SEOCRACY: DISS MY BLOG

Yesterday I was responding to a few RFPs, trying to determine what qualities I need to dumb down when explaining them to a bunch of fat-cats who don't know the first thing about search engines. After I realized I couldn't hack it, a light shot up in my brain.

I remembered SEOCRACY. This SEO blog is run by a guy who also builds and sells databases. But I remembered a specific post. In this writing, he explained "his host" (yeah...) corrupted his database backups, losing him "a TON" of original content. Since this guy can't even keep his own data in line (at the same time as claiming that "all your database are belong to us), I figured, he must have plenty of dumb blog posts that I could rip from for my RFPs.

So I fire up the browser to seocracy.com. Instantly I'm remindend of SEOCRACY's blog quality, as I get an error on my screen "THIS HOST CANNOT BE FOUND." Basically, the first time I saw his blog, I blocked it to prevent myself from wasting any more time there again. It's actually on a pretty exclusive list, containing only seocracy.com, goatse.cx and the original site with those singing hamsters. Anyway, I had to unblock seocracy for the time being... And I tried again:

"Finally, let's talk about Facebook." Great. I went to an SEO blog to hear more about "Facebook." I don't know if Rob just had nothing else to write about or what. But the fact of the matter is it didn't contribute anything to his readers ("Guys, guys guys, you guys should build a network of fake friends." Thanks, Rob. Welcome to 2005.). Furthermore, the use of "finally" here implies that it's been a long time coming, like Rob's had all this time to prepare (like everybody's been waiting to see what Rob has to say on this social network). But seriously, how elemental is this: "create a network of fake friends." Wow! I'm going to use that "advanced seo tactic" to become the next shoemoney. This post fails the "on topic" criterion, but at least it's dumb, as I expected.

In fact, I had to skip down to his third post to see anything about SEO. I guess an on-topic score of 33% is acceptable for citizens of a country that use a made up word, "eh," in 33% of their sentences. So let's take apart this post. It's a BH-link post, and normally I'd be excited. But, it's in the familiar SEOCRACY blog. Let me sum this post up. Rob spends 4 paragraphs discussing that log spamming is the past, and widget spamming is the future. Yeah yeah... And then for his example? He log spams! Okay, I'm not being fair. This is a twist on an old tactic, and it does provide marginal value.

So there you have it, 33% of SEOCRACY's posts provide marginal value.

This is my entry into SEOCRACY's DISS-MY-BLOG Contest

Go away

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Using Squidoo

Here's the process I used recently to leverage my writing via Squidoo:

1. Set up the RSS feed to your Squidoo lens

You create a RSS module in your Squidoo lens and add the RSS feed of your blog to this module.

2. Make a blog post

You make a post to your blog on a topic relevant to your Squidoo lens. The stimulus for this post could be a resource you received via email, a purchase or a giveaway product. It could also come from a forum posting or blog comment you made or even from a response you provided to an inquiry from a subscriber or prospect.

3. Edit your target lens

You can add a tag or two to your Squidoo lens to reflect your blog post. When you then re-publish your lens it will be updated with your new tags and the new feed from your blog entry.

4. Advise your mailing list of the new blog post

You can incorporate your post in an email to your mailing list. Alternatively, you can provide the post title and link from your blog - this way people will be encouraged to visit your blog. With this latter approach, you can add a brief review of an affiliate product or service mentioned in your blog post. In either case, ensure that your email includes a link back to your Squidoo lens as well.

5 More Steps

1. Use Alt tag. By nature, search engines cannot read images, only texts. Adding an alternative tag will provide texts to your pictures, so even your images can get indexed by search engines. Your website also becomes much friendlier to users who are only into text-only browsers.

2. Submit your site once alone in various directories and search engines. There are some sites that give penalties if you submit your site even twice. They see it as spamming. Submit your site just once, and read when you can possibly expect a confirmation or denial.

3. Sprinkle keywords. You need to use keywords in your articles to make your copies searchable in search engines. However, it doesn't mean you have to abuse such strategy. Make sure that you don't sacrifice the quality of your articles for the sake of keywords.

4. Include keywords in the title tag. Doing this will give hints to robots about the nature of your webpage. It will be also easy for search engines to determine the relevancy of your website to your chosen keywords.

5. Deep link. Don't just submit your homepage's link. For better optimization, submit links of your internal web pages to directories, with their corresponding title, keyword, and description tags.

More Business SEO: Outsourcing

Each business that has been market for a long time or is trying hard to make a position, gives it their shot to be known among people in the market. In fact, marketing in the right manner and through the right channel is the one strategy that can create huge differences for the business. In fact, it is a known fact that one has to follow the right and the best marketing techniques to get the desired marketing values. One of the best mediums of marketing these days is the internet. Internet has proved to be a great boon for humankind and also for businesses, as these days it has become a trend to opt for internet marketing. However, just by creating a website will not be sufficient to make it big in the industry. One will need to follow the right strategies and do the right planning to get the website promoted in the right manner. To get this done, one can take the help of outsourcing SEO, as this proves to be one of the best ways to promote any website among a group of target audience.

The major benefit of having any kind of service outsourced is that it helps the organization to get the work done at a much lower cost and the work that is done is highly professional and is good quality. Moreover, it helps both the party to get a good name in the market and also helps them earn good revenue. When you opt for outsourcing SEO facilities, you become more relaxed and you can actually expect to get good work in return. As internet has become a major source of communication and has become a good platform for marketing, therefore, if you can promote your business and your services in the right manner, you can actually make your website a big name in the market. Outsourcing SEO guides you in upholding your brand or the product and even the services through the internet and it even makes sure that your website gets high ranking in the major search engines like Google, yahoo and others.

SEO for Small Business

Positive Search Engine Optimization practices to consider:

1. Keywords in the Page Title
2. Keywords in the H Tags
3. The Age of Your WWW Domain
4. The Size of Your Website
5. Backlinks (inbound links to your pages)
6. Keywords in Text Links
7. High Quality, Original Content

Negative or deceptive SEO practices you should avoid:

1. Do not have affiliate only advertising pages. You need original content.
2. Do not have over optimized pages. It won't help SEO and may confuse your visitors.
3. Do not have link schemes, inbound or outbound. Deceptive practices will backfire.
4. Do not have identical content hosted on two separate domains (mirror sites).
5. Do not have plagiarized content. It is illegal, and search engines can tell.
6. Do not have foul language as in cursing, or content that is hateful or racist.