SEO

SEO & AFFILIATE MARKETING BLOG

SEMRush Review – A Kickass Keyword Research Tool, Rank Tracker & More

By Rae / October 18, 2013 /

I’ve known about SEMRush for a long time. I’d heard people mention it and had seen the site, but I’d never really used it until my partner in my agency signed up for it. He loved the service – and since we were paying for it – I decided to fully check it out. It…

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Search Engine Submission Services? DON’T – Here’s Why…

By Rae / March 27, 2013 /

This post is a short one – and a very basic post – but a needed one. Think of this like a PSA that is attempting to pay it forward to new marketers everywhere. In doing some keyword research today, I was a little startled to see tens of thousands of searches being performed centering…

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Why You Should Never Build Your Site on a Free Subdomain

By Rae / August 17, 2011 /

I’ve been asking my readers and subscribers for feedback on what they find to be obstacles to finding success with affiliate marketing. As a result, I’ve been learning a bit about what I take for granted as far as SEO knowledge goes. At the top of the list? The concept that you should never blog…

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Simple Linking Maintenance for WordPress Sites

By Rae / May 18, 2011 /

The site structure of the Sugarrae blog has changed several times over the years. Sometimes for testing, sometimes for “bettering” SEO. This blog has been moved from Moveable Type to Expression Engine to WordPress. The internal linking structure has been changed from /blog/post-name/ to /post-name/ to /category/post-name/ and who knows what else. Category landing page…

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The Real Reasons Big Brands Don’t Rank

By Rae / April 30, 2010 / Comments Off on The Real Reasons Big Brands Don’t Rank

Someone pointed out a post to me that Advertising Age did a few days ago called “Meet the Brands Hiding on Google.” I’m assuming it was because they knew sending me something that got me a little riled meant I’d go off on a tangent and write a post about it… thus getting me to…

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Google Enables Real Time Spam and More

By Rae / December 9, 2009 /

So, I’m at Chicago SES and see someone tweet about how Google has integrated Twitter into regular search. Sure enough, Search Engine Land has an article about the topic. Being a former practitioner of the “dark arts”, I immediately start running some searches and was pretty shocked at what I found. Funnily enough, Dave Naylor…

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2003 Called; They’d like their URL structure back

By Rae / August 25, 2009 / Comments Off on 2003 Called; They’d like their URL structure back

Over the last decade or so of offering SEO consulting services to clients, I’ve seen a lot of interesting things. One of the more common (and surprising) things we see are URL structures in “current” sites that are completely “root based.” What does this mean? Sometime around 2003, Toolbar PageRank was all the rage, and…

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I’M TELLING! (or reporting your SEO competitors)

By Rae / August 7, 2009 / Comments Off on I’M TELLING! (or reporting your SEO competitors)

When I did the Ask the SEO Vets panel at SMX Advanced a few months ago, someone in the audience asked a question about what to do when your competitors are buying links and getting an advantage from them in the engines. Vanessa Fox immediately answered that you could report them, to which several of…

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You Don’t Need SEO to Rank in Google

By Rae / January 9, 2009 /

I’m sure you’ve no doubt heard that getting indexed and ranked well in Google is all about “Pagerank and links.” While Google search engineer Matt Cutts may have confirmed that statement almost three years ago, it doesn’t mean things never change and/or that Pagerank and on page signals (aka SEO) are the only factors that…

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