Is there any context in which "SEO" isn't a synonym for "worthless slimy huckster"?
Ok, somebody has to tell mom and pop about proper use of metadata; but as for the rest? "Say, this slick gentleman promises to help me lie to search engines for a very reasonable price, he seems honest to me."
Here's a great example I learned at a web marketing conference (so I can't take credit for this pearl):
A major UK bank was flummoxed as to why less credible credit firms were ranking higher on Google for loans, even though their own popular "lending" website had been live for over a decade. The bank hired an SEO who interviewed them about the marketplace and its customers, researched the competition, and investigated rankings based on relevant keywords found in the web server referrer logs. This armed the SEO, an outsider to the banking industry, with a unique perspective from which he taught the bank to see through the eyes of their customers. In response to the SEO's advice the bank changed all their literature about "lending" to use the word "borrowing" instead. Poof - #1 spot on SERPs in a couple of weeks. It turns out that when people need money they're interested in "borrowing", not "lending".
SEO is all about empathy. You have to understand the business you're in and the problems you're solving for your customers. When people search the web they're looking for answers to their real problems, and the companies at the top of the SERPs are the ones who have the answer to that very problem.
Doesn't a company with that motivation deserve to be found? Do you feel that, in my example, the bank was being misleading?
if you're doing your job right to begin with then organic SEO follows naturally.
It's not as obvious as you make it sound. It's anything but natural, for example, to write a blog about your business, using a corporate voice. Companies didn't speak this way until a few years ago, and only those at the forefront are aware of this practise. And even if you figure that much out on your own, do you allow comments? Do you host it on your existing domain or on a new one? Do you speak as yourself or anonymously? Which strategies worked best for your industry in the past?
I agree with all the methodologies you've quoted, but those are non-traditional means of marketing. I agree with you that SEO is more of a mindset than a checksheet of items to search and replace in your source code. I think it's important for companies to partner with experts to work through this methodology and learn how it fits in with their specific company, in their specific marketplace, in order to communicate more convincingly than their specific competitors.
Your hostility makes me wonder whether you know what SEO is, or that there are such things as white hat and black hat SEO.
Black hat SEO is about exploiting oversights in algorithms. Black hat is a great way to get immediate gain, but will carry severe penalties when it's found out.
White hat SEO is about providing superior information to users and building your real-world credibility over time, which is subsequently rewarded by search engines. You first provide meaningful content which is relevant to your business, you ensure you are interesting enough that the industry showcases you which encourages enthusiasts to discuss you, and you maintain your brand and credibility for years while your PageRank snowballs.
Rome wasn't built in a day. Anyone who promises you Rome tomorrow might be telling the truth, but it'll be Pompeii the day after you buy it. White hat and black hat are not unique to the SEO industry, nor to marketing, nor to business. A rotten apple does not spoil the bunch. It's wise to be suspicious but it's foolish to be dismissive.
I think your reasoning is very old-fashioned and jaded. Just because your website is a turd, doesn't mean your company is.
We're talking about mom-and-pop operations here. Small businesses should stick to what they do best, and subcontract when an odd job is needed. Do most companies shoot their own TV commercials or record their own radio spots? Of course not - they consult marketing firms who do it for a living.
Let's face it - all marketing is scummy. In traditional marketing the goal is to convince people they need something that they really don't. The web is the opposite because people query search engines to solve a specific problem, so you've got to convince them that you have the best answer to their question and you've got about 4 seconds to say it before they go elsewhere.
I argue that SEO is the LEAST scummy and perhaps the most skillful form of advertising of all time. Good SEO involves making one set of content useful to humans and spiders alike, and it requires the lightest touch to ensure the optimizations blend naturally with the prose and don't make the design any less attractive, nor the content any less informative.
SEOs are ninjas that must be experts at marketing, web design, and English, plus they must understand the state and history of the marketplace of each customer. It's not reasonable to chastise anyone for not having all those skills, and it's certainly not something you can excel at after googling the topic for a few evenings.
SEO isn't just about making your website better, it's about presenting your product more effectively than your competition. You first have to make people aware of you, and if you're that lucky you then have to make them like you. And who likes a scumbag?
Just wanted to add that I bought Descent Freespace 2 from GoG and was able to use a FOSS third party interpreter to run the game asset files with a different executable. I don't remember the exact interpreter I used (I think it was on Sourceforge) but it's multiplatform including Linux and maybe Mac. Many of the games on GoG include the unmodified asset files which might be compatible with various community projects.
So the FBI created and administered this forum encouraging illegal activity, attracted 2500 users over 2 years, and arrested 56. Don't those numbers seem lopsided? Didn't the FBI create many more criminals than it caught? Isn't it legally and morally reprehensible to trifle with real citizens' financial information in order to catch such a tiny number of perps? What of the innocents whose financial histories have been at risk these past 2 years?
Am I missing something here? Isn't this entrapment? And reckless endangerment on behalf of the FBI?
Both [former state police superintendent Thomas] Hutchins and [Maryland Police Superintendent Terrence] Sheridan said the activists' names were entered into the state police database as terrorists partly because the software offered limited options for classifying entries.
So what kind of terrorist did they hope to classify them as?
Stealing from labels is illegal. Stealing from artists is immoral.
Is the RIAA truly stealing from artists when musicians willfully sign with a member of the organization? I have little sympathy for artists who knowingly endorse litigation against their fans by earning money for the RIAA.
Sentencing is set for December when Papagno could face up to two years in jail for the thefts.
Seems pretty lenient considering this is a case of grand theft and potentially identity theft since there was information about contractors. It could also be construed, perhaps, as terrorism or treason considering the organization the equipment and data was stolen from.
Contrast this with penalties for copying music over the internet. Is "Enter Sandman" a more valuable national resource than naval research equipment and data in Washington?
This is a pretty common outcome. Often musicians will sample copyrighted recordings and either hope no one notices, or clear the sample with the rights holder after the fact. Often the price of clearing the sample outweighs the entire of the income brought in by that song, so the new song gets transferred to the rights holder to avoid having to pay the balance. James Brown is the single most sampled and one of the most litigious artists in history, and as such, owns a crap load of other musicians' works.
There was an attachment for the old Gameboy which had a barcode scanner. Scanning any barcode would produce an attack or monster or scenario, so you and a friend could run rampant in a grocery store, battling your monsters with barcode attacks. They could do that and much more with a camera.
Many developers take advantage of Nintendo's proprietary hardware gimmicks which make for some really fun ideas, like Warioware (, Cooking Mama, Phoenix Wright ("Objection!"), and Ninja Gaiden (it's very fluid with the stylus).
I just wanted to add that I recently switched from Thunderbird to Windows Live Mail and I've never looked back. It's the best email client I've ever used. I've also been using Windows Live Writer to post to my WordPress blog as it is much superior and more stable than the native AJAX editor. MS has some really great free apps these days.
I've been using the free, ad-supported edition of Gmail For Your Domain (now called Google Apps) for over 3 years and have been extremely happy with it. I get more than enough email addresses (I think there's a limit but I haven't reached it in 3 years), 7GB of storage, an @yourdomain.com suffix, the awesome Gmail AJAX interface, plus you can access it with a POP3 client.
I especially love this service because my local email archives have gotten corrupted a couple of times, and I'm not the type to back that sort of thing up. I can just log on to my web account and reset the download date to download all my emails all over again at any time.
Everything is worth as much as people are willing to pay for it. I suppose if people weren't willing to pay $35 for WinRAR then they'd change it, so more power to RARlabs. I love their product but I'd sooner deal with their nag screens than foot the bill.
In RARlabs' defense, I emailed them saying this a year ago or so and they said they'd knock 25% for me. I thanked them but it still seemed to expensive so I passed.
P.s., I waited about 10 minutes before cancelling that 33 hour uncompress, just in case the estimate adjusted itself. It didn't.
P.p.s., rarlabs.com doesn't have much of a website at all, never mind marketing. Perhaps their excellent (but very overpriced) product speaks for itself.
Yes, in my tests it looked like it was going to take WELL over 10x as long to uncompress the same file in 7Zip. I can't say for certain because I took 7Zip's word for it when its estimate told me it would take about 33 hours to unzip a file that literally took 15 minutes in WinRAR.
It's entirely possible that I used the product wrong or that there was a problem on both the PCs I tried, but if this was true then I'd rather use WinRAR simply because it worked better out of the box with no additional configuration.
I was very likely understating my frustration with 7Zip. I think it's appropriate to zip up a DOC for an email attachment but in my opinion it's worthless for backup and archival use on anything but a very small scale.
It is definitely not slightly slower. For me, in my isolated but multiple tests, 7Zip was obscenely slow. I tried on many OSes on 2 PCs and the results were very similar. Your mileage may vary. Me, I won't try it again until the next major version.
Try it yourself. I can only speak for my experience using 3 OSes on my own computer, and one OS on someone else's computer. The results were consistent for me but I hope they're better for everyone else and that I simply used it wrong.
I'm not exaggerating when I state this 10x delay. I'm probably understating. The bigger the file, the longer it takes. A RAR file that took 15 minutes to unzip in WinRAR would have literally taken a day and a half in 7Zip - and that was with a quad core Intel CPU on a 64-bit OS, unzipping from one physical HDD to another.
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This game is $20. If it were $10 I'd buy it right now. I wonder whether the game's sales would at least double if the price were halved.
Is there any context in which "SEO" isn't a synonym for "worthless slimy huckster"? Ok, somebody has to tell mom and pop about proper use of metadata; but as for the rest? "Say, this slick gentleman promises to help me lie to search engines for a very reasonable price, he seems honest to me."
Here's a great example I learned at a web marketing conference (so I can't take credit for this pearl):
A major UK bank was flummoxed as to why less credible credit firms were ranking higher on Google for loans, even though their own popular "lending" website had been live for over a decade. The bank hired an SEO who interviewed them about the marketplace and its customers, researched the competition, and investigated rankings based on relevant keywords found in the web server referrer logs. This armed the SEO, an outsider to the banking industry, with a unique perspective from which he taught the bank to see through the eyes of their customers. In response to the SEO's advice the bank changed all their literature about "lending" to use the word "borrowing" instead. Poof - #1 spot on SERPs in a couple of weeks. It turns out that when people need money they're interested in "borrowing", not "lending".
SEO is all about empathy. You have to understand the business you're in and the problems you're solving for your customers. When people search the web they're looking for answers to their real problems, and the companies at the top of the SERPs are the ones who have the answer to that very problem.
Doesn't a company with that motivation deserve to be found? Do you feel that, in my example, the bank was being misleading?
if you're doing your job right to begin with then organic SEO follows naturally.
It's not as obvious as you make it sound. It's anything but natural, for example, to write a blog about your business, using a corporate voice. Companies didn't speak this way until a few years ago, and only those at the forefront are aware of this practise. And even if you figure that much out on your own, do you allow comments? Do you host it on your existing domain or on a new one? Do you speak as yourself or anonymously? Which strategies worked best for your industry in the past?
I agree with all the methodologies you've quoted, but those are non-traditional means of marketing. I agree with you that SEO is more of a mindset than a checksheet of items to search and replace in your source code. I think it's important for companies to partner with experts to work through this methodology and learn how it fits in with their specific company, in their specific marketplace, in order to communicate more convincingly than their specific competitors.
Your hostility makes me wonder whether you know what SEO is, or that there are such things as white hat and black hat SEO.
Black hat SEO is about exploiting oversights in algorithms. Black hat is a great way to get immediate gain, but will carry severe penalties when it's found out.
White hat SEO is about providing superior information to users and building your real-world credibility over time, which is subsequently rewarded by search engines. You first provide meaningful content which is relevant to your business, you ensure you are interesting enough that the industry showcases you which encourages enthusiasts to discuss you, and you maintain your brand and credibility for years while your PageRank snowballs.
Rome wasn't built in a day. Anyone who promises you Rome tomorrow might be telling the truth, but it'll be Pompeii the day after you buy it. White hat and black hat are not unique to the SEO industry, nor to marketing, nor to business. A rotten apple does not spoil the bunch. It's wise to be suspicious but it's foolish to be dismissive.
I think your reasoning is very old-fashioned and jaded. Just because your website is a turd, doesn't mean your company is.
We're talking about mom-and-pop operations here. Small businesses should stick to what they do best, and subcontract when an odd job is needed. Do most companies shoot their own TV commercials or record their own radio spots? Of course not - they consult marketing firms who do it for a living.
Let's face it - all marketing is scummy. In traditional marketing the goal is to convince people they need something that they really don't. The web is the opposite because people query search engines to solve a specific problem, so you've got to convince them that you have the best answer to their question and you've got about 4 seconds to say it before they go elsewhere.
I argue that SEO is the LEAST scummy and perhaps the most skillful form of advertising of all time. Good SEO involves making one set of content useful to humans and spiders alike, and it requires the lightest touch to ensure the optimizations blend naturally with the prose and don't make the design any less attractive, nor the content any less informative.
SEOs are ninjas that must be experts at marketing, web design, and English, plus they must understand the state and history of the marketplace of each customer. It's not reasonable to chastise anyone for not having all those skills, and it's certainly not something you can excel at after googling the topic for a few evenings.
SEO isn't just about making your website better, it's about presenting your product more effectively than your competition. You first have to make people aware of you, and if you're that lucky you then have to make them like you. And who likes a scumbag?
Sure, but it's worth $6 to me so I bought it!
Oops, hit submit prematurely.
Just wanted to add that I bought Descent Freespace 2 from GoG and was able to use a FOSS third party interpreter to run the game asset files with a different executable. I don't remember the exact interpreter I used (I think it was on Sourceforge) but it's multiplatform including Linux and maybe Mac. Many of the games on GoG include the unmodified asset files which might be compatible with various community projects.
I'm fairly positive the entire store is dedicated to making older games run on XP and Vista only.
So the FBI created and administered this forum encouraging illegal activity, attracted 2500 users over 2 years, and arrested 56. Don't those numbers seem lopsided? Didn't the FBI create many more criminals than it caught? Isn't it legally and morally reprehensible to trifle with real citizens' financial information in order to catch such a tiny number of perps? What of the innocents whose financial histories have been at risk these past 2 years?
Am I missing something here? Isn't this entrapment? And reckless endangerment on behalf of the FBI?
So what kind of terrorist did they hope to classify them as?
Stealing from labels is illegal. Stealing from artists is immoral.
Is the RIAA truly stealing from artists when musicians willfully sign with a member of the organization? I have little sympathy for artists who knowingly endorse litigation against their fans by earning money for the RIAA.
Seems pretty lenient considering this is a case of grand theft and potentially identity theft since there was information about contractors. It could also be construed, perhaps, as terrorism or treason considering the organization the equipment and data was stolen from.
Contrast this with penalties for copying music over the internet. Is "Enter Sandman" a more valuable national resource than naval research equipment and data in Washington?
This is a pretty common outcome. Often musicians will sample copyrighted recordings and either hope no one notices, or clear the sample with the rights holder after the fact. Often the price of clearing the sample outweighs the entire of the income brought in by that song, so the new song gets transferred to the rights holder to avoid having to pay the balance. James Brown is the single most sampled and one of the most litigious artists in history, and as such, owns a crap load of other musicians' works.
There was an attachment for the old Gameboy which had a barcode scanner. Scanning any barcode would produce an attack or monster or scenario, so you and a friend could run rampant in a grocery store, battling your monsters with barcode attacks. They could do that and much more with a camera.
Many developers take advantage of Nintendo's proprietary hardware gimmicks which make for some really fun ideas, like Warioware (, Cooking Mama, Phoenix Wright ("Objection!"), and Ninja Gaiden (it's very fluid with the stylus).
I just wanted to add that I recently switched from Thunderbird to Windows Live Mail and I've never looked back. It's the best email client I've ever used. I've also been using Windows Live Writer to post to my WordPress blog as it is much superior and more stable than the native AJAX editor. MS has some really great free apps these days.
Exactly what went through my head. I had to convert with Google to figure out the temperature in a real unit of measure.
Brrrrr... but not quite absolute brrr.
What's required to clean up such a spill? Wouldn't that temperature make everything that approaches it become very brittle? Or very solid?
I've been using the free, ad-supported edition of Gmail For Your Domain (now called Google Apps) for over 3 years and have been extremely happy with it. I get more than enough email addresses (I think there's a limit but I haven't reached it in 3 years), 7GB of storage, an @yourdomain.com suffix, the awesome Gmail AJAX interface, plus you can access it with a POP3 client.
I especially love this service because my local email archives have gotten corrupted a couple of times, and I'm not the type to back that sort of thing up. I can just log on to my web account and reset the download date to download all my emails all over again at any time.
You might be right. I think we tried it on pre-SP1 Vista so that might have exacerbated the disk access issues.
Everything is worth as much as people are willing to pay for it. I suppose if people weren't willing to pay $35 for WinRAR then they'd change it, so more power to RARlabs. I love their product but I'd sooner deal with their nag screens than foot the bill.
In RARlabs' defense, I emailed them saying this a year ago or so and they said they'd knock 25% for me. I thanked them but it still seemed to expensive so I passed.
Yes, Vista.
P.s., I waited about 10 minutes before cancelling that 33 hour uncompress, just in case the estimate adjusted itself. It didn't. P.p.s., rarlabs.com doesn't have much of a website at all, never mind marketing. Perhaps their excellent (but very overpriced) product speaks for itself.
Yes, in my tests it looked like it was going to take WELL over 10x as long to uncompress the same file in 7Zip. I can't say for certain because I took 7Zip's word for it when its estimate told me it would take about 33 hours to unzip a file that literally took 15 minutes in WinRAR.
It's entirely possible that I used the product wrong or that there was a problem on both the PCs I tried, but if this was true then I'd rather use WinRAR simply because it worked better out of the box with no additional configuration.
I was very likely understating my frustration with 7Zip. I think it's appropriate to zip up a DOC for an email attachment but in my opinion it's worthless for backup and archival use on anything but a very small scale.
It is definitely not slightly slower. For me, in my isolated but multiple tests, 7Zip was obscenely slow. I tried on many OSes on 2 PCs and the results were very similar. Your mileage may vary. Me, I won't try it again until the next major version.
Try it yourself. I can only speak for my experience using 3 OSes on my own computer, and one OS on someone else's computer. The results were consistent for me but I hope they're better for everyone else and that I simply used it wrong.
I'm not exaggerating when I state this 10x delay. I'm probably understating. The bigger the file, the longer it takes. A RAR file that took 15 minutes to unzip in WinRAR would have literally taken a day and a half in 7Zip - and that was with a quad core Intel CPU on a 64-bit OS, unzipping from one physical HDD to another.