SEO

Welcome to Outspoken Media's Search Engine Optimization blog category. Props to you for taking the initiative to scope out the good stuff.

The search engine optimization landscape is becoming more complex every day, increasing your need to push your Web site harder and grab those conversions.  Outspoken's Search Engine Optimization blog category is here to keep you up to speed on everything that's happening in the way of personalization, Universal and blended search, link development and more.  Use it as your compass as we delve into high-level and advanced SEO tutorials, guides, theories and more to help give back to the SEO community and educate a new breed of SEOs.

We hope you'll pardon the dust while we get started building up the Outspoken blog.  In the coming weeks and months, you'll find all our posts that relate to search engine optimization listed below.  While we get to work building up our own arsenal of trusted information, we happily point you to the following resources that have always treated us well:

If you have suggestions for posts we should do or techniques you’d like to see covered, please feel free to contact us and let us know.

Or, if you want to know how we can help you through our search marketing services, feel free to contact us about that, too. We'd love to show you how to become outspoken.

How To Manage Client Trust

August 20, 2010

Your clients chose you as their SEO agency because they have complete and utter trust in your capabilities, right? So why do they keep calling to check up? Why can’t they just let you do your work and report back to them when you’re finished? Well, because they probably don’t completely trust you. Because you [...]

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8 New Link Types That Exist On The Web

July 27, 2010

A long time ago in a land far, far away, Web searchers linked to content that they liked and found useful. It was a utopia of sorts, one where users tried to pass on the most relevant content for a query. And then, the great Google discovered what was going on. It observed user’s linking [...]

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What to Know Before Hiring an SEO Agency

July 21, 2010

Hugo Guzman recently outlined several questions to ask when interviewing SEO agencies. But interviewing an SEO company is the second step – if you don’t know what your expectations of an SEO agency are, who should you reach out to in the first place? How do you know when it’s time to reach out? Not [...]

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Link Building with the Experts – 2010 Edition

July 7, 2010

The link building interview is back. In prior years, I’ve gotten together some of the best minds in link building and asked them to answer some questions about link development. What resulted were two very powerful (and long) link development interviews. It’s been more than two years since the most recent one, so I decided [...]

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The Magic of the Meta Description Tag

July 1, 2010

This is the first blog post I’ve ever written and I’ve decided to take you all on a brief tour of a few meta description examples around the Web. I love the meta description tag. I love it so much that although I don’t have a blog or even a real website, I do have [...]

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9 SEO Mistakes Businesses Make With Content

June 16, 2010

Do you know what I do all day? I do what you hate. I write content. I write content for Outspoken, I write it for Outspoken clients, and sometimes, when I’m really lucky, I get to write it for myself. And all that content writing has taught me a few things – mostly that many [...]

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The Real Reasons Big Brands Don’t Rank

April 30, 2010
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Lisa pointed out a post to me that Advertising Age did a few days ago called “Meet the Brands Hiding on Google.” I’m assuming it was because she totally didn’t want to blog today and knew sending me something that got me a little riled meant I’d go off on a tangent and write a [...]

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Who’s Responsible for Teaching, Protecting SEO?

April 20, 2010

Yesterday Kim Krause-Berg asked a pointed question. She asked: Where all the skilled, generous SEOs? And the question got many people riled up, myself included. But was she asking the right question? Kim was part of the SEO generation where people flocked to forums to create relationships, to seek advice and for their own personal [...]

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5 Quick SEO Tricks For AFTER A Post Goes Hot

April 12, 2010

I don’t pay a heck of a lot of attention to SEO while blogging. I’m just not that concerned with it. I realize this is blasphemy to most of you, but Rae, Rhea and Dawn are the SEO minds over at Outspoken. My interest with the blog is in creating discussions that people care about [...]

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Thank You.

March 15, 2010

After an overwhelming show of support from the community, I wanted to take a minute to thank you. When I originally discussed the SEO trademark news with Search Engine Land, it was suggested that readers may want to donate to my legal funds. I tried to brush this off and we published the articles. I [...]

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SEO Trademark Registration Terminated

March 15, 2010

Two years ago I set out on what would become one of the biggest challenges in my life to date. It ranks up there with starting Outspoken Media, chairing a non-profit and getting married. On April 24, 2008 I filed my notice of opposition to Jason Gambert’s “SEO” trademark application. On March 11, 2010, I [...]

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9 Signs You May Be Ready To Hire An SEO

February 4, 2010

I’m not an SEO myself, but having been brought up around them the past few years, I can certainly understand their pain. Sometimes it’s hard to filter out the clients who are really serious about SEO and improving their Web site from the well-intentioned folks who just think SEO sounds good on paper. And if [...]

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How to Learn SEO

December 23, 2009
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I’m asked a lot of times when I tell folks what I do how I learned Internet marketing. People are usually surprised when I say I’m all self-taught, but the reality is, there is no real way to learn Internet marketing *other* than being self-taught. A traditional marketing degree might offer you insight into certain [...]

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Is Google Moving In The Wrong Direction?

December 11, 2009
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It’s been one hell of a week for all of us. I’m exhausted and I need a nap. I do have a question, though. And it is only a question, so simma down, Internet. The question is this: Is Google making search too complex and moving in the wrong direction with things like default personalization [...]

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Google Enables Real Time Spam and More

December 9, 2009
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So, I’m at Chicago SES and see Michael Streko tweet about how Google has integrated Twitter into regular search. Sure enough, Search Engine Land has an article about the topic. Being a former practitioner of the “dark arts”, I immediately start running some searches and was pretty shocked at what I found. Funnily enough, Dave [...]

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The SEO’s Guide to Page Speed – Don’t Panic

December 3, 2009
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Matt Cutts mentioned page speed during his Pubcon keynote this year and it felt like people went a little nuts. “Page speed is going to be a ranking factor?! We need to stop everything and make our pages load in Pi on a 56k connection!” Here’s the deal, page speed is important, but it’s ALWAYS [...]

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Penalties, issues and filtering; it’s all just semantics

October 9, 2009
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I was reading the recap Shawn Collins did of his trip to SMX on day one and a comment he made within it got my attention: Some interesting revelations in the duplicate content session, such as Google’s Joachim Kupke saying there is no duplicate content penalty and that Google is “working on something to help [...]

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Where to Kickoff Your Keyword Research

September 30, 2009
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Keyword research is a pain in the butt, but someone’s gotta do it! And, let’s be honest, if you’re a search engine marketer there really isn’t anything more important than keywords. So, you’re essentially doomed to a life of tedious research and spreadsheets. Sorry. How many of you get judged solely on the movement of [...]

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SEO, Love & Baseball

September 22, 2009
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[claps] Let’s play a game! I want you to tell me what the most important part of the SEO process is. Ready? I’ll even give you three options. The most important part of your SEO process is: The SEO firm that you hire. The links that you get. The amount of keyword-rich content that you [...]

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2003 Called; They’d like their URL structure back

August 25, 2009
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Over the last eight months or so of offering SEO consulting services to clients via Outspoken Media, I’ve seen a lot of interesting things. One of the more common (and surprising) things we see are URL structures in “current” sites that are completely “root based”. What does this mean? Back around 2003 (hey I’m old, [...]

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I’M TELLING! (or reporting your SEO competitors)

August 7, 2009
mean kid

When I did the Ask the SEO Vets panel at SMX Advanced a few months ago, someone in the audience asked a question about what to do when your competitors are buying links and getting an advantage from them in the engines. Vanessa Fox immediately answered that you could report them, to which several of [...]

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SEO Audits: What You Need to Know

July 3, 2009
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“The first step in diagnosis is to find the root cause.” – Vanessa Fox at SMX Advanced 2009 Conducting an SEO Audit We couldn’t agree more. That’s exactly how we approach SEO audits, they’re a diagnosis. You have a horrible, gaping wound and we’re here to fix it. There isn’t a fool proof system in [...]

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Google Openly Profiles SEOs As Criminals

June 9, 2009
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If we can stop talking about nofollow and PageRank sculpting for a second, maybe we can openly talk about the bigger story of last week’s SMX Advanced. The one that has to do with Matt Cutts taking the stage during the You&A and openly stating that Google profiles SEOs like common criminals. I was naïve [...]

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Duplicate Content Solutions & The Canonical Tag

June 2, 2009
SMX Advanced

Now that we’ve gotten the bugs out, it’s time to get technical! Watch as my head spins. Actually, Stephan Spencer is on this panel which means I may actually throw up from the knowledge overload he’s famous for throwing out. Get those motion sickness bags ready, this should be fun! Alex Bennert is moderating a [...]

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The Internet Marketer’s Tool Belt

April 22, 2009
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Over the past couple of months I’ve added several new tools to my Internet marketer’s tool belt. Some of these tools aren’t new, but they are new for me. Others are brand new, but they’ve already worked their way into my daily routine. I thought I’d give you a sneak peak into these recent additions [...]

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Three Easy Ways to Geotarget Your Search Results

April 2, 2009
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We’re here sitting in sunny (read: humid) Ft. Lauderdale and the subject of geotargeting came up. Why? Because we’re trying to find a spa to go to later, a place to go eat, cute places to shop…and all our results are different. Google knows we’re in Florida. It’s not such a big deal for us, [...]

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Big Brands Are What’s Wrong With America

March 23, 2009
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scoble (v): To cry, whine, or bitch about not receiving something you didn’t deserve in the first place. As in, “He totally Robert Scoble’d about it” or “I stopped caring once he scobled”. It’s Monday, I’m about to hop on a train to liveblog SES NY and big brands are scobling. Shoot me in the [...]

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There’s More To Life Than Links & Sex

March 4, 2009
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There are a few posts I’ve written in my career where I think to myself, “this probably isn’t going to go well. I should just shut up.” This is one of them. Only I’m not going to shut up. Not that this should surprise you. As people often like to lovingly point out to me, [...]

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Is Google Using Brands To Get to Content Producers?

February 25, 2009
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Head to SEO Book. Aaron Wall has written the best post on search I’ve read in a long time. The post deals with the new emphasis Google is placing on brands and the algorithm update that quietly took place on Jan. 18 without much attention at all. In his post, Aaron shows pretty strong evidence [...]

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