Mike Levin

This is the flowchart on how to blog for SEO, growing your content by taking writing suggestions from the HitTail keyword tool. I have to start featuring this on the HitTail site more. It was eliminated because the folks who controlled the site at the time thought it was “too complicated”. Do you think this is too complicated?

This is the flowchart on how to blog for SEO, growing your content by taking writing suggestions from the HitTail keyword tool. I have to start featuring this on the HitTail site more. It was eliminated because the folks who controlled the site at the time thought it was “too complicated”. Do you think this is too complicated?

I’m a search engine optimizer, and it’s time to start optimizing on my name. I’m actually not doing too bad, with my new domain, MikeLevin.me. First lesson of SEO: get the most important keyword in the main (second-level) domain if you can. Duhhhh. But I’m in competition with a bunch of other high profile Mike Levin’s, and the fact that there’s a popular radio personality named Mark Levin, resulting in a whopping “See results for…” insertion, occupying 3 precious spots on the Top-10 list, and pushing me down. So, there are actually several aspects to optimizing on Mike Levin. I need to keep pushing out more content (of course), give people plenty of reason to link to me (though I don’t want to encourage deep linking yet, because I don’t know if I’ll keep the Tumblr URL structure), and interestingly, I need to increase the overall search-volume on “mike levin” to put it on a more level playing field with “mark levin” and eliminate the alternative search suggestion. Does that mean I need to become an ultra-conservative radio personality? Maybe I’ll start an ultra-liberal radio show and confuse the hell out of everyone. Ha ha.

I’m a search engine optimizer, and it’s time to start optimizing on my name. I’m actually not doing too bad, with my new domain, MikeLevin.me. First lesson of SEO: get the most important keyword in the main (second-level) domain if you can. Duhhhh. But I’m in competition with a bunch of other high profile Mike Levin’s, and the fact that there’s a popular radio personality named Mark Levin, resulting in a whopping “See results for…” insertion, occupying 3 precious spots on the Top-10 list, and pushing me down.

So, there are actually several aspects to optimizing on Mike Levin. I need to keep pushing out more content (of course), give people plenty of reason to link to me (though I don’t want to encourage deep linking yet, because I don’t know if I’ll keep the Tumblr URL structure), and interestingly, I need to increase the overall search-volume on “mike levin” to put it on a more level playing field with “mark levin” and eliminate the alternative search suggestion.

Does that mean I need to become an ultra-conservative radio personality? Maybe I’ll start an ultra-liberal radio show and confuse the hell out of everyone. Ha ha.

It’s not only Memorial Day weekend, but it’s also Geek Pride Day. That’s why it’s perfect that I’ll be launching SuperGeekSEO this weekend, where I’ll over-share about my upcoming entrepreneurial ventures in long, rambling posts like this that will be of no interest to anyone but super-geeks. Let me elaborate. Turn back now.

In these trying times of recession, many of us are already paying for broadband out of our homes, and now find it a necessity we cannot give up. It’s costing a cool $60/mo on top of digital cable, another $100/mo, then cable phone and a premium channel or two, pumping your bill to over $200/mo. I will be teaching you how to get the most out of that investment through home website hosting on cheap, low-power hardware that won’t add more than $5/mo to your electric bill—less than your cable box does!

So why host from home when you can use Blogger or Tumblr for free? The answer is simply the kick-ass capabilities that comes with controlling every miniscule detail of your own hardware and software that you don’t with free hosting. And ultimately, that means building more traffic to your site faster and promoting your cause better than with other approaches.

This of course has the catch-22 that when you really build some significant traffic to your site, you may show up to your ISP as violating your terms of service by doing home hosting. Bit the idea is that by that time, you’re making enough money with your venture that you can move a second copy of the hardware to a hosting site (or use a virtual server host), and make your home system into your development and staging system.

Meanwhile, all your software development tools are going to be free, and all the content you produce will have a master copy residing on your own machines with the proper licensing to ensure that you maintain ownership of everything, addressing concerns that people have with systems lile Blogger, where your original content resides only there, and the could theoretically shut you off. With my approach, no one will have a kill-switch on you, and you could keep popping up like Wack-a-Mole.

I’m going to always put the targeted traffic-generating concerns of SEO first, and take a pure, from-scratch approach to site building. But not only that, I’ll be thinking about the future of the Web, the Internet as a whole, the threats to it, the alternative access platforms (like iPhone), alternative browser technology (like native apps), data tagging and organization issues, XSLT and other open standard page layout tech, leveraging other services, taking advantage of best-of-breed tools, and generally future-proofing and vendor-proofing every bit of work you do.

Welcome to the imminent geekiest site about SEO ever written. Turn back now.

Well, I’m FINALLY starting to use my LiveScribe pen. This is perhaps what I’m best at doing—illustrating ideas in a whiteboard fashion. This particular idea is about list reduction, an key underlying principle to HitTail that anyone using HitTail is intuitively familiar with. I’m thinking about how I can apply it across other ventures, and thought I’d share the thought process. I’m actually figuring out what my process is, and in doing so, making pencasts part of my process. See? Very circular. Circular is good, but creating the snowball effect is better. Anyway, if you have 7 minutes to flush down the tube, go ahead and watch.