Blog
When Is A Link A Bad Link?
The last week has been full of speculation, hypothesis, and outright guess work by many people in the SEO industry. Suddenly years of supposedly acceptable link building tactics are coming back to haunt thousands of websites. Right or wrong, it appears that the sins of the father are coming home to roost on the sons of today. Setting aside the larger discussion of whether Links can hurt you, negative SEO works or does not work, or even if link building is black hat or white, let’s first discuss several ways you can tell if a link is good or bad, assuming that links can be...
read moreWhich Reports Matter and Which Ones Don’t
We write a lot of reports here at Steam Driven Media. We have monthly client reports, site audits, executive summary reports, SEO reports, traffic reports, proposals and more go out every month. Over the years we have refined our reporting process to a point where our clients get the data they need for their business and we spend the absolute minimum amount of time writing them because every hour we spend writing reports is another hour we can’t be out there helping to improve someone’s business. Reports should be opportunities to inspire confidence in your work at best, warn...
read moreSearch Geeks Speak: eCommerce
Barry Adams and I were invited to join David Harry and Terry Van Horne on last week’s Search Geeks Speak on the SEO Dojo Radio podcast about ecommerce link building and ecommerce in general. We hit on a lot of topics including foundational link building, article marketing, product feeds and more. The show runs about an hour and you can listen to it here or find it on iTunes (search for Search Geeks Speak) and download it to your iPod. Search Geeks Speak:...
read more6 ways charities can increase business donations
We are very involved in helping animals in need through our Animal Charms jewelry web site. But we also have a business to run, so we tend to help charities that can help us raise even more money for them than those that are either indifferent to the needs of business or even worse, go out of their way to make it hard to help them. Over the last few years however, we have made a list of seemingly simple things that can, and should, be done to make it easier for these charities raise money. Make the fact that you are a 501(c)3 obvious. I can’t tell you how many hours we have spent over...
read moreWhy Pinterest Should Be On Your Radar
I had originally written this post a few weeks ago, before the Pinterest feeding frenzy started. I debated internally about publishing it because I really like Pinterest and it seems like marketers tend to ruin everything they touch by turning it from something fun into a force fed marketing channel. In the end I decided that it was important for our clients to understand this new social media site and understand how it can apply to their business. what is pinterest? Pinterest is a sharing site. Similar to sites like StumbleUpon or Reddit where you can bookmark and share your favorite things...
read moreMingleWing: Sharing With More Than Just Your Friends
Everybody seems to be sharing everything these days, from news stories to videos, from pictures to the smallest details about their daily life. The only problem is that with most social communities you are limited to sharing with people that you already know. This limits your ability to reach new friends, followers and readers to your immediate circle and anyone they happen to share with. MingleWing is trying to broaden your reach by allowing you to share with everyone. By using the MingleWing toolbar, the one real weak spot in the process, you share things using the toolbar. The toolbar then...
read moreAdding Categories in OpenCart
This is the first in our series of training tutorials on how to set up and use OpenCart, our preferred entry level eCommerce software. In this video I explain how to create new product categories, explain what each field is used for, and which ones you can ignore if you choose.
read moreSlaktivism: Awareness or useless?
“Slaktivism” is a term coined in the early 2000′s that generally means: the act of participating in obviously pointless activities as an expedient alternative to actually expending effort to fix a problem.(1) In other words, doing something easy that makes “you” feel good rather than doing something that might actually help. Last week a campaign on Facebook started to help raise awareness about child abuse. The goal was to have everyone change their Facebook avatar to a cartoon character. Generally these types of campaigns see limited support, but the...
read moreSEO Breadcrumbs for OpenCart
OpenCart is one of the more popular open source eCommerce systems available. We use it here for many of our clients and like most aspects of it. One of it’s failings, however, is the lack of attention to clean URLs in the breadcrumb structure. Fortunately this is a relatively easy fix. As installed, the Home link in the breadcrumb navigation is the rather unweildy /index.php?route=common/home instead of pointing to the clean URL of your choice. You will need to edit the following...
read moreWorld records: the new viral marketing
Over the last few years viral marketing, leveraging social networks in an effort to drive large amounts of traffic to your web site in a short amount of time, has become one of the hottest marketing tactics. Unfortunately for every 1,000 attempts at viral marketing one may succeed. We have seen some brilliant ideas that were stunningly successful, others that just left us shaking our heads wondering what just happened. The biggest weakness in viral marketing is finding a topic that will actually go viral. Sometimes the best ideas go nowhere while some random thing on the net goes...
read more
Follow Us!
