Peter Vatistas

For those of you who are serious about building extremely quality links and have a padded budget, I recommend checking out a service called Hosted Marketing Pages by Text Link Brokers.

Hosted Marketing Pages are an extremely powerful link-building method that are optimized pages with content relevant to your keywords. The Hosted Marketing Pages are hosted in Text Link Broker’s partner sites which are all above a Google PR5 and have between 10 and 10,000 links pointing to them.

The great thing about this service is these pages are optimized content based on your keywords. They contain embedded links that are natural looking - much more powerful than links located on the side of bottom of a page.

HMP’s (Hosted Marketing Pages) also give you more control over your online reputation. Because your adding many HMP’s across many domains with your optimized content, you build a stronger presence for your site and your reputation, helping to lower other (not so nice) pages in the SERPS along with your competitors.

So what do you guys think? Who here has tried HMP’s before and what was your level of success? Click here to learn more about Hosted Marketing Pages.

Want to talk about Hosted Marketing Pages in detail? Check out this thread in the Peter-V Forum.

Here are a few quick and easy steps I suggest to optimize your WordPress blog:

Permalinks
Permalink Settings > Custom Structure
/%post_id%/%postname%/

Mod Rewrite (Make sure you have Mod Rewrite enabled on your server)
Permalink Settings > .htaccess

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Ping your posts
Writing Settings > Update Services
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.wasalive.com/ping/
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://www.blogsdominicanos.com/ping/
http://www.xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.php
http://www.feedsky.com/api/RPC2

In a following post I will provide my list of WordPress plugins that I use and recommend.

I’ve consulted for a countless number of companies over the years and one thing I’ve noticed more recently is the concern many companies have for their online reputation. Social media allows anyone with something to say to be heard, everyone has a voice on the web and it’s up to you to find out what their saying about you and your company.

In the past I’ve set up my clients with Google Alerts to monitor what’s being said about them and who’s saying it. One of the downfalls of Google Alerts is it lacks features; it’s a strong tool but it’s missing the ability to monitor all social/search sites, produce RSS feeds and the ability to share the information effortlessly across your network of contacts.

Trackur goes beyond just Google content. It tracks images, videos, Digg, del.icio.us, Twitter, as well as the usual news and blog stuff. Trackur allows users to submit multiple keywords–such as their name, products, and brands–and automatically monitor news, blogs, images, video, and other social media for any mention of those keywords.

Users can view their results using a cool AJAX enabled interface and get updates via email or RSS. You can save multiple searches, add filter keywords, save discovered items, and sort the results the way you want. Think about this, by using RSS feeds you can quickly integrate the feeds into your company’s intranet site so the right people can have the right information without any extra steps! Even better, integrate these feeds directly into their email client and spare them their inbox!!

Google Alerts, can’t do any of that!

If your one of the thousands of companies interested in hearing what the world is saying about you, then I suggest signing up for the 14-day free trial so you can see for your self. Even if your an individual, wouldn’t it be nice to see whats being said about you, your friends, family or even or your boss? How about an old girlfriend or childhood buddy?

Trackur works for your peace of mind, every hour of every day.

Here is a video-walk through created by the maker of Trackur, Andy Beal:

Click here to sign up for the 14-day Trackur trial.

It’s funny how private I’ve been about my SEO techniques and where I spend my money to help optimize my clients sites. It’s not so much that I tried to hide some secret SEO technique that makes my client’s sites rank #1 on Google, its more resources than anything (which is my secret weapon).

The most valuable thing I spend my money on by far is events, website memberships and books. Of course I buy links, I pay for analytical services, content and etc but those come secondary to my budget and many times I never spend a single dime on them.

So what resources I spend my money on and recommend?

SEOmoz - Get the premium membership, well worth the money.

SEO Book Training Program & the SEO Book - Either is fine, I find the training program is a lot like the book with updated content & a community presence.

For resources that is basically it; I’ve read probably close to 100 books on internet marketing and I’m a member of probably every SEO forum on the internet but with everything I know now the only two resources that actually teach me new things are the two listed above.

As for events (physical conferences, forums, etc) I recommend the following:

SMX: The Search Marketing Expo - $1395 for an all access pass.

SES: Search Engine Strategies - $1795 for a platinum passport.

PubCon: Search Marketing Conferences - $799 for a full pass.

Forums I recommend:

Search Engine Land

Sphinn

The V7 Network

Search Engine Watch

SEO Guy

Another thing I like to do is track the experts in search engine optimization. Here is a list of people I highly respect and follow religiously:

Aaron Wall

Chris Hooley

Andy Beal

Matt Cutts

Andy Hagans

Danny Sullivan

C.K. Chung

Lee Oden

Neil Patel

Patrick Sexton

Todd Malicoat

Content baiting is a technique I have utilized for many years while building social communities and blogs. As an internet marketing consultant I am faced with many challenges while developing client’s social communities and blogs; the most challenging and important pieces to any site’s growth and success are content and links.

While I was consulting for a large student loan company, marketing a new community site, I regularly contacted webmasters for links. Because of how new the site was I constantly had issues getting other sites to link to me, the biggest reason why I had such a hard time was the lack of content. This went on for a few weeks and while I was still steadily building links, I wasn’t satisfied with the amount I was getting vs. the amount of content being produced by the internal staff.

One late night I decided to try something new, I emailed a handful of webmasters in relevant content fields and I asked them for help. I stated that we are a new, quality social-website in need of exposure and content. Instead of asking for a link, I asked if they would be interested in writing an article about their product, solution or experience and link to their site within their content. At the end of each email I added how beneficial this is to their exposure and if they would reciprocate the “love” by providing a link to us (even if its to their article on our site, I didn’t care).

Out of the 30+ emails I sent that night I received over 20 replies by the next afternoon; out of the 20 replies all but 2 agreed, linked and produced content for us. By the end of the week I had replicated this process several hundred times and the response was overwhelming - I had more content than I knew what to do with and my cup of link juice was overflowing big time!

Content baiting has proven to be a fantastic way to kick start the growth of many types of sites. One very important part to this technique is how you communicate to the potential content providers and link providers. If you really feel there will be a mutually beneficial connection then say that, let them know how you like their site and how you would love to give back to them for making you laugh, teaching you or getting you a better deal on your insurance. Ask them for their help and give them yours, people will respect you if your honest and sincere.

Good luck and please let me know if you’ve used content baiting, I would love to hear your hit and miss stories.

As an SEO I always try to stay up to date with techniques, tools and information. A few years ago I started my own Internet Marketing firm offering SEO, SEM, Analytics, Affiliate and Ad marketing services for medium to large companies and over the years I’ve compiled quite a list of SEO tools.

Within the last three weeks I’ve received over 150 requests for what tools and/or applications I use specifically for search engine optimization. Below you will find my list of tools, applications and services I use on a regular basis, I hope this information helps and keep the questions coming if they don’t! :)

Analytics:

Google Analytics
Omniture SiteCatalyst
Web CEO’s HitLense
StatsCounter

Keyword Research Tools:

WordTracker
Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool
Microsoft Ad Intelligence (Excel 2007 Plug in)
Web CEO
SEOBook Keyword Suggestion Tool
SEO for Firefox

Link Analysis Tools:

SEOElite
Web CEO
SEO for Firefox

Competitive Research Tools:

HitWise
Alexa
Compete
SpyFu
Quantcast
DomainTools

SERP Rank Research & Reporting:

Web CEO
SEOBook Rank Checker
Rank Tracker
Free Monitor for Google

SEO Web Browser Tools:

The Best SEO Plug-ins for Firefox

If you have suggestions on SEO tools please comment on this post, I’m always looking for tools to save me time and headaches!

I thought this was pretty funny:

While Google’s spider “crawled” the whatsmyip.org site it managed to record it’s own IP in the title and publish it in the Google SERPS. Funny stuff.

As you all know I am an avid user of Web CEO for my SEO/SEM solutions company. Although there are a few other tools and applications I use, Web CEO is by far the most powerful and stable application I have ever used in this field. I easily spend the majority of my day using Web CEO for just about all steps of my search engine optimization for all my clients.

Become an expert in SEO quickly and easily:

* Web CEO software package consisting of 12 potent tools to organize your efforts
* Professional Training Course in Search Engine Marketing to learn all the best practices

Web CEO is a full-range search engine optimization software with advanced site troubleshooting and web analytics functionality. Here are a few facts about Web CEO:

The choice of 440,000+ businesses.
Web CEO stands on guard of the rankings of IBM and Motorola. These companies have no right to make mistakes. What about you?

Simple and user-friendly.
Packed with powerful features, Web CEO still can boast an ultra user-friendly interface that turns a novice into an SEO expert right away after installation.

Completely Safe.
Employing Google API and cutting-edge human emulation techniques, Web CEO makes the optimization process absolutely safe for you and your site. Some of the important tools you will find in the package will help you:

* Get suggestions for new keywords relevant to your business and research your own keywords
* Get optimization advice and tweak your Web pages in friendly editing environment
* Create link partnerships
* Keep track of your site’s rankings and links
* Get comprehensive real-time visitor reports

I’m sure your looking at this like I just wrote a sales pitch but if you’ve read my blog before you’ll know I don’t sell a damn thing. In addition to that fact - WebCEO is free! Just download, install and get your rank on.

Download the free edition of Web CEO and get access to the Training Course now!

In addition to Web CEO’s awesome application and training program I totally recommend that you grab the latest copy of SEO Book by Aaron Wall. It doesn’t matter how much you know about search engine optimization/marketing, SEO Book is by far one of the best (if not THE BEST) reference and training materials available today.

That. Just. Happened.

I use a great application called WebCEO to track and manage various parts of my SEO/SEM efforts. As much as I would like to get into how awesome their software and support is I would rather talk about the people behind WebCEO.

A couple days before Christmas I received an envelope from Kherson, Ukraine. I wasn’t sure why I had received a letter from the Ukraine considering I don’t know anyone from there, I thought it was some sort of mistake or just a marketing piece. I opened the envelope and pulled out a very rich and shiny holiday card with a little WebCEO logo at the bottom. I figured it was just a holiday promotion printed in the masses - I was wrong.

I opened the card and found a long, had written letter addressed to me - wishing me a safe and happy holiday season. The letter was well written and by the looks of it not rushed at all. In addition the letter never once mentioned anything about business, their products, money, or a holiday deal - just a letter hoping and wishing I have a wonderful holiday.  WOW.

Now this is what I call great marketing, you see they didn’t have to mention what they are about or what they are selling - not even a holiday coupon or discount - just a hand written personal letter directed to me. It made me feel great! I was very impressed with what I saw and very happy to be a customer of theirs. More importantly (for them) it made me think about WebCEO and their products.

In my opinion this is the kind of thing that separates companies apart; even though there aren’t many comparable applications to WebCEO available today I would stick with WebCEO regardless. Something like this shows me (the customer) that I am important to them and they care about me and my business (which they do).
Take note of this guys, a great marketing campaign with little cost and a bigger impact than you could imagine. Thank you WebCEO - Happy Holidays!