Online Marketing and SEO Blogs

SEOMoz

This is one of the key SEO blogs out there and is particularly good for those new to SEO. It has covered pretty much everything you will need to know when starting out and also makes a great stopping off point as you become more SEO savvy.

Vertical Measures

Vertical Measures are experts at creating intelligent Internet marketing solutions. While not exclusively aimed at beginners, they are a great place to get an idea of what’s out there and how SEO can transform your business. Get used to using it now.

Jaffe Juice

A fun site that covers many of the topics below and is perfect for an overview of the world of online marketing. Nice use of video makes it great for the beginner.

Link Building Blogs

Ontolo

Superbly wide-ranging blog that has a huge amount of link-building material. It is one of the best places to get a round up of link building resources.

Marketing Pilgrim

While focused on marketing, this blog has frequent tips for making the most of links and is also a great place to get a view of the bigger marketing picture.

Better Blogging Blogs

ProBlogger

This is a great place to go when inspiration has run dry. Focusing on getting the most out of your blogging, the site is full of great tips and suggestions of where to explore more. Suitable for everyone from beginners to web veterans, it is also a fun site to use. Highly recommended.

ConverStations

A good example of the power of interactive blogging. Using photographs and videos to complement regular blog posts, the site is a really useful location for learning more about the blogging world and is full of very useful blogging tips. Great to browse over lunch.

We Blog Better

A lively blog focused on helping readers get the most out of their blogging experience. Updated daily, this is definitely worth having a look at whenever you have a spare moment. There is even an opportunity to ask questions, something that can prove really useful. One of the best blogging resources on the web, the site can also be used as a great example of what the best blogs should be like.

Content Marketing Blogs

Junta42

For anyone wanting to get the most out of content marketing or who just want to maximize their own website content, Junta42 is a wide-ranging site that covers many areas and has a really useful blog that is regularly updated. Definitely one to check every few days.

Web Ink Now

A great resource for getting an idea of what is going on in the world of content marketing. Perfect to give your business site an idea of the marketplace, it also has regular updates of other sites worth visiting. Makes content marketing fun and always makes for a great read.

Top Rank Blog

One of the key online marketing blogs that is particularly strong on content marketing. Regular updates make this a must visit at least once a week.

Your Favorites

These are just a small number of blogs you could and should follow to learn more about the industry, whichever expertise level you are. Tell us, what is your favorite industry related blog? Share with us in the comments below.

This guest post is by Steve Lazuka, owner of Interact Media, a website content marketing firm based in Ohio. Follow him on Twitter.

Wow…it’s been quite a long time since I’ve posted any new content here, and for that I apologize.

For the past couple months I’ve been working with the extremely talented team over at Vertical Measures, and I have to say that getting readjusted to actually going into an office wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Working from home for years was great, but it was definitely time for a change.

Anyway, we recently came up with an infographic, or “linkfographic” to be more precise, that illustrates the variety of links required for an effective link building campaign. The key to keeping your link profile looking natural and link building efforts under the radar is diversification, and our hope is that we’ve now created an easy way to visualize this important rule.

Oh, and did I mention that we also compare the different types of links to beer? Just as the beers of the world vary greatly in quality, so do links to your website.

Check out our SEO infographic for link data visualization to learn more about link types, how to obtain them, and how we score each on both quality as well as difficulty. And, as always, if you have any questions or comments please feel free to leave them below!

I knew this would be a challenge from a 301 redirect perspective, due to the fact that I decided to go with a completely different permalink structure AND have WordPress installed in its’ own directory instead of the web root like it was on the old site. So I figured I’d share my experiences…

If you need instructions on how to move your entire WordPress install to your new host/domain, check out the following pages depending on your situation:

Moving WordPress

Move Your WordPress Blog To A New Domain In 10 Steps

How To Move Your WordPress Blog to a New Domain

How To Move From WordPress.com To WordPress.org

The actual moving part was extremely easy, since I didn’t care about the theme, categories, tags, or any extra data from installed plugins remaining intact. In my particular case, I wanted to migrate all posts and comments ONLY, so that’s what I did.

The built-in WordPress import/export functionality didn’t work at all for some reason, so I had to find another way. The next best way to do it (if you’re comfortable working with the database) is below:

Moving Comments and Posts ONLY To A Fresh WordPress Install

1. Just to be sure everything goes according to plan and the table structures match, verify that both WordPress installs are the exact same version. Upgrade if not.
2. Log into the old WordPress MySQL database via phpMyAdmin (if you have forgotten or don’t know your login details, just open wp-config.php which is in the root folder of your blog…it contains all your db info), then select your database from the available options.
3. Export the posts table to a file (also called a sqldump), then save the text file.
4. Export the comments table to a file, then save the text file.
5. Now log into the new WordPress MySQL database, select the database, then drop the comments and posts tables.
6. Go to import and import each sqldump (text files) created from the old WordPress database.
7. That’s it!

Great, but you’re not done. You still need a way to permanently redirect all visitors, search engines, and inbound links to the new site without just redirecting everything to the home page.

If you’re keeping the same permalink and directory structure this is very easy, just add this to the .htaccess file on the old site:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^youroldsite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yournewsite.com/$1 [L,R=301]


NOTE: The ‘(*.)$’ says that we’ll take anything that comes after ‘http://www.youroldsite.com‘ or ‘http://youroldsite.com‘ and append it to the end of ‘http://www.yournewsite.com‘ (that’s the ‘$1′ part), and redirect to that URL.

Important Notes About .htaccess Redirection

• Verify that you’re not overwriting an old .htaccess file, sometimes servers place one there for your custom 404 pages, existing applications, etc.
• Always be sure to upload .htaccess files in ascii mode, uploading as binary won’t work.
• .htaccess will not work if you’re on a Windows Server (IIS).
• Since some operating systems don’t allow you to make a file without something before the ‘.’, you may need to save it as htaccess.txt and rename it once you’ve uploaded it.
• Make sure your ftp program will show .htaccess files (FileZilla does and is free).
• Make sure you triple check your changes. Test the server headers to make sure you see a 301 (that means it’s permanent) not a 302 (temporary) unless you are absolutely sure you really mean temporary.

Unfortunately this was not the case for me. Everything went very smoothly when it came to moving the site itself, but now I need to redirect all old page names to the new URL and permalink structure.

In the past, I had two options here. I could create a very lengthy .htaccess file containing entries that map all old pages to new ones, but this would take forever so that’s out. I could use regular expressions with mod_rewrite in .htaccess to create rules to handle the 301 redirects, but that would be time consuming/complicated as well. What to do?

Luckily there’s a WordPress plugin called Redirection to do this for you. Not only will it save you tons of time, it also automatically prevents headaches for you down the road. Once installed, I was able to create 301 redirects with regular expressions to take care of everything using a simple admin panel:

Let’s run through these quickly, shall we?

Redirections Sorted By Order

1. /page/(.*)/ => http://www.tidalwavemedia.com/blog/page/$1 – redirects all requests for paginated URLs to their corresponding paginated URL on the new site, for example ‘http://www.jasonhendricks.com/page/5/‘ to ‘http://www.tidalwavemedia.com/blog/page/5/‘
2. /(\d*)/(\d*)/ => http://www.tidalwavemedia.com/blog/$1/$2/ – redirects all requests for date-based URLs such as archives to their corresponding URL on the new site, for example ‘http://www.jasonhendricks.com/2006/06/‘ to ‘http://www.tidalwavemedia.com/blog/2006/06/‘
3. /(.*)/(.*)/ => http://www.tidalwavemedia.com/blog/$2.htm – redirects all requests for blog posts using the old permalink structure of /%category%/%postname%/ to their corresponding URL on the new site using the permalink structure of /%postname%.htm (notice the category is stripped from the URL), for example ‘http://www.jasonhendricks.com/seo-advice/how-not-to-be-seen-by-google/‘ to ‘http://www.tidalwavemedia.com/blog/how-not-to-be-seen-by-google.htm‘
4. /(.*)/ => http://www.tidalwavemedia.com/blog/$1 – redirects all requests for blog pages to their corresponding URL on the new site, for example ‘http://www.jasonhendricks.com/about/‘ to ‘http://www.tidalwavemedia.com/blog/about/‘
5. / => http://www.tidalwavemedia.com/blog/ – redirects all requests for the old parent domain name to the new parent domain, for example ‘http://www.jasonhendricks.com‘ to ‘http://www.tidalwavemedia.com/blog/‘

NOTE: Be sure to test using your old URLs in your browser and verify that the order of redirection is correct. Also note that ‘http://www.youroldsite.com/wp-admin/‘ will no longer work after you’ve configured Redirection as I have. To login to your old site to check redirection/error logs and view stats, use ‘http//www.youroldsite.com/wp-login.php‘.

For more on regular expressions, how to use them with Redirection, and to download the plugin, scroll through the plugin author’s page:

WordPress Redirection Plugin

Pretty cool, right (OK…maybe not cool, but you know what I mean)? As if that’s not enough, here are several more features of the Redirection plugin worth noting:

• 404 error monitoring – captures a log of 404 errors and allows you to easily map these to 301 redirects
• Full logs for all redirected URLs
• Automatically add a 301 redirection when a post’s URL changes
• Apache .htaccess is not required – works entirely inside WordPress
• Redirection methods – redirect based upon login status, redirect to random pages, redirect based upon the referrer!

If you find this plugin incredibly useful like I did, be sure to donate to the author and help support free software.

Related Post:

301 Redirect Example When Using Wildcard DNS For Subdomains

Here’s the skinny on how this hustle works from snopes.com:

“While prospective job seekers are told they need to pay a $2 charge for kits that supposedly contain the step-by-step instructions on how to begin working from home (often explained as Google’s way of sifting the serious from non-serious candidates), a closer examination of the Terms and Conditions associated with the program’s applicants are signing up for reveals they are instead authorizing monthly charges either to their bank accounts or credit cards, usually to the tune of about $80 a month. Those who attempt to cancel these charges find the task a difficult one, in that only rarely does anyone at the phone number supplied for that purpose actually come onto that line.”

Jeremy Schoemaker, aka Shoemoney, settled a lawsuit earlier this year with some d-bags using his trademarked name and even his copyrighted image holding a large AdSense check in an attempt to add credibility to their offers. Apparently a-holes just like the ones he dealt with have now moved on to much, much lesser known names like myself to take your hard earned money.

I received a few emails recently from people asking how easy it is to earn income from Google AdSense. I responded to these emails in detail, thinking that visitors were just looking for advice on generating additional income with the economy being so bad. I thought it was kinda strange that I had so many people asking me the same question when I’ve never made AdSense or site monetization the focus of any posts here beyond this quick observational one, but didn’t really think much of it.

Then today I received the following comment, tipping me off as to what was really going on:

Author: you suck
E-mail: Yourfuckinggay@aol.com
URL: http://www.Iscampeople.com

Comment:
jason hendricks aka scam artist. read over your privacy policy and terms and conditions for google home income. you should learn how to spell check, and maybe even how to phrase a sentence. When ripping people off I guess you would think that people might actually read that bullshit you spilled on those pages. Fake Fake Fake. get a life and a real job. My partners and I actually run an online business and know how hard it is to earn an income through and internet ran company. I personally put in over 50 hours plus each project, and anyone who thinks that working 10 hours a week will make them 5 to 7 thousand dollars a month is foolish. Don’t take advantage of honest people. scumbag.

Thanks for that…but I do have a life (somewhat), a real job (operating “and internet ran company”…lol), and I wasn’t aware that I was gay (their words, not mine; I’m not narrow-minded). I do own several affiliate sites, but I have never and will never promote anything that I feel is unethical. The softest pillow in the world is a clear conscience, and I sleep very well at night.

Now beyond the immature/homophobic parts of his comment, it’s obvious that the ads pissed this person off so much that they actually took the time to look me up and send me a message. How many people saw this, thought the same thing, but didn’t waste their time emailing me? I don’t know, but most likely quite a few.

I’m still hunting down the ads/websites using my name so if you find one, please snap a quick screenshot and contact me so I can take immediate legal action.

If interested, please use the contact form on this site and be sure to include your phone number.

UPDATE: this project is completed, thanks to all who emailed.

The first time that I published this was about 2 1/2 years ago, and I was quickly asked by a well known SEO expert and friend (I won’t name any names, but he’s on the panel at the “buying sites” SMX session) to remove the post and wait until buying old virgin sites was common knowledge.

I completely understood/agreed with his logic that while he did have an abundance mentality about most things, some really effective but not yet widely adopted tactical SEO should remain private. It’s one major reason why posting here has always been so light, some things are better left unsaid until a later date.

So without further delay, here’s the entire article about my quest for the perfect virgin site finding tool.

With Google’s increased emphasis on website age as a factor in earning top rankings, it’s more important than ever to find links from old, established, authoritative websites in your industry. This is especially true for new websites, where building up your Trustrank (while still looking natural) is crucial in escaping or dodging the sandbox. One solution is to purchase well-aged, authoritative websites and/or negotiate advertising space with trusted website owners. So how do you find old websites to purchase outright or make advertising deals with?

At first I really didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the old website buying game, but had read of others that had made it their new pasttime. Since I actually have some free time these days to sit and develop new businesses (I recently stepped down as VP of Marketing for one of my companies and transitioned over to a strictly consultancy arrangement), it finally occurred to me that there’s some money to be made selling advertising on old websites as well as using them for my own benefit. Yes, I’m slow to catch on to new trends as times, but once I do I give it 110%.

I had dinner with my programmer yesterday, whom I also grew up with and have known for over 20 years. We began talking about his current projects and what he’s been up to, which is pretty impressive and involves a major airline company. After a few drinks we started talking about online marketing and all of the new opportunities I’ve recently opened myself up to, as well as the possibility of him working with me full-time. Normally when I talk about SEO and marketing his eyes are quick to glaze over, but for some reason today was different.

I told him about an immediate need I have for a tool that could find old, non-SEO’d, “virgin” websites. Some immediate requirements I had for him were:

1. The tool needed to check and display website age via WHOIS
2. The tool needed to show all links to the site, and display breakdown by type (to spot powerful backlinks from .edu, .gov, and .mil domains)
3. The tool needed to check/display the Pagerank and pages indexed (for informational purposes, not of great importance)
4. The tool needed to check if they’re listed in dmoz and the yahoo directory
5. The tool needed a way to identify whether or not the site was poorly-designed/coded/maintained

The logic with the last requirement is that if the site is ugly and/or outdated, the owner probably hasn’t been successful with it and will part with it for very little money. The ability to use keywords to find sites within a particular industry was a feature that we also discussed.

So, we moved on to covering the APIs involved, how they would interact, what technologies to use, etc. Though I’m not a programmer, I do have an understanding of programming because of my previous experience as a software tester. The tough part actually came when he asked me, “What criteria would you use to find old, poorly-designed websites?” Uhhhh…errrr…that’s a good question. What are the greatest common denominators of poor and/or outdated site designs that we could look for to view the largest number of results?

My first thought was to search the source of the page for ancient HTML editor footprints, like HotDog, FrontPage (using the date or version, ie. 2000), etc., but that seems like a very narrow selection. I would miss the sites that were created by those that coded HTML by hand in Notepad or vi Editor as I did when starting out.

Animated GIFs? Nah. Same problem, too narrow. I also thought about searching the body text and footer for “Copyright (year)” and “Last Updated (year)”, but not all old sites included copyright info or update statistics. What about hr tags (in the body, not in a stylesheet) and other obvious old school HTML footprints? Remembering I had read that Google released a report of web authoring statistics, I gave it a quick scan for ideas but didn’t come up with anything substantial.

Wouldn’t the tool also need to reference the Wayback Machine, to ensure that the site has actually been up for the entire time that the domain has been registered (or close to it)? What about using archive.org to look at an old copy of dmoz for old trusted sites? I couldn’t go too deep into dmoz and still have the wayback machine return results, but it was worth a try. Should a cache date check be included as well, so that we know that the site is still being indexed on a regular basis? What about checking Alexa data, with a higher three month average ranking being a positive indicator for our purposes?

As you can see, this “little tool” as I referred to it when we started the conversation had turned into a full-blown project. It should be fun, kind of like resurrecting forgotten websites and “recycling” the web.

My plan (after contacting the site owners and buying the sites, of course, which I’m sure will be difficult due to low response rates and undeliverable emails) is to change as little of the existing content and WHOIS info as possible, then slowly add new content to the sites to freshen them up.

Buying and improving old websites shouldn’t be viewed as a bad thing, even if you do plan on benefiting directly or indirectly from them later down the road. As long as you’re not converting old sites to new spam and you put real effort into polishing up the sites to the high-gloss, true resource finish they once had, I don’t see a problem with it at all.

What are some other common footprints of old school, “virgin” websites designed years ago? Do you have any old website search tools or ideas that you’d like to share?

So this year make a resolution to never, ever do this again and just insert some code to handle the date for you. Examples in a few different languages are included below as well as a javascript version for static HTML pages:

PHP
Just copy, paste, and change the beginning year (shown as 2001)
Copyright © 2001-< ?php echo date("Y"); ?>

OR

Just copy, paste, and change the beginning year (shown as 2001)
< ?php $time = time () ; $year= date("Y",$time) . "<br />“; echo “Copyright 2001 – ” . $year; ?>

ASP
Just copy, paste, and change the beginning year (shown as 2001)
< %response.write("Copyright 2001- "&Year(Date))%>

OR

Just copy, paste, and change the beginning year (shown as 2001)
Copyright © 2001-< %=Year(Date)%>

OR

Just copy, paste, and change the beginning year (shown as 2001)
< % Dim yy yy = DatePart("yyyy",Now()) %>Copyright © 2001-< %=yy%>

ASP.NET (C#)
Just copy, paste, and change the beginning year (shown as 2001)
< %Response.Write(System.DateTime.Now.Year.ToString());%>

Javascript
Just copy, paste, and change the beginning year & company name
<script type="text/javascript"><!-- copyright=new Date();update=copyright.getYear();document.write("Copyright © 2001-"+ update + " (your company name) All rights Reserved."); //--></script>

OR

Just copy, paste, and change the beginning year (shown as 2001)
<script LANGUAGE="JavaScript"><!-- today=new Date(); y0=today.getFullYear(); // end hiding ---></script>Copyright © 2001-<script LANGUAGE="JavaScript"><!--- Hide from old browsers document.write(y0); // end hiding ---></script>

Business Goal: I have about 10 site launches planned for this year, and I expect all to be very lucrative. I’ve slowly changed my mindset when it comes to internet marketing and feel like previously I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. In the beginning, it was all about tweaking content and building links with a singular focus on capturing “free” search engine traffic (not a good idea as the search engines can be a fickle bunch, so easily offended). I’ve now evolved into a smarter marketer that can see beyond the search engine traffic and gain not just traffic but conversions from more reliable sources.

I’ll write here when possible, but with so much going on posting will most likely be even lighter than usual for the next couple months. Happy New Year and here’s to wishing you the best of luck and success in 2008!

In the bottom left corner there were two arrows, which are obviously next and previous buttons. I clicked on the next button and with an ajax looking fade effect two new ads were displayed.

Is this some beta feature they’re testing out or did I miss the email about that?

I just noticed that I missed my blog’s two year anniversary. Sorry blog, Happy Birthday.

I still suck at blogging, but please make my blog feel better by reading some of my favorite posts so far:

• Linkbait: A New Name For An Old Rule
• 10 Tips For Better Client Relationships
• A Few Quick Link Building Tips
• Always Be Converting
• Find Employees While Building .edu Links
• How NOT To Find An Internet Marketing Company
• Get Your Business Logic Right
• The Single Biggest Entrepreneurial Obstacle
• Thinking Like An SEO Genius
• How NOT To Request A Link To Your Site