Minnesota SEO Services | Brent Rangen

What is a High Quality Link?

Chances are if you own a website or blog, the phrase “high quality backlink” is not a new concept. Most of the articles surrounding this topic are outdated. The main concepts remain the same, for the most part, but some of the minor details have changed.

This question does come up a lot in SEO forums, but they get buried fast and the majority of them give bad WRONG advice, because the people responding have ulterior motives; selling you these bitter bad links! Just because people sell social bookmarking, forum, or directory links, they will tell you that they work better than anything else. This is not the case.

The common question:

We just purchased 2,000 back links and our rankings haven’t changed much yet? We are not showing up for long-tail keywords either. What’s the deal? continue reading   »

The article I composed, “SEO for Small Business: Get an SEO Primer” won Grand Prize on BruceClay.com this past week! It has been a busy fourth of July around here. This was a great surprise to kick-off the holiday weekend though. Along with the recognition the grand prize winner gets a free pass to SES San Francisco. The Agenda looks great. I am really looking forward to it.

Grand Prize: A 3-day Platinum Passport to Search Engine Strategies San Francisco 2010, a seat in the SES San Francisco 1-day SEO training with Bruce Clay, and a copy of SEO All-In-One for Dummies. The grand-prize winner will be interviewed on the SEM Synergy podcast.

Of course the training from Bruce Clay will be excellent as well. I am really chomping at the bit to see the PPC lab and meet the fine people at Bruce Clay! Everyone who voted for me, you are awesome, and I hope to see all of you in San Francisco! Thanks #SEO, Forums.SEO.Com, my Twitter followers, and of course Bruce Clay and his staff for putting on such a great event.

Related articles,

• Link Building this Month (06.2010) (wiep.net)
• Internet Marketing Contest: Lessons We Learned (bruceclay.com)
• SMB Online Marketing Contest: Announcing the Winners! (bruceclay.com)

First off, let me start by saying that I am not selling any product here. I am not an affiliate nor will I ever use this site to sell other products. However, because of the increased number of requests I have recently been receiving on rank tracker software, I decided to write this post to help users in the community looking for a decent solution. Those of us who have been around know that many rank trackers are not worth time or money.

An API Keyword Tool Built into Ranking Software Shows the Caliber of this Ranking Software

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Bruce Clay is a heavy hitter in the SEO industry. He has long been setting the pace for the rest of us. So, when I saw the chance to participate in a contest on their site I jumped on it.

We were told to create an article for small business owners in one of three categories: PPC, SEO, and SMO. I chose to do SEO. The winner will win a free entry into SES San Fran and will be interviewed in a podcast after the show. Not only that, it’s a good way to connect with other people in the business. Even before the winners are announced I have already won because of the new contacts I have made as a result of having my name on a site like bruceclay.com.

that’s great Brent.. How the heck do I get to the Articles?

http://www.bruceclay.com/about/smallbizarticles.htm

If you think my article is best, click on the radio button next to my article, and hit submit. I believe the voting can be anonymous too. Votes will be taken until the 15th of this month.

Hey Folks,

Many of you know me as the “SEO guy,”  “the web consultant,” or something similar. Not anymore, now we are officially known as the Optimize Guyz! This site will still function as my personal blog.

My goal in starting the Optimize Guyz was to help my clients who required design work by finding talented designers who I have used in the past. Joining forces with these new talents will allow me to offer the same high quality services on a bigger scale. I still believe that harnessing new technology is key to unlocking website potential and if we do have a mission statement, it would be that! I know many designers started offering SEO services simply because there was money to be made there. What many people do not know is that SEO is a ton of work. It’s hour and hours, days and days, behind the scenes building links, building content, and using proper techniques which have been specified by Google. Using tools, analytics, and reports are necessary for benchmarking and understanding why things are happening and figuring out what is best for the future. When designers sign on to do SEO simply because they think they should, they don’t always follow through on getting out the weekly reports, proving the ROI, and are not out there everyday building links and syndicating content.

By doing my design in house it allows us to do a better job offering a complete solution. We can set up SEO-friendly sites from the foundation up, use CMS’s for clients ease-of-use, and save them money in the long run because a) they won’t be paying a ton for updates and b) the Optimize Guyz is small enough to keep our overhead low!

The design services will include: custom websites, custom WordPress websites, custom facebook pages, twitter profile pages,  landing pages, and logos as well. We have two talented guys working with me who are very experienced in image work, design, marketing and advertising. Two new product we will offer will be:

• Specific site maintenance & upgrade requests
• Do-it-yourself link building campaigns. We arm you with the info necessary to obtain high quality back links and help you get through the process. It’s a good option for smart webmasters who have time but not a lot of money. These really do work and have helped someone recently to get on page 1 on a fairly competitive term on a relatively new site!

Please bear with us while Optimize Guyz.com is in a development stage. Anyone interested in hiring us can contact me here.

Google is impossible to keep up with. New product launches, modifications, and new features popping up and disappearing at a jack rabbit’s pace.

My goal is to identify and exploit the Google features that matter – the ones that make a difference. This one matters!

Introducing Google.com/Places.

1. Sign in to your Google account (through Gmail, Wave, Orkut, Voice, or Google application of your choice)
2. Point your browser to www.google.com/places.
3. If you are signed in to the Google account you set up your business listing with you will see new reports and tips for optimizing your business listing for maximum visibility.
4. The two things that really matter are 1) complete profile information as much as possible 2) select the right categories. If you are unsure which categories to pick then check out what your competitors are using.

That’s it! I figured a blog post would help a few of my clients walk through this. Hope it helps those of you viewing my site from the web too. continue reading   »

The Basics on Increasing Google Visibility.

So here he is again, the ruler of the web, and the face of Google, Matt Cutts, Google’s Spam czar answers a few questions on visibility. One thing to note: Google rewards sites that follow along with the SEO guide they published a few months ago, almost a new standards body in himself. Webmasters and SEO professionals alike all watch Matt’s web activity under a microscope even speculating at nick names he may use of forums.

Now Matt Cutts is the undisputed golden boy of the web 2.0 era, in fact, one could even say that he never does anything wrong, but we all remember this. Hey, nobody is perfect!

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Rising Trends in Minnesota Real Estate Search over the last 12 months. Way to go Google! It would be nice to see Bing and Yahoo offering the same data.

We recommend following the battle plan of niche marketer’s, find hot buzz words and adjust your keyword campaign accordingly. Use tools like Google Insights, Google Trends, weekly/monthly reports, and social media trending tools from Twitter. Capitalize on any new “buzz” keywords, or keywords which can have an Oprah Effect. Sometimes you may be the only site going after an industry buzzword and can achieve mass amounts of traffic while expending minimum time and effort.

Current events and real time search create a lot of new keywords on a regular basis. Sometimes those keywords can come about by a celebrity (like Oprah Winfrey) and many major players are competing in current events. With real estate you may find such keywords by analyzing users search behavior and by tracking data from your MLS and IDX sites.

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Every real estate webmaster knows about Google’s two main basic functions:

1. Returning results for a basic search query (ie. Brainerd Real Estate) .
2. Serving highly targeted ads by sponsored ads on SERPs, mobile, and the content network.

Did you know that there is more though?

Sign up for a verified Google Profile, add a business listing (which can be linked to your Adwords campaign), use Google Maps to the full extent, Google Earth for ‘listing fly-overs’ , market and sell homes in 3d, and of course the ARMY of Google Apps can help streamline your path to web success.

• Google can generate real estate leads and referrals.
• Google has more real estate searches than other search engines combined, and more unique visitors than all real estate specific web sites.
• Google is the most-used search engine for researching and purchasing real estate information and services.
• The Google Network reaches over 80% of U.S. Internet users.

When we say, “Google offers highly targeted ads” we mean: “Over 56% of all Internet searches on “real estate” and related terms are conducted on Google and our partner sites, and the majority of those searchers are actively looking for listings or referrals to brokers and agents.”

Read the Google Article on Achieving Real Estate Success on the Web

Bob Rains is an expert in SEO. He has been a leader in gaming SEO and is now VP or marketing at Affiliate Media Inc. His view on Caffeine is similar to what we have posted in the past. Let’s watch the video.

Click “read more” to see the video continue reading   »