Online Marketing | Web Training Wheels

My Three Favorite Backlink Research Tools for SEO

One of the most important factors in off-site Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is backlinks. A backlink is simply a link from another website, to your website. Search engines see links as “votes”, so the more links, and quality, relevant links at that – you have pointing to your site, the better. All else being equal, if you can get better backlinks than your competitors, you can outrank them. Given its importance to SEO, it’s frustrating that there isn’t one solidly reliable (free) tool with which to do backlink research. Backlink research can help you :

Find out what your website’s link profile is looking like, and what progress you’ve made
Do some competitive analysis in your niche – how well are competitors’ sites performing
Assess how much better you have to do in order to outrank your competitors.
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Handy Web Design Resources For The Non-Designer

Online Marketing

I consider myself creatively impaired when it comes to visual design. I know generally what I like and what I think works, but I’m not good at actually creating it from scratch. I leave that type of stuff to the pros and absolutely think that just because you can use Photoshop, or make a website, that does NOT qualify you as a designer!

But once in a while, I need to sort of cheat and pull off some design-y type things and I have found several online tools that help me do this in a competent way. Plus, most of these tools are just super-fun to play with!

Web-based Color Palette Tools

Need to pick a font color for a website that will match the overall look and feel? Or maybe you need to introduce an additional color that will match. These handy tools will let you upload a logo or any image and generate a color palette of complementary colors.
Color Palette Generator
This is very simple to use – just paste in the url of a logo or image and it will generate some colors.
Adobe’s “Kuler”
tool does a few more things. It has some preset color schemes which can be useful if you’re starting from scratch, or you can create your own based on a color you select, or an image. It also presents versions of the color schemes based on mood or other criteria.

Planning Your Website Effectively- WordPress Is A Tool Not A Strategy

Online Marketing, WordPress

One of the reasons why WordPress is so awesome is because it makes building powerful websites pretty easy. Pick a theme, add some content, hit Publish and there you have it. Lack of technical know-how is no longer a barrier, and the array of shiny, sexy themes that are available along with the inexpensivenss of it all can make it dangerously easy to under-think the process of building a website. But while WordPress and its eco-system have made many parts of the process simple and taken the grunt work out of making a site, the one thing that YOU still have to do, is the analytical thinking and planning behind your site.

For your site to be an effective business tool, it must reflect the core goals and missions of your company. Whereas many of us start the planning of a site by looking at the available WordPress themes and letting those designs sway our decisions, we really need to be starting from a more strategic point of view and making decisions about themes, plugins etc, based on the bigger picture.

So before you put pixel to screen, or start buying themes, consider the following.

Treat Your Blog Like A Business – Slides From San Diego WordCamp

Online Marketing

Below are the slides from my San Diego WordCamp talk on “Treat Your Blog Like A Business”. I discussed a few common monetization strategies, and the ins n’s outs of each. My overall premise is that in most cases, monetization doesn’t just happen to you, you have to be prepared and have a strategy that will help you take advantage of opportunities that may arise. The more value you build with your blog, even before thinking of monetization, the better prepared you will be. Don’t wait until you actually want to make money before building an email list or developing your social networking efforts.

How To Tell Google That You’re A Great Content Author

Online Marketing, SEO

In its continuing effort to keep low quality content out of its search results, Google announced this week that it would be supporting “authorship markup”. Authorship markup is essentially a couple of specific pieces of code you can add to links that would designate you as the author of that content.

Google describes it as:

a way to connect authors with their content on the web. We are experimenting with using this data to help people find content from great authors in our search results.

Get More Clients & Sell More Products with Effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Online Marketing, SEO

It’s true that there can be many confusing intricacies to the science of Search Engine Optimization, but what’s also true is that most people get tripped up on the basics, before they even get to the complex stuff! In working with many entrepreneurial and small business clients, I’ve come to see a few common trends in the way that people look at SEO and why they are often not getting the results they want. Improvement typically begins with some fundamental shifts in the way you think about the process.

1) Forget Sex, Specificity Sells!
Lack of clarity about your business offerings and target market will lead to lack of clarity in your search marketing efforts and you will either attract clients that aren’t a good fit, or you will have trouble converting your web traffic. Your search engine strategy should be based on a clear picture of who your ideal client is and exactly what you can do for them. Then make sure that you are effectively communicating that on your website.