BusinessOnLine SEO Blog - Search Engine Marketing techniques for 3rd generation SEO» Conference

Free Long Tail Keyword Analysis, SEO Research and Measurement Tool from BusinessOnLine

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:36:18 +0000

Today at Pubcon I will be announcing a new keyword analysis, research and measurement tool from BusinessOnLine that is free and built simply using Excel. This search analytics tool can be used to baseline and understand the long tail keyword performance of your Web site. At SES in San Jose, I told people of the importance of understanding your long tail performance over time as another key indicator of the success of your SEO campaign. However at that time, I told people that it is virtually impossible to do this in most existing analytics platforms and that we use a proprietary tool to accomplish our long tail baselines and subsequent performance monitoring. Well after I said that I felt like I had let some people down by not giving them a solution to the problem. So for Pubcon 2009 here in Las Vegas, I wanted things to be different. So I had Ilya, the mad Russian scientist of BusinessOnLine who is an Excel expert, but together a simple tutorial on how to build an long tail keyword analysis tool for FREE

So, here is the new Free Long Tail Keyword Analysis and Research Tool from BusinessOnLine. Let me know how you like it and also if any of you other Excel wizards want to add other cool features to it, let me know and I will post those updates for the community.

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Catfish is Back! What’s new in SEO for 2010

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:40:24 +0000

Hello everyone. Really sorry I have been gone from the blog for so long. The last four months have been absolutely crazy around here and to be honest I have been a little overwhelmed keeping up with everything that has been going on. The good news is that the chaos is a direct result of all the increased business that BusinessOnLine has gotten this year and the incredible growth that is happening around the company. We have doubled our SEO team this year and we are getting ready to start hiring SEO analysts again here in San Diego! Look for those job listings to be available soon in the careers section of the site. Additionally, we have been hard at work growing our process based on all the new advancements in search that have happened this year. Whether it’s the advent of the rel=canonical tag, the inclusion of view through data to our analytics offering which completely changes how we look at search attribution, or our new tool FirstLinkChecker.com which revolutionizes the way we look at internal link structure, there have been a ton of new developments. So that coupled with my SES presentation for San Jose in August as well as my upcoming presentation at SES Chicago in December and my Pubcon presentation in November, it has been impossible to find blogging time. The good news is that I finally have a better handle on all changes and I am once again in a position from a time standpoint to be more consistent. So thanks for everyone’s patience and hopefully I can share some things with you today which can give you a head start for your 2010 SEO initiatives.

Avoid duplicate content with the link rel canonical tag.

The REL=canonical tag is definitely something that should be included on every page of your site. This tag solves a lot of potential duplicate content problems and there is no reason it shouldn’t be a standard part of your code. Another recent advancement in duplicate content prevention is Google’s new dynamic parameter tool. Actually we should give the credit to Yahoo Site Explorer for coming up with the dynamic parameter handling idea first. These new tools significantly alter the approach to addressing duplicate content issues although a healthy 301 redirect strategy is also still part of a good duplicate content prevention plan.

If you didn’t see my webinar about View Through Data and how it dramatically changes the way we look at search and social media, you should really check it out. This data allows you to ask the question, of all the people that I am seeing as bookmark traffic, or alternatively, of all the people who typed my company name into Google, how many were exposed to a specific social media site, video, press release, Website mention, web page with a static advertisement, or any other digital asset. And the amazing part is, no link needs to exist between the asset in question and your site. It’s not voodoo and we didn’t make a pact with the devil, but it is amazing. If you want more information about how you and your company can leverage view through data to give you insight into your analytics that was previously impossible, contact me at catfish@businessol.com and I will set you up with someone who can answer questions specific to your application and analytics platform. But seriously, this stuff is incredible, its brand new and it can really help you understand what is causing your brand related searches as well as paint a much clearer picture of your social media ROI.

First Link Check - FirstLinkChecker.com

One of the most exciting things we are doing right now is the official public launch of our new tool “First Link Checker” at www.firstlinkchecker.com. We did some testing and found out that what SEOmoz reported a while back was true. Only the anchor text found in first link between two pages is counted in Google’s scoring. So this tool highlights the first links found in source so that you can see which links are being counted and which ones are not. Benj will be releasing a blog post on the subject this Friday to coincide with our initial public launch of the tool this weekend at DMA (the tool is in Beta right now). We hope this is the first of many tools we hope to develop that will be useful to the SEO community.

WebmasterWorld's Pubcon

And with all this going on, I am really excited to be headed to Pubcon next month to talk about SEO for Mega sites, meaning very, very large sites. This topic is very dear to me as many of my clients have absolutely huge sites. It’s one of the reasons we built our in house SEO tool called SEO Explorer. It’s been going on for a couple years now. Hopefully in 2010 we will be able to extend it to people outside of BusinessOnLine. We will see! But in the meantime, I have a lot of cool things to share about SEO for really large companies. So join me in Vegas next month for Pubcon!

Search Engine Strategies

I will also be speaking at SES Chicago in December. Ill be back on the Beyond the Numbers session where I will look at some ways to augment your analytics data and how that should be driving your ongoing SEO Strategy.

Also look for a new blog post from me next week where I will give everyone a cool excel trick that allows you to measure your long tail keyword performance. Thanks again for everyone’s patience with my blogging schedule! Have a great week in search and hopefully I will see you next month in Las Vegas!

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First Link Checker in Alpha Stage Tested by Initial SEOs from SES

Benj Arriola — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:24:02 +0000

First Link Checker by BusinessOnLine

At the previous Search Engine Strategies Conference, BusinessOnLine’s Ray “Catfish” Comstock has shared to a number of SEO professionals our new tool called the First Link Checker which is under it’s alpha stage. So far the feedback has been favorable and has also guided us to make minor improvements just before our beta release. We thank everyone that has been helping out and if you wish to be an alpha tester of this tool also, send us a tweet and mention anything about our first link checker. Expect more information to come in the following weeks!

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My SES New York 2009 Experience: SEO Adventures 3000 Miles from Home

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:53:00 +0000

I just got back from SES New York on Friday where I was very honored to have an opportunity to speak and to contribute to an outstanding session called “Meaningful SEO Metrics: Going Beyond the Numbers”. Between myself and the other exceptional speakers including Cindy Krum, Founder and CEO of Rank-Mobile; Anne Kennedy, SES Advisory Board and Managing Partner and Founder of Beyond Ink; and Seth Besmertnik, CEO & Co-Founder of Conductor, Inc. I felt like we put on a very informative session and the feedback I got from audience members after the presentation was very encouraging. I will be presenting a separate blog post later in the week covering some of what I spoke about at the conference.

I was happy to have an opportunity to speak right after Guy Kawasaki’s keynote speech which I thought was fairly well done and educational despite what some other people have suggested. I thought most people coming away from the keynote were energized and ready to learn more about SEO, SMO and everything in between. So I wasn’t surprised that we had an almost capacity room of about 150 people.

After I was done speaking, I attended some of the sessions in the afternoon although I admit I skipped the session after I spoke to unwind and get some pizza. I have been to SES before so I wasn’t particularly confident that the stock lunch menu would be to my liking (I was happily surprised that SES has definitely improved their food selection since last time I was there two years ago). Props to the SES New York organizers for taking care of the problem. However, I was more than happy to have some authentic slices of pie from Ray’s Pizza around the corner from the Hilton where the conference was taking place.

While we are talking about the Hilton, let me say that the hotel is fantastic. The only complaint that I have (and it’s a big one), is if your going to charge a $250 discounted nightly rate, don’t try to weasel me for $15 extra a day for Wireless Internet. If nothing else, be smart enough to realize that at this conference its pretty much a given that almost everyone needs it. So bundle it in with the total package cost and let me be happily surprised that my laptop works as soon as I enter my room. That was a REALLY annoying part of the whole experience.

Overall though I had a great time. I thought that the sessions were really good for the most part. I thought Michael Gray had one of the better presentations that I saw, and was impressed with the amount of tactical advice that he gave people that could be implemented immediately. I am a big fan of sessions that teach people how to do things, rather than those whose speakers pontificate about high level subjects that make for interesting coffee conversations, but don’t really help you make money.

For example, in the session titled “Universal and Blended Search: An Update”, the people that were from agencies did an ok job discussing some tactical elements of Universal Search. But the search engine representatives seemed like they were giving a commercial about all their Universal Search properties. There was no real tactical advice and it felt like that they were all trying to convince people that their search engine was cooler than the other guys (and it wasn’t hard to figure out how to spend advertising money with them… *lol*). Ironically, Google, who invented the phrase Universal Search, was not part of the panel. Thankfully for them. So that was a little disappointing.

But the session on video search was outstanding. It was probably the best session I went to (or at least tied with the “feed” session that Michael Gray was part of). It’s amazing how the popularity of video has turned YouTube into the second biggest search engine in America. And goes to show you how important video content is to SEO.

I also learned a lot more about social media, especially with regard to how cool targeting ads can be with FaceBook. Actually there is a lot of cool stuff happening at FaceBook. If you haven’t set up a page for your business on FaceBook, now would be a good time. Between the social media capabilities, the viral possibles, and the potential SEO benefits, a FaceBook page for your business should be a priority for your online marketing efforts.

It wasn’t all business in New York (although mostly it was). The first night, Monday, I went to sleep early so that I could be well rested for speaking. Plus the 6 hour flight is always draining. The second night we went around the corner to a little New York bar filled with other SES attendees and talked a little SEO over a couple Heinekens. The last night I went to Dave and Busters in Time Square which was definitely the highlight of the trip. I got to hang out with my friend Heather and we were thoroughly entertained by the wisdom of Bruce Clay. Bruce is a fun guy to talk SEO with. His experience and his passion about the subject of SEO are almost unmatched in the industry. We both laughed when I reminded him that I met him six years ago. Time Flys.

So I had a great time, but after three days of intense SEO and meeting all kinds of amazing people (like Jefferey Eisenberg for example), I was VERY happy to get home (although not so happy with the extra hour of waiting for our plane to take off… *lol*). One fantastic thing about living in San Diego is your never really sad to come home. It’s not paradise, but its pretty darn close.

And it sure is a lot warmer here than New York

Stay tuned later this week for my blog post about my session and some of the SEO tips that I spoke about. Have a great week!

Catfish

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Online Marketing Summit (OMS) 2009 Conference Recap

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:36:00 +0000

Well now that I have almost caught up with the work I missed from being at the 2009 Online Marketing Summit, I have to say, what a fun time! If you missed my presentation on Long Tail Keyword Optimization, Kate Fleming did a wonderful job of summarizing the main points of the presentation. Additionally there were a lot of other great presentors and presentations which made this conference the best one ever in my estimation. Thanks again to Aaron Kahlow and his whole staff of tireless workers for making it such a success. And who can forget the free Jamba Juice!

For my personally, the opportunity to perform and sing in my acoustic project for the first time ever in front of the 100+ people at the Thursday evening cocktail hour was amazing. I really enjoyed myself and so did my band. Thanks to everyone for all the kind words and wonderful feedback about the performance. That was our first show together as a band and we are looking forward to playing a lot more of them soon.

If you missed this year’s event, don’t forget that regionals are coming and definately make plans to be here next year. It really is one of the coolest conferences that you can attend. See ya soon!

Catfish

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Online Marketing Summit (OMS) – SEO and Social Media in Houston and San Jose

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:10:00 +0000

So I am finally caught up enough after being gone a week for OMS that I can blog again..lol. What a crazy week and a half its been. First I went to Houston for the first time where I met some incredible people who were very hospitable. I spoke about the SEO benefits of the social media broadcast system. I defined the social media broadcast system as:

“Your social media broadcast system is the collection of technologies that are used to broadcast your message to your friends and their friends.”

So this collection of technologies includes your blog, social networking sites like LinkedIn, FaceBook, MySpace, social news sites like Digg and Mixx, social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Stumble, image and video hosting sites like Flickr and YouTube as well as microblogging platforms like Twitter and hub pages like Squidoo. My presentation will appear on the blog at some point but I am currently using this material so it’s only available to OMS attendees at this point. But essentially we talked about all the ways to integrate these sites together as well as how to best utilize them for their SEO benefits.

My presentation seem to be well received in both Houston and San Jose although I think the San Jose presentation was a little stronger because I has already had one performance under my belt. And I modified it slightly to be a little more action oriented because I think that many people who heard the presentation were still learning about some of the concepts, likewhat microblogging is and why you should do it, and so I wanted to more completely spell out some of the tactical elements of what I was talking about so that people could walk away with a check list of things to do, even if they didn’t all make sense yet..lol.

All in all, I really enjoyed getting to talk about social media at this year’s OMS regionals. I have one more next week in Denver. Unfortunately, due to a scheduled surgery and the fact that the San Diego OMS date was recently moved, I will be unable to speak at the September regional here in San Diego. But I will be back with a vengeance in February for the OMS main conference where I will be focusing on more traditional SEO with my Shotgun / Sniper approach to SEO.

In the meantime, I will try to recover from recent OMS adventures which include jumping in the pool in Houston with my cell in my pocket. Not such a good idea if you don’t have your contacts backed up somewhere So if I haven’t called you recently, now you know why..lol. I can’t say enough though how impressed I always am with the people that I have met at these OMS events. Their collective enthusiasm for SEO and all things Internet marketing really motivates me to push my own process past where it already is. I think one of the biggest things about these events that make them so worthwhile is leveraging the collective enthusiasm of the group to energize your own passion. And of coarse, a free dinner courtesy of Aaron is always a welcome change from my own cooking or lack thereof

To everyone who I had a chance to meet last week, it was a pleasure. To the wonderful group of people I had a chance to have dinner with in both Houston and San Jose, thanks for an outstanding and entertaining evening of conversation and laughs. Hope to see everyone in Denver next week. Until then, keeping your SEO rockin!

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SEO Videos from OMS – Internal and External Link Building Strategies

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:57:00 +0000

Hello again everyone. Sorry I have been MIA this week, although I did do a guest blog over at the OMS site about the 4 most common way that marketers squander resources for SEO. But I have been incredibly busy with client work, developing new internal processes for the SEO team, and putting together my OMS presentation for next Tuesday in Houston. I am happy to say that my band has been selected for Hyperfest 2008 in New Mexico which is very exciting for us, but the planning of that event is cutting into my free time (think blog time..lol). So that’s my long winded apology for taking so long to get these new link strategy videos up.

Obviously these videos are not comprehensive guides to linking but I think there is a lot of solid advice on the subject of both internal and external links that you hopefully will gleam a couple SEO tips from. Let me know what you think!

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** Just posted the next two SEO videos from this presentation on Wed, July 9th, 2008..

With the Online Marketing Summit’s regional tour on the horizon, I thought it would be a good time to give everyone a taste of the kind of material that is presented at OMS. So I contacted the always helpful OMS marketing team and got their permission to release some video footage of my presentation here in San Diego last February. The presentation was entitled “SEO: Unveiling the Black Box – Everything You Want to Know that an SEO Wont Tell You”. Now before all you fellow SEO’s think I’ve been sniffin a little too much glue on the side, I didn’t come up with the title. *lol* So I will give you a more accurate title of the presentation: “Good SEO Practices for an Ongoing SEO Campaign”. In other words, this presentation centers around the kinds of activities you want to be doing once the initial optimization of the site has been completed.

The first two videos I am releasing for this presentation are focused on how to effectively use Google Webmaster Tools to augment an existing SEO campaign. I basically go over each section of Google’s Webmaster tools and how to use the information provided there to enhance your overall SEO performance. Keep in mind that this presentation was done in February of 2008, so there may be some slight variations in what is displayed now. Please let me know what you think of the videos. I will be posted the rest of the hour long presentation here soon. Have a great week!

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Surviving BMA in Vegas – Thoughts on Corporate Blogging

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:42:00 +0000

I was in Vegas last week at the annual Business Marketing Association conference in beautiful Lake Las Vegas. I had never been there before and even though its odd not to be on the strip, it was both beautiful and relaxing. Our resort (Lowes) is a very nice place with ZERO slot machines or gambling so it almost feels like Palm Springs here (never fear though, we did manage find a casino or three..lol). But before all the late night Vegas fun at TAO in the Venetian (which I am not allowed to blog about..LOL), I had the opportunity to catch the corporate blogging session at the conference, which given the fact that I am a blogger, was of interest to me. It was the only session I got to attend as I was doing SEO Labs most of the time I was there.

I thought it was a good panel with a lot of different perspectives on blogging. It was more centered around the case for corporate blogging versus the tactical execution (which was a little disappointing since I am obviously already convinced that blogging is a good idea). But some of the things I did take away from the session I thought were interesting.

I thought it was really interesting, especially given the traditional makeup of the audience, to see so many hands when the moderator asked who in the room was on Facebook. And also surprising was the number of hands that went up who were on Twitter. Equally as important was the fact that the moderator was recommending to all these people that they integrate Twitter into their marketing programs as another channel to directly communicate with their audience.

All in all, I didn’t learn any new strategies for blogging really, but I did realize how mainstream Web 2.0 technology is becoming. Although, no one there I talked to knew anything about Plurk, but I imagine that will be a hot topic at next years convention Of coarse by then, we will have some new service to talk about (like Jolt for example). The Web 2.0 world changes quickly and understanding how to leverage the newest, emerging technologies is critical to understanding how to get the most out of your blog.

Stay tuned for my new Social Media Broadcast System post where I will detail how I set up my own social media sites to interact with one another and maximize my ability to broadcast my message across my social network.

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