Are there ways that you can help your SEO company improve your results? ABSOLUTELY!

In this post, I’ll help you assess which of the 3 types of SEO Clients you are (from an involvement perspective only), and why it matters to you in terms of results and ROI.

The Impetus:
I recently wrote a post titled “I Jeff Quipp Am Not An SEO … I’m An Authority Builder“. The premise of this post was that as SEOs, we should strive to build strong client profiles online, and to make clients recognized authorities in their respective spaces.

Since the Holiday’s I’ve become a StumbleUpon addict. I spend most of my free social media time discovering new sites, looking at my friends great finds and meeting new people with similar interests. Inspired by my colleague Dev Basu’s ‘The Ballad of Social Media post and with apologies to Culture Club, here’s my very very very late entry in the SEP Lyrics contest. You may want to scroll down, start the video and sing along….

I’ll stumble for ya

Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down
What’s that next hot one to be found?
Digg’s Done
Mixx’s got no one
What’s Spostareduro Discoverin’?

Social Media head out for lunch….

source: myextralife.com

I’m not going to waste too many words on this. Fist and foremost because it’s almost weekend and you have better things to do, right?

I’m against the moaning and groaning regarding Google’s 404 "hijacking". And if yesterday you weren’t bashing it up because Firefox or Internet Explorer "hijack" 404 pages, then neither should you.

Internet Explorer, Firefox — they don’t show 404 error pages under 512 bytes. You know what they do instead? They replace them ("hijack" them) with their own error pages. Erm… like what Google’s new toolbar plans to do.

Like most SEO’s, I’m a huge fan of Firefox and all the versatility it offers as a browser, and a tool for optimizating my optimization experience . With thousands of extensions available to augment your browsing experience, I thought it’d be great to create a resource for the top 10 firefox extension’s for SEO’s that you didn’t know about!

1. User Agent Switcher - Adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.
2. LiveHTTPHeaders - View HTTP Headers on the fly. Extremely helpful for debugging web applications.

Under the auspices of a little levity going a long way… I was particularly amused to see the strength of the Canadian dollar reflected in the Google keyword estimate tool today.

Have a good one.

~The (SEP) Guy

How do you define authority as it relates to search?

The whole concept seems very generic and loosely defined at the moment. In this, the second post in the series (the first published last week I Jeff Quipp am not an SEO! I’m an Authority Builder), we’ll explore the definition of an authority, and various possible strategies to either become, or help a client become, an authority.

What is Authority?
An authority is someone or some entity who’s opinion(s) about specific topics are respected and valued by industry peers. This definition is both interesting and important because it can guide much of our decision making going forward. Case in point, it suggests why we blog in many cases, and for whom we blog.

(title inspired by Kevin Heisler)

The feds seem pretty hesitant to say th “R” word.

But between the sub prime crisis, the credit crunch and plummeting stock markets; you and I both know that it’s not a question of “if” a recession going to hit the US but “when?”

Recession is something that the search industry rarely talk about . . . most of us are currently experiencing a period of tremendous boom.

Our biggest constraint to growth is not finding new clients, it’s finding and training new SEO’s. Where optimizing a site might have cost $350 in the 90’s, now we see SEO’s charge $350 per hour, some even more.

After the first post, the first CAPTCHA.

For the visually impaired: a cartoon shows two cavemen. One holds a club as if it’s a microphone, looks up at a cave drawing and says to the other cave man "Just to make sure you’re not a bot: please read this".

Byline: History of Web 2.0 - Part 14. January 31st 9356 BC: the first captcha in history.

Credit: Geek and Poke

If you’re a certified geek ( not a nerd ) , its quite likely that you’ve grown up with epic classics such as the Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien. After going on a 9 hour Lord of the Rings triology marathon, I was wondering what the how Frodo, Gandalf, Gimli and Sam would do SEO in the land of Google.

Sméagol the Spammer - Smigol the spammer type’s can often be found lurking on the Digital Point forums, offering spammy services to unwary customers in search of search optimization services.