Can Rel=Author and Analytics Event Tracking Live in Harmony?

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Scott Dodge

Here’s a question that I posed via Twitter during yesterday’s fantastic #searchchurch SEOmoz meetup at SEER Interactive.

I have a question for @chriscountey if anyone wants to be my surrogate: Can we use onClick tracking successfully with rel=me? #searchchurch

— Scott Dodge (@scott_dodge) May 10, 2012

Thankfully, Jen Sable Lopez asked the speakers this question for me. Oddly enough, no one had a solid answer!

@scott_dodge I just asked your question & we’ll want to test this out a bit & get back to you #searchchurch

— Jennifer Sable Lopez (@jennita) May 10, 2012

As an analytics junkie, I’m a big fan of using event tracking wherever I can – I love seeing when people are clicking out to external links. On this site, I use Yoast’s SEO Plugin, which allows for you to automatically include event tracking for every outbound link.

On my homepage, I have a link to my Google+ profile, with rel=”me” implemented, and I have yet to have my “mug appear in the SERPs” for this page.

A fleeting thought I had was that perhaps rel=”me” and event tracking conflict on some level – but I haven’t seen any information to that effect.

What are your thoughts? Leave a comment below – I’d love to start a discussion on this topic.

Local SEO Tips – Where Should You Begin?

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Scott Dodge

Local SEO can be quite a mystery for some, and a joy for others. As you can guess, I subscribe to the latter belief. This post will cover some simple Local SEO tips that I’ve learned throughout my experiences with the trade.

How to Tell When You Need to do Local SEO

Generally, if your site needs to be visible for any location based searches that are even remotely competitive, such as “Minneapolis Auto Repair”, you’ll probably need to do local SEO.

If your business listing appears deep in the search results, you’ll need to do local SEO.

If you have customers complaining about how hard it is to find you, then you really need to do local SEO.

Citation Labs Link Prospector Review

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Scott Dodge

As an SEO, a large part of my job is building links – which can be an often struggling, remedial task. Not to mention time-consuming – and as well all know, time = dolla bills, ya’ll.

As we all know, links are the holy grail of SEO. Based on an academic concept of citations, links work as ‘votes’ for your site. The more ‘votes’ you have from authoritative, relevant sources, the more trust search engines will put in your site.

Since links are so valuable, and so time consuming, how can we scale this process?

Enter the fantastic Link Prospector tool from Citation Labs.