Oh, you’ve seen the sites. “Just $49 and we’ll submit your site to a gazillion search engines! It’s great for SEO! It’s amazing! Give us your money!”
PFFFTTT!!!
This is just one of those bullshit services that newbies fall for.
Here’s the deal… DO NOT pay anyone for search engine listings. The robots will find you, even if you have no keywords in your title, even if you have a crappy description, even if you’ve only been online for a week. Robots will find your page and decide whether to rank it or whether to come back at all.
Want to see if the search bots have seen your page and when?
Just type your domain into the search engine and see what comes up. At Google, if you click in the “Cached” link under the description for your site, you can see your page and the date and time that Google last visited. If it was the current day or yesterday, cool! You’re updating often. If it was a month ago, you have problems, brothers and sisters. You need to add some fresh stuff to your site or you’ll never rank in the SERPs (search engine results pages) at all.
Bing also has a “Cached Page” link that you can check out, but they’re still slower than Google. Google had my page from yesterday, while Bing hadn’t been there since 11/5. You know how often I post, so…
Yahoo also has a “Cached” link, but it wasn’t working, so… I can’t comment on its frequency by using this technique.
But there is a foolproof way: You can also go into your hosting account’s c-Panel dashboard to check this out. Most have a feature called “AWStats,” which tells you quite a lot of information, including which search bots visited and how many times they came during the month and even how many times they successfully accessed your “robots.txt” file. continue reading »
All I can say is, “Wow!” I just read a post by Ann Smarty over at SearchEngineJournal.com about some very cool Yahoo pipes that you can run. (http://www.searchenginejournal.com/5-useful-yahoo-pipes-to-monitor-your-brand/14320/: “5 Useful Yahoo! Pipes to Monitor Your Brand”)
For those of you who don’t know what Yahoo Pipes is it’s an aggregator for different types of content. For example, they’ll take several feeds and put them together, either to make specialized reports or for publishing on blogs or elsewhere. They allow you to mashup lots of stuff and make it really cool.
For example, I read several SEO blogs and instead of having to go to all of them, I have a Yahoo Pipe that gives me everything at a glance. My Pipe is called “SEO Goodness Pipe” and you can find it at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=YsYIE89w3hGA4vj2BNV6qA. The reason I call it that is because I also use the pipe to send interesting SEO stuff to Twitter every hour or so.
People love it, and retweet the stuff I send out all the time. I’m finding myself on people’s Twitter lists and it’s a great deal all the way around. I made the Pipe, people get to read the same cool stuff I love on Twitter. They’re happy, I get more followers, they retweet, and the circle goes ’round and ’round. continue reading »
I’ve done some advertising with Google AdWords, but it usually ended up being more expensive than it was worth. Oh sure, I got optins and sales, but they were either break-even or only marginally profitable. I don’t have that “special code,” I’m afraid. It takes a lot of trial and error to make it work really well than I have to spend at this point. I mean, I know I can make it if I focus on it and nothing else. But remember, I work for Tellman. 
But…
Working for him has its perks. Well, lots of them actually, not to mention he’s a great guy. (In case you don’t know, he’s running across the country for Homeless Teens and well… in his bare feet. Pretty cool… go donate at http://RunTellmanRun.com. It’s a very worthy cause, and well… bare feet, people!)
Anyway… Tellman got me to go through Frank Kern and his cousin Trey’s “Screw Google” course, and I have to say that it’s great! It’s short enough to run through in a few hours, and the information inside is easy to follow and really spot on. It’s typical Frank Kern style, of course, and he’s one of the LEAST boring people to watch no matter what he’s doing. He just has that kind of personality that makes you smile. (It’s a no-brainer that he and Trey are cousins, either. They even sound alike. Both of them are good at teaching and keeping things light.)
The course is based on PPC advertising with Yahoo, and I have to tell you that after having worked the AdWords stuff for OE and myself, I find Yahoo to be 1) less anal and 2) far less expensive. My most expensive click to date has been around 12 cents. Plus, I’m getting tons of optins and I don’t have a mega keyword list, either. I have a very select group of keyword phrases that I’ve tested and know work for my & Tellman’s product, Spider Language, which (in case you don’t hang here regularly) is a basic course on SEO. continue reading »
