Over the last year a small group of US based internet marketers formed a group called IM Charity, which is currently in the process of getting 5013c status (to become a non-profit). The group was formed so we could help use our talents for worthy causes. Currently, IM Charity helps to raise money for various charitable organizations through throwing fundraising events. In the future many of us will also donate time to non-profit organizations looking for a little help with their internet marketing strategy.  Last year, through varous party’s at US search conferences like SES San Jose, SES NY and Scary SEO we raised nearly $100,000.

We’d like to start this year off on the right foot by throwing an IM Charity Party at SMX West on Tuesday February 10th. Yahoo! has been gracious enough to donate space and a variety of other things to help raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Thanks to sponsors like the amazing Jim Boykin of We Build Pages, Clix and BOTW (the only directory) this event can happen and all money raised that night will go to charity.

For anyone who will be near Santa Clara, CA on February 10th you are officially invited! For a $40 donation, you get 4 hours of open bar (and we didn’t skimp on the alcohol), appetizers, and networking with the best of the best. To top it all of, there will be a raffle for some really amazing prizes like a pass to IM Spring Break, 1 year subscription to SEOmoz pro, an iPod Nano (thanks Tony Adam) and much much more. In fact, there are over $15000 in prizes.  If you attend, be sure to come up and say hi and offer to bring me a drink. 

If you aren’t near Santa Clara and won’t be making it to SMX West, you can still participate! Feel free to donate money for yourself , sponsor part of the event or if you are interested, throw an IM Charity event of your own.  Just e-mail me lauren[at]lvlogic[dot]com or send me a message on Twitter @laurenv. Keep an eye on www.imcharityparty.com for information about future events.

If there is one (more) thing that makes no sense to me whatsoever, it’s international power standards. Electricity. That which spews out of the wall when you plug shit in. Juice, and not that of the link variety. It’s the same everywhere. My stuff runs out of batteries at the same rate in every country, yet multiple countries have different power standards. Forgive me for not knowing their technical names, but the prong things that stick into the wall are not the same worldwide. There is also that voltage problem. I am going to England tomorrow and thus I have to deal with it. I have one hundred little gadgets to take with me, but one has caused slightly more trouble than the others.

Most U.S. mobile phones won’t work with international SIM cards unless they’ve been “unlocked.” I could pay exorbitant international roaming rates, but I’d rather not. However, thanks to Gillian at SEOmoz, I have got my paws on a couple of unlocked telephones which will gladly accept other countries’ SIM cards. I took them to Australia. They are not the most graceful telephones on the face of the earth and thus, despite their good service, I have dubbed them the Fail Phones.

Taken with my far-superior BlackBerry

Yes, this story has a point. I lost the phone charger for the Fail Phones and I am going to England tomorrow. I needed a new one immediately, otherwise I’d be phoneless, Fail or otherwise, for almost two weeks. You can get anything on the Internet. You can get freaking unicorns on the Internet. Live ones. You so can. Of course you can get a phone charger for an ancient Motorola V600. I went to Google.

However, I have now discovered the one drastic flaw of online shopping. It’s very hard to find anything that exists at a store within driving distance which you can acquire immediately. There is a disconnect between online research and offline acquisition. It’s 9am Saturday and my plane leaves for Heathrow in less than thirty-six hours, and I have no time for shipping. My searches were useless.

As an avid online researcher, purchaser and overall Internet shopping fan, I had never before considered that I would not be able to find something that I could buy “in real life.” Obviously, common items are pretty simple to come by offline when you’ve discovered them on the Internet. However, these telephones are old. They don’t take a USB charger; the part that connects to the phone is a prong. AT&T, who issued the phones, no longer carry the chargers. Every online electronics store on the Net had one, but would ship it to me by Tuesday, at which point I’d be at the Future of Social Media conference at the Hilton Tower Bridge. Admittedly, I could have had one sent there, but the phones are out of batteries and have been for six months, and I want one to function when the wheels go down at Heathrow.

In short, finding rare goods online which you can purchase and pick up offline is more difficult than you’d imagine. I tried a range of other searches to indicate that I wanted to walk into a shop and hand over cash for my item, but Google didn’t comply. I was also getting very tired of calling stores and being almost laughed at by sales assistants who were stunned that I owned such an antiquated phone.  I was about to resign myself to the fact that my methods of tidying were next to disastrous (I still haven’t found the pillow and don’t expect to), when searching for electronics stores and reluctantly partaking in some vertical searching paid off. I never thought I’d say this about anything, but Circuit City’s website (which I’ll never again call Circuit Shitty) agreed to cell me the phone charger online and let me pick it up at their store.

But I was lucky. Plenty of other stores didn’t hold the product or didn’t have it at a nearby location. However, I can’t account for shops that had the product and didn’t list it on their website as something they’d sell online. I’m completely sure this happens. I was also disappointed and yet not surprised that Google couldn’t identify offline retailers who listed what I wanted.

This fault is traceable to two sources: retailers think that if someone is searching online, they want to buy online. This isn’t necessarily the case. Plenty of people would rather use the Internet than the phone: everything from disabilities to a vague distaste for the telephone will send people to their computers before their phones or their cars. Additionally, there are plenty of reasons, including mine, why someone might not want to make the purchase online after finding the item.

The second problem is not Google’s fault, but it is Google. Google failed at multiple queries asking for products that could be purchased offline, but Google relies quite heavily on retailers to provide it the best information. Circuit City, and other stores that allow online ordering / offline pick-up, don’t make it clear enough to search engines. My natural inclination was to add keywords like “offline” and “in store” to my queries: as a retailer, I’d investigate who else did this and take advantage of it.

As it turned out, I canceled my order today. I had to do that over the phone. I found my original charger, safely filed in an abandoned shoulder bag at the bottom of my linen closet, where everyone would immediately think to leave it. What can I say: intuitive storage comes naturally to me. Thus, online shopping woes or not, I will have a telephone in London and it will have a charged battery. I’ll call you when I land

Okay, so it has been a little more than a week since Part I, but SES NY takes a long time to recover from.

There are a ton of keyword research tools and tool lists out there, but it is still incredibly important to have all of your tools in one place. There are a lot of familiar tools in here, but there should also be a some lesser known ones here as well.

Let’s start this off with an SEO snack provided to you by one of my newest friends, Gareth

Free Tools

SEObook’s ultimate keyword research tool is a great place to start. Another tool on the site, is the Google Scraper tool

We can’t forget everyone’s old favorites, the Adwords Keyword Tool or Overtures Keyword Selector (although it doesn’t always work)

Quintura shows keyword maps to help you to generate more keywords!

Track keyword trends with Blogpulse.

If anything, Kartoo is a lot of fun. It provides keyword maps of who is ranking for what terms. Results could be a little bette

Find your competitors Keyword!

Start off with figuring out how competitive a keyword is

Long tail keyword discovery shows you the 3, 4 and 5 term keywords for your (or a competitors) site.

SEO Digger is pretty awesome tool. Find out what keywords your site ranks in Google’s top 20 for, or use this to spy on the competition

Shoemoney review

Keyword Spy is great at finding what your competitors are bidding on and ranking for and you test it out for free right on their homepage. The free version only lets you see 10 results, but the paid version for $90/month lets you see a lot more.

Digitalpoints Keyword suggestion tool is another good free option. It also lets you specify what country you are looking for data for. They also have a free keyword position tracking tool.

Paid

Wordtracker has a 7 day free trial for their tool, otherwise, it is paid for at $329 a year. They also have very good free version of their keyword research tool.

Trellian’s keyword discovery is another fantastic tool. It draws info from over 180 search engines around the world and has keyword brainstorming tools as well as the ability to import import keyword lists and add descriptors. This is paid for with prices varying, but a 1 year standard subscription will run you about $600.

Keyword Discovery also won Best Keyword Research Tool in 2007 on www.toprankblog.com

Wordze has gotten a bit of a following with tools that let you perform keyword research, get historical keyword data, perform competitive research, and download top searches. They cost $45/month

Wordze also had a great deal of praise TopRank Blog

Wordze review on copyblogger.

AdGooroo, which also deserves a mention in Yoda’s Ultimate Competitive Research Tools Post is also a great keyword research tool. It allows you see what terms your competition is bidding on so you can make sure you don’t miss any opportunities. Prices range from $89/month to $399/month depending on what you need.

Spyfu also let’s you see what your competitors rank for as well as help you find new keywords to use fro your own site. They let you perform some research for free, but if you want to dig deep, it will cost you $308/year or $6.75 for 3 days

Miscellaneous

Shimon Sandler listed some keyword stemming tools on his site a while back that are very useful. Basically, they help you to take the stem of a word and build out additional keywords by adding in the variations of that term. Here are a few good ones:

http://www.usingenglish.com/resources/wordcheck/index.php?word=work

http://www.related-pages.com/adWordsKeywords.aspx

Other Great Keyword Research Lists

The other Loren (Baker that is) recently wrote a post at Search Engine Journal asking what keyword tools his readers liked – WordTracker, SEOBook, and Keyword Discovery seemed to make it out on top.

Mona Elesseily also put together a great list about spying on your competitors including Compete and Spyfu (mentioned above).

SEOBooks keyword research tool list is another great one.

Anne Smarty’s list on SEOMOZ is also very comprehensive

Coming soon . . . Must have Firefox Plugins

You have made a promise to yourself to be a better you, as you do every new years. There is a whole industry based around New Years Resolutions, but it has changed entirely. If five years ago you started a food journal on January 1st, by now you might have added the “My Diet” application on Facebook, which has about 520 daily active users.

With so many people searching the web right now, how are web based companies capitalizing on New Years? As people are Googling this week, whether it be for a new diet, exercise routine, budget planning, etc., will your website have something to offer?

I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed with the SERPS for New Years Resolutions. Actually, there was only a handful of “resolutioners” that bid on the keywords “New Years Resolution“. I guess (in a nutshell) I expected a lot more creativity. There were hardly even any PSA type sites to help quit smoking (for those who made that their resolution).

Of course, some websites are not totally flexible and they may not have anything to offer when it comes to resolutions or capitalizations…fine. But for the most part, the job of Internet Marketers is to use swift tactics to stimulate the user into believing they have a reason to be at your website; whether it be for a New Year’s sale or the debut a new product. This gives them a chance to participate and engage with your brand, your commodity and keeping them there. So, if you are smart (and have budgeted correctly) you can make new years work for you just by using Social Media.

Ultimately, capitalization is defined as using something to one’s advantage; how is it that you can market YOUR brand to your advantage?

The #1 Top New Years Resolution is: To Lose Weight (not a surprise). We were all caught up in that resolution one time or another, if not still.

According to this article, companies-capitalize-on-New-Years.

However, companies are still capitalizing on the scheme of “Losing Weight in ’08.”

“Weight Watchers International is debuting a billboard in Times Square in a campaign for the first quarter of 2008 that will include television and print ads, an Internet video and MySpace page.” What about Facebook? I think, Weight Watchers International should really be more attentive to their market. Don’t they know that people prefer Facebook over Myspace?!

Facebook Application Developers didn’t waste any time this New Years. They were really thinking about “capitalizing” on their New Years Resolution. Remarkably, there were 29 Active Applications with the keywords “New Years”. The New Year Resolution 2008 Application has 2,836 daily active users, compared to other applications; that is a very large number.

Of course the Blogosphere naturally goes crazy with the concept of New Years. Millions of boring “end of the year lists” to read, but Aaron Wall took a different approach. He wrote a new years resolution; not for himself (not that I know of) but for SEO Book. What is YOUR blog(s) or website(s) resolution?

In the case of other Social Media sites, there were 157,000 New Years Youtube videos. Nevertheless, it was common to see many New Years Day photos spreading around Flickr. In particular, many pictures depicting what New Years day and celebrations looked like from different perspectives and areas of the world.

    One night, from the only punk rock bar in Las Vegas, I gave a horribly long rant to RateItAll’s Lawrence Coburn. It was my take on the industry. It is hard to find those words again as that was a conversation at 2AM and my brain was competing with the Bouncing Souls. The rant went on and on about popularity, branding, reputation management, and so on. Ever since this conversation, I have been thinking about this concept of SEO and Internet Marketing being something I think must be taught and discussed. Ultimately, the industry lies within conversation and apprenticeship.

For my first article on the SEO-Chicks blog, I wanted to write about the importance of understanding this industry, but that has been done so many times, and I just can’t take another “What my dog can teach you about Social Media” post….No offense.

I suppose there should be some sort of prerequisite, especially to understand where I’m coming from in this post.

I decided that I needed to be in this stimulating industry when I recognized how much observation my band was getting from just our website, social media, and forums; not to mention fans, PR, and label interests. We built links, contacts, tours, sold merchandise, licensing deals, but we really weren’t famous or critically acclaimed (but in our heads we were!). However, we looked great online.

*FYI: the site no longer exists, the band dismembered= long story.

My silly little band acquired huge label attention just based on our social media sites. I then asked myself, what kind of ROI would a legitimate business with awesome products see?

I contacted as many people I knew in the industry, took jobs with websites; primarily selling products online- slowly making the switch to purely working online and getting to know the ins and outs of this amazing industry. Over the next few months I decided that I would try to encompass everything I learned, did and sell to the internet. Slowly but surely this strategy worked, (Of course this is a really long; but short story) and I developed great skills to work in online marketing, something that teaches me new tricks every day.

Having been to Pubcon, other social events, reading millions of blogs, and e-books, I have learned that in the industry the only way to learn the trade is to be an apprentice. So I latched on and learned, like other thousands of young SEO’s. Even in job listings, companies are looking for SEO Apprentices, because as we know, every SEO has their own style, so you would want to train your staff according to your own practices. As Sugarrae said at Pubcon, when she spoke about hiring staff; “You must be able to train them.”

Apprenticing, the “Original 4 Year Degree” is extremely important in the SEO industry; and sure, most people in the industry have learned the skill as an extension of web development, but will the practice die out just as it did for the chair makers in the Middle Ages?

Apprenticeship= A master craftsman entitled to employ people as an inexpensive form of labor in exchange for providing formal training in the craft. – Wikipedia.

Well, we are already seeing huge numbers of companies outsourcing SEO work to places like India, reading articles saying a career in SEO is a bad choice, and there are many new SEO, SMM, SEM and even Facebook classes in tons of Universities.

So will the practice of Apprenticeship live on in the world of SEO, or will it be replaced like it was in the golden days? I think that to be an SEO you must always be an apprentice. Learning the skill is never-ending… thus we have millions of SEO blogs.

Questions:

• If the practice is replaced by manufactured SEO’s, what will be better for the industry?
• Aside from this ancient practice of training, are their better ways to become seriously skilled in SEO?

Recently SEOmoz has had the pleasure of being caught in several bloggers’ scopes because of the controversy behind Rand’s Google Payola post. While much of the criticism was largely professional and constructive, some of it has been more personal and not constructive. Regardless of the type of criticism, it’s essential to react to it appropriately, especially when the Internet is essentially your workplace.

Before I delve further, let me be the first one to admit that I am a stubborn person (thanks, Kelley genes), and I’ve had my feathers ruffled a few times online. It can be difficult to respond to professionally to criticism, whether it’s constructive or a personal attack. In light of recent events, however, I’ve thought a lot about how to “temper your hubris,” as Rand often puts it, and handle the occasional negative or disagreeing remark thrown your way.

Let’s face it, a huge appeal of the Internet is its seductive anonymity (Rand had a recent Whiteboard Friday about a similar topic). You can say things to someone you wouldn’t dream of uttering in person because you’re hiding behind the warm, soft glow of your monitor. Keep this in mind when you get your feelings hurt and are furiously typing a scathing response—would you say what you’re about to type to that person face-to-face? If so, more power to ya because you’ve got quite the pair on you. If not, it might be a good idea to tone it down a bit and write a response you’d actually give in person. Lots of people avoid unnecessary conflict in person because it’s uncomfortable—keep that in mind when you’re addressing it online. Don’t exacerbate the matter or add fuel the fire if it’s unwarranted.

Someone (I forgot who, so if it was you then let me know and I can credit you) pointed me to this great writeup about how to handle criticism on the web. I recommend giving it a read. One sentence in particular stuck out to me: “The more viewers your work has, the more likely you’ll be to encounter a completely unreasonable opinion.” Indeed, the longer I’ve worked at SEOmoz, the more criticism and backlash I’ve seen directed at both me and the company. When we were the underdog we got a lot more polite encouragement. As SEOmoz became more visible and a rising authority in the industry, more and more people began to scrutinize and criticize our business decisions and blog posts. From a personal standpoint, it is pretty surprising to go from reading comments about how I’m a great addition to SEOmoz to hearing people scoff that I “don’t know anything about SEO.” But, I understand that the more visible you become, the more attention (both good and bad) you get (here is a nifty graph for you visual learners). What matters is how you react to the attention.

The important thing to remember is to not take criticism personally. Remember that constructive criticism, though it may hurt, is meant to help you, whether to be a better person, run a better business, implement a better business strategy, etc. Personal attacks are juvenile and are meant to hurt you, so don’t give those people the satisfaction of knowing they got to you and upset you. Don’t dismiss criticism, however—ignoring constructive criticism ensures you’ll make the same mistakes over and over again and run the risk of alienating those who are trying to help you, while you can take negative criticism and decide to avoid or not to do business with the offenders.

In my opinion, if you have any sort of visibility online and are sensitive to everything negative you read about you, you won’t last long in that role. Though it may sting, if you’re looking to have a positive brand and be successful on the Internet, it’s a good idea to remember when to swallow your pride and thicken up your skin.

The battle lines have been drawn.  The weapons readied.  The battlefield, full of the milling throngs of social network users, stills briefly as the combatants take the field.  This is the new front in Google’s attempt to force themselves into every facet of the web.  Google has entered in to the fray of social networking.

Since the news broke at the Virtual Worlds Forum about Google working with partners around the globe on a new virtual world, the pieces have begun falling in to place and more leaks have sprung.  It seems Google is no longer simply helping us find what we need and selling ad space, it also wants a piece of the Yahoo! action by actively courting the social network scene.

TechCrunch announced that Google was going to confront Facebook’s dominance head on.  Google is apparently at war with Facebook and their dominant position within social networks.  What, there isn’t room for another large, global-reach company outside the Google empire?  If it was a Yahoo! property, would it still be such a threat or is it the “loose cannon” nature of a company not controlled by one of the big search companies too much for Google to handle?  Facebook has suddenly become the target of a company seeking to own the web.

It smacks of petty schoolyard antics.  The geeks got cool and people crowded around them.  Suddenly another group of geeks got cool and they gathered a crowd.  The geeks at the centre of the older, larger grouping are now getting jealous and trying to make the other geek group change or shrink or something.  I can just hear them all chanting “join us” as the leaders at the centre lay a series of elaborate traps designed to try and show how cool they are and how not cool the other geeks are.

People - please can we all just stop drinking the damn kool aid (acid laced or poison laced), down some jelly shots and all be friends.  I like the green ones please.  And there is no such thing as too much vodka.  Seriously this is starting to look a bit like Google wants to be the biggest and best around and have all the press.  This upstart grabbing some of their precious headlines must be stopped at all costs.

Google is a facilitator, and what TechCrunch suggested was about to be unveiled could be a brilliant bit of facilitating.  The drawback is that they will open and facilitate sharing between a limited number of websites picked by them so just creating another “club”.  Google trying to launch itself more in to the social sphere with virtual worlds and social networking facilitation seems like a step too far and one likely doomed to failure.  Orkut will never achieve the standing of Facebook without massing investment of time, money and effort and I don’t see that forthcoming.

There are many reasons that Facebook is the social network of choice besides the ease of signup and use.  Facebook lets me list my upcoming.org events, my twitter feed, my flickr photos, my techcrunch feed, my stumbleupon feed, and lots more.  It enables me to segment my social communications away from my work ones and gives me a 10-minute break from my day withoug having to walk away from the office.  It helps me find help when I need it, keep up on friends activities, and lets me broadcast to the world how chuffed I am that MY KID SISTER IS GETTING MARRIED!  Facebook has already enabled me to centralise my social networks in a single place and while I haven’t been able to port my friends yet, I don’t necessarily want everyone I friended on upcoming to be my facebook friend.

I think Facebook might yet prove itself to be the next Google.  A handful of formet Google-ers seem to think so.  What remains to be seen is how much Facebook open up to virtual worlds and how integrated in to our lives Facebook can become.

If you’ll recall, the internet used to be somewhat free of censorship, back before anyone realized how powerful it would become. It’s all relative of course, but it was harder to control online information than it was to control print media and television reporting. Things seem to be really changing now, unfortunately.

Online censorship has been all over the news over the past year. With the latest reports of Myanmar/Burma cutting off internet access to help quash a rebellion, we’re seeing how critical the internet has become. Censorship seems to be a governmental response to something that, otherwise, they really have absolutely no idea how to handle.

I have never been a fan of censorship. It’s incredibly dangerous to mask other points of view, even if those ideas are themselves dangerous. Removing access to information of any sort tends to have the effect of simply making people flip out like ninjas and find alternate methods of doing whatever it is they want to do anyway. Preventing people from doing what they want usually opens up avenues that can be used for worse things as well…

You may not even think much about censorship if it’s never happened to you personally. That makes you really lucky actually. I remember how my brother refused his first place award in an arts competition because the arts committee had refused to showcase a painting of, gasp, a NAKED WOMAN. Naturally, the artist who had painted the censored work still felt the need to accept the 3rd place prize that he won for another painting he’d done that had not been censored. This, sadly, is typical. Most people just don’t give a damn.

Here’s why you should care though: censorship restricts basic human rights for people to express themselves. It prevents us from gaining access to opinions that we may never have considered, and shuts down our own growth as rational human beings. So what if we see the Piss Christ photo? Some consider it to be blasphemy, suggestive of society literally pissing on religion in disdain for it. Others see it as simply a representation of what society has done to religion. These are very different points of view, but both valid. Why is discussion about this so bad then?

Think about the censorship of books. In Charlotte, NC awhile back, there was an outrage over a book that had two male penguins raising a young penguin together. Obviously this was going to make homosexuals out of every kid who read it, so parents had to act. I guess no one thought about the fact that, if a book about penguins made a homosexual out of a kid, that kid simply might be gay anyway. Why would we ever think that an idea could alter our very nature? And, if it did, why is that so frightening?

J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye was censored, as were Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (along with just about everything else he wrote), John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, and probably at least 50 other books that you read and loved. What if you’d never been allowed to read these? You’d still encounter the so-called outrageous themes they presented somewhere else in your life. Would it wreck you? I doubt it.

Boycotting something you don’t like is just fine with me. As a big lefty, I will jump on a boycott like a hobo on a ham sandwich. I boycott several things, from candy apples (they’ll yank your teeth right out!) to Domino’s Pizza, simply because I don’t like things that they’ve done. In fact, there’s not much I love more than a good boycott. Censorship is not ok. Some people love candy apples. Obviously they’re insane though. Some people eat Domino’s Pizza (not giving them a link due to the aforementioned boycott). That’s fine with me. If everyone thought the way I do, the world would be a boring (and utterly terrifying) place. We’d all sit around eating cheese dip, watching Father Ted, and listening to Wire. Bo-ring.

So pay attention to what’s going on with online censorship. It’s every bit as dangerous as every other form of censorship. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a great site devoted to what’s going on with online censorship. They also have a cool name that sounds like they’d do some Kraftwerk-style synth music, but somehow I don’t quite think that they do. More’s the pity.