My Story of Growing & Selling An SEO Agency

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In 2003 I started an internet marketing consulting firm called Ephricon Web Marketing.  At first it was a one-man-show and I offered a wide range of services from website design to email marketing to search engine optimization.  The latter of which was just starting to come onto the horizon with Yahoo, MSN, Excite, Alta Vista, … Read more

What kind of links can you safely build for SEO benefit?

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So it’s been about 6 years since I’ve posted on this blog.  Wow!  Well I’ve been busy running a growing agency and had other priorities.  Hence the default WP template here and lack of general direction and purpose.  Anyhow, I’ve recently (mid-2013) sold my ownership in the agency and will be serving as an advisor/consultant moving forward, which means I have more free time in my day-to-day to provide verbal discourse such as the below.  Enjoy!  🙂

Question:  What kind of links can you safely build for SEO benefit in 2014 and beyond?

Simply put, none.

It’s depressing to say that, and I think just a bit “unfair” too, but just because I don’t like the situation doesn’t make it less true.

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Categories SEO

Blog Themes and Widgets

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Customizing a blog is so much easier today than it was just 1-2 years ago.  It was a headache back then.  The separation of content and design (CSS movement) has played a big part in this.   So has the ability to customize and use custom domains on third-party hosted services like Blogger and WordPress.com, as … Read more

Oh yeah, another blog (Lead-Gen SEO)

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Just created one on Lead Generation & SEO as a way to test out Blogger, and it seems as though I’m taking an interest to it. I don’t have time to manage one blog, much less two… but I’ll figure this out as we go along. This site may turn into more of a professional … Read more

Baltimore SEO Meetup # 4

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Okay so its been two months since I’ve last posted and even then it was not very frequent. I think I’ve come to the realization that I just won’t be able to give much time to maintaining this blog. As such, it will remain a home for my random commentary about SEO, entrepreneurship and pretty … Read more

Baltimore SEO Meetup – September 2007

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Just scheduled it – here are the details: http://seo.meetup.com/75/calendar/6296144/ Other than that, I’ve been SWAMPED lately so no new posts. Honestly moving forward I will likely use this blog periodically rather than regularly. I need to stop spreading myself so thin!

Q&A – PPC Content Site Distribution on Google

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As has been my theme lately, here is an inquiry of a client for whom we set up a basic PPC campaign for a short period. The client wanted us to help set it up and then they would manage it themselves. Here is a parting question of sorts:

1. I paused some of the lower performers today.
[Jon Payne] Excellent. This should improve your efficiency. PPC marketing is all about continually stopping whats not working and doing more of what is working.

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Our Comcast Nightmare – Comcast SUCKS!

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Executive Summary: Six months after we moved out of our old office and “transferred” our Comcast internet service to our new office, we were still receiving invoices for the old office… plus those for the new office. Finally they’ve stopped sending those invoices, though we’re still waiting on the refund we were promised. To make things worse, we just got an invoice for Cable TV at the old office. That’s right, we’ve been gone from there for 6 months but somehow we decided to order Cable TV for that office? Unbelieveable.

Detailed Timeline:

Timeline of Comcast’s Ineptitude:

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SEO Meetup Groups

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In follow-up to the launching of our recent Baltimore SEO Meetup Group (my post | press release | group page) I’ve recently seen a few more groups start up.

Rebecca over at SEOmoz gave us a plug in her recent post about meetup groups, and it looks as though her town of Seattle now has its own group, as do Portland and Charlotte (organized by Keith), as well as Virginia – which, truth be told was my inspiration.

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DC / Baltimore SEO Meetup Group

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Hi all – I just created a “meetup group” for those interested in SEO in the DC / Baltimore metro area. Check out the page via link below and sign up for updates if you are interested. We’ll give it a couple of weeks to judge the interest and then try to schedule something. Click … Read more

Q&A: Getting a Website Crawled and Indexed

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One of my associates recently sent me an email requesting:

One of the questions during the [recent sales presentation] was: “How often do search bots visit a site?”

I know this is a “it depends” kind of answer, but I’d love to get a paragraph from you on that so I can send it to them.

A paragraph or two? Nonsense. A half dozen? That I can do 🙂 My response:

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Q&A: Banner Ads and New Website Revenue Models

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Its been forever since I’ve written, but that’s how it goes. Here’s another Q&A from an email I got today:

Question:

Jon –

I found your site from a general search of website developers. I am helping my wife build a rough pro-forma for a potential business. What I am curious about, and hopefully you might be able to share some insight with me, is an expected revenue target from advertising on a site (money made from a firm to post banner/ad on her site). Is there a rough ‘guesstimate’ on what “X” traffic would yield in terms of monthly or annual revenue from an advertiser? Can such a thing be a assumed?

Thanks in advance for your time.

My Reply:

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Thoughts on “Flash Websites” and SEO vs. PPC

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Here’s another one of those cases where I copy and paste my reply to a question a new client has asked of me:

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Q: (Asks about his 100% Flash site – meaning its all one Flash file and thus in essence a 1 page website where you can’t easily track page views, conversions, user behavior, etc.)

A: There are several ways you can go about it:

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