Keith Mithcell is our tech guru and he started to write on our web design blog a couple of weeks ago.  If any of you have any tech questions regarding web design, especially from a tech and SEO perspective, drop him a line or comment on his web design blog.  Here is one of his recent posts, we won’t be writing as many SEO blogs as we use to.  Sorry but we are just too busy with projects at the moment, but we will keep a healthy schedule of at least once a week.  Enjoy this web design blog, and don’t forget to get all of our SEO and blogging advice from our Marketing Book, which is now selling at Amazon.com.

Web Design Inspiration… are you design impared too?

May 22nd, 2008 at 03:59 pm by Keith Mithcell in Design Inspiration

Today It’s all about design and inspiration for the non artistic folk ahem… or design impared. I would consider my self a hack at best when it comes to web design. When at all possible I like to leave the design to the to the designers, AND sometimes I feel like putting myself through the torture of creating a logo from scratch, or a complete web design for friends and family. Let me tell you after ending up looking like this guy a few times I decided there has got to be a better way to come up with foder to fuel my design …. Here are a few trips and trick I use to create designs Design Inspiration.

Where do designers get their inspiration? Talking to clients, using current trends in design, from the project parameters, or maybe right off the ether.

I go to a few sites:
For Logo inspitation check out – http://logopond.com/

For complete web design inspiration check out – http://www.designshack.co.uk

For More in depth design information check out – http://webdesignfromscratch.com/

lastly if you need a color palatte take a look at – http://www.colourlovers.com/

GOT Graphics?

Now That you’ve been inspired the design and creative juices are flowing…or at least trickling where are you going come up with graphics? the subtle aspects of a sites design that add that extra touch. Hell lets bust out the Wacom tablet fire up adobe illustrator and start drawing! oh you don’t have a wacom tablet? Ohhhhhh riiiiiight, how about a graphics editing program? No? Ok forget the wacom tablet too much hassle. but the graphics editing program is essential. I personally I would choose adobe illustrator and photoshop. The reason being is that it’s the industry standard. If you want to go the Open source route use GIMP a great photo and image manipulation app. now that you’ve got an editing program lets go find some images and graphics
For vector images check – http://www.freevectors.net

for Free photos check – http://www.freephotosbank.com

Don’t forget to google as a resource, to find similar sites there are many out there. please provide attribution the authors of images and photos when appropriate.

**As always none of our Free blogs could be possible without our clients, and we could not be blogging regulary and provide up to date information to help you.  We thank our clients such as web design St. Louis firm Art Works Design, Air purifiers by Steril Air purifier, Designer Jewelry by LoveRelic.com.  We also want to mention that all of our insights can be found in our Marketing book, I am sure you have seen the title.  It really does cover all of your SEO and blogging tips to help you promote your business.  We also want to promote our Seattle Real Estate Agent Alex Zeiday with NWgreathomes.com, he is not only a client but a friend.  He and his team specialize in Kirkland real estate, and Kenmore real estate, both great Seattle real estate neighborhoods.  

Just wanted to let you all know that we reserved a URL today, and launched a sister site to this SEO Blog, it’s our iSeoServices.org site.  This will be our website for marketing our SEO services.  Why did we need a separate URL?  We didn’t, but this was such a great URL for the keywords SEO Services, but in this case we wanted to keep our commercial services on a different location.  You all know that having your Keyword in the URL is the best SEO strategy.  I can’t believe it happened within hours, We have been thinking about the URL for days, but were not sure of it.  We finally made the move today, and I feel really good about it.

Webmaster Guidelines

Click on the link above to go to the Google Webmaster Guidelines, you can’t ignore them, even if you are an ethical SEO Services provider like us. I saw a reference to them, when I was doing a search for Seattle SEO’s. I was wondering who would show up in Seattle SEO’s, And, Google’s Matt Cutt’s blog showed up within the top 30. Even though, his blogs are good to read, not very relevant though hun:-). So I decided to write this blog about quality. Google’s webmaster rules are important to know, but more importantly if you try to write Quality blogs and quality content, you should never have to worry about it. I do a lot of links in my blogs, you are wondering duh right?

Don’t worry you can too, Matt Cutts provides lots of links in his blogs, just make sure you write well, contextually linking is just fine.

Here are some SEO tips for writing Quality blogs:

1. Write as if you are telling a story, make it your story, your opinion, your feelings.

2. You can write about anything, but use photos to jazz up your blogs, yes I wrote about this a couple of days ago. Did I mention that our community blogs site got over 500 visitors just in one day, because someone uploaded a famous person’s wedding photo? Yes, don’t forget about pictures to SEO your blogs.

3. Write with numbers or bullets, when providing information, it keeps readers focused, and makes the flow easier.

4. Use Tags at the bottom, just the words tags are important.

5. Be Casual, means be conversational, that’s the beauty of blogs. I was reading a blog of a CEO of one of the best SEO Services companies this weekend, and I found his tone to conversational and professional.

6. You might write a lot blogs, but it’s the quality so keep your content focused, and always try to provide helpful information.

7. Be newsworthy? Blogs are considered news by the search engines, because the blogsphere really is a great way to get end user content. The search engines such as Google like to empower end users and unique voices not just commercial promotion. What makes your blogs news worthy? That could be a blogs topic of another day, maybe even a series. I heard a news commentator talk about news and what makes it to the news. I think he was right on, “SOMETHING UNIQUE, SOMETHING STRANGE, SOMETHING THAT MAKES YOU STOP AND SAY–Can’t be”. Usually these are emotionally charged human type stories.

I think one of the biggest attractive traits of blogs is that, it’s the perspective of an average person, not the washed down version of a politician. So get the truth out, go be newsworthy!

**By the way, I am trying to increase the quality of our blogs, can you tell?  Also, as mentioned above Keith reserved and launched the very cool URL for our Seattle SEO business, call iSeoServices.org and .com. Hopefully those will get us some Seattle SEO clients. One of our major contracts ended last week, and we are desperately trying to gain more SEO Services business. Yes, the Internet works, I am actually working on a proposal from a lead we got online.

Thanks to all of our supporters, we have a number of prospects and leads for SEO Services because of our network of friends. Keep an eye out for businesses that spend a lot on pay per click, there are a perfect match for our SEO Services.  Also, we are launching the business social networking site hopefully soon, by the end of the week.  It’s been weeks that we have been working on it, hence a lot of our pictures point to it.

Lately our blogs feel to be more sales and biased oriented towards our own products and SEO Services. We are cautious of trying not to be, and we are not journalists. We are a for profit company, and looking forward to the day we actually have profits:-). Things are much better than they were 9 months ago, it’s been the course of SEO services and selling some of our energy saving heaters and products that has elevated our revenues. We are pushing for a few more SEO Services clients, hence the focus on SEO related blogs the last couple of days. We do get a lot of comments on our blogs, so I do believe that we are providing good information.

Our SEO Tools at LinkMint.com are free, and we wanted to highlight some of the features, so below is a post from the SEO Tools overview. A lot of SEO services companies are getting in the SEO Tools business. We actually are coming from the SEO Tools in to the SEO Services business. Why? Because there are so many adequate Free SEO tools on the market, we felt that we didn’t want to charge for them.  Also, we didn’t want to do SEO services, being a services company is hard enough, not to mention being a SEO Services Company. Before we talk about SEO tools features, I want to mention that blogging often with the most appropriate keywords in your blogs is the #1 SEO Tools you can utilize. So as always blog often!

Here are a few features that every SEO Tool should have:

1. Keyword Searches, no one can beat Google Analytics and Google Adwords, so in this case most SEO tools will never live up to the standards, they just don’t have the information.

2. SERP (Search Engine Result Pages), to see progress, we have to see our rankings even if they are not in the top 50. So instead of sitting their and clicking on Google and hitting next an SEO tools should have ranking checkers.

3. Submission Tools, automated submission should be done at a minimum, but having a tool do it for you is a lot easier.

**To be honest with you I can’t think of any more features, that are really imperative in a SEO Tool, so maybe that is why most SEO services companies don’t use one, and I personally don’t feel good about charging for it. I think providing SEO Coaching maybe a better way for us to do SEO Services in a scalable way, and we may offer than in the near future. I actually called up Rand’s Fishkin’s SEOMoz last year at this time, I spoke with his mom, who is a very very nice lady. Little, did I know at the time, that rock star of SEO blogs, was starting his premium services. And, still we have not launched our SEO Coaching, but some day, until than check out the free SEO Tools features:

Linkmint.com currently features 22 tools for SEO, SEM and Internet Marketing when you login to the linkmint tools page you will see 4 tool sections. Web site promotion tools, web site analysis tools, link popularity tools, and miscellaneous tools.
Getting started using linkmint Seo Tools .
1) Create an account – sign up with your email address on the linkmint tools page. After submission of your email address you will receive a confirmation email. Confirm your account and log in to linkmint.com by clicking the link in your email or by going to the linkmint.com homepage and clicking on the linkmint tools tab
2) Manage your account – After login to the linkmint tools manage your linkmint.com account by clicking the Manage Account link:
a) Input at least one web site in to analyze by clicking on the new website link under the manage account link
b) Input keywords or key-phrases, corresponding to the website you entered by clicking on the new keywords link, selecting the correct URL and entering keywords or key-phrases separated by commas. If you need some guidance in creating keywords selection visit our Keywords Search page.
3) Manage your search engines – click the Manage SE link under the Manage Account link. A drop down list of Search engines in our system are there. Select the search engines you are targeting for your sites then click submit
4) Manage profile – The Manage Profile link under Manage Account link contains all your settings for changing parameters on your account. You can make changes to your search engine selection, keyword selection for a given URL, and you password for your account.
Now that you are set up on Linkmint.com go ahead and start analyzing your sites to learn about the individual tools please click the pages on the left. For a general description of the uses of the tools in each category continue to read below.

General use for each SEO tool section

Web site promotion tools – This Section contains promotional tools for a web site. A webmaster would use this section to search keyword and keyphrase rankings and compare them to the number of pages that use the searched keywords and phrases. Calculate keyword density for each keyword given, get a percentage of keywords to other words in your site, optimize density for your prefered search engines standards. Create meta tags from keywords, That are ready to cut and paste in to your sites code. generate Submit a website to all the major search engines at once with a few clicks. Check a web sites ranking on a certain keyword or phrase on google***, yahoo, MSN, or other major search engines, see where you place. robots text telling a search bot to follow all your site pages or not to search certain pages. Optimize keywords / phrases that you have picked out for a site.

Web site analysis tools – Webmasters can use these tools to analyze various sites for meta tags of any given site, check out your friends sites or competitors sites. Check out the internal and external links in a site with a page link analysis. Use the website analysis to keep track of how many hits your site gets with a custom code generated for your site. Get a sites source code by using the page snooper tool. Want to know how your site will look in a search engine query? The search engine simulator will give you a good idea. Do a Whois search to find out who owns a domain. Is your site’s html valid? test it with the html validator tool.

Link popularity tools - This is a useful set of tools to see how a sites links compare relative to one another. It is also possible to see how friends and compeitors websites compare with link popularity. these searches are done specific to each selected search engine*** .

Miscellaneous tools - This set of tools is a webmasters mixbag of goodies. Get your domain name typos, and keyword / Phrase typos generated automatically. check how a search engine spider sees text on your front page. You can also access google dance. google dance can help webmasters figure out when google may be recalculating your sites PR ranking. google does this “dance” monthly where the servers www, www2, and www3 for google.com go through the calculation. you can determine when google is “dancing” with your site when the results within the three servers are not the same. Want to do a page rank search? use the page rank search to compare the page rank of web page results for a specifed keyword on google, or use a page rank lookup for a single domain on google. Use the site link analyzer to get how many links are external and internal on a site. then use the future tool to estimate where your site may end up for its PR rank in google next month.
***must have a google API Key to Search google for keyword / phrase ranking, get a google API Key. Check out FAQ questions on google API keys

Lessons Learned As An In-House SEO Consultant

An Article above is from on of the best sources for SEO articles and insight, SearchEngineLand.com site, as mentioned before we select the best articles for you and try to bring them here.  We are currently focused on the topic of SEO Services and therefore the title of the blog, SEO Services In-house or Outsource?  As mentioned in the article, SEO talent is very hard to find, and so companies are forced to outsource.  The hybrid model of an Outsource + In-house model is best, for knowledge transfer in house.  One of the most important aspects of SEO Services is that the in house team is aware of the Link sources, to make sure that the client has full control of the inbound links.   More on this subject later, do check out the article above.

Before I start to rattle off some great insights from our SEO tips and Internet Marketing vault, I want to be clear that you understand that we are biased. We are in the business of SEO Services, but we still want to provide you the most information as possible, to help you make the best decisions to grow your business. The objective of this article is to convince you that we at MyTypes, Inc. are very knowledgeable about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and that we are one of the best SEO Services companies in the world. Proof is in the pudding (well actual Google results), and our results should already tell you what you need to hear. We have engaged in SEO services for years, and we can execute ethical SEO strategies to get you top results, as our proof is in the pudding. We don’t advertise, here is a little self promotion on a minor note, we never wanted to do SEO Services, and until recently have alway just advised clients to do their own internal SEO services in the past. We have always wanted to just focus on our Blogging platform. We have delivered top results for large companies such as ITEX Barter, which is a public company. And for smaller businesses such as real estate website BoatCommunities.com, and LoveRelic.com a designer Jewelry company.

While we continue to engage with large and small companies for SEO services, we only want to work with/for a handful of clients. In the last year, we have also started to SEO for our own products in silver jewelry and infrared heater market segments. We have been providing professional SEO services for clients since Jan of 2006, and we have done it for our own products since 2003. We are pushing forth with a professional SEO Services strategy, and therefore we came up with the idea of Ten Questions to ask a SEO services company:

1. What is the most important factor in your SEO Strategy to achieve top 10 Google Results?

2. How many major Keywords do you have in the top 10 in Google for SEO and/or other related keywords?

3. Providing SEO Services for major Keywords is very difficult, how many keywords for your client’s major keywords do you have in the top 10?

4. What is your overall SEO services strategy and plan for us, your clients, what will you specifically do for us?

5. How do you help us pick the best keywords to SEO for our business? This is probably the most important question of our 10, if they shy away from major keywords, this is where you want to look for clues.  Why not go after the biggest most traffic based keywords, make sure you get a straight answer, if not ask us!

6. What SEO Tools do you use, and for what?

7. What is your process for Link aggregation?

8. How much emphasis do you place on Google Page Rank, and it’s value in the SEO Process?

9. How do you SEO for Yahoo and MSN, not just Google?

10. What are your thoughts on Social Networking, Wiki’s, Blogs, and Digg?

**Notice we are not going to give you answers to these questions as other SEO Services providers and competition will use that against us. We are obviously very successful, but we work with you at y our level, we utilize simple but powerful SEO strategies, and if you read our SEO blog, and business blog, at our blogging platforms, you will see that constant focus on content. Google and the best in the SEO Services business world will/should help you develop a comprehensive content strategy. We just happen to have some amazing blogging tools and social networking and internet marketing strategies that simply work. And, for the most part we are willing to be compensated based on a mixture of performance and set hourly work, so you always feel that you are getting the best value.

Google Now Selling SEO Services Via Performics

Check out the article above on Google and it’s acquisition of DoubleClick and the SEO services company that they now own called Performics. A lot of people are against Google offering SEO Services, but I am not totally against the idea. Read the Tech Crunch Blog above by clicking on the link above. Here are my reasons for Google to keep the SEO Services firm:

1 . If Peformics offers SEO services, it legitimizes the SEO services business as a whole for me. Some have said that SEO services should not offered as they are simply too unethical period. Obviously, being one of the best SEO consultants in the Internet Marketing world, I totally disagree. Ethical SEO strategies are part of good content development and web design strategy.

2. Google and Matt Cutts have always been forward and honest about what ranks well for SEO. Matt Cutts even shares in a video Ethical SEO Tips. They will only continue to be more honest with not only their clients, but the world, as they will be watched more carefully.

3. We need oversight and ethical SEO strategies right from the Google mouth, while I would like to think Google will share it with there peformics group, we all already know what ranks well. It’s the Title Tags, Keyword in URL, great content, and high PR links back to your website or blogs.

4. We need Google to continue and we need to watch what the clients of Performics are doing as far as their rankings. Whatever changes and they are doing it, we need to understand and emulate.

Why invent the wheel, let Google tell us what is the best SEO Tip, and let’s do it. For most of us that means we have to write lots of blogs, and get lots of people to write about our blogs or contents. On a side note, Did any of you notice a little more focus from us on our Internet Marketing and Social Networking lately? We are behind schedule in our launch of the marketing and business social networking site, but it got a lot closer today. Keith, did some amazing simplification of the front end and all seems to be working in our tech area.

Now the battle is between strategic position of the social network, should it continue as a business social network? Or should it position itself in to a marketing social network, a social networking site focused on marketing people, SEO consultants, and Search marketing, and Internet marketing professionals? Any comments, which is the best strategy?

By the way, did I mention that we are looking for a couple of SEO Services clients at the moment? We just had a large SEO Services contract get reduced as the project scope just changed, don’t worry they are still clients, and raving fans. If you know any one who need any SEO consultants or SEO Services, please pass on our information.