To change it, go to the triangle in the top right and then Account Settings (see screenshot below)

Be selective and be absolutely sure – so far, Facebook is dead serious about only changing your username one time.

If it’s a Facebook Page / Fan Page, then you need to first acquire 25 friends (i.e. 25 Facebook Likes) before you can get a custom page URL. This is done to prevent people from squatting on good URLs.

Go to http://www.facebook.com/username/ to get started and update your username.

If you’re trying to put a bunch of Google Adsense ads on your website but not seeing them show up, it may be because you have too many. You can only have three text ad units, three image ad units and 2 search units for Google Adsense. (Other ad banner networks will be completely different of course.)

From the “view” menu click on Wordwrap

That’s it! There is no step 2!

While it’s true there are things you can do to make sure your site is more easily indexed, the truth about SEO is really quite simple.

Create great content.

Just type, baby. Or record. However you want to create content, just do it and the SEO will come.

That’s it.

Search engines will love it, as will visitors.

The problem is that most companies don’t have the time or knowledge to be able to create great content. On the flip side, SEO companies don’t know about your company so how can they create solid content for you?

It’s a different era, one in which consumers expect companies to be more human, more real. You must find your voice and communicate it clearly, whether it’s on your site’s blog, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or in any other format or on any website.

Tell your story, create compelling content and the SEO will mostly take care of itself. Sure, there’s a little more to it than that (mostly in backlinks) but it’ll get you off to a great start!

It’s the word…. “blog”. It sounds horrible and has all of these negative connotations. It’s a contraction of “weblog” but it doesn’t really mean that anymore.

A blog is COMPLETELY different than a weblog (Well, it can be). That is, a weblog is a subset of a blog, but a blog can be about any topic under the sun.

A blog can also be professional. Big companies are blogging now, and having great success with them. Of course that success isn’t measured directly in dollars in cents. That’s why it’s sometimes hard for the mucky mucks to justify the ROI on things like blogging and social marketing.

But if you think about it differently you can turn it all around. A blog is merely a way to manage content, a content management system. If the word blog was instead “webCMS” or something more professional-sounding, we might not have such a problem with it.

Well, actually we probably still would have problems getting companies to do it. Firms would still have to yell and scream and drag them towards doing what’s best for their own business.

But how can we flip it around and make it a nicer sell to these companies? They should be doing it, we know it’s the best thing they can do, but how can we convince them without them parroting “no ROI, no ROI” back at us?

Well, we can tell them that blogging is merely the act of putting content on the Web. People these days expect companies to put content out there. Those that don’t will be left in the dust of the Internet age.

A blog can be engaging. It’s not the days of a single, static web page as your “About Us” link. It’s a whole blog of the CEO telling what his company is about. It’s everyone company-wide pitching in and telling their part of the story. Part of it is making your business human and not just being some headless, vague entity floating in the ether. People need to relate to you and blogging helps that.

A blog can make a site un-dead. Not undead as in a zombie, but actually alive, continually updated. This makes it something that people will actually come back to visit every once in a while.

Perhaps the biggest selling point is the SEO goodness a blog can bring. Google has repeatedly said that they want to give good rankings to sites with fresh, relevant content for specific keywords.

Now, Google isn’t perfect, not even close, but as it stands now a blog with good content that is updated daily will do pretty well, pretty quickly in Google. And if you really target certain niches of keywords, you can kick ass. Plus, Google’s algorithm will get better and better at determining which sites suck (i.e. which are old and stodgy and don’t have a blog and/or which ones are spammy/black hat SEO’d) and which ones legitimately rock it.

Good luck convincing your company or clients to blog. If you accomplish it, I’d love to hear different takes on how you did it.

The best, awesomest, totally legit Star Wars: The Old Republic strategy guide. I kid you not. (Click the image)

There’s also an affiliate program for it which is kind of interesting. More on this in a future post that will explain this update to those interested in the SEO aspects of the SWTOR strategy guide.

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As a huge Star Wars fan I’m pretty excited about the official release of SWTOR, or Star Wars the Old Republic. I think it’ll be a great game and overtake WoW in a short amount of time. How does this relate to SEO? Well I was searching for the best class to play and what the differences were when I stumbled across a site that turns out to be a great case study in SEO.

My exact search terms were “swtor class videos”. I dug deep, to about the 20th result where I saw this:

For whatever reason, I visited it and knew what I was dealing with immediately: The classic spam/affiliate site: http://www.swtorstrategyguide.net/ Let’s dig in to what they’re doing and how they’re doing well. Here’s what it looks like:

Click to enlarge

On the main page they have a lot of great keyword rich SWTOR-related content. In the right sidebar they have tons of links to popular SWTOR categories or things that they think would be common search terms, I.E. “SWTOR Strategy Guide”, “SWTOR Datacron Locations”, “SWTOR Flashpoints”. Each one of those pages has some good content – mind you, not necessarily informative text for the user. That is, it’s very basic. Someone might read through this site for a while but likely won’t find what they’re looking for.

The whole goal is just to get traffic there. The content is for search engines, not humans. Then they refer people to another site for what they’re selling – their SWTOR Mastery Guide.

If we pull up the site in Open Site Explorer we see they have a Page authority of 45 and a Domain Authority of 35. They also have a lot of backlinks: 56 linking root domains and 123 total links. That’s pretty good, and a large part of why they rank well.

Looking at some of the backlinking sites, we see ioonos.com. This is almost certainly spun article text. That is – they took one piece of content and, using article spinning, created dozens, perhaps hundreds of version of the same article. Then they posted it to various sites, all linking back to their main site.

Here’s another one of their sites: http://imwithdorothy.info/ As you can see, they have tons of topics about everything under the sun, all linking to some kind of affiliate marketing site. By looking at how oddly the text reads, we know the text was spun with some words replaced with synonyms that sometimes don’t fit quite perfectly. Here’s a snippet:

My View

I used to think this sort of thing was sick. Who would do such a thing? I equated them with the lowest of the low – spammers were villians, criminals almost in my book.

But upon further review, yes, they’re gaming the system. But it’s the system that sucks, not necessarily the spammers. How does Google let these guys get away with it? Surely there are ways to tell crap content and content farms from real sites, right? Apparently not. Or perhaps the search engines choose to look the other way (i.e. it’s about money?)

If these spammers/affiliate marketers can do it and make money, we can certainly gain from these tactics as well. I’m not saying go all out black hat SEO, but perhaps we can sprinkle in some grey hat linkbuilding.

Agree/disagree? How can we do linkbuilding better than this?

Good luck in all your SEO endeavors!

Well if you look at them, they’re not really set up for SEO really well. They don’t have a lot of great keyword-rich text and aren’t built that well.

“So how do they rank?”, I wondered. I picked one dealer site at random and looked at their backlinks using Open Site Explorer. They had a lot of good backlinks but one in particular caught my eye. It was dodgepedia.org (http://www.dodgepedia.org/ – Not linking to them in order to not give them any more backlinks. Not like my little site matters much, but still.)

It you take a look at Dodgepedia, you’ll see a lot of interesting things. It looks like a spam site but it actually has (what appears to be) quality unique content.

(Click to embiggen.)

They also have a “Dealers” link which is just a directory of Dodge dealers. If you visit the dealers linked from this page, guess what? They’re ALL Dealer.com sites.

Then check out the other link at the top: Automopedia.org (http://www.automopedia.org/). The have a “Find a Dealer” link with a directory of dealers throughout the US. The only dealers with working links on this directory are, that’s right, Dealer.com sites.

It gets better though! In the top right is a list of brands:

Each one of these links to another directory site, for instance Acurapedia, Chevroletpedia, Lexuspedia, etc. Each one of these sites has it’s own content and links back to Dealer.com’s multitude of sites.

What This Means

It’s no wonder that Dealer.com sites can outrank almost any other auto dealer site. The resources they put towards this is astounding, at least for the amount of content they need to produce. But really for the payoff of having hundreds of car dealers rank high, it’s probably WELL worth it.

It’s also an indictment of Google/Bing and their algorithms. If someone can game the system like this and get away with it, beating out the “good guys” or white hat SEOs in the process, then why should we all continue to play by the rules?

I’m not saying what they’re doing is bad, just that it sucks that anyone who wants to compete with them will have to also resort to these sorts of linkbuilding tactics. It’s an argument for content farms, spam directory sites and grey hat linkbuilding.

Again, not a bad thing, but this reinforced my decision to jump into grey hat linkbuilding and I have no qualms about it whatsoever.

The answer to this last question is yes, you can do it yourself, but sometimes hiring an expert is the way to go. It’s up to you and how much you want to learn.

What are the ingredients to a solid SEO campaign?

1. Site Structure

To start, your site should be built in a search engine friendly manner. This means with valid XHTML code, semantically correct, with a Google sitemap, and so on. All the technical stuff should be correct first and foremost. If you have a site built with tables from the late 90s, it’ll be much harder for crawlers to “digest” the information on your site and figure out what’s all there. Your website designer/developer should’ve done this if the site was built in the last, say, 5 years or so. This is something you may well need to delegate if it’s not done already.

2. Content

Secondly, you need great quality content. What do you offer? What problems do you solve for people? Your site shouldn’t be just an internet billboard that says, “Call us, we’re the best!” No – you should seize the opportunity to actually talk to people. Write about the problems your customers have had and how your product helped them. Write about the good, the bad AND the ugly of your industry. Prove to people that you are the expert at what you do. These days people don’t expect perfection from you, but they do expect honesty. And what your goal should be is for your site to the the ultimate repository of information on what you do, on your industry. Whether it’s a blog, twitter, a series of articles, PDFs – it doesn’t really matter what the format is, just get it out there.

This is a really important concept so I’ll stress it: YOU are the expert in your field. So prove it.

3. Backlinks

Third is quality backlinks. That is, incoming links to your site from other sites. You can get them in many ways. One is over time by creating excellent content and naturally having people link to you. This is great and how Google envisions the world working – but if you rely only on this, you’re at a pretty big disadvantage.

The ethics of linkbuilding will be saved for another article, but suffice to say that there are ways SEOs can create inbound links to your site with certain keywords targeted. Having a bunch of links to your site is like having individual “votes” for it, or rather those sites are vouching for it. The bigger and better the linking site, the more value the link has. There are companies that only do this one aspect of SEO – and some can be really pricy.

So that’s the basics of SEO: Site structure, Content and Backlinks. You typically  need all three to do well these days.

In the paid results what do I see but this:

You get it, right? Chevrolet is targeting possible Dodge Challenger purchasers and redirecting them to their own Chevy Camaro landing page. Simple, brilliant and probably pretty effective.

It might pay to think outside the box a bit in your PPC campaigns. It’s a war out there and any way you can steal the other guy’s possible customers, you should go for it. (Well, assuming you’re not breaking any laws or being unethical of course.)

Ain't she a beaut? And no, I wasn't convinced to buy a Camaro instead, even though it looks cool too.

We should all use tactics laid out in Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War”: use every possible advantage you can get, attack the enemy where he lives, damage his supply lines, disguise your tactics, and as in this case, use a little bit of deceit to steal his resources.

It must have been several days later when I was checking out another site about TV tropes when I saw the very same face in an ad.It was very familiar to me, although I couldn’t immediately place it.

A Retargeter ad in the wild with Neil Patel's smiling face.

I clicked the link to learn why it was familiar to me. I was taken back to Neil’s blog and then it hit me…

This was the blog I visited a while back, and the ad was being served up to me specifically because I had visited the site.

The ad is done via Retargeter , and they say get much higher conversion rates than other ads. It makes complete sense too: you’ve already seen the site or something in the ad and it had some sort of relevance to you. The Retargeter ad merely reminds you of it.

Some people (like me) are going to love this because of the simple brilliance of the service. Others may not even know what’s going on but may click the Retargeter ad because it’s familar and/or relevant to them.

This is a sweet advertising service.