SEO Mentor

Just did a guest blog post called Don’t Forget the Brand in SEO, PPC and Social Media at SearchEngineJournal.com and wanted to make sure everyone had a chance to look at it.

As I said in the article “I am constantly surprised when I find SEO efforts that do not include the brand.” If you are forgetting your or your clients brand in your SEO, PPC or Social media efforts then you are truly missing out.

There was a great comment from David, “Great points, Grant. I hate to admit it, but I’ve made that mistake in the past – optimizing for the high traffic keywords and related queries to help this client get more relevant traffic, I completely left their name off the title to improve relevance for the keywords I placed there. This worked great for landing new visitors, but I completely screwed over anyone that searched for them by brand, which turned out to be around 35% of their target audience. Won’t make that mistake again, to be sure.

I think the key point is to know how the company is getting business currently. Are their clients are from word-of-mouth referrals, or is it solely from internet traffic that’s searching for a deal on an item, etc… if it’s the latter, brand recognition isn’t the end all – if it’s the former, yeah , it should definitely be in the title, ppc campaign, or other marketing efforts.”

So take a look at the article at SearchEngineJournal.com now!

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So I recently wrote an article called Optimization Checklist and Checking It Twice! about a checklist of SEO items that I believe a lot of people forget. I want to thank all those that left comments on the post, very kind words.

We spend a lot of time with our sites and client sites on optimizing for better rankings and it is a shame when we forget the little basic things that can really affect all of our hard work.

So take a look at the article and make sure you print it out and don’t forget the checklist.

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I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year this year of 2009!

Probably the shortest blog post ever, aaahhhh yeeaaaaa!

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So it has been a while since I have posted anything and can’t say I am sorry! I have had a great break for the past month with family and friends and can honestly say that 2008 was a great year.

With the birth of my first child (little Gracie, the SEO Baby), my wife and I have never been so happy! With me joining the Trust Guard team, I am totally enjoying each day of work. I am thankful to all those that have allowed me to interview them for my weekly podcasts.

As 2009 approaches I feel very lucky to be alive and am happy to continue my journey of life. I want to thank all those that take time to read my blog posts and listen to my podcasts.

Stay tuned for more great podcast interviews from the leaders in the online industry also stay tuned for more tips, new, and resources to help you with your everyday lives.

Check out this video below I put together for Trust Guard using Animoto.com:

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Jeff Quipp is an outstanding mind and friendly guy. In this interview he gives a bit on his background and some great tips and resources for all you SEO and Social Media junkies.

Garrett: Hello everyone, this is Garrett Pierson, Your SEO Mentor. I’m a little under the weather today, so excuse my voice. I’m going to interview Jeff Quipp of SearchEnginePeople.com. I’m so excited to interview him. I had the opportunity to meet Jeff back in Florida a couple of months ago. He’s just an outstanding guy, very friendly, and knows his stuff. How are you, Jeff?

Jeff: Great, thanks Garrett. Thanks for having me.

Garrett: Let’s get started. Tell us a little about yourself for people that might not know you. I know that’s very few, but some might not know you. Give us your background in the SEO and online marketing industries, your hobbies and anything else you want to talk about.

Jeff: As you said, I’m Jeff Quipp. I’m President and CEO of Search Engine People. We’re based out of Toronto. My background is actually pretty interesting in how I got into search in general. Essentially, after graduate school, I started working for the Yellow Pages here in Canada. In Canada, there is really only one Yellow Pages company, unlike the U.S. Of course, I got to experience different departments within the Yellow Pages group, had some really interesting experiences. Ultimately, I became in charge of yellowpages.ca at one point. Then, I migrated over to Sympatico-Lycos, which basically evolved out of the Yellow Pages group. Sympatico-Lycos was a content play essentially, but it was also the largest ISP in the country at the time.

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If you like SEO, Social Media, and PPC then you are going to love Brian Carter. This guy is not only really funny he is also a very smart guy. Take a listen or read below some great tips from Brian, also prepare to laugh.

Garrett: Hello everyone, Garrett Pierson here, Your SEO Mentor. Today I have the wonderful opportunity to interview Brian Carter of Fuelinteractive.com and Getmorefaster.com. How are you doing, Brian?

Brian: I’m good. How are you doing, Garrett?

Garrett: I’m doing great. I appreciate you taking some time out of your day to answer some questions about yourself and about your background in online marketing. Let’s just jump to the chase. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background in SEO online marketing, and maybe some things about your personal life like your family, hobbies, or anything else you want to talk about.

Brian: I used to be an acupuncturist. Then I started a site to explain acupuncture and Chinese medicine for people in regular language. That was Pulsemed.org. I spend about four years building articles on that and building an email database. I fully planned to become an acupuncturist.

Ultimately, I started getting a lot of traffic. I learned a little about SEO. I was running AdSense ads and I started making money on that. The next thing I knew, I figured out my own version of the KEI thing, which I felt was actually better than KEI and helped me choose the right key words to rank on. Some of them weren’t in Chinese medicine. I started going for all kinds of weird things like wedding favors and things like that. I started making four thousand dollars a month. I thought, “I think I found something.”
I hired twenty other writers to write all these key word articles. I really didn’t know what I was doing. I was kind of ‘spammy’ at the time. I thought, “I’ll just turn my site into an article index.” I started writing all this stuff. There were a couple of months in a row where we brought in more than twenty thousand dollars in AdSense. I thought I was rich for the rest of my life. I was telling all my friends they should starting writing key word articles for Google. They thought I was crazy. I said, “No, this is a revolution! We’re going to make all this money!” All of a sudden, I lost all my rankings. Whether it was an algorithm change or Google decided my site was no longer an authority, or I was being a spammer. Now, when I look back at the instructions I gave to some of these writers, it does look like spam to me.

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