Bloggers are dying out there people.  I mean, look at us poor SEO Chicks!  Look at the toll blogging has exacted from us - we’re often silent, recovering from near death.  I’m telling you, this blogging business is a dangerous thing.  Look at that empty tea cup next to me!  I could dehydrate!  I could starve to death, trapped on the couch under the laptop weakened from dehydration by lack of tea!  SOMEONE QUICK GET ME SOME CHOCOLATE!

Yes, blogging can be deadly and as such, those of us in the profession apparently need a rescue pack.  None other than the drugs giant Bayer has recognised the plight of bloggers and have created a bloggers relief pack.  You can pick one up from the Berocca Blogger Relief Pack page

So, what can prevent the deaths of thousands of bloggers?  Killing other things it seems.  Stabbing the “Dead Fred Pen Holder” with the provided Berocca pen and leaving it there, sticking out of it has a kind of sick satisfaction about it.  Getting in to the packet was so difficult, I was able to vent some righteous indignation about someone being _wrong_ on the internet while trying to open it.

Frustration is, however, more likely to lead to death and so the lovely Berocca folk have provided an anti-stress squishy ball with a happy face so you can crush the heads of all those annoyingly chirpy people who seem to plague those of us who are hung over.  You are meant to crush their head by squishing the ball in your hand and not by assaulting them with it I did find out.  Sorry.

Another toy for helping us bloggers relax is a never-ending bubble wrap keychain.  You can pop bubble wrap to your hearts content.  In fact, I have found it extremely effective at removing those annoyingly chirpy people from the general vicinity of my person.  Apparently bubble wrap and chirpy people are natural enemies.

Just in case you are blogging at work in order to try and utilise an environment where being fed while stationary is a possibility, there is another toy to play with.  It’s a panic button which throws up an excel spreadsheet which pops up when you hit the button in response to the boss getting close to your computer.  That way you’ll never again be caught surfing for porn blogging at work ever again.

Of course, the central point of this kit is the branded Berocca glass and a pack of Berocca to help keep Britain blogging.  I have to admit to some mild trepidation at consuming the vivid orange liquid concoction however after a night of heavy drinking blogging I was in need of some instant relief.  Possibly not as instant as I could have wished for but better than water or anything else I’d tried.

So why not do what I did and go and sign up for one of these blogger relief packs?  Heck, why not spread the word around - the toys are great fun and the Berocca’s not bad either!  Thanks for the chocolate… nomnomnom…

For a $40 donation to charity, you will get 4 hours of open bar with some of your favorite online marketers like Neil Patel, Michael Gray, Jim Boykin, Chris Winfield, me Lauren Vaccarello and Pat Sexton. The pre-registration for this event has already drawn a lot of attention, but there is still time register. Thanks to Surehits, Webuildpages, BOTW, and ACS SEO all proceeds for the event will go to either the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society or the Children’s Hospital.

Details:

Where: Agenda Lounge – 399 S.1^st street, San Jose, CA USA

When: 8pm-12am PST on Monday August 18,2008

Why: Because the only thing better than drinking on a Monday night, is having it be a tax write-off too

Here is the happy couple with a chocolate cupcake each ready to tuck in to the yummy goodness. Look at the size of that ring! WOW!

Regrettably the BBQ people did not show up but having Brivck Lane close by means we had plenty to choose from. Many of the people at LondonSEO went off to some of those fine establishments afterwards.

The event was great with lots of new people - although the August weather let us down a bit. I hope I’ll be seeing more folks coming to these events in the future

It could have been the rain which kept people away - it certainly made it a bit of a challenge for the goodies but twin umbrellas saved the day!

Thank you to Rob a.k.a. EvilGreenMonkey for organising such a great event. I know everyone appreciated the time and effort you put in (well, everyone I spoke to did! ) and I am looking forward to the SMX London one!

The characters - playing the fiery viking is LisaD and the swashbuckling hero Jon Myers

The action - a romantic dinner, a romantic setting, a romance made in SEO.

What could possibly come of something like this but LOOOOOOOOOVE!

That’s right folks - the question was popped and LISA SAID YES! Our favourite Viking is getting married and I’m sure everyone wishes her well - I know all the SEO Chicks do! We love our Lisa!

I’ll let her tell the whole story but I’m sure that London SMX just got extra special so make sure you’re in town for it!

Jon is a wonderful person and Lisa is a special woman and I just know everyone is going to wish her oodles and oodles of luck and love!

YAY LISA & JON!

There is definitely a lot going on with the industry, but so much of what is out there for our consumption deals with personal issues. This person doesn’t like THIS one, this idiot thinks another idiot was rude, this asshole thinks that someone was wrong to criticise him or her for making a truly stupid analogy, etc. Several of my good friends, people that I have the utmost respect for (plus Rob Kerry, ha!), have taken a LOT of heat over things ranging from speaking their mind, nicely of course, to trying to do the right thing and prevent Sphinn from becoming even more of a suburban high school drama. If you like gossip and silly antics, you’re probably happy right now. If you actually give a damn about anything else, good luck finding much about it.

As much as people like to talk about how meaningful things other than link development are, from what I see, not much else truly means all that much. Since I own a link development firm, talking about it in this blog doesn’t really interest me…I LIVE it. Otherwise, what’s left? The newest search engine that MAY compete with Google? Whether Yahoo and MSN will merge? How to prevent people from snooping on your site? Yet ANOTHER piece about how to properly code a robots.txt file? You can see where I’m going…Boredom City. Consequently, I am struggling to write these days. There is simply nothing that I haven’t said, or that another SEO Chick hasn’t said, or that one of you hasn’t said. There are so many bloggers out there blogging about the same things right now. You can read 10 different opinions on one tiny little tidbit, all written within an hour of each other. While it’s nice to read differing voices, sometimes it becomes a bit difficult to actually want to add to the noise.

I’m not bored with what I DO every day, actually, nor am I bored with the industry in general. I am simply bored with writing about it, because the online space is becoming incredibly cluttered with people who seem to know absolutely nothing about anything; they just want to create disturbance. They harass people in comments, they trash everyone who says anything of any value, and they attract like-minded followers who, in turn, attract their attention and they feed off each other. Instead of joining in, I’d rather focus on making sure my company makes a profit, and that my clients get what they pay for. I’d rather watch Father Ted DVDs and order broccoli and tomato pizza. I’d rather watch “Control” again (spoiler alert! Ian Curtis DIES at the end!!) even though it makes me cry and I become depressed for days, spending money on a variety of crap that I don’t need, and eating lots of chocolate doughnuts. I’d rather talk to Flora and Tw@ and make rude comments about Liza’s Facebook photos. Those activities, however, don’t make for good blog fodder. Well, the conversations with Flora and Tw@ would but I don’t want to incur the wrath of all the people we constantly talk trash about so…

Take a look at the current (as of this writing, obviously, I mean) headline stats on Sphinn: 8 on the front page are about social media in one form or another, whether it’s fake profiles or Digg; 3 are about Cuil; 4 are pieces dealing with numbers of either “this many experts say x” or “this many reasons to do or not to do y”; and the rest are all variations on themes we see all the time like new Firefox extensions or what’s wrong with Wordpress. Honestly, I understand that there are many people just starting out in the industry, but how many ultimate guides to SEO do we truly need? We’re also seeing tons of recaps of various conferences, further reducing the desire of many people to actually attend these once enormously popular events. Now, it could be argued that Sphinn isn’t representative of what’s going on in the industry, and as much as I would like to believe that that is indeed true, I really don’t, sadly. BO-ring.

So, until there’s a major Google Dance or people start going to federal prison for buying links, I really don’t have all that much to say unless anyone is interested in which bands I’m going to see this summer. I’ll continue to discuss anything interesting with the people I trust on IM or Facebook, or make prank phone calls.

I have a site I love to use as the perfect example of how flash lets you down. This chocolate company has some of the most yummy looking chocolate treats. Problem is, Google doesn’t think it has much to do with chocolate. Take a look at the Sweet Thoughts chocolate site which looks like this to Google and results in the Cadbury UK site along with many others to outrank it for a search for chocolate. In fact, the spidered flash is there but just not ranking. So the new spidering of flash content by Google should be a RankSaver for sites like this but I would caution everyone for the moment against complacency and encourage adoption of existing best practices.

From July 1st, Google started spidering the content of flash files to help to unlock some of the last places on the web left unlookedat. However, rather than looking normal, these sites are clearly marked with “[FLASH]” next to the search result. Yahoo! have had the technology made available to them as well but have not yet committed to a timeline to implement this enhanced spidering. Who knows what Live will do - maybe Ms. Dewey will simply take her crop and beat the offending sites in to HTML submission. Or run over them on her motorcycle. Mocking them might work as well

Google’s help files specifically state that “In general, search engines are text based. This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format. This doesn’t mean that you can’t include images, Flash files, videos, and other rich media content on your site; it just means that any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won’t be accessible to search engines”. So while this is changing for flash, I would still continue to create a mirror site for those with things like old browsers and flash turned off.

While being able to spider Flash content may seem like a solution to the issue of invisible content like the chocolate site above, it can present additional problems. Any flash currently loading via JavaScript will still be inaccessible since Google’s spider will not be having the ability to execute javascript added anytime soon if they tell the truth over in Mountain View. Recent personal experience leads me to believe they are sometimes painfully honest about some things so I’ll trust the news on this.

A lot of the Flash content has no text basis to it since it has been created out of images and possibly links. This spidering change will have no impact on the ranking of these sites until it combines image recognition with flash spidering. Sometimes, flash files are better left hidden but it may help with the ability of Googlebot to access and possibly rank deeper pages previously inaccessible.

Some flash content has multiple text-based ‘pages’ buried within the program. So lots of text, no context. If this causes one page to become authoritative for multiple keywords, it could cause issues with ranking. With the chocolate shop example, it could cause all items to be lumped on a single page, diluting a stronger authority if similar products were grouped logically together with unique textual content. So really, to catch chocolate lovers like myself that will want to include a different version of the content which breaks up text through a set of logical, focused pages to help Google rank each page for what it is authoritative for.

While duplicate content will be less of a problem with Flash since it’s all lumped together, the underlying code itself would need to be clearly understood by a robot. So you’ll suddenly need very clean, very well structured and very well written code. Since sometimes code which executes well is not necessarily written well, this may also pose potential spidering issues.

With the potential for so many problems, best practice remains the same. Include alternate, text based information for search engines in order to help them spider, understand and rank your site. Especially if you sell chocolate

Next time, I’ll look at the problems of javascript driven chocolate sites and how to overcome problems of the type the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory has.

Obviously there could be a lot of black hat type stuff going on if you employ all of your friends to blog about client related topics. I am sure it’s done quite often. But I work with my friends on Mommy Blogs, Music Blogs, and others for pure amusement (and pancakes). It teaches me about how non industry bloggers are really using the internet and social platforms. This helps me to understand the space around me with much more efficiency which to me is worth it all.

I decided to share this information by asking my best new trainee how she feels about the blogosphere.

Dana Malave is a newbie Mommy Blogger @ Zen 4 Kids and a Motivation Blogger @ My Life In Abundance. She has only been blogging for about a month but is quickly picking up why using Social Networks, tags, proper anchor text, commenting, and engaging is so very important.

Here are some questions I asked her:

1. What is your blogging inspiration? My blogging inspiration is knowing that I can speak my mind freely, touching upon any subject I want. My family gets to see a side of me that they never knew by reading my blog everyday.
2. How do you find your constant flow of content? For my mommy blog, being a mother of two children, I spend a lot of time in the playground. I look around and see things that are happening that bother me and it inspires me to write. For my Motivation Blog, I use my life experiences in hopes that sharing my story will inspire people to be more motivated in their own lives.
3. What are your blogging goals? My blogging goals are to reach as many people possible in all age groups and all ethnicities and make them feel like they are not alone. I’d like for my blog to generate money and good reputation.
4. Where do you see your blog in the next 3 years? I see my blog opening the window for me to have motivational conferences worldwide.
5. How much do you care about Ads and Networks? Joining networks helps me to promote my blogs and generate some revenue at the same time, which is great.
6. Do you actively use Social Networks like Facebook and Twitter to promote your blog? Do you find value in them for social reasons as well? Yes, I use Facebook, Twitter, Ning and Myspace to promote my blog and reconnect with old friends. And I constantly look for product support from Business twitter accounts like @wholefoods while food shopping.
7. What blogs do you read? I read a lot of blogs on Blogher, that covers a lot of the female focused blogosphere. I also read many blogs on Cafe Mom.

In the world of Social Media, it is becoming more and more important to ask questions and learn about non industry bloggers and Twitterers. These are the evangelists of our clients brands and they are voices to be reckoned with. They are more accessible than publishers and can easily build fantastic relationships with you. So next time you come across a blog that interests you or the likes of your clients, talk to them!

Organic search results and paid search results are mixed in on the search results page (commonly referred to as the SERP) to varying degrees depending on the engine.  The human brain will register unconsciously more information than the conscious mind can grasp.  On a SERP, this means the more mentions your site/brand has, the more likely this will register in the searchers mind and sway their decision making process.

Natural and paid search can work in harmony to increase brand/site awareness especially if your organic rankings are not in the top five.  While a smaller proportion of searchers will click on a paid search result, it is still important to have a presence there.  Since you do not pay for exposure, just clicks, maintaining a presence in the SERP is essential.

For some searchers, this paid result represents an investment in that search term and therefore increased relevance.  For other searchers the ad may have a more compelling call to action.  To those searchers who choose organic results, your paid ad may become more relevant if what they require is not listed naturally.  A paid search ad can also offer a different call to action than your organic listing.

Organic listings, attracting around 80% of searchers clicks, are the main focus for any site.  With each page able to rank for a query it is authoritative for, getting organic optimization right is essential.  Temporal, semantic and popularity elements of the search algorithm are difficult to fool and as such, sometimes paid search gets you where natural/organic has not yet placed you.

Paid and natural search both have a role to play in attracting searchers.  Each provides opportunities to target searchers through exposure and availability of listing.  The importance of display cannot be discounted though as Seth Godin illustrates here

Technically, this was a viral marketing failure as opposed to linkbait, but it got me thinking about what does and what does not constitute link-worthy content.

Things That Could Be Linkbait

1. Sordid email and IM transcripts. Politicians know this quite well. It happens to them all the time, usually involving someone of or under the age of seventeen. It happened to the mayor of the town I lived in in 2005. Nothing so exciting had ever happened to Spokane, Washington and nothing as exciting has happened since. Here is an example of something that would be linkbait were it not for the big black rectangle in the middle of the good bits.

   

   If you can get your hands on someone’s email exchanges, or care to publish your own, and they’ve talked about anything other than who’s managing the company’s H3 tags or whether the loos on the second floor are still broken, people will love it.

2. Screenshots of epic stupidity. I’d not recommend adding the picture to StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg etc as simply a picture. You decrease the likelihood that people will link to it and increase the likelihood that they’ll just steal it. When I had a neat picture to put on Digg, I linked to the post rather than the picture. This way, it received scores of comments and was reproduced less / linked to more. But I digress. Posting pictures (and video, for that matter) of humanity at its worst will always get some attention.
3. AnonyBlogging. The SEO industry has been catching on to this lately, but it’s been around for a while. It comes in two forms: We have both SEO Hack and Slightly Shady SEO, neither of whom will tell the majority of us who they actually are. Then we have one-off ranters like SEO Bitch on Shoemoney’s blog, and anonymousblogger from today’s helping of YOUmoz. Plenty of people like to speculate who SEO Bitch and anonymousblogger really are, which only adds to the buzz and links. I must, at this point, go on a tangent and point out the funny thing that happened when I was lazy and searched for “SEO Bitch on Shoemoney’s blog” in order to find the post. Yes, I’m aware it wasn’t a good search phrase.

   

   That is indeed Matt Inman’s SEOmoz member profile. The problem with this approach is that it’s often hard for writers - especially good ones - to disguise their style. It’s almost as hard as faking an accent, and anyone who’s heard my botched up AustrAmeriKiwi voice will attest to how tough that is.

4. All things really fucking random. This is a perfect example where the bait and switch could be used. For some reason, we like domains with very little content. Silly little sites that usually serve no purpose whatsoever. We love them. We link to them. We Stumble them like they provided valuable content. They inform us of very important information such as whether or not it’s Christmas and show us dumb pictures. No, it’s not funny, is it? Then how in fuck does it have a PageRank of five? Milk it for what it’s worth and 301 it to somewhere else. Keep the cat if you’re concerned about ethics. (There is more content on this domain than just the cat, but the cat alone has 59,425 inlinks.)
5. Clever Photoshopping. A perfect example of a marriage of three things geeky, this image combines zombies, Twitter and Photoshop. There’s only one thing better than presenting people with one thing they like: cleverly combining multiple elements into one display of awesome.

But you’re SEOs and you knew that. How about some things that are definitively not linkbait?

1. Long dumb lists of stupid “did you know” facts. What in hell were they thinking? Let me list the fails:
   • White text on black background. I have 20/20 vision and can see from Seattle to Japan and I have trouble reading that.
   • Page as long as The Last Samurai. The last time I read a document that long, it was a text-only paper and it was for a sociology class that I didn’t want to take and which proved to be an utter waste of time.
   • Massive area of white black space at the bottom of the page for no reason.
   • Exists as the dillionth “did you know” list on the Internet. The Internet has had enough.
   • Anti-fail: The last “fact” is lovely, true or not.
2. Video of other people’s fireworks. Fireworks can be wonderful. The fireworks in Seattle from Gasworks Park this Independence Day were a thoroughly professional work of art. I could feel the sound-waves through my feet on my concrete patio. The way the sound echoed off Capitol Hill was amazing. But on a shitty video, reproduced on YouTube, the noise is fantastically annoying. Exception to the rule: Fireworks fuck-ups. Seattle’s New Year’s Eve display was positively painful. I had the pleasure of watching one of the biggest cockups in fireworks history take place out of both my living room window and on television.
3. Reproducing this. Again. And again. This too. Although it’s still funny.
4. Posts bitching about being asked to present a receipt upon leaving Circuit City. I understand. We’re honest adults who bought unnecessary sound-canceling headphones during our lunch break because it finally dawned on us that iPod headphones are crap. The security guard likely saw us at the check out, purchasing said headphones. The security guard may well have even seen the cashier hand us our receipt. But for Christ’s sake, is it really a human rights violation to show the dude the receipt as we walk out? Is it worth giving him the satisfaction of causing us a world of shit? If it is, I seriously suggest getting a hobby aside from blogging. The internet is rife with posts like this. Just show him the fucking piece of paper. He’s a Circuit City security guard, for Christ’s sake. Give him something to do. Surely you have some veal to eat or something.
5. Everything on this list. This is quite possibly the most wonderful thing Wikipedia has ever done.

For the last while, LondonSEO has also been the home to Sweedish Druid Chocolate – a yummy concoction of chocolaty goodness lightly dusted with cocoa powder. They are quite yummy and favoured by many… but not all.

Regular readers know of my love of FINE CHOCOLATE (not an affiliate link but a gift registry-it’s a silly link) but I do not scorn those of lesser status. Indeed I embrace the Cadbury’s and Masterfoods chocolates of the supermarket shelves. I gleefully indulge in whole nut chocolate and malteesers while dreaming of peanut M&M’s. Chocolate is a consuming passion for me

So, armed with boxes of “Heros” and “Celebrations”, I strong-armed my new work colleagues (nat vis as they are called here at i-level) and we ventured forth to the Ship Inn. This fun pub was hidden down an alley and yet was full with regulars and SEOs alike.

Immediately greeted with fellow SEO Chicks also proudly wearing the green SEO Chicks t-shirt I ventured up to the SEO bar to procure some wine to go with my chocolate. Having eaten only a small bag of nuts for lunch, the wine went straight to my head and foolishly I tried to joke with my fellow SEOs offering “chocolate for links”. Apparently at least one took me seriously. Come on people! When have *I* ever asked for a link? Please. Last time I drink before eating though.

The chocolates went well, finding an even wider audience than usual. It seems that I’ve found the “new hope” for chocbait… Heros and Celebrations! So onwards and perhaps after ad:tech there will be another LondonSEO event!