Utah Search Engine Optimization | SEO

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I recently guest authored a post on David Harry’s blog entitled “Social Media Pitfalls: 5 Lessons Learned“. In this post I discuss the lessons I’ve learned by diving into social media. My hope was that others could learn from my mistakes so they don’t make the same mistakes when getting started in social media marketing.

The reason this is so important is because social media done wrong can have some costly mistakes as far as reputation, time, and money wasted. So shoot on over to Huomah.com and give it a read. Hopefully it’ll help you out in your future endeavours.

I thought I had seen it all when Stanford computer science students went gangsta rap. MC Plus + recorded songs about binary code, programming, C++, and Java. Some songs make fun of “script kiddies” and while they are hillarious they aren’t very well done.

Now for the SEO/M world we have OG Charles Lewis (Chuck) also known as Poetic Prophet, from Pop Labs, droppin’ beats and putting a new “sphinn” on social media addiction, paid search, and link building. Chuck raps about search engine marketing techniques and social media as part of a daily lifestyle.

PRESS PLAY

His videos went up in November of ‘07 but I just barely discovered thems thanks to a Tweet from Muhammad Saleem followed by a Sphinn post from Danny Sullivan. While researching I saw that WebProNews.com had reported on this in November but apparently I missed it.

I love Chuck’s witty lyrics. He’s a guy who obviously knows what he’s doing. Here’s the lyrics to the link building rap video:

“You create a new site and its content heavy,
With the right amount of pictures you believe it’s ready,
So you launch it trying to put money in da bank,
But when you search and try to find yourself, you can’t,
So you thank until your mind goes blank,
Got titles and headers but no page rank,
Sooner or later it will show if I wait,
In the meantime make sure my code validate,
And it do,
Hmm, now what I’m supposed to do,
Add meta information and alt tags too,
Still don’t get listing,
Something must be missing,
Brad and Chuck recommended doing link building,
So you start hunting down sites like a predator,
Doing back links on all your competitors,
Whoever linking to them need to link to me,
Is it free, do we swap, or do I pay a fee,
Well take it from us, before you take that step,
Some things about the site that you might want to check,
Did they use a link farm or some dirty tactics,
Could have a bad effect on your site that’s drastic,
Could’ve link baited, look at what they created,
Compare it to yours, is it even related,
Take the time, go inspect and see,
Take advantage of paid directories,
If you follow all the steps with a little bit of patience,
Get links from relevant sites that are favorites,
Update your content on the regular basis,
I’m confident you’ll make it to first page placement”

Check out Chuck’s YouTube Channel to see all of his videos.

Rebecca Kelley, of SEOmoz, recently wrote a post on ShoeMoney.com entitled “How SEO is Like Guitar Hero”. The breadth of her post is an analogy of how learning SEO is like playing guitar hero for the first time. It seems extremely hard and overwhelming but the more you dive into it the better you get and the easier it seems. At that point, you advance to a whole new level and encounter the same thing all over again.

Figuring out the best way to learn SEO is hard. You don’t know where to begin, who to trust, where to look, what to believe, or how to begin. I’m going to highlight how I started and a few things I’ve learned along the road to hopefully help you decide how you want to begin.

At the very beginning I was working as a Web designer and when times were slow I was mentored by an SEO professional, Jason Miller of EngineReady, to help create landing pages for certain clients. In this process I learned the ins and outs of on-page optimization. It wasn’t until a few year later did I decide to further my education in search engine optimization.

Not knowing where to begin, I dove into the deep end of the pool swimming in an overload of information from blogs and podcasts that I found via search. The frustration I dealt with was that often times author’s information contradicted what I had just read a few articles before. I spent weeks absorbing all the information I could then began implementing and testing different strategies.

Before long, I was figuring out what worked, what didn’t work, who the authoritative authors were and who to ignore. From that point forward I’ve spent approximately 10-12 hours a week keeping up on industry news and blog publishing to keep my education current.

I wish there had been an easier way, I spent months and months reading stuff I didn’t have to, that wasn’t accurate, that was untested or just heard through the grapevine. Now days I’ve heard about people spending hundreds of dollars on e-books and thousands of dollars on training courses to learn SEO so Garrett Pierson and I came up with a cheaper solution.

We wanted to be mentors to new people starting out, like Jason Miller was to me, and help them along to learn SEO step-by-step. We wanted to make it affordable so they wouldn’t have to spend thousands on training courses, months of their time sifting through garbage and fallacies on the Web, or hundreds on redundant e-books that only TELL you what you need to do to improve rankings and not SHOW you how to do it.

What Garrett and I do is walk you through screencast videos where we show you exactly the process needed to optimize a site from scratch. This includes all the keyword research, competitive analysis, tool usage, trade secrets, etc. If you want to sign up for our launch date then check us out at Learn SEO Live. Only $19 a month forever if you sign up now!

Learning SEO the RIGHT Way

An important thing to note is that every Website is different. What works on one site may not work on another. What worked yesterday may not work or work as well today. So the best thing to do, after learning the basics, is to begin testing yourself. Sure it’ll be a baptism by fire and you’ll make mistakes along the way and come across a few roadblocks

Make sure you seek out the reputation on background of the professionals that share their experiences and testing with you. Test results will vary for each Website, but there is a lot to be learned from others that can save you some costly mistakes.

So a summary of the key takeaways are:

• Reading and Research
• Conduct Testing
• Get Professional Training

To get started: check out the teleseminar podcast with Garret Pierson talking about our background, SEO tips, and more.