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Jill
Holy cow! Jessica looks just like Sarah Jessica Parker on that magazine cover! :D
Congrats to Jessica. Sounds like all is going well for her! I did catch up with her for a few mins. at SMX West (I think that's where it was) and she seemed to be thrilled with all she was doing!
Wow! You get to work for the nicest woman in SEO. You are one lucky guy!
Congrats to you, Christine, Mike and the rest of the gang!
Story: Why I Don’t Like Sphinn
I don't typically sphinn the usual happy bday posts, but this one was different as there was a very funny page to go with it. I had a big laugh and that's always worth a sphinn.
So how old is young Lisa anyway? :)
That's a great article. And honestly, I think what Seth says there is the very reason why so many blackhatters turned them in for white ones, it's actually a whole lot easier and you don't have to keep redoing it.
With or without Google Guidelines, if your primary incentive is higher SERP rankings, regardless of how clean you think your marketing tactics are, you aren't a white hat.
What if your primary goal isn't higher rankings, but increased targeted traffic and conversions? Would you call that person a white hat?
Go with nofollow.
People who truly have something worthwhile to say will say it regardless of whether they get link popularity from it. If they don't, then they're jerks anyway and who needs their comments. :D
Story: Happy Birthday Lisa Barone!
Need to check that page in firefox as it showed dark background with dark text and was unreadable.
Personally, I have no desire to create my own sites to get rich off of. I just like helping clients and others to learn SEO and do it the right way.
Perhaps it doesn't make me as much money, but I'd still rather do it that way.
Anyway, the question was do I *need* clients and the answer is still no. Having clients is a choice not a necessity.
For me, I do feel it is a necessity. I don't work with the types of sites I could simply duplicate myself. I work with real, established businesses. Generally they are B2B. It's not the kind of thing I could just say, "Hey, why don't I just start selling 'lead generation software'" or whatever it might be that a client happens to offer.
If I were helping people create affiliate sites or things like that where I could just duplicate it, it would be another story. But when you are helping real businesses to create a better web presence it's a bit of a different story.
If building a better web presence means creative marketing, relation building, and creative content development that I'm willing to lend a hand.
Those are the only types of jobs/clients I would take. Can't really help those who aren't interested in that stuff.
Could not agree more. About 90% of what I read on SEO blogs is complete bullshit (in my opinion!).
@Skitzzo that's certainly part of it, but from my perspective it's much, much worse than that.
It's so bad that there tons and tons of SEO companies that base their entire way of working on stuff that actually has no real affect on whether the website ends up gaining more targeted traffic and sales.
These people and companies have simply followed the incorrect myths that others have talked about and perhaps got lucky now and then. So they figured it actually worked just keep on selling the snake oil.
I just read an article here about supposedly important things to check for to better SEO your site, and in my personal opinion, based on my many years of experience having worked with hundreds of websites, nearly everything that this person checks will not actually make a difference to the bottom line of a website, i.e., gaining more targeted search engine visitors.
Sad but true. And why it's so important to continually debunk the SEO myths that prevail in this industry.
@Donna... yep...big sigh
And the meta keyword tag is only the tip of the iceberg. Once they're done with that, they'll waste time and money on bunches of other useless crap!
@andrewsho
2. "Your code to content ratio is too high." When I asked what the ideal code to content ratio was I believe he said "17%". Everyone got that?
That's totally awesome. I'm nearly spit my water all over my keyboard LOL.
I get the local paper for free, would you hold it to the same incredibly low standard?
I think you'll find that most of what's there has errors one way or another too, unfortunately. Doesn't mean we shouldn't hold them to high standards, however.
My hope with anything written, be it local papers, worldwide news, blogs, online articles, or whatever, that those who read this stuff can somehow manage to filter out the bad stuff from the good. Unfortunately, in the case of SEO stuff, there's often more incorrect info than correct.
Which means we just have to keep spreading the correct stuff as much as possible.
Yes, agreed, Harith. Which is why I said it was "my hope that..." rather than it was actually happening.
p1r, while I agree with you that sphinn should not be a place to out spammers (said as much in my desphinn comments), I disagree regarding the snitch part.
Some of the biggest snitchers in our industry are the blackhat types. I'm pretty sure I've seen DaveN outing sites, as well as Aaron Wall, and I think even Graywolf. (I'm doing this by memory, so if I'm in error, I apologize.)
It always does make me laugh to see spammers outing other spammers. So I think the OP here is just following the lead of his/her mentors.
Threadwatch was rampant with outings. I used to say same thing there...that it was like being at IHY!
Hi Jill, Not sure that you should be accusing Aaron as Black Hat.
Huh?
I guess you missed the threads where Matt Cutts declared him as such:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/anti-google-claims-to-reply-or-not/#comment-116573
I didn't realize Aaron didn't like to be associated with being a blackhat anymore. I'll keep it under my uncolored hat in the future.
Note to Aaron: You may want to get rid of the blackhatseo.com website! :)
It was a good article that told all sides of the story. No company is gonna be perfect, especially one that has grown so quickly.
Sometimes people sphinn something because of the resulting conversation in the comments, regardless of whether they agree with the original post.
I think that's a legitimate reason to sphinn stuff, although if I don't agree, I tend to simply not vote on it and just leave my own comments.
Story: SEO Jessica Bowman featured in Marie Claire Magazine