I would like to take the time to urge everyone to regularly check out the Google Webmaster blog where Matt Cutts and others at Google share SEO and webmaster tips that range from beginner to advanced. The blog is well organized and very informative.
Matt just posted his video responses to last month’s Q&A. They can be found at the Google Webmaster Help Youtube Channel and have some great answers to some very common questions in the SEO world. The Q&A videos were posted last week and are the videos with the white backgrounds, right now they’re towards the end of page one.
In fact, Matt even answered George Murphy (aka Murph) of Foster Web Marketing’s question about the best way for webmasters and website owners to find out what other websites/blogs are linking to them. Check it out:
I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t spend as much time on social bookmarking sites as I should. Building your reputation on sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and others can usually provide a great ROI later in the future, but who has the time anymore?
Well, Stumbleupon has a great new site, SU.PR, that I’m very excited about. It wraps a number of awesome features into one nice, easy package, and allows you to:
Post the same status massage to Facebook and Twitter at once, which eliminates some of the need for Ping.fm
It automatically shortens URLs for Tweets, eliminating the use for TinyUrl and other URL shortening services
Your submissions are automatically added to StumbleUpon for people to Stumble
It tracks clickbacks and views
It allows you to schedule future Tweets/postings.
An awesome tool for anyone looking to save time and better promote their blog posts and website pages.
To start using it (if you don’t already have a StumbleUpon account), follow StumbleUpon on Twitter to obtain Invite codes.
We’ve heard all of the hype surrounding Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. Some sites are announcing that the new search engine is already competing with Yahoo! for second place in the SE battle, and the reviews of Bing (”But it’s not Google”) seem to be pretty good so far. So, the question is: what can you do to optimize your site for Bing and strike while the iron is hot?
I came across a pretty good blog post this morning which cites a number of other resources who have done case studies on what Bing looks at as opposed to Google and Yahoo! when ranking websites. One of those resources has a detailed chart showing a comparison of on-page factors of the number one websites on Google and Bing for the keyword term “seo services”.
In summary, the resource came to the conclusion that the number one ranking website on Bing was able to keep a leg up on the competition by
Having an older domain age, and
Having inbound links from websites that included the primary keyword in the referring site’s title tags- in other words, building inbound links from other SEO sites and directories as opposed to being from just anywhere.
Obviously you don’t have much control on domain age, but here is another search engine that is ranking with inbound links as, what seems to be, one of their primary ranking factors.
I don’t know how many times we tell clients and other webmasters this when they ask why they’re not ranking well for their keyword and keyword phrases, but we can take this chance as an opportunity to say it again: If you’re not maintaining some sort of (professional) link building campaign, you’re already ten steps behind the competition.
Quality content is key, obviously, but taking the “if we build it they will come (and link to us)” approach isn’t enough to rank number one for more competitive keywords and beat out competing websites who are taking the time every day (or hiring SEM professionals to do it for them) to acquire links from relevant and authoritative sites in order to increase their rankings and keep you buried in the search engines.
We’ve put together some pretty good do-it-yourself link building techniques which you could take a look at if you have the time to build links to your website on a daily basis. But, if you’re like most of our clients, you simply don’t have the time (or professional knowledge) to do this and, if that’s the case, feel free to reach out to us and we’ll be happy to tell you how we can help.
Whether or not Bing lives up to the hype remains to be seen, but one thing is for certain: now is the time for you to get ahead of the competition and improve your search engine rankings (on Bing, Yahoo!, and Google) with an effective link-building campaign.
Offering an incentive for someone to Tweet about your product is a great idea if done correctly (and with some sort of creativity), but the tactic seems to be used more and more lately.
In the most recent Tweet incentive, Squarespace is giving away 30 iPhones in 30 days for anyone that tweets something about #squarespace, a free DIY web design platform.
People are willing to Tweet about promotions like these because 1) it’s easy, thanks to the user friendliness of Twitter, and 2) most people using Twitter on a regular basis have so many followers (including a large majority of people they’ve never met) that the message probably only reaches 1/3 of their audience, meaning they’re more willing to take a risk of seeming a little bit promotional.
The question is, what kind of incentive could you offer as an attorney?
A free case review? No, that’s pretty standard these days
A free Blackberry? Not very original, plus that can be a bit costly.
Well, we’re going to celebrate our new blog renovation (how do you like the new design?) by offering our own incentive.
Anyone in the legal community (lawyer, paralegal, law student, legal marketer, etc.) who Retweets this blog post will receive a free link back to their blog or website with the anchor text of their choice (this blog has a PR of 4/10 so it can really help out with you SEO efforts). Just click on the “retweet” button on the top left, it’s that simple.
In addition, we’re also collecting ideas for a “Retweet incentive for attorneys”. The most creative idea will be announced in a separate blog post on Friday morning, June 12th, and will include another link to your website, blog, Twitter profile, and a short bio of the winning submitter.
If you have an idea you’d like to submit please follow us on Twitter and direct message us with your idea. The deadline for submissions is 5pm EST on Thursday, June 11th.
UPDATE here are the Tweeers in the legal community who Retweeted this post. It’s not too late to be listed here, just Retweet this blog post and we’ll get you listed later in the week. And be sure to RT @tomfosterweb otherwise we won’t be able to track the responses. You’ll also have to have your website listed on your Twitter profile.
Spending time on Twitter or Facebook, reading your daily Google RSS feed, and other time consuming daily “tasks” that you complete can be extremely addicting. Twitter has recently been labelled by many as a “time waster”, but did you ever think that you could use that time a little bit better?
My clients and co-workers (myself included, actually) tell me all of the time how hard it is to budget time to get off of the PC/Mac and actually EXERCISE.
Afterall, do you ever think about how much more motivated and how great of a mood you are in after a fulfilling workout?
Most of our clients are stuck in a law office for up to 12 hours a day, and when you add in court appearances and client visits, their time is VERY hard to manage.
That being said, I was talking to a good friend of mine, Washington, DC personal trainer Josef Brandenburg, at the Glazer Kennedy conference in Chicago over the weekend and he game me some good tips on how to maximize your workout with a minimum amount of time.
“What you need is a short program that you can do on Monday that will still be burning body-fat come Tuesday. That’s how you get the body you want at your desk. That is NOT a pie in the sky wish. I do this with my clients all the time, and its something you can do too.”
“With regular exercise like jogging, you only get paid once (and poorly). If you go jogging for an hour, you get one hour of benefit and no more. You will burn a few extra calories, and a little bit of extra fat. BUT when you’re done with your jog your body will just get hungrier and eventually force you to replace those calories. The net result is almost nothing.”
“Recent research in the Journal of Obesity shows that men who did 6 hours of aerobic exercise for an entire YEAR dropped only 6.5lbs of fat (less than 4 for women). 20 pounds will cost you 18 hours per week for a year!”
What to do instead: Metabolic resistance training (MRT). MRT is an intense resistance workout where you alternate an upper and a lower body exercise that each work a lot of muscle at once. So, a bicep curl would be out since you work only one muscle, but a chin-up (assisted) would be a great upper body choice. You would alternate that with a lower body exercise like a squat. The intense nature of MRT gives you a HUGE ROE.
Research shows that this kind of a workout causes your body to switch over to burning your own stored fat for the next 24 to 36 hours. In addition to burning away your fat, you will also build some muscle that will make you look a lot better at the beach whether you’re a man or a woman. Plus you’ll get the cardio workout of your life.
Josef went on to tell me that he was over 50 lbs overweight before trying this exercise. He had tried everything from running ever day to every extreme diet on television and nothing had worked. After he dropped 50 pounds using this workout, he said he’s been able to keep the weight off and has curbed his appetite (and became a full-time personal trainer in the process)!
Twitter, Facebook, Google analytics, blogs…. all of this is great, but just be aware of how much time you’re spending Tweeting and how much time you’re budgeting for yourself. If you’re like me, you’re not one of those guys who stand around in the gym talking in between reps because you just don’t have the time, but with Josef’s tips you can maximize those precious few minutes and see some better results in your daily energy level.
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This post was written by Foster Web Marketing on May 5, 2009 Comments (5)
You’re probably hearing more and more about Twitter as the days go by, either on television when they announce the newest celebrity who is “tweeting”, or from your friends and colleagues who already seem to be up on the Twitter lingo.
Well, just because you’re left scratching your head whenever they bring up words like “tweet” and start talking about their “followers” (I thought it was some sort of e-cult or something at first) doesn’t mean that it’s too late for you to join the Twitter revolution.
Tom Foster and George Murphy of Foster Web Marketing just wrote a new free report, “Twitter for Attorneys”, which you can download here.
The report covers a number of topics ranging from how to sign up for an account, what your profile should and shouldn’t include, basic Twitter etiquette, and how you can use this social media powerhouse to improve both your online networking efforts which can lead to referrals, and your lead generation efforts through creative Twitter marketing.
Just because you are new to Twitter or don’t know anything about it yet doesn’t mean that you have to be scared or hesitant to sign up. This report will help you understand what you need to do to catch up with all of the other attorneys already Tweeting and gaining more and more followers as the days go by, so take a few seconds to download it and let us know what you think!
We here at Foster Web Marketing decided late-last-year to launch a new offering to our clients: attorney blogs. You see, our DSS content management system has a blog feature built-in, but we decided that, for those clients who have the time to dedicate to content development for two different sites, we would offer a new custom attorney blog package with a new domain in order to help out with search engine rankings for their websites (and increase their overall online exposure).
As a result, the average increase in website traffic after the new blogs for clients launched is thirty-five percent (one client has seen a 150% increase in website traffic two months after their new blog launched), and that doesn’t include the traffic that is coming into the blog itself. The clients have also been noticing a dramatic increase in their website’s search engine rankings, and are (so far) more than pleased.
I’d just like to take a few minutes to share a few blog designs that we have come up with for our clients in April.
We’d like to thank all of our clients who decided to move forward with us on this new venture, so far the results are amazing and we hope that our blog network (and your traffic/lead counts) continue to grow.
You can click here to find out more information about our blog offering.
Chris was interviewed by CNN’s Andrson Cooper about Natasha Richardson’s death:
The first question I always ask a client who is interviewed by a television, radio, magazine, newspaper, or any other type of press publication is “How did they find you?”.
Turns out that the CNN producer who invited Chris on the show found Chris’ Foster Web Marketing blog through a Google search that populated his recent blog post on Natasha Richardson’s death and then asked him t appear on the show.
Search engine optimization, as well as making sure that you’re actively blogging and staying active in the social media world, is not only important for your lead generation efforts, but also because you never know who is out there looking for you.
The CNN producer and Sun journalist could have just as easily did a Twitter search or looked through LinkedIn. They could have just looked through the Yellow Pages.
But because Chris and Bob take time out their busy days to stay on top of their web marketing efforts: they take the time to write a detailed blog post as opposed to a few sentences in a hurry, they make sure that their web sites have optimized page titles, content, and other SEO factors… not only are they ranking better on search engines and are getting more traffic to their websites/blogs, but are also in a better position for the press to find them for interviews and features.
It can be a lot to ask at times, but making sure that you’re taking time out of your day to thoroughly update your blog, connect with people through social media, and add content to you website is extremely important to your SEO efforts and web marketing success as a whole.
It might not seem like you’re getting an immediate return on investment, but over time you will definitely reap the rewards.
This was a question that we received today during our 30/60/90 day webinar with Communications and Estate guru Dave Frees.
I can’t stress the importance of using keywords that you’d like to rank for in the anchor text of your links enough. It is probably THE most important factor when it comes to Google and other search engines deciding what keywords and/or phrases you’d like to rank for, and making sure that you’re aware of what anchor text other sites are using when linking back to you is very important.
Check out this backlink anchor text analyzer tool to be sure that you’re aware of what anchor text other sites are using when they rank to you, and of course you can shoot them a quick e-mail asking them to change it if you’d like.
After reading an article in the Washington Post this morning about people Tweeting while serving jury duty, I immediately said to myself: is it bad that I could picture myself doing that?
After I realized that the answer is yes, I finally had a breakthrough: my life would not be complete without Twitter (or Facebook). This is pretty weird because this time last year I said what 95% (my guesstimate) of the country says right now: “Twitter? What the….?”
Here are my top five warning signs that you’re addicted to Twitter:
5) You respond to emails using “@” instead of “re:”, and not just in the subject.
4) Any time you type something that is approaching 140 characters you get the “uh oh here come the red numbers… I know they’re coming…. here they come” jitters.
3) You texted your best friend yesterday asking if he was coming to #happy hour.
2) Who needs Google? search.twitter.com is where it’s at!
1) The thought of your life minus Twitterberry or Twitterfon just doesn’t seem right.
By the way, is it just me or is Facebook trying to look like Twitter all of a sudden?
