Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Its time to get things done (and get to the front of the line)

Posted: 20 Feb 2014 11:57 AM PST

I have been waiting for this day for quite some time. I have been using a mobile app called Acompli.

I was approached a while back from a good friend of mine named Kevin Henrikson about being an initial alpha/beta tester for this app but it was under very very tight confidentiality.

Kevin was one of the key members of Zimbra, an enterprise email company that sold to Yahoo for $350M. He was also an attendee of Elite Retreat #1 and has been to 5 ER events.

Anyway this application is awesome. Its been an absolute game changer for me and my team. Since we started using it we have become so much more productive its insane.

Before I started using this application I had 5 places I stored files… where do we find contacts… who’s calendar has what on it… who’s doing what.

Literally I would have a important call but needed to find materials and I’m scrambling at the last minute asking my team where the files are… I am checking dropbox, google docs, skype messages, only to find it was sent to me by an email attachment… fun fun..

Acompli has truly been a magic bullet in solving these issues.

Lets get right to the point. Acompli is FINALLY launching public beta but its very limited.

However because of my relationship with the company, if you sign up through this link, they have given me 1000 guaranteed in’s.

But here is the best part.. If you get in on this beta the application is free for life!

Just incase your wondering I have not been compensated to write this post in anyway. Also I get nothing if you sign up through that link. Its simply so they can track your id to ensure you get in.

Ok here is more about Acompli:

And some high res screenshots:

Jump on this as it will fill up fast and could be many months before its open to the general public.

Make sure you sign up through this link

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Looking for an SEO service that won’t get you banned?

What The KGB Can Teach You About Advanced SEO Strategies

Posted: 20 Feb 2014 07:04 AM PST

“Quick, Hide. The KGB is Coming.” This terrifying phrase was often uttered throughout Mother Russia during the KGB’s reign of terror. They struck fear in every single citizen with one simple and brilliant tactic. They convinced millions of people that they were constantly watching their every move, (which was a complete impossibility considering how greatly outnumbered they were.) What was their secret? How did they strike fear into the hearts and minds of every citizen?

They randomly arrested random people for random reasons.

People like to believe there is a rhyme and reason to everything. It helps them feel in control when they feel there is order amidst the chaos.

It was a cold and dark day in mid December of the year 2013 when a similar doctrine was revealed. Matt Cutts, Google’s Fearless Leader in the daunting fight against Webspam made the following confession,”If you really want to stop spam, it is a little bit mean, but what you want to do, is sort of break their spirits. There are lots of Google algorithms specifically designed to frustrate spammers. Some of the things we do is give people a hint their site will drop and then a week or two later, their site actually does drop. So they get a little bit more frustrated. So hopefully, and we've seen this happen, people step away from the dark side and say, you know what, that was so much pain and anguish and frustration, let's just stay on the high road from now on.”

Google deliberately creates an environment of chaos in their search results with the goal of scaring you into submission.

How do you convince millions of webmasters that you are all powerful, watching every single thing every single website is doing? You strike down random websites, in random verticals for random reasons, hoping to scare them into submission.

It worked for the KGB and It’s working for Google.

Do you have a better explanation for why that spammy site is crushing you and your legit white hat site?

Can you explain why when I compare my website traffic against every algorithm update (ask me about my awesome tool for this.) about half the panda updates helped my clients rankings and half hurt them, half the penguin updates dropped their organic traffic and half improved them.

I thought these algorithms got better and better, so why is its impact good half the time and bad half the time?

One explanation is that while these algorithm updates only improve 1% of real results, they create chaotic fluctuations in a random set of other sites ( i.e. your site), and Google views it as net win. Sure, a few bad websites improve and a few good websites get dropped, but over all fewer webmasters resort to spam.

So, how do you emerge from the chaos and actually achieve sustainable seo results?

First, here’s the prepared response from my PR team

Create Killer Content! Now that we got that out of the way…

Seriously though, Creating great content isn’t the first step. That’s sound advice, but want to know what’s really killing your rankings?

You’re Doing Google’s Dirty Work For Them!

So, the real first step is to stop shooting yourself in the foot.

Yes, you heard me correctly, despite all of Google’s best efforts to strike fear into your strategy, and despite that fear driving you to complete submission, you are still probably killing your own rankings and preventing yourself for achieving the rankings you deserve.

Good News: Fixing these problems is not only easy, but it will cut the time it takes for your SEO to work exponentially.

Creating great content takes months or years to achieve meaningful results and rankings.

Fixing technical SEO problems and leveraging your existing ranking potential can net results almost immediately.

How quickly can these SEO strategies work? As soon as Google re-crawl your site. How soon will they crawl your site, well, you can get them to index you in a matter of hours if you really want. (Hint: Share it on Google+)

Want some examples? A few years ago craigslist accidentally told Google to delete their listings from the index. Basically, they didn’t follow Google’s technical guidelines for letting them know when a listing is stale, and by making a simple change to their site, they screwed their rankings.

Want Another Technical SEO example? Let’s start with spreading your credibility too thin. Two birds in the hand might be better than one in the bush, but two pages on your website competing for the same keyword is not as good as one webpage ranking much higher for that same keyword. (want to test this? I’ll show you how to track it in a minute.)

Want to know if your site is competing with itself? Here’s my secret tool…Google. That’s right, for all the fancy tools and SEO platforms out there, using Google is the first step in my am-I-shooting-myself-in-the-foot analysis.

The first thing I check is if there are canonical issues, which basically means two pages on my site, with the same exact content both showing up in search results. The most common occurrence of this problem is having both the www and the non-www versions both showing up in Google SERPs. Here’s how to check if you have this problem. Search on Google for site:yourwebsite.com . This will surface all the pages on your site that are in Google’s index. Check to see if you are showing two different versions of URL’s for your pages. If you are only seeing the www version, now search for site:yourwebsite.com -inurl:www which will return all the results of my website that show URL’s without the www. If you are only showing the non www version, just remove the minus sign from the query above and search site:yourwebsite.com inurl:www you can also search site:www.yourwebsite.com etc… Using search operators in Google will help you surface problems really quickly.

If you find that two versions of your site are competing with each other, you probably have backlinks pointing to both versions, and by consolidating them you will get the full power of your backlinks.

How do you fix this?

Simply choose your preferred domain version. It doesn’t matter if you choose the www or non www version, but I would probably go with the version that has the most pages indexed, or the most backlinks. You can check the backlinks of both versions on opensiteexplorer.com and you can see how many pages from each version are indexed by running the query site:yourwebsite.com inurl:www and site:yourdomain.com -inurl:www or some variation of those queries and see how many results Google returns. Once you choose your preferred version, go ahead and 301 redirect every individual page to their counterpart on the preferred version. I have a client who had this issue, and fixing it gave him a 15% bump in organic traffic within a couple of weeks.

The next thing you want to check is if you have any pages competing for the same keyword. I have pages on my site that pull in an 81% Click Through Rate (albeit not on a ton of traffic) by sitting in position 1.
high ctr serp

If you have two pages on your website ranking for the same keyword, say one in position 4 and one in position 7, if you redirect the position 7 page to the position 4 page, you can probably get a nice bump up to position 1 or 2. If position 1.2 could drive an 81% CTR for me, I bet it could drive similar click throughs for others as well.

I asked Kalman Labovits and Eli Feldblum, two incredible SEO consultants at RankAbove who built my favorite SEO platform (which I personally love and use) for their recommendations on SEO changes that they’ve seen deliver quick results in Google. They replied, and I quote…

"This will be the most controversial recommendation any SEO could make to a company. Even with Panda being 2 years old, companies are not willing to trade in the old way of building websites for a new way. What is the new way? Not segmenting information into bit size chunks. Example, most medical websites will built a section of the site for diseases. Each disease will have 5 or 6 different topics covering, what is disease, treatments, side effects, operations, etc. Historically each topic would be a page by itself. Today, it could be more advantages to actually have all that content on one page. This new page will be a very heavy content page (Um… for SEO that is usually a good thing) but usability might be an issue, but today there are multiple ways to handle this issue."

Not sure if this will work for you. Here’s how to test it.

Choose one topic on your site, look at the historical traffic to those pages. Now, add all that content to one topic page, and 301 those individual pages to the main page and see whether you get more total traffic or less.

My bet is you will get more traffic. After all, the amount of traffic you can get from one high position is exponentially greater than two lower positions.

Now, here are a few other things you can do to identify and fix issues quickly.

1. Check in Webmaster Tools to see if there are any crawl errors, for example 404 pages. It is a crying shame to have pages ranking in search results that no longer exist. This will also send the message to Google that your site isn’t reliable. 301 redirect that page if possible. It would only be in the index if it’s linked to from somewhere, capture that linkjuice. In fact, there is a whole industry around building broken links, which is basically finding pages with links to dead pages and asking the webmaster to point those links to your similar resource.

2. Check your Webmaster Tools search query report to find keywords that are ranking on page two. Simply optimizing them a bit should give you a nice bump in impression share.

3. Crawl your site with Screaming Frog or an SEO platform, and quickly check if your title tags could use improvements. I still see massive ranking improvements from rewriting title tags. The first thing to check is if its too long and getting truncated. Also check if your meta descriptions are too long.

4. If you are already ranking, but not getting a high Click Through Rate, you can work on your snippet. For example, you can add the keywords you rank for in your meta description, so it will show up in bold. Look for yourself at your page in search results and see how you can make it stand out on the page. One page on my site ranks near the top for keywords around how long SEO takes, and gets a 81% CTR because it dominates the appearance of that SERP.
It’s near impossible not to click on this page when you search for a keyword like “how long does seo take to work”
How Long Does SEO Take image

Once you are ranking, just playing with your meta description alone could give you nice bump in your click through rate.

Having a 100% optimized site is nearly impossible, especially if you have a very large website. This means that no matter what your web developer said, there is probably room for improvement. Any SEO consultant worth his weight in salt should be able to surface some of these technical issues right away and fix them.

Once you stop shooting yourself in the foot, you can start worrying about other advanced SEO strategies to get real fine tune your organic traffic strategy, and once you have all your ducks in a row, you can worry about creating excellent content consistently!

If you want to start creating content immediately, you should watch this Kevin Spacey video on my blog where he talks about what people really want (Hint: They Want Stories!)

(Afterthought: I hope Dan Kennedy was wrong when he said giving free advice is futile.)

Want to see these strategies in action?

Join Me for a Live Webinar next Monday and I will show you step by step exactly how I Achieve Quick SEO Results and Show you how you could stop shooting your rankings in the foot. Register Here.

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