What do you like the most about SEO?

The best part of SEO is getting to see companies grow, and being a part of it. Sometimes we'll start an SEO project for a company and they may only be getting 10-20 hits per month from keywords. It really feels good to help them grow that to hundreds or thousands of hits per month.

What do you like the least about SEO?

This is split between two things:

First, it's frustrating when you hear stories from clients that have had bad experiences with other SEO companies. There are SEO companies out there with relatively no SEO experience asking for 16 month contracts and profit sharing (true story from a client).

The second would be those occasions where you really put a lot of work and quality content behind a keyword, only to be out-ranked by what appears to be a low quality site with a lot of spam links.

What skills are helpful for someone wishing to become an SEO?

There are a lot of skills that can help. Some people can be really good at one area and that is all they need, but for the most part, I think it helps to develop skills in each area of SEO.

Here are a few notable skill areas:

• Working knowledge of Coding/HTML - When you are working with websites, it helps to know the language of websites. This is extremely helpful, but probably not required.
• Networking/Link Building - If you are really good at finding ways of getting others to talk about or link to you, this will go a long way in being a good SEO.
• Writing - Oh yes, being a good writer can definitely help. Web pages and blog posts are made from good creative writing and thinking.
• Photoshop - Sometimes SEO involves reworking images. An example would be taking an image with text in the image, not readable by search engines, and converting it to an image with text in html. While you can hand this over to a developer and designer to do, you will become much more efficient if you can do these types of edits yourself.

There are about .71 web pages (with "Utah" and "SEO" in the title tag) per person in Utah.

Visit our latest blog post to find out how many results there are compared to the population in your state.

U.S. Translation Company recently launched their new website design. The project was a combined effort between Red Olive and the U.S. Translation team to merge design with a large amount of content, while maintaining ease of use.

One of the goals of the new site was to highlight the wide range of translation services U.S. Translation provides. They serve a wide range of industries and they translate nearly any kind of document for nearly any purpose.

Website:

Along with our recently updated website documenting a lot of our web design work.  We will also be updating our SEO pages by adding SEO case studies and recent work.  If you have any questions about SEO or looking for an SEO, please don't hesitate to contact us.

Red Olive Design has been designing websites in Utah for 12 years. During those 12 years we have launched 4 major revisions to our own website. The latest redesign features a dual-width layout where visitors get an optimized browsing experience depending on their monitor size.

The new design was a team effort by our 3 designers to come up with a site that is easy to use and highlights our work. The new extensive work portoflio shows off over 50 projects completed for local Utah companies and a few national brands.

Enough talk, here is the latest design:

I created a goal in analytics and added a required step at the beginning.  I didn't quite get all the data I was looking for with the standard reports.  So I created a custom report.  Here is what the custom report looked like:

Check out our recent post on short general keywords vs longer more specific keywords in a conversion rate showdown. Also known as short tail vs long tail for the people that like to confuse clients. (not me)!

Information is great for seo. Slides are a great way to present information. So naturally, a slideshare.net account might be helpful for your seo campaigns. Hence today, I created a slideshare.net account for our Utah SEO program. Taking the time to present some helpful information is usually a good thing. This was also my first power point. Although I can hold my own with excel, formulas and conditional formatting, I am new to power point.

Intro
I recently ported my iphone number to Google Voice. I did this without fully understanding how Google Voice works, and now that I do, I thought I would write up some notes on my setup and how I am getting the most of out Google Voice.

Making calls from your PC or MAC with your newly ported number displayed as the caller:

• You'll need to download and install the Google Voice plugin here
• Next, you'll need to activate Google Chat as one of your forwarding phones in Google Voice. Log in to Google Voice, then settings, then voice settings, and then checkbox. Detailed instructions can be found here.
• Lastly, log in to gmail, and look for the call phone button in the left side navigation.

Start sending and receiving texts (without phone service):

• Download the Google Voice app for your device of choice - ipad/ipod/iphone/android etc.
• You'll need to log in and have some form of internet access.
• Enter the phone number and hit text.

Message Notifications:

I am currently in the (not receiving text messages for 3 days period) since I just ported my number, but I can give you a breakdown of how "voice mail" and "call" notifications have been working. If I am in a wifi environment with my iPad and someone calls my number, I get a push notification noting the call and the subsequent voice mail. I can then open the Google Voice app, and read the transcribed voice mail, all on my ipad. I can't answer the call or call them back with my setup, but I can text them back within the Google Voice app. I did temporarily try the whistle phone app, and I was able to make phone calls from a wifi only environment. But I did have to disable my router's sip firewall setting to place the call (I am not exactly sure what that does).

Summary
These are the steps I have taken after porting my number to GV, and I must say I am enjoying the results. As with anything phone related, make sure you speak with your cellular service provider to get the facts on how Voice, Data, Texting, and Messaging Rates apply to using your phone and Google Voice.

Next stop is a pre-paid phone to forward and receive calls from Google Voice. I'll probably wind up using my old cell phone "in wifi" environments to: surf the web, watch hulu plus, send and receive gv texts, and *receive* gv transcribed voicemails left on my phone roughly 90% of what I need. Then use a pre-paid phone to cover me during the other 10%, when I am on the road and when no wifi is available, or if I need to place an actual phone call (I mostly text).

I thought I would write a post about how to evaluate links when link building. In other words, what due diligence can you perform when researching links?

1. Check the domain with McAfee SiteAdivsor. McAfee SiteAdvisor rates sites based on testing for spyware and other malicious items. They also have a strong community of site reviewers.
2. Check the page rank of the domain. SEOmoz has a powerful historical page rank checker tool that will allow you to see if the site has had any drastic changes in page rank recently. The historical data is not always there, but it is in a lot of cases. (I think you can get access to the tool from a free membership)
3. Search Google for a unique text string or full sentence appearing on the website, and see if the website pulls up. Hopefully they will show up.
4. What is the title tag on the homepage? Do they rank for any phrases from their homepage title tag?
5. Perform a whois search on the domain. I typically use godaddy, enter the domain, and then click "get info." If it's a site about "Utah web design" and the whois information points to a country far far away, you probably want to look elsewhere.
6. Lastly search yahoo for links pointing to the site in question. Go to yahoo.com and enter "link:www.thewebsiteinquestionyaddayadda.com." This will often uncover secondary sites the site owner *may* own. If you find a lot of spammy sites pointing to the website in question this could possibly raise some flags. Check the whois information on the spammy sites (see #5). Do any of them have the same whois information as the site offering the link?

These are some of the things I check when evaluating links. If you have any tips or suggestions, please comment below.

Tips courtesy of the Utah SEO team via @ Red Olive Design