you are choosing words you actually want to get ranked for and that are related to your business.

Well, enough for now. Keep on plugging away!

Posted in Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

SEO Friendly Footers

This is an SEO strategy I used last week that takes less than five minutes to implement and can have a very positive result in regards to rankings in search engines.

The footer on my employer’s company website contained a copyright statement and sometimes some other links. Some websites have a two line footer where one line has links and the other has only to the copyright. Adding a company description to your footer is an easy way to implement an seo strategy that is simple and doesn’t take a lot of time. Here is the example:

Previous footer: © 2007 Twelve Horses

New SEO-Friendly Footer: © Copyright 2007 Twelve Horses – A Web Design, Development & Search Engine Optimization Company in Reno & Utah

It usually works best when you have the text-only portion of the footer fit on one line. Here is why this is useful to SEO:

1. Our website is focused on providing web design, web development, seo or search engine optimization, email marketing, and social marketing services. Although this is a very long list sometimes you have to pick and choose what you can fit in a footer. The above example ensures that every single page of the website contains the keyword phrases of ‘web design, development, and search engine optimization’. This will help the search engines recognize that our website is related to those keywords since they appear on every webpage. This SEO strategy not only assists search engines in recognizing the services we provide but also educates human web visitors as well. If a website visitor can not determine what our website offers they general do one of two actions: leave or look in the footer for an ‘about us’ link. Having this company description in the footer ensures that if they do glance at the footer they will be able to know what the website is about without having to click to another page.

2. The above example also contains ‘Reno and Utah‘ in the description. We have our main office in Reno, Nevada with a secondary office in Salt Lake City, Utah. Having these terms in the footer lets the search engines know what geographic area our website provides web services in. You may be wondering why the footer contains Reno (a city) and Utah (a state). Through some keyword research it was discovered that people in Salt Lake City generally search for ‘utah [keyword]’ rather than ’salt lake city [keyword]’, possibly because Salt Lake City is too long and time-consuming to type and ‘Utah’ only has one major metropolitan area which is Salt Lake City. On the other hand the state of Nevada has several metropolitan areas such as Reno, Las Vegas, etc. which are spread out from each other. From keyword research we discovered citizens of Nevada are more likely to type in the major metropolitan area they are in compared to just ‘Nevada [keyword]’. This also provides website visitors information on the geographic area the company is based in by glancing at the footer.

I hope this information was useful.

Posted in Search Engine Optimization, SEO Copywriting | 3 Comments »