SEO - It's in the (domain) name

I have to say, if your company is big enough to have offices in multiple metro areas or in multiple states, and your company runs commercials on television, then you're also too big to ignore the importance of optimizing your website.

Case in point - Morgan & Morgan Law Firm. It's one of those random TV commercials that you rarely seem to notice, especially if you're a young, healthy American with no traffic tickets. However, I noticed the commercial because the URL for their firm's website seemed a bit odd to me - www.forthepeople.com.

I finally got around to typing the address into my browser and seeing what's there. But my first thought about the website is, "why don't they have the company name in the URL?"

So, I decided to look up a few related to see if this firm had registered any of them. I tried the following:

• morganlaw.com
• morganmorgan.com
• morganandmorgan.com
• morgan-morgan.com

Somehow I wasn't surprised to find that none of these had been registered by our law firm in question.

The point of all this is, if you're a mid-sized business or firm and you want to register some idealistic URL for your company website, then go ahead. But, for goodness sake, also register a URL with your company's name in it!

If a potential customer hears about you, then goes home and blindly tries to guess your website's name, he's going to be unsuccessful in finding you. Fortunately for this firm, they have captured the #1 rankings on SERPs for their company name.

You don't see firms like Orkin or Terminix (pest control) with URLs like www.WeHateBugs.com!

They took my idea! - How To Buy A #1 Organic Ranking

Look what I found over at SE Land:

How To Buy A #1 Organic Search Ranking On Google

So, here's one of the popular SEO blogs talking about how PPC ads and other paid material can benefit your organic ranking. I seem to remember writing about that recently - maybe they read this blog?

Link Text Optimization - Sunday SEO Series

Ok. I know - it's Monday. night. But since I didn't add to my current series of SEO posts, I felt that I should make up for it as soon as I could. So here we go...

Text Link Optimization.

The key word to focus on when thinking of Link Text Optimization is right there in the center. TEXT! That's right - text. No pictures, no JavaScript, no Flash. In order to properly optimize your website's links, the links themselves have got to be text. For this reason, we could probably refer to this as Text Link Optimization. Here's why:

How a search algorithm works.

Search algorithms go out and scour the web, taking in text and links. In general (this is changing every day, but this is still the general consensus), algorithms are not able to read pictures. Therefore, pictures of text do nothing to enhance your site's visibility in the eyes of search engines. When it comes to a picture link, the algorithm will see a link to some web address, but it will not see any text, even if the picture is of text.

Use text links in navigation, and picture links in content.

The basic practice that you should take away from this is to use all text links for site's navigation links. These are those important links that are on every page, and are always the same. Usually, you'll have a row of links across the top and a row down the side. Those are the ones that should be text.

You can use picture links, but you should use them in the content of the pages as you need them. This is the part of each page that is different.

"Alt" Text - a chance to double up.

Alt text is text that shows up when you place the mouse over a link. Specifically, in HTML markup, this is an example of a link with alt text:

Link text goes here...

This text is read by the search algorithm, and it can add to the visibility of your website. Therefore, you should always make use of alt text your navigation links. It's not always necessary to use this attribute of the link tag, but it will give your site a boost if you use it properly in your site's navigation.

SEO Title Tags - SEO tips for a Sunday Afternoon

I've had several friends request advice from me on optimizing their websites for search engine visibility, and so I thought it was probably about time to start a series of posts on my blog about SEO. My goal is to provide some clear and quick tips that can get someone started on the right foot when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). The first thing that comes to my mind is title tag optimization.

Make Title Tags descriptive and unique, but uniform!

For those of you who are new to the web design world, the "title" of a webpage is what shows up in the title bar of your web browser. Usually it is blue, since most people probably have Windows running on their computer, and the default color is blue. So, look in the blue bar at the top of the browser, and you will see the title of the page.

Planning for proper title tags - the step before the step. In order to have good title tags, you've got to have pages, and in order to have good pages, you've go to have good, well organized content. Don't place all your content on one page. If you do this, viewers will find it hard to sift through the content in order to figure out what they want to know about you. Here are some easy things to do that will help you figure out how to structure your site:

1. Think about your business and how you might organize your information.
   
2. Then look at some websites of similar businesses. Go to Google.com and type in your product or industry. How are those websites organized? Are there conventions that your customers might expect when they visit a site in your industry?
3. Organize your content.
   
• Create different "buckets". You'll probably have the "homepage bucket", then the "products bucket", then the "about our company bucket", then the "contact us bucket", then (if you're big enough) a bucket with information about applying for jobs at your firm, and so on.
  
• Under the products bucket, you may have subcategories of products. Think about these things, then divide up your content and place it on corresponding pages.
  
4. Chose titles for the content on each page. Do not make all titles the same. For example, don't just use the company name as every page's title. Chose titles that describe what the page is about.
   

The most common mistake - no variation. Most small businesses probably don't pay too much attention to the title tag, other than making sure it has the company name in it somewhere. The most common thing I've seen is to have all pages in the site have the same title tag. This is a mistake. You want the titles of your pages to be different.

But some uniformity is encouraged! If your company's name were ACME Inc., you would be alright to include ACME somewhere in your title tag on every page. The best way to do this is to add the company name at the end of your title tags.

• The page that has most of the general information about your company would be titled, "About our company - ACME Inc."
• Similarly, if you were a photographer, you could have a page entitled, "Jon & Trish's Wedding - Acme Photography, Inc."

The basic principle: Unique parts of the title should come first, followed by uniform parts. This basically means that, since all titles are to be unique, place the unique parts at the beginning, followed by the category name or company name. If you're a newspaper, you would place article titles in the front of the page title, followed by the name of the newspaper. For example:

• Diplomat's speech stalled by talking donkey - The Bethlehem Chronicle

Also give the reader an idea of where they are in your site. If you have a site with lots of content and subcategories, it is a good idea to include the names of categories in the titles of the site. If you chose to do that, the above example could look like this:

• Diplomat's speech stalled by talking donkey - Local news - Bethlehem Chronicle.
  

This simple example follows the format of [Unique article title] - [Section] - [Website title]. You can easily tailor this to your site.

The moral of the story - capturing a potential customer's specific web search. If you're wondering why these suggestions have been made this way, think about things this way:

• Each search engine user out there is a potential customer of yours.
  
• When a search engine looks for results, title tags are one of the most important factors in determining the relevance of a webpage.
• If your page is relevant to the user's search, the first way you're going to tell the search engine that is by placing specific information about your page in your title tag.
  

Your company name might be important to you, but if your customer is looking for camera parts, they'll be more quickly drawn to a page that has the word "Canon" or "SLR" in the page title. If you've ever done online research about anything, just think about your own behavior when you search for something. "Smith Enterprises Inc." is not going to draw many people, if that's all your title tag says.

How to change the page's title with Notepad.

• Open Notepad.
• With notepad, click File, Open, and then find your webpage that you want to open.
• You'll see confusing text that looks like web programming language. Press Ctrl and F at the same time.
• You'll see a Search box. Type "<title>" and press Enter. (type it with the greater than and less than brackets, but without quotes.)
• You'll see something like this:
• <title>Canon Digital SLR Cameras - ACME Inc.</title>
  
• <title> and </title> The stuff between is open for you to change. That's your page's title.
  
• Change the text, save the document, then close it.
  
• You have now changed the page's title. Open it in a web browser to see the new page.

I hope that was easy enough to follow. This is the first entry in a weekly series about small business SEO. Come back next Sunday for the next article.

I Beg to Differ! Buying Ads Just Might Be the Ticket To Better Organic Listings

Consider the following post over at SELand:

No, Buying Ads Still Won't Help You With Google's Free Listings

I know, I know. By even suggesting that I disagree with this post, I'm opening myself up to criticism. Let me say that I know, and agree, with the theoretical law of SEM, that Adwords spending will in no way influence one's natural rankings on Google. I know it, you know it, we all know it.

HOWEVER...

What if we look at PPC spending as part of the SEO effort for a webmaster? SEO focuses on increasing your site's visibility. Visibility is affected by several factors, but some major ones include internal accessibility, usability, and overall popularity.

How would you go about increasing your site's overall popularity? Why, you would do whatever you could to get your site's brand name plastered around the internet. You would talk to fellow webmasters about linking to your site, try to get listed on major indexes and directories in your industry, and just get your name out there. Why wouldn't you consider PPC ads as a way to "get your name out there"? Just imagine - someone searches for your product, and there you are, right in front of them, all because you spent a few dollars.

Basically, I'm just contending that anything you can do to increase the number of links to your site out there on the internet - that is a way to increase your site's visibility and influence your site's natural rankings. Increased visibility on a SERP will result in better branding, more link juice, and eventually, better rankings.

Now, we all know about cannibalization, as well as a slew of other issues that this post raises. I know that there are other issues involved, but all I'm saying is that it may be indirect, but PPC ads can eventually influence your natural listings, if they contribute directly to the traffic on your site.



More later.

Yahoo! Search Assist as a Keyword Generator

This article by Rand over at SEOmoz got me to thinking about Search Assist, the new feature from Yahoo!:

SEOmoz | Yahoo! Leveraging "Content" for Queries

Can you tell I have SEOmoz in my feed reader? Anyway...

As a result of the article, I was looking at Yahoo! SERPs, wondering about implications for my company's PPC campaigns, when I realized that Rand's observations also apply to the entire Search Assist feature in Yahoo! SERPs.

Just to quickly provide some background, Yahoo! recently rolled out the new Search Assist feature, which is advertised prominently by a yellow "post-it note" graphic "hanging" down from the search bar on the Yahoo! homepage. On every SERP, you will see keyword suggestions closely related to your search term, displayed in a box that drops down from the search bar. Click any one, and you'll be taken to a new SERP that hopefully will serve your needs better than the one that you got from your initial keyword.

Basically, the article at SEOmoz was commenting on the fact that Yahoo! has started to place links to SERPs directly on their homepage, driving users to SERPs directly related to the content of the day. For example, one of today's blurbs on the Yahoo! homepage is entitled "Cleaning up 'Rat Island'". Below the blurb, there's a link that says, "find out how to get rid of rodents", which will take a user directly to a Yahoo! SERP for the keyword "how to get rid of rodents". Not surprisingly, the top ads that can be viewed here are mostly for pest control companies.

The thing that I noticed from this is how Yahoo!'s Search Assist feature also takes you to SERPs on pre-determined keywords. Rand rightly observes that if you want to beef up traffic on your blog or website, one good idea might be to keep track of what's showing over at the Yahoo! homepage, and bid on those keywords. However, with that in mind, my observation is that the entire Search Assist feature could be used as a kind of keyword generator for your PPC campaign. You should not only keep track of what SERPs Yahoo! links to from its homepage, but you should also keep track of what SERPs are possible from the Search Assist feature. For example, after looking at the blurb about rodents and doing a few clicks on the Search Assist feature, I was able to get the following 15 keywords:

how to get rid of rodents naturally
how to get rid of rodents rats
how to get rid of rodents bait
how to get rid of rodents in your attic
how to get rid of rodents in the attic
how to get rid of rodents home
how to get rid of rodents in attic
sonic mole chaser
mole chasers
solar mole chaser
windmill mole chaser
mole chaser windmill
electronic mole chaser
solar powered mole chaser
p3 mole chaser
p3 international mole chaser

Now, I know that some of these overlap, but most of them have no ads, or at least not very many. What's more, if there are ads, they don't seem to be that helpful. Basically, I'm saying that this is a new list of 15 keywords, and the ad space for all of them should be easy to penetrate. Savvy PPC managers should not only grab Yahoo!'s content-related SERPs, but they should also grab Yahoo!'s Search Assist-generated SERPs - which will probably guarantee a number of highly targeted impressions.

Search Volume is the Best Indicator of Satisfaction

Consider this article over at SEOMoz by Rand Fishkin:

SEOmoz | Yahoo! Is the Most Fulfilling Search Engine?

Rand acknowledges Compete.com's recent findings that say Yahoo! is the most successful major search engine at getting users to click on a result - in other words, Yahoo! SERPs have the highest CTR. However, Rand extrapolates from this that Yahoo! users are the most satisfied users. I don't know if this is the case - just because Yahoo! has a higher CTR on their search results, I don't know if that means Yahoo! users are more satisfied than Google users.

By contrast, I would look at reports such as this one and extrapolate that, since Google's market share is so large, that means Google is so satisfying that it gets everyone's search attempts - even the ones where people don't think they're going to find anything.

Obviously, there are some differences between SERPs on Google and Yahoo. At least, 7 of the top 10 sites will often be the same, though they may not be in the same order. These differences may be what gives Google its edge in market share.

I would like to see some data on searches per user. I know this would be hard to compile, but I think that would take us closer to knowing which SE is actually more satisfying. If a user identifies one SE as more successful, my guess is that the main indicator would be the return visit. And, based on Google's proven ability to steadily keep its market share up, I think the right assumption would be that Google is most satisfactory.

Presidential Thoughts

Old Dudes Dig Fred [ClickZ]

This is an interesting, if brief, post over at ClickZ's blog about presidential hopeful Fred Thompson. Of note, though is the mention that Republican Ron Paul's campaign site has garnered the most traffic from social networking sites like Facebook, Flickr, and MySpace. Of course, Obama and Hillary are next in line, but does anyone else out there think this is strange? I would think the younger, more internet-savvy voters would be the ones visiting Obama or Hillary's sites - not those perusing the site of a libertarian.

Will the Internet Eventually Close the Loop?

SELand: What Influences Online Searches?

OK, so this is not a link to the actual study, but iProspect conducted a recent study that says, according to SELand,

"...offline channels prompt two-thirds of online search. 37% said a television ad encouraged them to conduct a search, 36% said word-of-mouth initiated a search, 30% said a print ad, 20% said a physical store's location and 17% said a radio ad."

If it were me and I were an offline kind of guy, I'd be asking, "where'd that other third of the people go?" It used to be that all searches were prompted somewhere along the line by offline channels. But if a third of the people don't even get their search terms offline, then I am thinking that number is not going to get any smaller.

Is this an indicator of the power of offline channels, or an indicator of the growth of the internet?

A Message to the TV Industry

BBC NEWS | The Editors' Blog: A Message to the TV Industry

If you read this blog at all, you're probably surprised that this post is implying that I've gotten at least some of my news from the BBC, given my recent post about how the news giant just doesn't know how to blog. But, alas, I did read an interesting post this morning in the editorial blog about the upcoming International TV Festival, to be held this weekend in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Basically, the post is just brushing the surface with a couple of general questions about the industry, asking whether TV is trustworthy, and which direction the industry will take in the future. It's a worthy quandary, but I think there are also some other issues to consider.

Like, for instance, how is TV going to follow the example of the internet and become an efficient medium for communication, and a more effective place for investor dollars? It used to be that everyone watched TV at night when they got home. If a Presidential debate was on, or the World Series, or even just the Braves' game, you could bet that most people would be watching something between 7pm and 11pm. The Nightly News, with Dan Rather, with Peter Jennings, with Tom Brokaw... remember? "More Americans get their news... " Now, you can't really say that more Americans get anything from TV, any more than they get it from somewhere else.

But I think that the most important perspective is probably that of the advertiser. With the Internet, there is Cost-Per-Click, which gives you Click-Thru-Ratio, Impressions, and reports on spending categorized any way you like them. Basically, the idea is that you know exactly how much business you are generating from an Internet ad. And so you pump in more money - or, better yet, just the right amount of money.

With TV, there never has been that opportunity for measurement. Everyone just knew that, if you were big enough, you ought to advertise on TV, and in generally, you'll help grow your customer base. But is the ambiguity in knowledge of ROI enough to make people begin to see TV as a second-rate advertising medium, compared to the internet? These are the questions TV must grapple with, I think.

Notes on Blogging

I apologize for the absence. The Independence Day week has taken me to several locations around the southeast, most notably Lake Junaluska, North Carolina - a place that is, in the words of one Anglican minister, "not far from the heart of American religion." Family reunions are fun, even when you're still just getting to know everyone (I'm married in).

Anyway, back to a subject that is more relavent to this blog. Blogging. Due to my week-long absence, and my recent business at my job, I have been left with very little time to devote to other things, including posting on this blog. Not surprisingly, the traffic on the site went down very near to zero during the past two weeks, and I have had no comments to moderate.

So I think the take-home point is very clear: frequent posting is essential to improving traffic on your blog. Of course, other things are also equally important, but everyone needs to be clear that there is no reliable way to gain readership without also providing fresh content. This is true because your readers will always be searching for something new to read, but also because of pings - your blog won't ping the server if new content is not posted. Pings signal feed readers, and feed readers tell people who's got the freshest, most relevant material. So, that's all just to say that there is no static solution. A couple of tips to help with frequent posting:

Keep your posts relatively short. I still have a personal blog that I started a couple of years ago. I would post long dicourses on philosophy, religion, literature, and life in general. However, it very quickly became such a burden to write these long posts that I very nearly quit posting. It became a thing where I would post two or three times every six months, just because it took so long. Don't do that! Keep your posts under 500 words, and you'll be best served.

The other point to realize in this is that nobody reads your blog in the first place. Let's be honest - besides your friends and a few random surfers out there, who's going to read your blog? A relatively small number of people, compared to the number of people on the internet. You've got a much better chance of increasing that number if your posts are short and to the point. And the truth is that nobody's going to keep reading your blog if your posts are very long. If they don't know you, and you're not a columnist, they won't care about the ins and outs of how you feel about something.

Oh... and if you're not a columnist, you're not going to become one on a blog. Unless you think people only read very short columns.

Pick a well-defined subject matter and stick with it. This blog is about sEO issues, Google, and other issues related to web design. That's definite enough for me to keep the content flowing. The other problem with the personal blog was that there was no subject matter, other than me. Therefore, it was extremely hard to figure out what was worthy of posting and what was not.

The last point is to LINK, LINK, LINK! Find a post on the Official Google Blog and link to it. See what happens. The fact is that each post on the Google blog lists at the end all of the pages that link to that post. It's an automatic "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" situation. And if you post about Google and SEO issues often, linkbacks from Google will bring you lots of traffic, because the Google blog itself is a very widely read source. If you post about other things, go ahead and find pages within your subject matter to link to within your posts. Comment on your world within your sphere of influence. This will eventually bring you traffic, as other webmasters and bloggers see your blog on their referral logs and visit your site to see what you're up to, and why you're sending readers their way. You must link to things that are actually relevant, but there is a lot of freedom here. No link is a bad link.

And linking to a blog is better than linking to some website. A blog has an individual author, most likely, who will investigate your site if you send him traffic.

OK, got to go do some work. If I ramble on any more, I may violate my first point!

The Death of SEO?

A very interesting article by Mike Grehan over at ClickZ:
SEO Is Dead. Long Live, er, the Other SEO

Mike waxes for a while in this one about the "death" of SEO, or, more specifically, the death of SEO as we know it. Perhaps this "death" will also be a way for SEO to catch up with the technology of the current day. Mike points to Ask.com several times in this article, saying that their 3-column approach has basically turned the SERP into a virtual portal on the information searched for. He's right, and he may also be right about this being the future of SERPs.

If it is, then we may see Google follow suit and ditch the adwords column on its SERP in favor of a 3rd column displaying more universal search (US) results. However, since Google rarely seems to follow trends that it didn't start in this industry, I wouldn't hold my breath. It's just possible, that's all I'm saying.

One question to ask is, if Google and other SEs did go to the 3-column SERP, what would be the future of adwords-type advertising? Where will it go on the page? If you view this Ask.com SERP, you can see only one sponsored link, for Target.com, who obviously paid a lot of money to get their link right in the center of the page. If you actually go to page 2 and following, it's at the top of each page.

I've actually thought that Google's layout for US SERPs was lacking something, and now that I've taken a decent look at the Ask.com SERPs, I think the 3-column approach is where they should go if they want to improve it. I look at this SERP from Google, and I have to say that Ask has the upper hand. I see a lot of white space - that could be used just to drive revenue (adwords), if not for US results. The US results are there, but it's at the expense of traditional results, which I don't think is the answer.

Ask.com: The better marketer

Take a look:

ClickZ News - Yahoo Shows Off Panama
PC World - Yahoo Opens Access to Panama
SEW Blog - Ask.com: The Other Search Engine

Does anyone see a dichotomy here? What we have is a whole bunch of people that want to throw Google off of their thrown. We've got different news stories, all asking the question, "Is this going to be the thing that enables [Insert Company Name] to catch up with Google?"

However, the story about Ask.com is very interesting, because it shows a company that seems to be openly embracing its standing in the marketplace, behind Google and the other search engines out there. They're not content with their standing, but in order to move up in the world of search, they are openly acknowledging that they are not number one, or even number two for that matter. Perhaps this line of thinking will help them better identify with the majority of users out there, who also designated Google as the SE to beat. Ask.com seems to further feed this line of thinking by advertising on YouTube, a Google-owned property.

Yahoo, on the other hand, like Microsoft, is continuing with the more traditional approach of pointing people to itself as the best search engine out there. Of course - why wouldn't they want people to think they are the best? The problem with that is, most people don't. They've got a larger network, perhaps more tools, and a different ad platform now, but everyone still says Google is better. That perception doesn't seem to be changing soon, either.

This is all to say that, while Yahoo and Microsoft seem to be taking the old, traditional approach to marketing themselves, it doesn't seem to be working, and Ask.com's approach seems to be more in line with the users out there.

The Value of PageRank

Paul Barrett's post at Apple Pie & Custard about Google PageRank:
http://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/2006/10/google-page-rank-update.html

It's early, so I figured I'd comment on this article, since it's short and to the point, and commenting on it would not take too long. PageRank is something that has baffled me for a while, as another one of those things in the field of SEO that is good to have, but is not exactly essential to good visibility. The crazy thing is, we know that it is part of the mix somehow, but we don't really know exactly how - it just another one of those weird puzzle pieces to SEO. We know it fits, but we don't always know just where. For example, the Google blogger page that I'm using to write this post has a PageRank of 7, but each page in my website at work a PageRank of 3, even though the site hundreds of pages of content, all interlinked, with several inbound links from outside sources. We've never been able to raise the PageRank, even though I've been able to increase in SERPs considerably over the past year.

So, I guess I'm just saying that I wish there was an A+B=C equation in this business for something, mostly so that I could go show my boss something that is certain, and he could say, "well, I'm glad you found that out..," or something like that.

That's my ramble for the morning. Enjoy.

Not too Late for SEO

It's almost midnight, which means I ought to be in bed, getting rested for another day, but I haven't posted anything today, so I thought I would just leave a tidbit before retiring. The post about search types has me thinking (still) about my adwords campaign, wondering what quantifiable ROI can be gained from paying for ads that show up in "informational" SERPs, versus ones that show up in "transactional" SERPs.

Just to define terms, by "informational", I mean a search for something like "East Indies pictures". For "transactional", I mean a search for something like "Cheap international airfares".

If you are just beginning to start out on the CPC path, looking for a good ROI so that you can justify continuing the cost of continuing an Adwords campaign, then my first thought is that you want to go 100% toward "transactional" SERPs, leaving the other types of searches for later, when you have more experience.

But you also want to think about the difference, if there is any, in user behavior. Do users view a "transactional" SERP differently than an "informational" one? Are they more likely or less likely to click on the paid ads? I would say that they are more likely, because ads on those pages are more geared toward making a quick deal. Basically, ads on those pages are probably more immediately relevant.

However, sites like Google and Yahoo benefit from users merely perusing the pages of the network - regardless of whether they actually purchase anything. So then, do these kinds of sites consider every SERP transactional in nature?

hmmm...

Segmenting The Market

Segmenting The Market

Frank over at SEW also wrote about this article, on SEOMoz blog:

Segmenting Search Intent

Randy at SEOMoz is onto something, and it has me thinking about my website a little differently at the moment. Since I'm about to help my company launch a paid-search advertising captain to increase the amount of business we drive to clients. My thinking is, obviously, that we want to be showing up in those "transactional" searches as well as the "informational" ones, and that will influence how we buy keywords. But for Google/Yahoo/MSN, if that influences where they place ads on the page, then that is interesting. I would like to see some research on click patterns and with regard to search types. How do people treat an SERP obtained by an informational search, as opposed to one obtained by a transactional search? Do they scan the SERP differently based on their intent? Do transactional searches yield users who are more likely to scan the adds to the right, as opposed to informational searches? I would assume the answer is yes, but I wonder how stark the contrast would be.

Back to posting

Sorry for my absence; I know I haven't posted since Friday, but (1) I usually won't have the opportunity to post on weekends, and (2) I was writing a paper for a seminary class I'm taking. It ended up being ...eh... not that good, but good enough for the purposes intended. All I have to say is, Kerkegaard is quite inspirational, and truth is subjective! Anyway, more posts will follow soon, once I get the engine running. Later!

An Open Source OS that's NOT Linux

Google, if you're listening at all - I mean, I am within your blog-dom - I'm asking you to take up the challenge and move toward offering a complete line of software - including an OS. After buying and setting up computers and computer software for my small office over the past year, I have been overwhelmed by way that Microsoft has gradually attempted to force its software down the throats of small offices and large offices across the world - and I believe it is stifling innovation and competition. The latter is a "no, duh" observation; Microsoft is obviously taking a copyright-and-monopoly approach to software development, trying to use the current laws that protect innovation and authorship to cement its own place in the market for years to come. Their attitude has made it virtually impossible for someone else to spend the amount of money necessary to compete. Impossible, that is, until now.

Google is now the world's largest software company, and they have already ventured into software. Now that they're not afraid anymore, I would be the first to buy a Google attempt at a fully-functional operating system that is user-friendly like Windows, but does not cost a person or a company thousands of dollars to outfit just a few systems. Obviously, this need doesn't have to be met by Google-source - it could be met by any number of open-source developers out there who have the time and money to devote to such a project (*ahem* - are you listening, Mozilla?), but the thing I am worried about is usability. I don't have any interest in a piece of software that's only useful to developers and network administrators, as is the current case with Linux. The obvious problem with having a small outfit develop something is support - someone like Red Hat, though well-intentioned, is not big enough to promote or support its product in the same way that MS is. MS has constant updates and help docs online, which are supposed to alleviate the problems caused by the fact that their software is crappy and is designed to use the monopoly status MS enjoys to coerce offices into spending thousands of dollars per year trying to keep current.

My vision is a system that would cost $100, or would come pre-installed on a new computer, and then would always stay current through an online membership system, which would have an annual cost of something like $50 or $100/year. Imagine the possibilities, if the systems were always updated properly, automatically, and then people enjoyed the same massive technical support that MS purports to give.

Frequency Matters!

I found a very informative and helpful post at ConverStations, the blog of Mike Sansone, a Conversation Conductor who lives in Iowa. What a job. For more about Mike, click here.

Frequent and Consistent Posting Does Matter

In the last few months, I've had customers/prospects tell me that frequent and consistent posting isn't important. Wrong. Especially at the beginning.

They insisted that if blogs are such a great thing, they didn't need to update that often. Sounds like a cob-web strategy to me. Sounds like they either don't want to put in the work or it's just not a priority. But for a blog to be successful, the blogger must put in the work.

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Ok. I know. You're thinking, "duh." Well, we all should be. But his post is pretty true to life, I think. People naturally are going to want more output than input. That's convenience - they call it the American way these days.

Thinking about it from an SEO perspective, pings are never generated when the blog is static, so it doesn't make sense to "strive" for a static entity that will consistently rank highly in the SERPs. The mentality actually goes against everything I said in my inaugural post about the nature of the SEO industry. Nobody ever arrives. It's very existential, very postmodern. Experience is everything, and experiences are by nature fleeting - therefore, SEO does not end. It's the never ending project. That's why you hire a web design team if you're a firm or a company. Or, that's why you become an SEO consultant.

Opening Day

And so starts the first day of this blog. I have started this blog as sort of a message board for people who are actively engaged in some time of SEO, but still consider themselves novices, as they might not have any formal training, or whatever.

Remaining true to existentialist thinking, my opinion is that we would all do best to consider ourselves novices, recognizing that any progress lies in the struggle itself. That is to say, in the ever changing world of SEO, it seems that no one "arrives" (perhaps with Matt Cutts, and a few others that happen to work at Google as noteworthy exceptions), and that the whole idea is to remain locked in the "struggle" - that is, the day to day striving to learn the latest trend. To arrive would be to exit the struggle, and to exit the struggle would admit defeat.

So that is my philosophical rambling for the day (I would like to thank my mentor, Soren...). Feel free to comment as you wish; I hope that before long I will have the SEO of my own blog up to speed, and the visibility will be high enough for you to actually see this post and comment on it. For more philosophical rambling, visit my other blog - Square Peg.

Jonathan