Happy clients and years of experience, providing social media, search engine optimization, and search engine marketing services to New York City businesses and beyond.

This post is a ranking experiment for search engine optimization services in New York. If you found this post through Google, Yahoo, or MSN well then it’s working . For more information about Squareoak’s seo, sem, blog development, or viral content services please click here.

Since Squareoak is located in New York City it’d be nice to rank for the keyword phrase which is the title of this post. Not that location matters when working remotely but still, local clients are always nice. After a bit of KW research I found that search engine optimization pairs geographically with Michigan first (which I thought was a bit strange) and Seattle second in terms of search volume. New York was not in the list so I guess that volume’s a little low, but no matter. Google is telling me that there are 3.1 million instances of this keyword phrase in its index.

There are a few things I’ve done to maximize this post’s exposure using only wordpress and without any sort of link building. Using the All in One SEO WordPress plugin, we’re autogenerating the description tags from the first paragraph of the post. Hence the slightly cheesy intro. Then, I’ve gone to WordPress’ Manage tab and then to the Writing sub tab. Scroll down and you’ll see the services that WordPress pings when you publish a post. The default service is http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ but I’ve updated mine to include the following:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

If you decide to enter all of these services into your WordPress you’ll have to be aware that WordPress naturally pings all of these services the instant you press the publish button. WordPress will churn and churn until all of these services are pinged and more often than not, WordPress will time out. So what we’ll need to do is install the No Ping Wait WordPress plugin which does exactly what it sounds like.

After we get this in order the post is published and I view it through my feed reader. I’m checking out my own feed because with Feedburner you can add Feed Flair. My flair is setup to include a great site called outside.in which will allow me to geo tag this post.

So that’s it. That’s all I’m going to do for now so we’ll see how well this works. And if you’re worried about content scrapers, let them do a little link building for you by adding the RSS footer WordPress plugin.

One of the most interesting and exciting parts of search marketing for me is the competitive necessity for adaptation. A tactic I laud to no end. This post will be a short one since it focuses on one particular website but a very important one. One that i depend upon for consistently replenishing my social artillery. The site name has an odd and almost anti-mnemonic quality to it; Go 2 Web 2.0 is a constantly updated directory of new sites that are attempting to help us (and sometimes themselves) make the world an easier place. There are all sorts of tools, apps, rep management, bookmarking, social utilities, etc, etc, that are listed here. You can hover over each logo and a little informational blurb will pop up. You can also sort by tags. This site is a phenomenal resource which can help introduce you to new tools, apps and ideas that you may be able to leverage to beneficial ends.

I’ve used SU advertising once before but wanted to do a revisit and take a second look at how effective…or not this service really is. At just five cents per page view it seems like a pretty good deal but I’ve noticed some discrepancies in my analytics that could make me think twice about advertising again.

I started a campaign with $100 and budgeted that for $10 per day. This equals 200 page views per day. So every day the campaign is running I should see 200 page views in my analytics right? Well, not quite. As of 4:00PM Friday SU was reporting 200 page views but my analytics (Mint) was reporting 156 and Google analytics reported 163. Today being the fourth day of this campaign, SU is reporting 801 page views, Mint is reporting 690, and GA is reporting 631.

A friend suggested that this discrepancy might be due to fast clicking where people are hammering the SU button so it’s recorded as a page view on SU’s end but not within analytics.

Has anyone else encountered this issue? I’d love to hear if others have noticed this.

Sometimes I get so caught-up in work that I forget how important it is to read through my list of seo feeds. Glen posted a nice article on Five Sneaky Ways to Build Website Traffic. In his post he mentions the RefControl Firefox Plugin. First time I have seen this one, thank you James Abbatiello for creating it. Nifty little tool which allows you to control your referring address. Just enter your site’s domain and every site you visit will think it’s where you came from. There are some tactics out there which talk about ways to abuse this (not recommended) but if you’re into that sort of thing then I’m sure you’ll find the tips you’re looking for. I was talking to Tim about this a bit who mentioned you can set up your user agent switcher (another Firefox plugin by Chris Pederick) to make it look like your user agent is your domain. Tim also suggested making a landing page for RefControl so that when people visit your referring address they know why your domain is seen as the referrer. Good stuff guys, thanks for the great tips!