Warmest Greetings,
:: Thursday, July 25, 2002 ::
More bad news for US stock holders invested in the Internet...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59973-2002Jul24.html
Federal regulators are looking into how AOL Time Warner accounted for several transactions. CEO Richard Parsons said Wednesday that the SEC had opened a "fact-finding" inquiry into the transactions, which include an arrangement that allowed a British entertainment company to buy advertising instead of paying an arbitration award in a legal dispute, shifting revenue among two divisions and sold ads on behalf of eBay while booking the sales as its own revenue.
:: posted by Kimberly Krause on 7/25/2002 01:05:23 PM
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Wanna be famous? I have the pleasure of being a judge for a contest whereby small and home businesses vie for some glorious promotional prizes worth $706 that will help them with their online business. It's been fun reviewing the websites. I do this for a living, so I see a lot of websites in all shapes, themes and sizes. Every so often one truly stands out. It's a real pleasure choosing them in a contest such as this.
If you want to learn more, see winning sites or get to know my friend, Carol Daly, who devotes countless hours to helping small and home online businesses get off the ground, please visit: http://www.creativethought.com/
"Here's the contest you've been hearing about!! We won't guarantee to make you famous, but we can perhaps give you a little help in jump-starting your business. We want to reward those who've worked hard to build an original business concept and web site, and we want to reward it with the opportunity to win some fantastic business-building tools and products!
From now through September, we'll be choosing one winner per month to win a variety of goods and services to help the winner's traditional small business grow! You'll find the link to enter the contest below."
For winners, see: http://www.creativethought.com/The_Main_Office/Business_Contest_Winners/business_contest_winners.html
creatively yours,
Kim
:: posted by Kimberly Krause on 7/25/2002 12:33:16 PM
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:: Wednesday, July 24, 2002 ::
We're All Doing It
(Someone wrote): "Hypocrits' because *all* attempts to influence the search results can justifiably be called spam, and everyone who is engaged in search engine optimisation is engaged in attempts to influence the search results."
I guess we're all hyocrits then, eh? Everyday humans do countless things to try and influence something - a mate, potential lover, boss, teacher, and I'm not afraid to admit that in my 20's and 30's, before settling down to my present life as a boring person, (!), I did my damdest to make sure I looked HOT before going out with friends, to influence those "search results" at the bars or dance clubs. You know what I'm saying? We all optimize, my friend. (wink)
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Copy This Down
I don't consider good copy writing to be SPAM. Several SEO "gurus" rave about SEO copywriting. It takes certain skills, but less of the nonsense that was formerly drilled into our heads (and which I always ignored because I was never that desperate), such as keyword density per page counts. I've never done this for my site or a client. Never needed to. Good copy written on a single topic works just fine. It'll be found. People will link to it because it's useful and informative and makes sense - not because it had 15.2 keywords on it.
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You built it. They came. Then what happened?
You don't need access to your server logs to get some great pointers from this article from DigitalWeb (http://www.digital-web.com/tutorials/tutorial_2002-07.shtml)
"... but two things are often missed. First, how the link to your site is presented in the results is critical. Next, what are visitors experiencing once they select that link? Many sites spend significant resources ensuring high placement in search engines, but usually little effort is spent on designing how those results are displayed and whether the pages they point to will help the visitor achieve their goal."
As I've mentioned here and on Cre8pc.com many people think the job is done when the site is designed, launched and being promoted. But what often happens afterwards, especially in situations where the site's goal is to generate sales leads or sell products, is poor traffic, site abandonment, no leads and no sales.
This article touches on usability issues that occur after the site is found in search engines, as well as how your site is linked and made searchable.
-- Kim
:: posted by Kimberly Krause on 7/24/2002 08:18:47 PM
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:: Tuesday, July 23, 2002 ::
[7/23/2002 7:40:33 PM | Kimberly Krause]
She's an SEO Gladiator
At 08:59 AM 7/21/02, Phil wrote: (in the Cre8asite Forum)
"I have never heard of an seo who doesn't create new pages."
I never have, unless you consider building html sitemaps to be creating a new page. As far as what optimizing I do, it's all in the code (how the site is built), refocusing meta tags and title tags to fit the subject matter of each page, and adding to or rewriting content so that stands a chance of being properly categorizied by both engine and human editors. All the other things done over the years, including optimizing per engine, I never did.
There's always been a catch-all phrase for people who work sites to be indexed and/or ranked by search portals such as Search Engine Marketing or Optimizers. But I've found there's many ways of approaching our goals and "marketing" isn't always part of it. (This is why I changed the name of my site from Cre8pc Website Promotion to just Cre8pc.) Being a manual submitter and never straying from that, I stood apart from all those who got into the business and relied on software like WebPositionGold. I charged less than those who used automatic software to guide them in their optimization, and gave more personalized attention because my goals weren't about earning a living doing this. My interests and career goals lay elsewhere but I enjoyed the challenges of helping web sites navigate the world of search engines. My freelance in SEO was via word of mouth from happy clients. I never needed to advertise.
You'll note that some SEO companies advertise all the time, and many use scare tactics to get new clients. I don't consider myself in the same line of work as those companies because I'd never resort to desperate tactics to get clients or to promote their sites.
The other thing I'd like to point out is that lumping everyone together, and all SEO procedures together, isn't accurate or fair. We don't all have the same approach, use the same methods, or have the same business goals. For example, my goal was ALWAYS to make sure my clients didn't need me anymore. I never provided long-term contracts or made promises to anyone about results. I chose to teach my clients how to manage their own SEO for their own sites. This was included in my fee. I didn't want a bunch of co-dependent clients. I wanted to enrich my clients with knowledge and resources so that they'd be independent and be able to create their own Internet destiny. I never met another person in the business with that approach and who in their right mind would do it like that anyway? But like I said, I've always been different. Cre8pc.com has always been a labor of love. (It wasn't until I put a services page on my site that Yahoo! would accept it into their Directory - which is why, after arguing with Yahoo! for 2 years after my site was dropped from their database when they switched to fee submissions, I advertised providing services. It was to get back into Yahoo!, not to get new clients.)
Just because one or a few of us do things a little differently doesn't mean we're any less skilled. Working on corporate sites with proprietary software driven pages and trying to get those pages into engines because the company stock depends on it - that's the world I come from. In the 1990's it was fun to build sites, submit them, alter pages to climb up rank and watch the traffic numbers change depending on what you did. It was TONS of fun to optimize, change code, experiment. We learned rather quickly what not to do, especially when some engines had a beef about something and would ban pages. If you were smart, you followed the rules - especially if your job responsibilities included "getting sites into engines." Nowadays, it's not fun. You send money and get rank. You send money and get indexed. You pay Yahoo! to look at it and pray they don't refuse it so your $299 fee doesn't go down the drain.
I prefer to be called an SEO Gladiator.
What we do for websites is necessary. How we do it is all over the place as far as what's available, ethical, moral, and all those code words. Some people would never consider jaywalking in a US street even if there was no police person there to ticket them. Others could care less and will take risks to cross the street and get to other side. We may all have heads, 2 arms, 2 legs, but we each make different choices with what we do with them. You can't lump us all together and expect us to all be called the same thing or do the exact same things.
It's the same thing with SEO. I'm happy to educate people and let them make the final choice. I also turn down those who want me to perform certain tasks I won't do, such as cloaking, mirror/cloned sites and doorway clones with different domains. If a client asks me to abuse technology or do something I'm uncomfortable with even if it's not really that objectionable (doorways are not bad for example. How they're built is where the potential is for risk.) I have the right to say no, and I do. They'll find someone else in this business who will gladly do as they ask.
Kim
:: posted by Kimberly Krause on 7/23/2002 08:43:35 PM
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