Another useful tool is www.ubersuggest.org. Type in "wall decals" and you'll get a massive list of what people are searching for.
Best posts made by MarieHaynes
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RE: Keyword Help! Please!
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RE: Buying Twitter/Facebook Followers
It's funny you should mention this today. In the past I've always been against boosting your facebook or twitter fans. I'm seeing some benefit now though.
As an avid user of facebook, if I see a page that has cool stuff and is followed by thousands of people, I am more likely to follow it. I'm not as likely to become a fan of a page with 100 members even if the content looks decent.
I'm experimenting with spending a few bucks on facebook ads to increase my fan base. These would be truly targeted fans who want to connect with me and my product.
I am finding that I am building some good relationships via facebook and getting some conversions as a result of my fan base.
Plus it's kind of an ego boost to post something and see a bunch of people liking and commenting on it.

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RE: Should You Create A Transcript of Podcasts
Yes! The whole idea is to populate your page with keywords for the search engines to see. You may have the best content in the world on your video, but Google won't know it unless it is in typed words on the page.
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RE: New consultant looking for advice on setting client expectations
I thought I'd chime in here about how a friend of mine got started offering local SEO to others. She contacted several people in her circle of friends and offered to optimize their local campaign for free. This accomplished two things:
1. She got experience and learned what she needed to learn to get these sites ranking well.
2. She got great testimonials from these clients. These testimonials made it really easy for her to get more business.
It sounds like you've already got some good SEO experience, so this may be a little basic for what you are already doing, but I thought I'd mention it!
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RE: .com vs .ca
I have a few dot cas. Given the choice I would likely just go with dot coms in the future.
What is currently on the .com? Is it a competitor? If it's an undeveloped domain you may be ok, but if it is a regular domain then you can be sure that some of your clients are going to end up on their site rather than yours.
I have a real estate site and a large competitor in our city uses, www.ourcity-homes.ca as their domain. I purchased www.ourcity-homes.com and I get a bunch of type in traffic that I'm sure wast meant to go to the other guy! People get confused.
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RE: Ranking for more keywords - Noob question
Wow. I remember having this discussion with you a few years ago. And it's so true. Some of the stuff that I wrote back then has filtered its way up to the top without me doing any link building.
I wonder if I could create an auto-reminder for myself to read this advice every 3 months to remind me to keep creating awesome content and not just get focused on links links links.
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RE: Buying Twitter/Facebook Followers
I agree 99%.

The other 1% comes from the part of me that is more likely to become a fan of a page that has thousands of fans. So, I have this thought that perhaps I will buy a thousand fake fans to make me look more credible.
But, then, the other side of my brain kicks in and says, "Look...you've done things by the book so far, so don't go looking for a cheap solution." I want to create my brand with quality marketing, not cheap gimmicks.....but it can be tempting.
(It's that same kind of temptation that makes me want to go out and buy links sometimes.) -
Resources for creating infographics
I have a great idea for an infographic. Does anyone have any resources for tools or tips on creating an infographic?
I have some design skills, but I'm not a pro. I'm not against paying someone to create it...but my budget is small.
How do you guys create your infographics?
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RE: Syndicating With Blogs
LOL at rel-colonical. I guess this tag tells which is the main site and which is more crappy?

But yes, the rel canonical is your answer here.
Putting that content on multiple blogs is not likely to help your SEO, but if you feel it will be useful to your readers then go ahead and then use the rel-canonical tag to tell the search engines which site is the main one to give credit to.
Have you watched the most recent WBF? It discusses this issue exactly.
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RE: Viral Marketing
I dont' have an answer for you as far as commercial companies go, but I wanted to give my input.
I have found that I just can't predict what goes viral and what doesn't. I have some incredible content on one of my sites that really should have gone viral. It is good stuff that hours and hours were put into. Often this kind of stuff will get a few shares and that's it.
And then, occasionally, an article just takes off. My last one that went super viral was a post that I wrote in about an hour. I never expected it to accomplish much but somehow it hit a nerve with people and enticed people to share it like crazy on FB.
The moral of the story for me is that you can't "make something go viral". The exception, perhaps, is if you have good contacts with top people in your niche. For example, if I created something really really good for SEOs and I got Rand Fishkin to tweet about it, then BOOM, I could have a viral sensation.
Perhaps, instead of "viral marketing", though, what your client really needs is advertising.
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RE: Point an expired domain name to web page on website.
If this domain has no backlinks pointing to it, then most likely the only benefit that it would give you would be for direct type-in traffic. In other words, if this is a url where people would regularly be visiting that url directly it could bring some visitors to your site.
But, if you're just buying it because it's an exact match domain and then forwarding it to a page on your site there is likely no SEO benefit at all.
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RE: Any issues with buying Twitter followers, FB fans, or Youtube subscribers?
The followers you get from these ventures are usually not real followers but fake accounts that are created simply to boost people's numbers. There might be some benefit in buying followers if you want to boost your numbers to show potential new followers that you are popular. But, you're not likely to get any fans that are going to interact with you.
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RE: Should I create mini-sites with keyword rich domain names pointing to my main site?
Check out the replies in this post - it's a very similar question: http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-are-the-good-strategies-using-satellite-sites-in-seo
Keywords in the url are being devalued. Spending time on a bunch of microsites is not going to benefit you much. While you may get some small benefit from having a keyword rich domain, there are a lot of other factors to help you rank. So, if you're going to spend time building links to these little domains, your time would better be spent building links to your main domain.
I would agree that you should have folders on your site so instead of creating the domain best-sunglasses.com have www.mydomain.com/best-sunglasses/
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RE: Could product sample giveaways be seen as 'paying for links'?
Most of my work is on sites that have been dealt a manual unnatural links penalty. I have worked with a couple of sites who were penalized for exchanging free product for a review.
Here's one of the points in the quality guidelines under "link schemes"
- Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link
Now, there are ways that you can do this where an algorithm (i.e. Penguin) is not likely to pick up on what you are doing. But, if you want to be squeaky clean you have to build links as if you were comfortable with someone from the webspam team taking a look. To me, it's all about scale. If you have a small handful of links because you sent someone a product, this is probably ok provided you didn't ask for a link back. But, if you do it on a larger scale then it can easily look like a linking scheme and could open you up to a manual penalty.
Is it wrong to send free product to someone? No. Is it wrong to ask for a link from someone? No, provided you haven't exchanged anything for it. Is it wrong to send free product AND ask for a link? According to Google, yes. So the obvious question is, "How would Google know that I asked for a link? Couldn't I just send free product and hope that they write about it?" I don't know the answer to that question. But if I was doing this I would be careful. If there is any sort of insinuation that the free product comes with the expectation of a link then you're treading on thin ice. Similarly, in my opinion, if you send free product and ask for a review, you are essentially asking for a link.
"One idea we had was to potentially offer bloggers the chance to earn a portion of their purchase back by writing a review on their blog. They'd buy from us and let us know they have a blog, then we'd reimburse them some credit towards their next order for every blog post they write about us. Does this sound like a good idea or is this potentially more dangerous than simply offering free samples?"
IMO this is a paid link.
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RE: Can anyone tell me where my site can be improved
This is just a guess, but I'm wondering if you've overdone it a bit on the anchor text for your link building? At a quick glance, the vast majority of your links are linked with the anchor text "designer radiators". It doesn't look natural.
I'm interested in seeing what others say though.
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RE: Gateway Pages
It's pretty common for a business to want to buy up all sorts of keyword rich domain names when starting out. I remember when my husband first started his business we got duped by a GoDaddy salesman who told us we should buy a whack of domain names that combined keywords and our city. And you know what we did with them? Nothing.
These domains might be useful for type in traffic. For example, if you are a plumber, people in your city might type "CityPlumber.com" into the url bar and you can have that redirect to your main site.
The obvious thing that people want to do when they have these domains is build microsites on them and then link to the main site. I have seen this work well for SEO. And then I have seen sites get disastrous manual penalties when this is overdone. In theory, if you had a keyword rich domain that you could truly build up and create a fantastic site on this domain, it might be helpful. But, I'd prefer to put that fantastic content on your main site.
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RE: Is Disqus SEO friendly?
I recently wrote to Disqus to ask how I could make comments on my site indexable. There is an API that you can use and you can set up a mysql database to store comments on your site. However, it's not straightforward. I want to figure it out, but for now I'm waiting for someone else to do the work for me.

However, if you have Disqus on a Wordpress blog then the comments are stored in your database and they are part of your site and as such are indexable and searchable.
I would disagree with the statement that comments are not helpful for SEO purposes. I get a number of searches that were delivered to my site because of content in the comments section.
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RE: Ranking drop
Looks like you've asked your question in here twice. I gave my answer here:
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RE: Please help....
Yup...that's what I was thinking. Simply put a rel canonical on each of the pages with duplicates and this will tell Google which page is the real one. This'll solve the problem.
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Anyone else noticing that their expired domains have lost PR?
A while back I experimented with buying some expired domains that had some PR. I built a small website on each and created content with anchor text that linked back to my main site.
For one of my sites I noticed a significant drop in rankings this week. At first I thought it was because of the latest Panda update. But, the drop was slow, not sudden like most Panda hits have been.
Then, I noticed that some of my previously purchased domains that had held their PR for quite a while are now PR N/A. I'm guessing that the latest algorithm change caught on to what I was doing.
Probably what I was doing was grey hat. I honestly think that every SEO goes through a period where they try out some grey or even black tactics. This makes me even more desiring to be completely White hat now....and build links that are going to last.
I was just wondering if any of you guys have experienced anything like this this week? Would love to hear your thoughts.
EDIT: A second question - What would you guys do with these domains? They're still in the Google index so they're not penalized, likely just stripped of PR. Would you scrap them completely? Remove the links back to my sites? Do nothing?