Toluu

Search Engine Marketing, Optimization, Social Media & Web Solutions | Squareoak Blog - New York City, NY

Customized Social Media Campaigns: Search Marketing, Search Optimization, Viral Content & Blog Development

How to Spot Shady Internet Marketing & SEO Service ProvidersNovember 14

It’s incredible the deluge of junk and spam out there originating from hack SEO and SEM service providers. If you’re a business owner or a marketing director who’s new to search engine optimization and marketing it’s easy to get lost and discouraged among the promotional swill. I’ve put together a list of warning signs that will allow you to steer clear of the hacks, what you can expect when searching for SEO or SEM services within specific sites, and where to look for reputable people and firms.

Warning Signs

Broken English
Broken English in a provider’s ad, pitch, or website doesn’t necessarily mean that their service is sub-par but more often than not this seems to be the case. The main concern would be that this provider is probably going to be working on your title tags, descriptions, URL structure, content, etc. They will be doing things and stuff to your site that require an intimate knowledge of the English language. They’ll need to

StumbleUpon Ads: Take Your Money & Run?July 21

I’ve used SU advertising once before but wanted to do a revisit and take a second look at how effective…or not this service really is. At just five cents per page view it seems like a pretty good deal but I’ve noticed some discrepancies in my analytics that could make me think twice about advertising again.

I started a campaign with $100 and budgeted that for $10 per day. This equals 200 page views per day. So every day the campaign is running I should see 200 page views in my analytics right? Well, not quite. As of 4:00PM Friday SU was reporting 200 page views but my analytics (Mint) was reporting 156 and Google analytics reported 163. Today being the fourth day of this campaign, SU is reporting 801 page views, Mint is reporting 690, and GA is reporting 631.

A friend suggested that this discrepancy might be due to fast clicking where people are hammering the SU button so it’s recorded as a page view on SU’s end but not within analytics.

Has anyone else encountered this issue? I’d love to hear if others have noticed this.

a

StumbleUpon Ads: Take Your Money & Run?

GoDaddy & Phantom Robots.txt FilesJune 11

Today I was doing my due diligence on a client’s site and noticed that their robots.txt file was much different than what I remembered it as being. I thought this was mildly odd but just racked it up to my own oversight. I uploaded the new robots.txt file and the appropriate changes were made, no problem. I then figured I’d just check this site’s robots.txt file to make sure everything is as it should be and noticed something peculiar. The robots.txt that was being displayed was not the robots.txt file that was in my root. What was going on here? For a second I half thought that friends had managed to get into my blog and mess with me a little but soon found out it was something more. I logged into my FTP client and deleted the robots.txt file. I then returned to my browser, cleared the cache and refreshed. Still, the file was there. It wasn’t MY robots.txt file and according to my FTP client, it was no longer present in my root. So…um…what? Google Webmaster Tools is reporting the robots.txt file as I had it written. Google Webmaster Tools is not enabled through GoDaddy, and there are no Wordpress plugins that could be causing this phantom file to exist. I had several people on other IPs check it and with different user agents all returning the same phantom robots.txt file. Then, this article about GoDaddy uploading their own robots.txt

Giving Away Free Stumbles TodayApril 18

It’s nearly 80 degress and sunny outside today in good’ol Brooklyn. It’s unfortunate that we have to be inside on a great day like this but to make things a little better, I’ve decided to give away free stumbles today for the entirety of the workday (for me until about 7:30-8:00 EST). All you have to do is post your to be stumbled link in the comments section and I’ll give it a thumbs up or submit it if it hasn’t been already. The only condition is it has to pertain to seo, sem, social media, wed design, essentially anything pertaining to this site’s industry or niche. So let’er rip and have a good weekend!

a

Giving Away Free Stumbles Today

Twitter Feeds - Linkbait, Link Building & Social BookmarkingApril 16

I decided to have a little fun today and created a page publishing tweet scan feeds based on search terms like linkbait, link building, and social bookmarking. Potentially, I can now find out about new sites and strategies pertaining to these topics all on one page instantly. Leave a comment below if there’s anything else you’d like me to add.

a

Twitter Feeds - Linkbait, Link Building & Social Bookmarking