Aug 17

Develop your SEO Strategy

By davgo SEO No Comments »

How would you like to have a Internet marketing system that is easy for you to do and effective at generating business leads or sales? Shifting your SEO thinking from tactical to strategic can produce incredible results.

Tactical SEO activities are those that have no business process behind them—you just do them. Take, for example, link building. A tactical approach would be to submit articles, do guest blog posts, directly request links, submit to directories, etc. These are all effective ways to build links but have the scalability constraints of time and talent.

It does not matter whether you are doing the work or a hired gun SEO is doing it; if it’s not linked to one of your business processes, it’s an inefficient use of resources and will always fall second to the business that does these very same things on a strategic level.

Strategic SEO takes more upfront thought but is ultimately easier and more effective, and provides the best ROI. The concept is simple, use existing business processes to generate content people will want to link to or talk about. The execution may require some creative thinking depending on your type of business and the strength of the competition. You can learn more by reading the SEO Strategy article I wrote on this subject

Companies that are successful at it can dominate their space.

Want to see the transition from tactical to strategic? As of the date of this post, this blog is a good example of using a tactical approach. I might be able to achieve a high search ranking over time for say, Jacksonville SEO, but it would be a tenuous grip subject to competitors who leverage a strategy to knock me off. Taking my own advice, BeContinuous is soon to shift to a strategic SEO model that will automatically generate backlinks, provide great content, and be part of a business process.

Aug 06

Domain Authority

By davgo SEO 3 Comments »

Link building is a key element to the success of any website.  Backlinks from sites with a high domain authority are more valuable. Domain Authority also influences how often and how deep the engines will crawl a site.

What is Domain Authority?

It is the search engines’ measure of a domain’s importance. Conceptually, it is similar to Page Rank, which gauges the importance of a single web page. Domain Authority is why one link from the New York Times can be more valuable than 10 links from lesser websites.

In an interview a few years ago Google CEO Eric Schmidt mentioned that (paraphrased here) brands were a way to clean up the “Internet cesspool.”  Brand strength can be assigned a certain weight in determining the importance–the clout–of a domain and used as a factor in search ranking. The idea is that it takes much work and time to build a well-known brand; it’s not something that is easily done to fool the engines for a better ranking. Bing also notes the importance of links from authority sites in their guidelines.

Measuring Domain Authority

The easy way to measure  authority is to tap into a third-party’s estimation of it. SEOmoz offers a free toolbar that displays it, as calculated by their in-house algorithm on a scale of 1 to 100.

Here is the the domain authority of the SiteBeSeen Web Directory as portrayed in the SEOmoz toolbar for Firefox. It is the blue meter indicating DA 51. (The Page Rank is on the SEOBook toolbar above and to the left.)

Increasing Domain Authority

A strong domain authority is built with time and with links from other strong domains.  If you go about brand building with marketing that includes press releases, articles in established publications, making the news, etc., then your domain authority will increase naturally as links to your site from these power-sources accumulate.

If you are not making the news on a regular basis then a more proactive approach is required. Article marketing is perhaps the easiest way to start improving your authority. Sites such as EzineArticles and Squidoo have very strong domain authority. Placing an informative article with them, with a link to your site, will help build your domain authority because the engines trust these sites.

Another form of article marketing is to guest post on a well known blog that permits links out that are free of the nofollow attribute.

Other methods include link bait, viral marketing, and social media but these are relative more difficult to pull together than an article.

If you know of other resources that can be used to measure and increase domain authority please add them in the comments section. (Comments with links are moderated. If they don’t contribute to the topic they will not appear.)

Jan 21

DropBox vs Live Mesh

By davgo Technology 3 Comments »

DropBox and Live Mesh are tools that backup-synchronize between desktop and the cloud. I prefer Live Mesh because it’s free, I can live within its storage allotment, and it lets me right-click on a folder and add to the synch.

The table below summarizes the results of the things that matter to me; your criteria might differ.

Feature Live Mesh Drop Box
Automatic sync Yes Yes
Free storage 5GB 2GB
Encrypted sessions and transfers Yes Yes
Smartphone access Web app iPhone app
File/folder-level sync settings Yes No
Remote desktop access Yes No
Change history Yes Yes

Both services automatically sync all added devices. DropBox provides 2GB of free storage before charging $9.99/mo for more GBs; Live Mesh provides 5GB free. However, DropBox is the core business of DropBox, Inc. whereas Live Mesh seems to be just a hobby for Microsoft amidst their numerous other lines.

DropBox has a free iPhone app that enables you to access and view your files and Live Mesh has a mobile site where you do that.

One feature of Mesh that I really like is the ability to right click on a folder or file and mark it for synchronization. Mesh then creates the file in your online account and uploads the files. With DoprBox you must place folders/files to be synced into the MyDropdox folder located in My Documents on your PC.  The difference is that with Live Mesh you can keep working right from your existing file structure without having to move things around.

Mesh has a feature that enables remote desktop access, which I suppose could be useful for a system administrator. This is not a big draw for me though.

Both services keep you apprised of changes made to files. I like how Mesh does this with a “news” pop-up that appears when you place the mouse cursor over the tray icon. With DropBox you right click on the tray icon then mouse over recently changed files to see the list. Both also list changed files on your web portal.

All things considered, I think Live Mesh has the advantage over DropBox in form and function–and even over Google Docs, which we use. Now that Google permits any type of file to be uploaded to Google Docs it would make sense for them to provide a desktop sync tool too.

You could also use Live Mesh as a free alternative to online backup services such as Carbonite if the 5GB storage limitation is adequate.

The buzz around Live Mesh has dried up and there hasn’t been new blog post on the Mesh developer’s blog site since October 2009. Hopefully Microsoft will come back to it and and promote it more. If Google comes out with a sync tool anytime soon MS will have squandered an opportunity.

Aug 30

The Look & Sound of Leadership

By davgo Business Comments Off

If you are interested in improving your look and sound of leadership, I highly recommend the free podcast series of the same name by executive coach Tom Henschel. Each 5-10 minute podcast provides strategies and tactics about a specific leadership communications topic with the goal of helping you polish your executive presentation. You can read them or hear them on his website or you can download them for free via iTunes.

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