Internet success stories rarely get any sexier than the story of Johns Wu. 

In 2006, while still an undergraduate research student in neuroscience, Johns started a Wordpress blog he named Bankaholic.com. A one-man-show, Johns used an SEO/SEM-focused approach to build traffic and revenue. Just over 3 years later, he sold Bankaholic to BankRate for a reported $14.9 Million.

He was 22 years old.

Anyone who has been an SEO consultant knows that SEO is often bolted-on as an after-thought.

Which is, of course, the worst way of doing SEO.

Part of the problem is that SEO is often thought of, by clients, as a fix. It is a fix applied to solve the unforeseen problem of not showing up in search engine result pages.

Whilst some businesses get it, we know most never will. But this fact is to your considerable advantage if you build and run your own sites :)

It's bad enough having to compete with Google's engineers.

But to win the search game, you need to out-compete your competition, too!

Back in the dark, distant past - around the turn of the century - there was an "us" vs "them" mentality in search. "Us" being webmasters, and "them" being search engines.

In 2008, Eric Schmidt let slip that Google would use brands as a signal to clean up the "internet cesspool.

SEOs ears twitched.

Quoted by CNET at the time:

Ever wondered how to price your SEO services? Your products? Have you set your prices at a point where you can get the best possible returns?

Pricing seems simple, but there's a bit of an art to getting it right.

In this article we'll take a look at different ways to price, a few strategies to use, and why you might want to avoid charging everyone the same price.

Why Pricing Strategy Matters

Obviously, if we get our pricing wrong, we'll miss out on business.

I spoke to Loren from Search Engine Journal today and he mentioned a conference he is helping put together in Los Angeles.

The conference is BlueGlass LA.

It's on July 19/20 in LA. The speaker line up is pretty awesome and takes a business / start up approach on top of the killer search & social media tactics he will be reviewing. Tickets are only $495, and he has put together a 15% discount for SEObook readers/members. It's seobook

In the past when I claimed that the Google Maps insertion in organic search results wasn't more organic search but rather a Google promotion, I was met with skepticism by some, who argued that Google Maps was just another flavor of organic search and visitors would still be able to go to the end ranked website.

Back when I got into SEO part of the reason I wasn't too into PPC back then was because I had limited cash, but another big reason I wasn't big on it was because it seemed so simple and boring. Over the past couple years that has changed a lot!

Today Google AdWords is far more complex than SEO was in 2003.

With that complexity there are additional opportunities for some & additional expenses for others. But keeping up with all the changes is easily a full time job.

The third reason we really like [eNom] is because the data, right. Almost 10% of the entire web hits our servers. At least 10 million domains. In a world like the web, where everybody is everywhere, trying to figure out what people are doing, particularly in the longtail this is a really exciting source of data.

If the domain name data leakage from eNom & BulkRegister is "exciting" for him that means sharing it must be "not exiting" for their customers.

One more from the "competing against yourself" series. ;)

This video is a review of one of our online SEO tools - the keyword list comparison tool, which makes it easy to compare up to 10 keyword lists against each other. This can be used to help determine the quality of keyword data sources, to pool data into a handy unified list, or to help understand the overlap in keyword strategy from competing sites when using competitive research tools.