Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
If you’ve used the internet in the last year, or read news items, you’re probably wondering what all this buzz is about social networking. Take Facebook – once a place for college students to meet and greet has now gone mainstream. Another site, LinkedIn, is a social platform for professionals that has redefined the word networking. Finally, the microblogging platform Twitter has many small businesses trying to figure out just what to do with it. So as a small business owner, why should you care? Here are some reasons your company should get involved: Read the rest of this entry »

Since 10 has ended, it’s time to set goals or “new years resolutions” for 2011. There are several things you must keep in mind when you’re setting your goals – these are to keep you from being too ambitious and thus unpractical. Nothing grates on you more like unfulfilled goals. I’ve compiled a list of tips to keep in mind, when you are discovering and then accomplishing your goals.

1. Be Reasonable
Every heard the phrase shoot for the moon? Well don’t. Like I said earlier, when you set goals, and don’t do them, it can make blogging incredibly depressing. Set goals that are possible to obtain, that way you won’t get frustrated if you can’t. And every time you can check off a goal, it’s such a great feeling. Read the rest of this entry »

Some of you have been here before – some of you haven’t. But I want to let you all know that MastersofSEO is now under new leadership. John did a great job, and left us with a lot of great connections and awesome content. But something was missing that was hindering this blog from really hitting the big time, and hopefully we can provide it.

In January of 2009, you may have read the goals that the previous owner had for MastersofSEO for last year. Here it is one year later. How did it go you ask? Let’s review. Read the rest of this entry »

Good news! Google Analytics is reporting that your SEO efforts are working and the result is traffic and alot of it. The bad news is your websites bounce rate. Analytics measures your bounce rate by determining the number of users that visit a landing page and don’t click any other links. The truth is you may have masterful SEO and fantastic content, but if users are not engaging your site your wasting your time. According to Jacob Neilsen, web usability guru, most visitors don’t scroll below the fold, and you only have a few seconds to engage your visitor. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Use Keyword Rich Descriptive Title Tags

Title tags are one of the most important factors on your website for optimizing for your niche keywords. Some guidelines for title tags are: Use your organizations name; use descriptive keywords such as “Northern Illinois SEO;” use 10-12 words per title tag; use a different title tag on each page based on what keywords on that page you are optimizing for. Don’t use comma separated words with spaces. Instead use pipes and spaces to separate keywords or phrases. A pipe looks like this | on your keyboard. It is the key above the return key. Read the rest of this entry »