Imagine a clothing store with only one pair of pants. Or a perhaps a restaurant with only one kind of dish and portion size. Maybe a car dealership with only one kind of car. Generally one size does NOT fit all so why are so many 'SEO firms' trying to offer flat rate packages? The very heart of marketing is the attempt to make one product or service more desirable over another. Why should we neglect that when building and promoting our web sites?

No two clients or even customers are the same. Why do SEO businesses attempt to offer the same service to all of their clients. Take a look at competitors, many will have three different 'packages' you can choose from. The package strategy fails on a couple of fronts. Firstly, no two web sites are the same. Secondly, no two industries are the same. Thirdly, no two customers are the same. Now I understand you want to offer YOUR product or service to a wide audience, but that doesn't mean the way you market and build your brand can or should be done like everybody else. Read the rest of this entry »

Starting Dec 1st, 2009, the FTC will impose rules in an attempt to control disclosure on blogs. For some highlights on the updates visit PCWorld. Basically, common sense needs to imposed when blogging. That means if you review items for compensation you should disclose that. IF you are defaming another product and you sit in a position of power or you're a competitor, you should disclose that (even if you're doing it through other social networks like Facebook). Also, you should pay attention to your own comments policy, and where you comment.

Essentially the biggest issues is disclosure for paid testimonials which makes sense. Disclosure builds trust with your readers, plus, it's hard to develop any level of legitimacy if your blog is full of incoherent product reviews, so maybe just label yourself for what you are -- a blogger who gets free stuff to talk about stuff. Read the rest of this entry »

Part of the overall experience of a user is the site speed. You don't notice it unless it's bad, but web sites on average load very quickly in our modern internet age. Anything over 2 seconds seems slow. For the most part this has been an issue of user experience, which is of course very important to the success of your web site. Google has started a push to recognize user behaviour metrics as part of their ranking index, it goes without saying speed would eventually fall into that category.

Turns out, it will/has. The new Google Caffeine update (the latest algorithm to roll out) will come out in the New Year, and SITE SPEED will be factor.

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Distinct SEO Inc. provides more than SEO services for our clients. In fact, we do our best to distance ourselves from an exclusive SEO offering. We believe that the realm of web marketing is comprised of many crucial components, of which SEO is but a mere subset. In reality, web promotion, content development, web development, branding, and so forth, are key cogs to any online marketing strategy.

Lately, we've been rolling out some of our web development and design capabilities to our clients. We'd like to share with you one of our latest partners, a non-profit organization, who were looking for custom solution to a brand new venture. Read the rest of this entry »

I just want to jot down a quick post on a question that seems to be keep cropping up. It usually stems from new web sites who are approached by third party vendors or simply through owners/webmasters doing some quick research.

The question revolves around submitting your web site to the search engines. Should you do it and does it help?

The answer is no on both accounts. Read the rest of this entry »

The emergence of the social networking tool Twitter, which enables users to post snippets of up to 160 characters per post (tweet), has raised some questions on its impact on the SEO industry. Frankly, I think this is the wrong question to ask. Twitter has only a distant and indirect relation to SEO.

However, it has a HUGE impact to the overall web marketing picture.

On one hand you can develop a following of interested, lurking, and completely useless followers. Some may be induced to visit your web site through your tweets, some may even link to you. That's the indirect benefit to your SEO endeavors. But given the nature of Twitter, this type of tactic doesn't fit within the ethos of network. Let me explain. Read the rest of this entry »

You've installed WordPress for the first time, lined up your theme and have added a few wordpress plugins. Now you have to write some posts and you ask the questions, "is there a system I should employ while writing?"

The answer is 'yes' and 'no'. No you shouldn't change your writing style or purpose for the sake of search engines or Wordpress. Yes, there are are some best practices you need to follow when writing which will help maintain clarity and popularity. So pay attention to the following suggestions, they'll go a long way to help increase visibility and visitors.

Title Tags

The single most important element that will help your visitors find your content is going to be your post title. Think of something that's not too short, that's relevant, that's appealing and attention grabbing, and also contains relevant keywords to your content. Avoid punctuation like commas, quotes, or periods. (You don't require a full stop at the end of your title.)

For example, rather than a title: I like Wordpress

I'd write something like: Distinct SEO's Top 10 Reasons We Love Wordpress

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*We've updated this post on September 30th with our tools and plugins for your benefit.*

Wordpress is probably the easiest and most malleable blog tool on the web that functions on Apache. Although it doesn't permit complete customization, it does provide a solid blogging tool with many additions to keep you're information and SEO needs satisfied.

We don't use many plugins, but over the years Distinct SEO has learned a few things through trials and tribulations. Here is a list of some of the plugins we use ideal for building a community and optimizing wordpress blogs.

Top Wordpress Plugins for Search Engine Optimization

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