Wingnut SEO

So this isn’t what I was going to write about today.  I was going to write a piece on “Social Media Karma and how down voting your friends that you ask to vote you up is a bad idea” so as I do, I go out to find a fun image to edit slightly and then throw up as my little teaser image.  I get on Google and search images for the word “karma” at least 4 of the images that showed up on the first page were porn.  Not just classy stuff either - I’m talking hard core porn.

Where the hell was this when I was 14.  Finding free porn on the internet was a difficult thing… now all you have to do is type in any word on the Google and blam… Plenty of high quality free porn.  There is no “are you 18″ buttons to click, no credit card info to give away…  This has got to be illegal… Right?  Or since there is the preferences section… it isn’t?

On one hand it’s great - Freedom of search of something - things not being censored… On the other hand THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

Maybe there is a way to lock this on your computer… I’m not seeing one.  All a horny teenager has to do is sign up for gmail… sign in… go back to search and he has his own preferences to set.  Good times.  I hear there are some 3rd party things out there that can lock it… but what average parent/gardian is going to know about these, or know even what to search for?

Okay… Seriously.  I am tired of looking at sites when people want SEO and seeing this… so just stop doing it… Hey web-designers - STOP BEING RETARDED

• www/no-www - Pick one or the other and do it when you set up your hosting - from the start NOT HARD
• Descriptions ARE NOT OPTIONAL - Sure they technically might be, if you ride the short bus.  Descriptions not only help with your ranking for specific keywords THEY ARE SEEN BY EVERYONE WHO FINDS YOU ON A SEARCH ENGINE
• <title> - STOP BEING A SELF CENTERED JERK AND JUST PUTTING IN “mywebsite.com” - These are also seen by everyone who finds you on a search engine.  Oh AND it’s a huge factor in where you rank for keywords
  • Sidenote - Also stop being a spammy McSpamson and just stuffing keywords, make them human readable - SO HUMANS CAN READ AND KNOW WHAT THE PAGE IS ABOUT

Actually… I take it all back… keep doing what you have been doing - I like having an easy job.

</End Rant>

2007 marked the rise to god-like popularity for social networks. Starting in late ’06 with a deal ranging in the billions of dollars when Google acquired YouTube to the hundreds of million’s invested into Facebook just a few months ago – it is clear that being social is big business.  Social networks are so popular that even the porn industry has gotten in on the action with Penthouse dropping $500 million into acquiring several dating social networks. These absurd amounts of money have caused the world to take notice.

 Social sites are popping up everywhere.  You can find them for just about every niche group there is.  There are social networks for music junkies, car enthusiasts, bargain hunters, tech people, book lovers, marketers, religions, and everything else.

 This, in turn, has and will continue to cause a radical shift in how online marketing and search in general is done now and in the future.  As little as just five years ago there were only a handful of well known ways to go about promoting a website and gaining traffic – SEO, PPC, link buying/banner placement, and the infancy of the social networks – forums and personal blogs. 

With the rise in modern social networks, however, it has opened the lines of communication from marketers to consumers and consumers to marketers in never before seen proportions.  This has unleashed an array of viral marketing campaigns, corporate blogs, and link baiting tactics that would have been nearly impossible in the past.

These new practices have caused online marketers to build reputations on networks such as Digg or StumbleUpon for the sole purpose of being popular enough to send thousands of unique visitors to a website with the single click of a button or a few lines of a written review.  This is no easy power to obtain but there is obvious value for companies to have people like this on their side.

Further changes to the state of search and the rise of social media in the near future include sites like Mahalo that continue to gain popularity and more users each day.  These sites are giving the power of search results to the people, by letting them submit like, find useful or think should rank more highly.

As this trend in social networks and social search continue the general population may one day inevitably turn away from the faceless Googles and Yahoos in favor of more reliable search from the people they or their friends trust. 

In essence that is what all the social networks are about - trust.  Something that the major search engines are losing as the general population starts to understand what sponsored links are and how easy it is to game the system to place a spam site at the top of the search results pages.  At the same time people are growing more wary of the search engines tendency to data-base everything they do for unknown (potentially sinister?) purposes.

In 2008 social networks will continue to gain steam with the general populace and with them more corporations will see the value in being a part of the social world through blogging and/or hiring people to become leaders in various social networks.

What the end result of these social networking and search trends will mean to the SEO and online marketing world is, as of now, uncertain. One thing you can count on, however, is that it will be very interesting to watch how the major search engines react to this fundamental change in how people find content online.  

You may have the best idea in the world for a website - except you will never make money with it because you’re just sitting on it.  Either that or you developed it but then decided to stop marketing it.  The fact is you’re lazy.  You have all these great ideas and you’re not doing any single damn thing with them… other than parking the domain.

That’s my problem anyway.  That’s why I’m working a 9-5 and not out there doing what I want to be doing.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I pretty much love my job/people I work with… But no one ever got rich working for someone else.

The hardest part about making money online is the follow through.

There are hundreds of thousands of ways to make money online so I’m not even going to get into that.  I have made a little, a paltry sum for the amount of ideas I have yet to make happen.  You just need to get out there and make them happen.  You need to stop getting hung up on the ideas that fail - let them go for now come back when you can - it was/is a great idea just needs more baking… cast a wide net, produce 20 ideas and hope that 2 or 3 start bringing home the bacon.  Then wash, rinse, repeat.

If you are sitting around waiting for someone to do the leg work for you, you’re an idiot.  Get out there and make your ideas happen, someone else isn’t going to do it for you… but even if you do get some sap to be your partner and do all the leg work - he’s taking half of YOUR money that came from YOUR great idea. It’s far more fun to split $1 one way.

Dan Perry has come up with a rather genius link-bait in the form of giving away something - Win a Google Fridge.  I have decided I need to win this fridge because it would be the perfect size to store my life sized bust of Matt Cutts that is made entirely out of his hair and used chewing gum (pilfered from conference trash bins).  Without a fridge the bust needs constant spritzing of the purest mountain spring water or it tends to dry out and catch fire… I don’t know why

Real posts will happen when I find some time… so thanks to all my readers for sticking with me

There has been some talk recently about why a career in SEO is a bad move and why it’s a good move.

This got me thinking about the past three months of my moving from the freelance to corporate SEO world. What started out as a personal rant on the matter (or more of a vent of frustrations about my experiences) has turned into a list of the bad and the good about working for a company - it may be able to help people decide.

If you have to make the decision to take a full time corporate SEO job here are some things to think about.

THE BAD:

• No longer do you get to pick and choose your clients
• Clients come because of the company, not you or your skills (who are you?)
• Suggestions made are not always heard or are filtered through someone else
• When you suggest a total site redesign or major overhaul it is seen as a sales pitch and often ignored
• Promises can be made on your behalf without asking you about it
• Showing value or explaining what was done or why rankings have been going down due to poor work someone else did (when put on a client that was there before you)
• 9 to 5 (You have to be somewhere at some point)

THE GOOD:

• You know where your paycheck is coming from
• Medical/Dental/Vision
• Other benefits such as possible phone, laptop, parking space, free conferences/business trips, company parties
• You no longer have to actively seek clients - Joys of a sales team
• The people you meet - I work with some awesome and brilliant people in their fields - Amazing connections that I would likely not have had
• You get to work with larger clients and accounts that you probably would not have been able to land on your own
• 9 to 5 (You get to stop working at some point)

Hope it helps.

Google the “Borg” like entity of the interwebs has long kept record of what you search for, where you live, what you do, where you like to shop, what you buy - it even spiders your email so it can hit you in the face with more directed advertising.

And we have been taking it. Taking it and liking it and asking - begging them not to stop. You wouldn’t give this kind of information to your best friend. Why give it to a faceless monster that grows each day - getting larger, swelling by the second with the information of millions of people. Confidential and personal used to mean something. The Google cares not.

Why - no - HOW do we let this stand? Big brother is no longer a dream written in a book somewhere, it is reality. We are being watched. Little by little our online anonymity - our privacy - is being sucked away and we let it happen. We let them take all that we have and we don’t say a word about it.

I will not let this continue. I will not let Google continue to take what belongs to me.

How will I do this? With a new promise to myself for the new year. 2008 will mark the time when I no longer feed the Google Monster with my data, my information, my email. No more will I search with their pages or use their email or other glittery free tools - designed solely to sucker me into compliance and acceptance of their awesome power, their ability to control the internet and to decide how I surf or sell advertising.

I am moving to Ask. What? Am I insane? Ask is the lamest of the lame and with 4% of the search market, what is the point?

The point, my friends, is AskEraser - The tool that could possibly save the internet from the evil that all of this personal information databasing will one spew onto the masses - destroying privacy and leaving nothing in its wake.

From their site: “At Ask.com, we believe that you as a user should have the power to control the usage of your search history. When enabled, AskEraser will completely delete your search queries and data from Ask.com servers, including: your IP address, User ID and Session ID cookies, as well as the complete text of your search query”

THE USER SHOULD HAVE THE POWER TO CONTROL THE USAGE OF SEARCH HISTORY! THE USER SHOULD HAVE THE POWER TO CONTROL THE USAGE OF SEARCH HISTORY!

The internet has come a long way and with its evolution we have just accepted what the search engines have told us. They need our information, to help us. They will never use our information against us - This IS BULLSHIT. We should not let them keep force feeding us this. We should not let this continue.

Now is the time to leave. Before it becomes too large to stop, before it takes so much from us we cannot fight. Do not let this information database continue indexing everything you do.

Free yourself before it is too late. Take back what is yours. Keep your privacy.

Taking a page out of the MMORPG china farmers handbook for success in business I present to you an idea that - if not already being done, I have not heard of it (if you have please let me know and I’ll take this post down) - this will soon be something that will start happening.

Social Media Avatar POWER LEVELING!

That’s right, I fear in the near future we should expect to see people building their living on gaining (then selling) popularity in the social media circles - making up “characters” and building huge friend lists that include A-List social media giants - to sell later on for someone to take over.

How will we even know? As long as the person who buys it isn’t an idiot, and tries (even just a little) to speak in the same tone as the character that was built up.

The reasons to buy a popular character is clear in MMORPG’s - PHAT LOOTS.

The same is turning true for popular avatars in social media circles. How much more often to you click on an article Sphunn by DoshDosh, TheNanny612, or aimClear?

If you could buy their avatar/persona and were able to keep in character when posting to a social media site how much traffic could you get? Probably a lot. The question is - How much is that worth? Again, probably a lot (depending on your business)

Would farming this kind of reputation be hard to do? Not really. You could have 7-9 different profiles pretty easy (that is to say without trying very hard/putting more than 2 hours a day into it) depending on the social media site you are on.

Since you are out there reading the blogs so you can comment about them - and already reading the comments other people are making so you can get involved in the community - it really wouldn’t be too complicated to game the system this way. Hell you could even start conversations and reply to yourself. (I suppose having multiple personalities IRL would help)

Actually…If I had the time/no conscience I’d start doing this.

I was reading an article today, written by Robert Musud, about What Employers Need to know about Employee Blogging. This caught my attention more because recently my company started its own blog and of course I asked for some link love, all links are good links.

I didn’t worry about it, because I am really happy with my company and the people I work with… but what happens if/when I am not? An unlikely situation in the foreseeable future.

What I worry about more is what happens if I have an opinion that doesn’t fit with the company? In Robert’s article he speaks about people being fired over posting racy pictures or speaking ill of their employers - but how far of a cry is that from catching flack from saying something the company wouldn’t? Since they are linked to me does everything I write reflect on them? Damn right it does.

Before I got the link with my company’s blog I really didn’t worry about what I wrote. I would rant about things and curse up a storm when I felt it was needed.

Now though, I am starting to wonder if by directing my fellow employees to my blog - did I do myself a disservice? Do I now have to bite my tongue rather than speaking freely? It feels like I just turned my personal blog into a work blog. I asked for a link without even thinking about that. Foolish.

I think when it comes down to it - it depends on the company. With where I work, I think I have more leeway when it comes to what I write in my blog - as long as I’m not an idiot.

It is something to keep in mind though, and I guess I’ll see what comes of it.

1. It’s a mosh pit of pictures of drunken college people and white chicks and gang signs.
2. Oh wait… that’s all

Maybe that’s why you like it, but it’s stupid. The only good thing that comes out of the FaceBook is that you are able to look that girl who’s name you can’t remember but you made out with at that party and want to call her and you know she’s a friend of a friend…

I don’t understand how so many people are in love (lust?) with it. Is it because it’s a slightly less annoying MySpace? No. Since it has been open to everyone - not just people the with .edu emails - it’s just as, if not more, in your face annoying.

Okay… is it that no one else is doing a simple social media thing like that? No. There are plenty.

It’s because they targeted college kids. Drunken college kids that don’t know how to use a computer if they arn’t looking up how to play flip-cup. This means 9999/10000 of the Facebook population do not even know that there are other social networks out there… other than Date.com

I should start my own project - using their business model.

Step 1: Hook the drunken college population on a sub-par social network(make them think they are special - it’s only a college network right?)

Step 2: Let them grow up and start real life knowing no other (good) social networks then sell ads then throw them in the face (as hard as possible so it really hurts) of the people who made you… all while opening up the doors to everyone else to make groups and spam the crap out of everyone.

Step 3: Profit.

I can’t get away from it though. Everyone is on it and I hate it. Sooo… Everyone who reads this should be my “friend” look me up, my name is Dave Winget. If you can’t beat them… network with them! Or some-such nonsense.

/sigh