I just have to rave about how good Apple’s customer is every now and then, plus I found the PERFECT case for my iPhone 4!
Branding
You may remember that this past summer I had the opportunity to meet Shoemoney. He was a pretty cool guy in person, and based on our discussions before and after the fact I have a lot of respect for the hustle he puts in trying to deliver cool services that are actually useful for the affiliate marketing vertical. He has proven his ability to leverage search engines to his benefit in both advertising and rankings. So if you are trying to get your site to rank, a good question to ask might be “What Would Shoemoney Do?”.
Understanding SEO
Most people who are just starting out with a website assume that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is some kind of witchcraft because they have heard the horror stories of people paying “experts” that simply regurgitate search engine theory yet have nothing to show for it. SEO is no different than anything else in life, if you follow the models which have a proven track record you are much more likely to succeed. Put simply, SEO is the ability to generate relevant content that humans care about and that Google can read in order to see its relevance. If you design your website for humans, with a few refinements you can totally dominate your keywords.
Having the right tools
Building a house without a hammer or nails is incredibly difficult. With no blueprints you are back in the stone ages just kind of piling things together hoping for good results with a sturdy foundation to continue building on. I can promise you that the people who are serious about building something valuable around a keyword are using the right tools to plan and build their “online house” for Google & Bing. Shoemoney recently released a cool tool that is really just a (cheaper!) spin-off of his Shoemoney Tools that not only gives people information on how they compare to their competition for keywords, but gives them the building blocks to rank more competitively and start producing real results.
The new tools name is even a spin off of Free Credit Report by calling it FreeSEOReport.com. Wait – free? Shoe is confident enough that you are going to love the new service that he allows you to generate your first report for free to keep, brand, and tweak for your needs. No bones about it though, this tool was designed to make money and costs money for any additional reports but he has pretty flexible/generous terms for people looking at unique implementations.
The Experience
Using Free SEO Report was actually pretty darn easy, just as the website says it was pretty much just 3 steps:
1. Enter the URL of the website you want data for
2. Enter the keyword you want ranking analytics around
3. Give it your e-mail and submit
The amazing thing for this report, is that even though it runs a series of queries against Google, scrapes data from your closest competitors to generate a truly custom PDF report with suggestions and feedback in ~ 4 minutes is pretty impressive. When was the last time your SEO guy got back to you with mountains of accurate and actionable data in 4 minutes? Exactly.
Cost: Free for the first report, then either $10/report or $19.95/month for unlimited reports
So next time you are thinking about ways to improve your traffic, boost your rankings in Google just go on over to http://freeseoreport.com for a very cost effective way to make an actionable difference for your website.
So as you may (or if new, may not) have noticed I have done quite a bit of housecleaning around the blog. What used to be a rounded blue and orange template heavy with added graphics and other extras is now a clean and spartan white design that tries to focus on the key aspects of this blog that people seem to enjoy.
“Why switch it up? The other blogging format seemed just fine?”
I felt that I owed the (2 actual) readers I have a better reading experience that was easier to navigate, more pleasing to look at, and offered a much improved commenting platform. I understand that new visitors are going to likely be annoyed by the lightbox pop-up added to the site, but it needs to be understood that in order for this blog to exist in its current form (minimal advertising) it is important to build an strong communication channel through the 7-week course.
What do you think of the new design? The code is supposed to be clean and SEO friendly out of the box and it has given me a chance to learn some CSS and PHP, although it has also reaffirmed that I will never be a coding professional myself, and instead will hire out the right people to make sure it is done right and done in a timely manner.
