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SoloSEO Blog

SEO for All

SoloSEO’s Super Dumb Bailout PlanNovember 26 2008

Due to the rough economic times we face together, the leaders here at SoloSEO have decided we are going to start taking out loans in the names of our people, and confiscating retirement funds for company use. We have learned recently that some of our vendors are really struggling, so we will be using these funds to help them through these difficult times.

As an example, the good folks who provide our bandwidth have lost quite a bit of money lately. It is mostly due to some Internet based companies going under. Many of these site owners were provided Internet bandwidth at almost no cost for the first few years, because they couldn’t afford the monthly fees normally charged up front. However, there was an agreement in place to raise the monthly fees over time, when hopefully the site owners could afford it. Unfortunately it didn’t really work out, and many, if not most of these clients never could pay the rising fees, and they just abandoned their sites and moved on. These site owners are now pretty upset at our vendors, and feel like they got tricked into having a site in the first place. Now I ask, how could our vendor know these individuals, who could

Branding and SEONovember 24 2008

Free Advice for Organizers of PubCon, SMX, and SESNovember 19 2008

I’ve been attending these conferences for several years now, just thought I would give some free advice to help the conference organizers of PubCon, SMX, and SES to get more registrations, and more people coming back every year.

1) Big Bucket of Bacon

I know this sounds a bit odd, but bacon has magical powers. Not only does it make your nose tell your brain to follow that smell, but your brain remembers that smell and will do anything to pursue it (even pay $995 to go to a conference). What would a bucket full of bacon cost to add to all those danishes and bagels? A few hundred bucks? I bet you’d get at least 2% more people registering just for the bacon.

2) Wi-Fi that works

I can count on half of one hand how many times the wireless has been (a) working and (b) faster than dial-up at these SEO conferences. Wi-Fi should be sponsored by a company and actually work (even when everyone in the conference is using it!). I feel bad for a company that sponsors the wi-fi and it doesn’t work, how does that fare for their reputation (and the conference itself)? For this reason, I have a Sprint card that I plug my laptop in that is actually reliable and gives

How to Get Free Tickets to Cirque SoleilNovember 12 2008

I really am going to tell you how you *could* get free tickets to Cirque Soleil, but the actual point of this post deals with Social Media and companies that reach out to their customers, like Cirque Soleil.

I’m at PubCon 2008, in the Online Reputation Management session (recap here) where Jessica Berlin, a Social Media Manager for Cirque du Soleil, just discussed how her company monitors, prevents, and resolves reputation issues.

They go to great lengths to find out who is talking about their company. They even rate their influencers by their reach or influence (backlinks as main indicator I think). Then they reach out to those people (big or small) and I’m guessing they offer them a second chance to have a good experience with another show. This is where that free ticket comes in, whether you’ve seen the show or not, you can probably expect to get contacted by Cirque Soleil even if you say something bad about the show with ever seeing it.

If Cirque Soleil tried to determine authenticity, like asking for a ticket stub, they shoot themselves in the foot even more by even “questioning” your authenticity. Will they pursue anyone with a bad experience? Or just influencers?

I seriously doubt that there is a significant percentage of people who blog/twitter/etc about Cirque Soleil who aren’t authentic in their opinion just to get free tickets. But I do

5 Ways to Get Visitors Coming Back Every DayOctober 30 2008

Launching “Link Bait” is a new and popular strategy for gaining traffic and links (and hopefully conversions), but one of the problems is that one visit isn’t enough! I’d like to discuss 5 ways to help keep your visitors coming back every day, besides just posting more often and having good content! Before I get to those steps, let’s look at some numbers. “>ComScore has some interesting statistics about what type of content gives “Stickiness” to your site (note, from 2006):

1) Portals (28.7 average usage days per month)
2) Entertainment (15.2)
3) Community (14.3)
4) News/Information (14.0)
5) Search/Navigation (13.6)
6) Email (13.2)
7) Directories/Resources (11.8 )
8 ) ISP (11.6)

Portals (think Yahoo!, iGoogle, anything people might make their homepage) brought in the most days per month visited, most likely due to a default home page being visited every time a browser is opened. The next two, Entertainment and Community, seem to me to go hand in hand with what we call Social Media now. Surprisingly, search is #5, which I thought would be at the top (at least for my usage, I search multiple times every day).

5 Ways to Improve Visitor Retention

So now that we have some idea, at least relatively, of what keeps people coming back, here are some actionable things (and real examples) you can do for your site to get visitors coming back every day:

1) Integrate Dyna