Mike Meisner

Fresh Choice Restaurant

Mike — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 17:25:45 +0000

Fresh Choice, LLC. is a major restaurant chain, focused on bringing the freshest ingredients to their customers. I took their graphic design and converted it into a workable WordPress site that includes menus, catering options, gift cards and many other types of custom functionality to suit their needs. No related posts. No related posts.

Know My Meds

Mike — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 17:22:35 +0000

Knowmymeds.com offers a unique service, helping individuals build a “smart” medication list using a simple step by step online interview. I did the front-end design and integrated their WordPress layout with their proprietary technology. Related posts:Web Design Related posts:

Web Design

Nonesuch Bakery

Mike — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 17:20:02 +0000

Nonesuch bakery is a vegan bakery in San Francisco. They needed a web presence and wanted a simple, clean design that showcased their menu, allowed customers to place orders, and comes with an easy to manage interface. Related posts:Purposeful PalateMind River Marketing Related posts:

Backlink Espionage Part I – Steal the Competitions Links

Mike — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:39:32 +0000

Recently I’ve been doing a lot of work with backlinks, including studying the most effective ways to create good, worthwhile links pointing to your site. In doing so, I always start by looking at some of the sites that rank on page one of Google for the search terms I’m going after. Often I find these sites have thousands of backlinks, and I often wish I had an easy way to collect them all and qualify them.

Well, now I do. Here’s some tools you will need to get started though:

Scrapebox
SEO Quake Plugin for Firefox
Roboform (for bonus rapid fire backlink technique)

You will learn:

how to find all of your competitions backlinks
how to qualify them by Page Rank
how to split them into blogs, articles, etc
how to create links rapid-fire style

If you don’t own scrapebox and you’re interested in SEO, you should probably invest in it. It’s incredibly powerful, and although it was originally a blog spamming tool, it can be used to carry out some tedious legwork for us.

Step One: Find a competitor

Today I’m going to target the keyword “Denver Living”. I see that the first two spots in Google are occupied by a website, www.kristalsellsdenver.com so she must have some good backlinks. I turn on SEO Quake and I can see she has 13k backlinks. That’s a good amount. Now let’s harvest them.

Find the amount of backlinks

Step 2: Extract links

The first thing to do is find all the pages for the website in question. Once we have all the pages for a website, we can proceed to find all the backlinks to those pages. Open Scrapebox and type site:domainyourcompetingwith.com into the custom search bar. Alternatively, you can use the Sitemap scraper tool.

Now, take the list of harvested URLs, and use the link:domain.com to find all links pointing to those pages. This will harvest all backlinks from Google and Bing, but not Yahoo. We’ll get to that next, since Yahoo typically displays the most accurate backlinks for a site. I like to copy the entire list of URLs I harvested in Scrapebox into the keywords column; then I use a custom operator, link: to merge with those URLS.

So you have the backlinks to your competitor site, according to Google and Bing. Now let’s grab those ones using the Yahoo search engine. Scrapebox includes a nifty add-on that will do this for us. Go to Add Ons > Backlink Checker and import a text file with your URL in question. Once you finish here, merge your two lists together – the list of Google/Bing backlinks, and the list of Yahoo backlinks, and remove any duplicate URLS. You should be left with a file containing the majority of your competition’s backlinks.

Harvesting competitors backlinks with Scrapebox

Step 3: Qualify links

That’s a good start, but let’s go further. We can use Scrapebox to figure out how many of these links come from blogging platforms, a convenient way to gain a backlink. Go back to ScrapeBox Add-Ons and download the ScrapeBox Blog Analyzer add-on. Open it up, and import the .txt file you just saved. Hit start.
ScrapeBox will go through every single backlink you just scraped and check them to see if they are a blog that ScrapeBox currently supports commenting on. If it is, it turns green. If it isn’t, it turns red. After it is finished, you can “clean” the list by having it remove unsupported sites. I like to split the list and keep the other sites for further analysis. What you’re going to be left with is ALL of the blogs your competitor has backlinks from, and more importantly, they are all capable of being commented on using ScrapeBox!!

Finding the blog platforms.

Continue by taking the list of blogs and opening it up in Scrapebox. Then check the Pagerank, and sort it from high to low. Can you see how powerful this technique is? We’ve extracted all backlinks from our competitor, split them into groups, and qualified them by Pagerank in minutes.

Bonus: Rapid Fire, High PR Blog Commenting

Now you have a giant list of blogs that you can leave comments on. I don’t like to use Scrapebox for this because I want to make sure my comments stick and are relevant. However, this can be a tedious task, and nobody likes to manually enter the same information over and over again. Here’s what I do instead. I use a tool called Roboform to help me automate this process. Roboform is a password storing tool, but it can also create “identities” which will populate fields on a website with any information want. I create a new identity, and give it a value for the Name, Website/URL that I can then use to populate forms with one click. This is actually a very powerful technique and can be used to help automate a lot of tasks once you understand it.

Create a custom identity with Roboform

Copy ten or so of the links, starting with the highest PR ones, and go to www.urlopener.com. Paste them into the box and then this tool will open all ten sites at once. Then, simply go to each site and populate the comment form with one click. You’ll still need to enter a thoughtful comment in the comment section, something relevant to the article.

Doing this, I can manually build huge amounts of high PR backlinks in a short time.

Why the Thesis Theme is Complete Garbage

Mike — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 07:20:24 +0000

Yea I said it. All you people out there using Thesis have been suckered into thinking it’s some WordPress equivalent of sliced bread. Have it any way you want! Get freakin’ powerful SEO! Who doesn’t want these things? Oh, and it’s upgradeable too – because so often I need to upgrade my theme…

Let’s break down why Thesis sucks so much. First off, let me say that I’m very familiar with it. I’ve used it on several sites, and I love the idea of modularizing code. I also use Thematic which is better than Thesis. It just doesn’t have the admin panel that Thesis theme has.

Their marketing ploy is based on some seriously vague and lofty statements. “Airtight SEO” they claim – all you have to do is “add killer content” and you’ll be set. Wow no shit! Add content and you’ll be good? That’s a golden rule of SEO, no matter what site you have. Using Thesis offers no super special features to do that, rather it’s up to you. Also, consider that Thesis is build upon WordPress’ platform, whose motto is “Code is Poetry”. There’s a reason WordPress is so damn SEO friendly. It’s build with clean coding practices and flexibility in mind. Moreover, SEO is in general a very broad practice, full of theory and takes place both on and off-site. They make it seem like it’s this almighty SEO machine, but really is it? What do they offer that’s so exceptional? I can’t find much on the site to tell me.

Then there’s the whole flexibility thing. It’s a bitch to modify this theme. Why do you think the forums are littered with helpless people trying to figure out the simplest of things like how to relocate the menu, or maybe add a custom homepage template? Countless sites exist just to help people using the theme. That doesn’t seem very reassuring in that it’s easy to use and modify. At least the newly formed Thesis theme consultants have some more business.

It has a steep learning curve and alt althoughthey point out a number of web gurus who use the theme, that doesn’t say much to me. I want something that’s easy to customize from a design standpoint and I don’t think Thesis offers that. Again, it’s a brilliant framework. But so is Thematic, and that’s free. Plus the documentation that Ian offers is great. But even then, I’d rather use a blank canvas, like the Sandbox theme for my starting points.

I guess my whole beef is that they mislead people into thinking Thesis is some incredibly different WordPress theme. The marketing is good, for sure. Maybe I just don’t get why it’s so exceptional.

Gioco Poker Italia

Local Business Marketing – Introduction

Mike — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:41:36 +0000

I’ve worked with many small businesses, and have helped them turn their websites around. I can’t believe how simple and ineffective some of their websites are. Some look as if they were designed by the owner’s ten year old nephew, and others just fail to capitalize on attracting users to their site. In 2010, almost every single client, lead, or customer will turn to the internet before the yellow pages when looking for information. They will look at the results Google shows them, and if you aren’t registering on the charts, you’re missing out of a lot of business. In fact, 90% of people don’t leave the first page of Google results; just imagine the traffic and business you could gain if you appeared there.

Don’t skimp on your website!

I think it’s crazy that some clients of mine will spend thousands on print advertising, billboards, airing radio commercials, and more, but don’t see the value in online marketing. When done right, online marketing for local businesses will bring the highest ROI, and it’s highly measurable. In fact, almost every single metric can be tracked, giving you the ultimate advantage if you know what to look for and how to exploit your site’s strengths.

One of the most important things I can recommend – do not skimp on your website. It’s the visual representation of your company. Imagine the conversions you’ll get from a site that looks good, and was built by a professional who knows how to include calls-to-action, email marketing integration, and writes solid code that attracts search engine spiders.

It’s perhaps even more important to have a website that’s good at what it does, that brings value to its visitors. A good website is also scalable, meaning that you should be able to easily update it, change the look and feel, and add features without taking the whole thing down. That’s one reason I recommend WordPress to my clients – it offers unparalleled ease of use and has worldwide support behind its development.

Communication is key

When you’re talking to someone about building your website, or starting an online marketing campaign, be sure to ask questions. All too often you’ll get some self-professed “expert” who can promise the world but can’t deliver results. Make sure you understand what they’re saying, and don’t get hung up on technical jargon. A good web designer/SEO expert will take time to communicate clearly, and make sure everyone is on the same page in terms of expectations.

Online marketing is easy

This is true, when you know what you’re doing. If you don’t, not so much. But again, this is why you turn to the experts. Would you go to your mechanic to get a tooth pulled?

What it boils down to is:

Driving targeted traffic to your site.
Converting them into sales and leads.
Tracking and measuring your performance.

In this series, I’m going to take you through some of the basics of marketing your local business online. You’ll learn about article marketing, social media marketing, Adwords/SEM, keyword research, email marketing, video marketing, and much more.

I’ll show you tools I use to analyze competition and pick apart what they have done to succeed. We’ll take their methods and do things better. We’ll look at key performance indicators (KPI) such as the bounce rate, pageviews, total visitors, time spent on your site, backlinks, and many other indicators that determine how well your site is doing.

Marketing your local business online is in fact easy. In general, a local market is not as saturated as a national one. There are fewer competitors, and the ones you do face likely won’t be very tough to outdo. You’ll expose yourself to a market that’s close, and interested in what you have to offer.

Get your backlinks indexed faster

Mike — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 21:03:30 +0000

A lot of people have their own methods for getting the backlinks they build indexed faster. Here’s what works for me.

Quick note: Backlinks may not show up in backlink checker services, tools, or even Yahoo Site Explorer right away.

Overview:

1. Create/grab the URLs for your backlinks. I keep a .txt file handy for each of my sites, with associated backlinks.
2. Create an RSS feed from all these URLs.
3. Submit the RSS feed to many RSS aggregators.
4. Bookmark your RSS feed on several social bookmarking sites.
5. Ping your feed.

Details:

1. Create/grab the URLs for your backlinks – This is simple enough. Whether you are using Angela’s/Paul’s profile links packs, posted scrapebox links, other packs, your own, it doesn’t matter – just save them in a text file.

2. Create an RSS feed from all these URLs- I use a service called HTML2RSS. It’s free to sign up and you can add up to 250 URLs to mash up into one giant RSS feed. Make sure to add all the URLs you created and saved in your text file. Also add a keyword rich description for your new feed. Create your feed.

3. Submit your new Feed to RSS Aggregators – Again, there are many. I prefer to use RSS Submit, but there are others such as SEnuke, Scrapebox, and so on.

4. Bookmark the feed – Socialmarket and Onlywire work well for this. No need to go overboard, just make a few submissions, that’s all.

5. Ping your feed – Pretty self-explanatory…Ping-O-Matic, Pingler, Pingoat are all good for this, but if you have some software, like Scrapebox, that’ll work great too.

Tips:

- Add URLs from your money-site and other pages within your money site (if available) when you are creating your feed. This will get some good backlinks to your money page and some deep links if you have a multiple page site like a blog.

- This method works great for profile links, but it can also be used for any other type of link as well.

Use Google’s Wonder Wheel to Find Longtail Key Phrases

Mike — Fri, 28 May 2010 19:22:44 +0000

If you are into SEO, then you’re familiar with longtail key phrases. A longtail phrase is simply a longer variation of your keyword. Usually they are easier to rank for, and they also bring a higher phrase-to-broad match, meaning that people are usually searching for that exact phrase.

Take a look at this example of a wonder wheel search, using the term “heel pain”:

As you can see, Google will suggest certain terms and phrases related to your main search term. This is a great way to explore and research various phrases to build up your keyword lists.

Changes in how Google ranks content

Mike — Fri, 21 May 2010 16:52:06 +0000

As an SEO, you need to be aware of how and why Google is changing. Lately, they’ve been unveiling their new search result screen to some viewers. And as usual, they have been changing the way content on your site is scored.

A lot of what you’ve been told is wrong. You probably heard that h1 tags bring a whole ton of weight…wrong. Try an h5 tag instead. From some empirical evidence I’ve gathered, you can see below just how some of the changes are taking place and what they mean…

* Link to relevant websites is WAY more valuable than it used to be.
* blockquote finally demoted from top 5 to 27. ouch!
* h1 makes a comeback! … but is still more than half way down the list.
* p makes a comeback! Span, Div, A, H1-6 are on the decline!
* 40+ tags fall from the test SERPs! Which probably means there may be a new factor or limitation in play for sites.
* I am surprised to see HTML comments made the cut when so many other tags did not. Still not worth much priority though.
* SERP Quirking is back! Use caption to get multiple links for same page.

Key
——————————–
parent tag > child tag
tag.attribute
(tag incarnation).attribute

Rank Placement
—- —————————–
01 title
02 samp
03 acronym
04 linking to relevant pages
05 a.href
06 p
07 pre
08 inside a textarea
09 kbd
10 caption
11 small
12 code
13 strong
14 sub
15 u
16 center
17 cite
18 big
19 font
20 bdo
21 em
22 legend
23 button
24 table > thead > tr > td
25 abbr
26 address
27 blockquote
28 caption
29 div
30 span
31 del
32 ul > li
33 strike
34 ins
35 sup
36 dfn
37 body
38 tt
39 table > tr > td
40 dt
41 h1
42 i
43 s
44 h3
45 a
46 img.alt
47 select > option
48 object > param.name
49 object > param.value
50 input.value
51 (meta:keywords).content
52 (meta:description).content
53 (meta:author).content
54 URL
55 b
56 HTML comments

Why SEO makes for a smart marketing investment in 2010

Mike — Tue, 18 May 2010 07:10:13 +0000

Focus on long-term, sustainable rankings

The internet marketing market is massive, estimated at $9 billion last year and projected to exceed $20 billion by 2013. That’s a figure that any business owner should be aware of. The majority of this marketing is spent on PPC – pay per click promoting, buying your visitors. Companies have been able to buy targeted traffic, utilizing certain keywords and bidding on them according to how likely they were to bring in quality targeted traffic that converts into sales or leads. If they concentrate solely on SEM and not Website positioning, they’re selling themselves short, literally.

Anyone interested in driving longterm, targeted targeted traffic to their web page needs to be interested in optimizing their internet site for search engines; on generating sustainable organic rankings for those keywords that they’d toss funds at on a daily basis. Think about it, an SEO campaign may cost a bit extra initially, but it builds sustainable rankings that draw the same visitors. It is an investment that pays off. Only 11% of advertising budgets go to SEO, although 87% direct their efforts in PPC.

Think about it – in the event you spend $10 on a keyword and get one hundred visits in a month, that’s $1000 that you allocated. If you put the very same quantity into Search engine optimization for that keyword, and brought your rankings towards the front web page of Google, you’d receive the very same exposure. Plus, as soon as you’re on page a single of Google, you may usually stay there with minimal effort and no further expense. Just look at the screenshot below, taken from Market Samurai, that shows the estimated values of various keywords on a project I recently worked on:

SEO Values

Those keywords are worth thousands, every day! I’m currently working to gain ground for these and have already broken into the first and second pages. In case you’re wondering, the SEO value is a figure determined by multiplying the estimated amount of organic traffic that term would bring to a site times the adwords cost per click.

Alternatively, you possibly can continue flowing income into PPC, however it is going to be a never-ending work. PPC remains attractive to marketers as a result of the capacity to effortlessly measure PPC success. Conventional marketers like to see solid metrics on ROI, CTR and other relevant data they can use to analyze campaigns. Web optimization is not as very easily quantifiable, but nonetheless a great Search engine optimisation campaign is usually measured and weighed effectively.

A number of studies on visitor trends and SERPs indicate that 90% of searches click to the initial page of success. The visibility of a natural listing, despite the fact that possibly reduce within the web page, still attracts twice as many clicks than paid ones. Why is this? I side around the reason that it’s because of implied endorsement; they trust search engines to deliver the very best effects, and many people today see paid seek out success as artificial advertising.

The bottom line is that if you ever need to save funds on PPC, you should invest in Search engine optimization. And I should point out, this is not an article meant to bash PPC. SEM has numerous advantages, and cannot be discounted, and in fact I use it all the time. That said, organic research benefits bring a steady flow of targeted visitors, just the same as paid ones, if not a lot more. Plus, when you’ve gained a solid ranking for a keyword you were previously bidding for on a daily basis, you can reduce your budget or even expand and test new ppc keywords.