I just came out of an SEO meet up in north San Diego called Encinitas SEO meet up or something hosted by Best Rank in Solana Beach. The topic of the meet up was link building and host of the meet up discussed article submission and press release as a good method for SEO.

While I agree both article submission and press releases are perhaps good way of marketing and building traffic, I highly advise against using them to boost and manipulate your rankings for following reasons;

All press releases and article sites are PR0 because they are deep inside each their parent websites news or article directories and since there are so many press releases and article submissions, there is hardly any good SEO value being passed.

You gotta do a lot of article submissions and press releases to be able to have any noticeable ranking changes. I am talking about hundreds and in some niches it may take thousands of articles and press releases to be able to improve ranking. And if you improve your ranking it won’t be by much and there won’t be much improvement and it will not last if you don’t keep it up.

That gives you the question of ROI; What is the biggest bang for my buck? And I sincerely believe article submission sites or press releases are not it. The ROI isn’t just there. Imagine all the time and resources you use to write these articles and you won’t even know if it is going to improve ranking or not and how much. The traffic it generates is not really the type of traffic that converts so why spend so much time abusing this method.

Don’ get me wrong there is still good uses for both articles and press releases. Articles are there to get your name out there, your content out there so people get to know you, and if your content is really exceptional, then you are going to get some really good results. So you don’t have to write a ton of content rather than less content but focus on quality so you may get someone to like your article and perhaps want to learn more about you buy following you and establish an online relationship and that may help you with long term marketing plans.

Same sort of concept goes for press releases. Press releases are tools to get newsworthy content to media. If you have a good newsworthy content like a new merger or partner, industry related news, new company earnings and major changes, or any other truly newsworthy content then submit a press release. And if your content is really newsworthy then it can grab some attention and perhaps some people write about you and link to you. This happen not long a go when I submitted a press release for a client of mine and then an industry related blog wrote about my client and linked to them. But if you are submitting a ton of press releases that lack true newsworthy content, just in hope of getting some contextual links in order to improve you ranking, then its going to take a lot of work and investment on your part to see a slight ranking improvements just like article submission sites.

Again it all comes down to biggest bang for your buck. If you have a nice article to write, then go ahead submit it to high traffic and authority article site. If you have a newsworthy content to release, then go right ahead and submit that press release. But if you don’t then spend your SEO time and link building efforts elsewhere.

More reading on this topic:

Press Release; Good for Link Baiting not Link Stuffing

Press Releases Becoming Less Effective, Thanks to Social Media

How to write a great press release

This post I will be a bit of how I got into SEO and what I thin it takes to make it in this field whether as an SEO consultant or SEO specialist working for others.

I am currently an SEO consultant in San Diego with a full time job in Encinitas as senior SEO. I have been doing SEO consulting for a few years now. I got into SEO professionally when I launched my online business GoHiTech.com which at the time was selling GPS and electronic Gadgets before ipod came out completely killing my business. The I got a full time job as a web developer at Experian and since I knew SEO, I got into the SEO committee where we would talk about SEO initivies and their implementations.

After a couple years, of working there, I decided it was time to own another business, a soccer store in Vista in San Diego county. We first started online with an optimized ecommerce website initially under LAsoccerShop.com and later I was able to get SoccerNation.com. We did great online and then expanded into a real physical break and mortar location. We did good the first couple years then the economy got bad and in 2010 we closed the shop, sold the website to our competitor who turned it into an local San Diego soccer news and magazine, and then I moved to LA working for Solomon Finance then Cooking.com as SEO manager. While working full time as an SEO manager, I managed to pull a few project on the side as an SEO consultant while I was in LA but I got tired of that city and decided to move back to the city I truly loved; San Diego.

Currently living in Encinitas in North San Diego County, I work full time as senior SEO strategist for a small marketing firm, and also do SEO consulting on the side and I must admit life as an SEO has been quite a bit of ride and very interesting for following reasons;

1.All of your employers or clients want to rank on the first page for the most competitive terms in short period of time and stay there so as an SEO you often find yourself educating your client about what it takes to get there and somehow you may never get there. For example, I almost lost my job when I told my last company Solomon Finance that they there was no way they could rank on the first page for either keywords payday loan or payday loans mainly because of all the competition and spam in that field, it was very heard near impossible to rank first page. I advised my previous employer to bank on smaller keywords such a “direct payday lender” or “payday advance online” which are less competitive or spammed and if we rank for a plenty of those, then we can get the same type of traffic we would get from the keywords like “payday loans”. But as mentioned earlier, it took near a year before I could convince my boss about that and at that point I found a new job at Cooking as SEO manager.

2.As an SEO manager, sometimes you don’t have control over things and you can only advise. But it gets frustrating when things you advice don’t happen. A good example was my previous employer Cooking.com where they had an old platform they were not willing to change, and poor editorial and product descriptions, which they didn’t have resource to change. As an SEO, there was so little things I could do where your platform and content aren’t SEO friendly and you don’t have resources to change it and other stuff like link building and social media marketing can get you so far if you two have the other two Cs (code and content).

3.As an SEO expert, you have got to stay up to date with Google and Bing changes specially Google that tends to modify their algorithm twice daily (business days). And since their algorithms are not public, as an SEO I find myself reading a ton of reputable SEO blogs and news sites to figure out what’s going on however the biggest challenge comes when you have to distinguish fact from fiction. SEO blogs and bloggers tend to make a lot of things up, some purposely mislead, and good information are often not shared and that leaves it up to you to figure out what’s working and what is not. And that comes with a lot of experience and some seo testing o your own.

4.SEO reporting is a tricky one. Different clients or employers want different type of reports. I have had clients and employers where they only care about the SEO traffic and sales, and others think about keyword ranking, conversion rates, keyword trends, etc. So satisfying your client or your employer is an important issue. I find myself using various SEO tools and analytic tools to pull that data, and of course you have got to be really good at tools such as Microsoft Excel and Word.

5.Client or employer industry research is a big one. In a short period of time, you have to learn about the industry fast. Of course there are SEO and keyword tools that enable you with that however to my experience, the best type of results come when you better understand your client business model, their industry, and their competition as comprehensive as you can so you don’t waste any time or resources.

Every job or profession has its own challenges and as an SEO consultant, I have stated some of mine above. If you are an SEO expert and would like to share some of your challenges let me know.

I came across a very good post on one of my favorite guest blogging websites Famous Bloggers on how bloggers are not your average writers yet many people tend to judge bloggers by the way they write.

Blogging was never meant to be true journalism. Blogs has been a medium to allow everyone to express themselves, their opinion and write casually about the whatever they wanted to talk about. It was never intended to be true journalism and for most part it is remanding to stay that way. In addition to self expression, blogs were also created to create a community where the bloggers and their follows exchange ideas and feedback.

One doesn’t necessarily have to be a great writer in order to be a good blogger. Blogs are usually judged by their number of traffic and followers, and the type of content they cater not necessarly how someone’s writing skills are.

Of course there business sites that took blogging to next level for business goals and hired professional writers to do their blogging in order to create professional content. As an SEO consultant, I advice my clients to use blogging to enhance organic traffic and I often do advise them to write really high quality content to grow their authority and search traffic but high quality content from SEO prospective isn’t necessarily the one with the best style of writing it is the type of content the audience of a blog like and find useful. True my larger clients tend to hire business writers but that is a business decisions they take however many personal and business blogs are getting results by keeping it simple and writing average type of content yet getting good results and that tells you more that to be a good blogger, you don’t have to be good writer as well.

If you don’t keep up with SEO knows (and I don’t blame you because you have a life), Google was ratted out by Danny  Sullivan of Search Engine Land of buying links for Google Chrome webpage.

In response to that, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team had the following response;

Sorry that it took me until now to comment on the situation that Danny wrote about at http://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pagerank-reduced-due-to-sponsored-posts-106551 . I’m in Central America this week and my ability to reach the internet hasn’t been great.

I’ll give the short summary, then I’ll describe the webspam team’s response. Google was trying to buy video ads about Chrome, and these sponsored posts were an inadvertent result of that. If you investigated the two dozen or so sponsored posts (as the webspam team immediately did), the posts typically showed a Google Chrome video but didn’t actually link to Google Chrome. We double-checked, and the video players weren’t flowing PageRank to Google either.

However, we did find one sponsored post that linked to www.google.com/chrome in a way that flowed PageRank. Even though the intent of the campaign was to get people to watch videos–not link to Google–and even though we only found a single sponsored post that actually linked to Google’s Chrome page and passed PageRank, that’s still a violation of our quality guidelines, which you can find at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3 .

In response, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days. After that, someone on the Chrome side can submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would. During the 60 days, the PageRank of www.google.com/chrome will also be lowered to reflect the fact that we also won’t trust outgoing links from that page.

My take on this

Of course Google is trying to set a good example by punishing its own product’ webpage for buying paid links that pass pagerank, but I don’t agree with the whole thing to begin with and here are my reasons;

1. Punishment Doesn’t Fit the Crime – Google Chrome only got one link that passes pagerank and that led them to a 60 day penalty? Really?!! Why not just discount the link and send a message via webmaster tool (or in this case internally) about the paid link or something. Again Google is trying to lead by example but in this case, I believe it was more of a over-reaction than a necessary reaction.
2. Sponsored Reviews Are Not Violating Google Guidelines– Google has been clear about buying links that pass pagerank and manipulate the search results. But Buying a sponsored review should not be considered as a paid link in fact sponsored reviews are a proven marketing tactic as Many marketers reach out to bloggers and ask them to review a product or service in exchange of a fee. Of course the bloggers will have to disclose in their blog posts that they are being compensated for the review and in this case they did so what’s the problem. Why can’t Google’s so called advanced algorithm pick it up?Sponsored reviews don’t necessarily mean Paid Links! When you buy a link, you ask the linker to link to a certain page of your website with a certain anchor text so you can manipulate the search engine ranking. But when you buy a legitimate sponsored review, you are asking for that reviewer to review your product or services and you are not asking them for a link. Now if they choose to link to you using whatever anchor text they want, that is something they do out of their own willingness and to me that sounds pretty editorial which is what Google wants.Again, if Google doesn’t like an inbound link, why not just discount it and not take it into their algorithms. As an ex-programmer, I don’t think it would be a super hard task and knowing Google is staffed with a lot of knowledgeable people.

In conclusion, web is a open standard place. I know Mr. Matt Cutts himself loves the web and is very advocate of openness of the web and hopefully i near future, he and his team take a more open approach toward such situations for all websites.

While we are still working on specing out our local seo tool, I came across a good tool for local SEO to help me find citations. Of course Google itself is the best source if you know all the commands but this tool is free and it exports to Excel and all that.  Name of the tool is Local Search Toolkit and it was recommended to me by my co worker and it seems to be working OK. It’s not the most perfect citation tool but it works for the keywords you are searching so give it a try.

Just for those of you that are new to local SEO, citations are the #1 ranking factor for google places and local SEO, reviews, number of locations in a city, and lastly links from local businesses. To get the most citations, you want to make sure you add your site to all local directories, and do a lot of online and offline promotion and marketing and make some noise to rank.

I wrote a post on my other SEO blog about my SEO strategy for 2012 I am going to pursue for myself and most of my clients. Some of my clients this may not apply but because either of their industry or their unique requirement but in 2012 I am going to take back to the main concepts of better code, better content, and better credibility.

I am intending to have better code for my websites by taking advantage of already SEO friendly platforms such as wordpress and their SEO plugs in order to make it SEO friendly.

I am also putting more focus on content. In fact I will be taking a creative writing class at a local Junior college in North county community college Mira Costa in addition to excel (yah I need some helps with excel), and I will be focusing on increasing overall credibility of my websites using natural link building and social media.

I want to focus on link building, I am spending less time doing “blog commenting” these days and spending more time connecting to other bloggers and influencers in the industry in order to get more than just links. (hey this would be a good topic to blog about).

Happy New Year and looking forward a productive and positive year!

I wanted to wish everyone a happy holiday and wish all friends, family, business partners, clients, and business associates a happy holiday seasons and a successful 2012.

My New Year resolution is to surround myself with motivated people who truly make me happy, and not with their words, deception, or manipulation but with their actions. Those who want to help you and be your true friends and true partners. And also be friends with people who will help you grow in all aspects of life.

Happy Holidays!

I am currently doing the SEO work for a Los Angeles Bail Bonds and a their other bail bonds locations and it does kind of remind me of payday loan seo industry, where the competition is just crazy high for major keywords. For example the key term “bail bonds” which is highly demanded key term by has the highest competition possible.

The best strategy for such industries in my opinion is local SEO. Most, if not all, have a physical location anyway, and that is a good place to optimize for and start.  If you are a bailbonds services and looking to promote your bailbonds online and need some SEO work, feel free to contact me for a free quote.

I am looking into one of the most under developed areas in terms of SEO and that seems to be the pharmaceutical industry is one of the industries where they have been using more traditional advertising and are behind SEO according to an SEO audit by Covario I read earlier on an article on website magazine.

“For decades pharmaceutical companies have been effective at using traditional advertising to target their largest brand advocatse — doctors. The results of this study show that pharma advertisers have leveraged this expertise and applied it to SEO as a branding channel directed at medical practitioners,” says Russ Mann, Covario CEO. “Having said that, pharmaceutical marketers have yet to translate their decades-old success in direct-to-consumer advertising in traditional channels like television into the Web-based organic search channel.”

Learning that fact, I have decided to look into the industry more. I do have healthcare background and considering I am in San Diego, one of the places for pharmaceutical industry, it makes perfect sense to do pharmaceutical SEO.