Category Archives: Blog

SEO is for Search Engine Optimization, or is it?

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SEO – Some site owners might think it stands for Spend Every Ounce of time and money on getting your site noticed for “free” by the search engines.

SEO can be very simple and should be.  And you can thank Google for that.  Search engines are so smart these days.  And you shouldn’t think of that in a bad way, if you are a legitimate business / site owner with something to offer people who might be looking.


Gone are the days of saturating your site with keywords for key word sake, irrelevant site links and repetitive content pages 10 layers deep.  This type of monotony used to be what many site owners were focused on because of exploits by “marketers” in those days.  Seemingly overnight, that changed.  Instead of getting boosted to the top of a search engine those practices may very well hurt you indefinitely now, even get you blocked.

Searching for the Right Optimization Techniques

Give them something to search for...

Beware of companies who claim they will get you to be number one on Google, because even if they do that, it may only be a brief moment, or it may only be for a very specific search term.

For example, one SEO company touts that they will get you noticed by Google and you will be number one in the search ranking.  However, what they sometimes don’t tell you is what search terms you will need to enter in order for that to happen.  If that search phrase is not relevant to what people are searching for, what good does it do you?  My buddy Joe is a musician.  Guess what?  If you type in his full name, he turns out to be the number one search result.  Guess how many people are searching for his name on a regular basis?  3 – him, his mom, and yours truly.


I never make any promises when it comes to doing SEO work. Search Engine Optimization is a never ending process for competitive sites. Competitive sites are ones that are more than just an informative/brochure site for a company — a manufacturing site, or a government site does not really need to pay attention to SEO, people are seeking you out specifically in a case like that. You still want to avoid the things that might block you from search engines like overloading on keywords. But even then, if someone is just typing in your domain name (direct traffic), you don’t need to worry about much.

Yahoo, Bing and Google don’t really need to worry too much about SEO…irony. People generally just type in “google.com” or “yahoo.com” or “bing.com” when they want to search for something.

The top 1000 most visited sites according to the Google.

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http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/

This is a fun page to check in on from time to time.

It’s a tool Google makes available via their “double click” adplanner.  https://www.google.com/adplanner/

Next time someone claims to have a top 500 site, top 1000 etc. you might want to pay this page a visit.

Using the Information

What good is this?  Besides knowing “who’s who” this list can reveal some true examples of “what works” and even show you some of the “why” it works.   Of course you’ll see the obvious big business sites.  MSN, Yahoo, Facebook (1st by far).  But you will also start to see other sites that might be able to help you better design your site, depending on the category you are in.  Home Depot was not a surprise for me to see in the top 100, but they have a very organized and referenced site throughout the internet searches and hubs.

Here is a link to the top 1000 sites in the US
http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top100countries/us.html

Coming Soon….Understanding Traffic… an even simpler description of what a unique visitor is versus a new one…

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2007/01/absolute-unique-visitors-versus-new.html

What are people searching for?

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Well, besides the obvious, like the answer to life (42) and the car keys, people are looking for a lot of things.

When it comes to choosing your domain name or planning your online marketing strategy, knowing what people are actually looking for can be invaluable.

So, how can you find this out?

There are many businesses online that will do the research for you. However, there are also some very good tools provided by Google that can prove to be exactly what you need to answer that question.

Google Insights is a way to compare what people are searching for on the web. It offers ways to line up “search volume patterns” according to regions (Geographic), categories, and time (Seasonality).

http://www.google.com/insights/search/

Google AdWords is googles advertising branch and they have a wonderful keyword search tool that will let you search for the term you want and show you how many people are also searching that term. I like this tool a lot because it really simplifies the information I usually want most which is “how many people want this information/product/service I am offering?” This is a great way to find out what key words you want to include in your site depending on your subject matter.

https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__u=1000000000&__c=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS#search.none

Lastly, Google Trends is a way to see what is being searched and how frequently by who and where.  It’s like a stripped down version of twitter in that respect.  But it is much much much more powerful than twitter.   You can take any search terms you want and put them on a timeline to compare how they have been trending since 2004.

http://www.google.com/trends