SEO Mentor

If you haven’t seen this video below about Twitter then you must watch it. I personally think it is hilarious!

Do you think this is an accurate video portraying Twitter users? Comment below!

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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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I find that sometimes the Online Marketing and SEO industries can be a bore and that is the very reason why Chuck Lewis the SEO Rapper has had so much success. If you haven’t heard Chuck’s raps then you have missed out on some serious entertainment and also some great content. I had a wonderful opportunity to find out more about The SEO Rapper in my interview and he even let me add one of his raps within the interview so listen to the interview above or check it out below. Thanks Chuck!

Garrett: Hello everyone, this is Garrett Pierson, Your SEO Mentor here. I have the opportunity to interview Chuck Lewis, also known as The SEO Rapper of TheSEORapper.com. How are you, Chuck?

Chuck: I’m good. I can’t complain at all.

Garrett: Good! I just want to ask you my first introduction question. Tell us a little bit more about yourself, for people that might not know you. Tell us about your background, the music, and the online marketing industries, family hobbies, or something we might not know about you.

Chuck: Okay, about me, it can be found online. I’ve been in the music business for a while. I’ve been writing rap since middle school and high school, doing gospel hip-hop, marketing hip-hop where the name “poetic prophet” came from, as some people refer to me. I released a couple of albums doing this and they did pretty well. My Mo Serious Entertainment record label, mostly entertainment, that’s where that album premiered. I have a couple of other artists that I manage for the most part. For about the five or six years I’ve been doing online marketing at an agency called Pop Labs. I do search engine marketing there. I’m doing keyword research, optimization, and managing pay-per-clicks and everything else there, all day every day.

I have three children, Jordan, Akilah, and Brianna. They are my Charlie’s Angels, as I call them. I play basketball, play pool, and watch sports. Those are my hobbies if I’m not on some social media site creating a profile or something.

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I had a blast interviewing James Duthie from Down Under! With his amazing Australian accent and wonderful online marketing tips and content, James is the epitome of a up and rising online star. James is famous for his powerful guest posts that rock the industry every time a new one is posted. Listen above to my interview with James or read the transcript below!

Garrett: Hello everyone, Garrett Pierson, Your SEO Mentor here with James Duthie. How are you, buddy?

James: Very good, Garrett, how are you?

Garrett: I’m great. I hear that Australian accent there, is that right?

James: Yes, that is correct. I’m from Melbourne, Australia, sunny Australia. It’s a beautiful spring morning where I am, at the moment. It’s a good time of year to be in Australia. It’s just coming into summer in the next few months.

Garrett: That’s awesome. I’m going to ask you a couple of questions throughout the interview, and it sounds like there’s a slight delay. We’ll work through that. James, tell us a little bit more about yourself. For those who may not know you, what is your background in the online-marketing industry, your family, your hobbies, or whatever you want?

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I had the wonderful honor of spending some time with Lee Odden of Top Rank. He gave great insight on the changing SEO Industry and the up and coming Social Media industry. Also Within the interview that you can listen to above or read the transcript below you will find that Lee is not only smart but a really great guy and down to earth. So take a listen or check out & read the transcript below:

Garrett: Hello, it’s Garrett Pierson, Your SEO Mentor, here today with Lee Odden. Lee is known for his TopRankBlog.com and TopRankMarketing.com sites. How are you, Lee?

Lee: I’m very good Garrett. How are you?

Garrett: I’m good. It’s good to have you. I really appreciate you taking time to spend some time with me and my listeners. It’s a great honor to talk with you. I’ve been following your stuff for a long time now and I really appreciate your wonderful content for the industry that we’re in.

Lee: That’s very kind of you to say that. I appreciate the opportunity. I also appreciate that you’re one of the few people who actually says my last name is “Oh-den”. Most people say “Aw-den” or some other variation of that. They are kind of like key word permutations or something. I don’t know.

Garrett: That’s a big reason why I do these short and to the point interviews. A lot of us follow you, or follow some great authorities within the industry, but we don’t know a lot about you. That brings me to my first, introduction question. What could you tell us about yourself that we might not know about you your background in the SEO, social media industry, your family, and your hobbies, anything you want to talk about?

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There has been a lot of questions about how Social Media is affecting the SEO industry. The question I would like to ask is how can it help the SEO industry and how will affect the SEO for my clients sites and my own. The major issue with Social Media sites and how they play a role in your SEO these days is a majority of them (especially the big boys e.g. Twitter) use the Nofollow link. “Well your asking what does this mean and why do I need to worry about it.” First of all don’t worry about it, this is not the end of the world but what it means is that going to all these major social media and networking sites and linking back to your website will for the most part have no affect on your search engine results.

The NoFollow link (e.g. <a href=”url” rel=”nofollow”>) was originally created to block search engines from following links in blog comments, this was due to the very high amount of blog comment spamming. The wonderful Wikipedia definition says, “nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.”

With Social Media sites popping up daily and with them being very easy to place user generated content and links spammers began the same old routine and therefore we suffer from their actions. The top social media and networking sites quickly found that they too needed to use the nofollow attribute to help reduce the amount of spam submitted. So for the most part placing a link on Social Media sites will not directly help your search engine optimization efforts. That doesn’t mean Social Media can not help in gaining valuable links to your sites here are a couple of ways Social Media and Networking help:

• Ask for links to your site from those people you are networking with
• Social Media is a great Link Baiting tool
• Create instant awareness of your website or blog posts making it easier for people to find and therefore link to

So these are just a few tips and examples of how you can use Social Media and Networking site to help gain valuable links back to your website for SEO purposes. Although the majority of these social sites we use daily will not directly help our site SEO here are a list of some that can:

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