SEO 2.0 | 2008 April

Twitter Dilemma: To Tweet or Not to Tweet? Pros, Cons, 50+ Links & Tools

30 Comments Filed Under: Sphinn, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Social Media, Definitions

In recent weeks I faced a huge onslaught of posts about Twitter from at least 5 sources per day I read. Many people will probably assume I’m an early adopter, but I was not on Twitter, well, until now. So follow me or I will never again stumble, sphinn, mixx or link you! Now said that, I’m not sure yet if I will use it for more than testing as with the hundreds of Web services I try. Indeed I’m only an early adopter where it does make sense from the start. Now Twitter was useless as is but with growing community and market share it seems the point where it matters has arrived.

Now I’m still undecided and was was analysing pros, cons among all things twitter like tools for a while now to assess if and how I will use it if I will. As I’m a social media monster when I enter a new service to really contribute I either take it by storm or I won’t at all. This way I conquered the above mentioned social media StumbleUpon, Sphinn and Mixx.

Indeed Twitter is a lot like Mixx although it’s a different concept. Both sites do not result in significant direct traffic or other benefits you can measure easily. I wanted to share my thoughts on Twitter and help you decide whether it makes sense or not so I collected 50+ Twitter related links to answer the question: To tweet or not to tweet? Also once you decided you want to use it, you will find plenty of ideas how to use it below:

Pretty bird by Picture Taker 2.

Balanced Twitter pros and cons articles

Polka - the humming bird by Cris Pierry

Reasons to use Twitter

I look up to the little bird by monkeyc.net

Reasons not to use Twitter

Red wing black bird 3723 by Casch52

Twitter tools
clients

scanners (Twitter search etc.)

Bejia flor / Humming bird by Marcio Cabral de Moura

Twitter marketing how tos, tutorials and resources

Now of course the main reason why I’ll be using Twitter is to inform you of my eating habits! No, probably to indoctrinate you with my SEO 2.0 propaganda. It does only make sense when I have enough people to preach to. So follow me now if you are really serious about the SEO 2.0 cult!

On a side note: I have been on Pownce for a while, but like with Digg, SEO hater Kevin Rose has failed to create a real community here. Basically most people who are my friends on Twitter either never show up at all or just reuse their Twitter stream there like Dosh Dosh for instance. I already was angry at him for not replying when I noticed this…

How do you use Twitter?
Do you use a client?
If yes, which one?
What are you using Twitter for?
What do you tweet about actually?
What are you doing?
What is your user name?

If it makes sense I’ll follow, stumble, sphinn, mixx and link you! Did I miss some valuable links? Add them in the comments, this list will be continually updated.

Semantic SEO: Your Website is a Goldmine with On-Site SEO 2.0

13 Comments Filed Under: Definitions, SEO 2.0, Usability, Web 2.0, SEO

This post has been sponsored by Nstein*

[Update May 15th, 2008: New image added]

Image by Kevin Rosseel

You think on-page SEO is dead? It hasn’t even begun! To be clear, your website is a goldmine and you haven’t even started to dig for the gold.

In my SEO 2.0 blog I have covered blogging, social media and the likes to the point of excess. At the same time I have dismissed most of on-page SEO as obsolete or as built in basics of even the simplest CMS software.

Do you think on-page SEO is just about h1 tags, meta descriptions or enhancing website copy with keywords? Now think again.

Consider using the term on-site SEO referring to the whole site not just each page for itself. Now add the adjective “semantic“.

The semantic web (often called Web 3.0) and its search are about meaning.

Google matches phrases without knowing what they mean. Semantic search is based on understanding what the search query is about. What if you could use software to determine the meaning of your own content and categorize it in topical clusters?

You could:

Make users stick with your website as a reader would always find related articles to the current one he just read
Serve contextual advertising like Google does
Automatically improve indexation with “internal links” cross-linking related content

Doesn’t sound revolutionary? Well, what does it mean then? Nowadays you will typically structure news by location and topics. For instance Europe or business are used as categories. So a story about fuel shortage in Great Britain could be found in Europe and business categories. Now what about other relations? What if the story is related to another one from outside Europe or one that is not about business directly? A reader keen on reading the latest energy and fuel news would not find anything of interest anymore amidst bizarre stories from Europe about a father hiding his daughter in a cellar for over 20 years or singer Amy Whinehouse and her legal problems.
Yes, these stories have been been put together in Europe on CNN (April 28th, 2008). The reader will leave.

With semantic SEO implemented on your website you can make the reader find several stories related to this one, automatically.

Using this example: There are a few related stories out there right now: In Brazil president Lula speaks out about bio fuel , in Singapore the oil price reaches a new height, Venezuela and Iran plan to work more closely together (thus limiting western access to oil). Also there is another story about pirates freeing hostages near Somalia. Now the first three are obvious. The fourth one is related too but how? Pirates and other militants are also increasingly a problem in Nigeria where they attack oil tankers.

How did I find out? I used a news aggregator that uses semantic web and search methodology to determine which articles and news are related.

So instead of reading just one article or page I read 5 increasing page views per visit or stickiness
The website could show contextual ads about alternative energy or energy saving
Older news about the same topic could have been directly linked to the latest news automatically. Google could spider them and rank them up as relevant again.

Now this means

an increase of 500% in page views per visit for this example
serving highly relevant ads with most probably high click-thrus
new crawling and better ranking for several articles resulting in more targeted search traffic

All this just with semantic SEO implemented on-site. Nowadays most of your content gets wasted. You can let machines dig for the hidden gold in your archives instead. So how do I do that or rather which solution can do it for me?

I do not know myself yet. I was aproached by Nstein, a company that is “powering online publishing” for large publishers across the globe to help them spread the word about their latest webinar. This free webinar is about “Semantic Tagging & Automated Discovery Strategies: For SEO, Editorial, Contextual Advertising and more“.

Now as even I needed some explanation what this really means I decided to write a sponsored post* for them. It does not make sense to advertise for something that nobody understands.

I was approached by potential advertisers in the past but never conceded to run the ads due to the lack of credibility of their products or companies as well as lack of focus at my audience or value for my readers.

Now the Nstein representative could convince me on the phone that this latest webinar can really be of use for my readers. Especially he cited the above mentioned news aggregator as one example where Nstein has already successfully implemented semantic methods for on-site SEO I just call semantic SEO.

Anyways, you can be sure that any method that looks like SEO 2.0 to me and that allows to potentially double, triple or even increase the number of page views by 500% in my case will make me want to cover it.

Now as I feel a little uneasy about this first sponsored post* and wonder if it’s too sneaky to write for an advertiser about something I want some feedback from you if this post was useful or not and if it’s acceptable to write posts I was asked for on my own blog and getting paid for them. Until now I only got paid for guest blogging on other blogs.

*This is a sponsored post. It’s not an ad. Also it’s not a sponsored review. It just introdocuces a topic I was asked to write about by the sponsor. The text is written by myself and only reflects my opinion so it’s not even an advertorial. It’s not automatically an endorsement of the above mentioned offer.

Top 7 CSS Tricks for Better SEO

19 Comments Filed Under: CSS, Design, White Hat, Usability, Google, SEO

Google baby by skoop.

As most of us know it is often really difficult to build websites for both the user and Google.

Google still needs to be assisted in finding and assessing a website’s worth to such an extent that it can break the user experience altogether.

Of course there are plenty of CSS solutions for Google’s weaknesses. Although I do not like the term tricks I have to refer to them as CSS tricks as in fact these are workarounds to suit Google. Google spiders are still unable to recognize most advanced web technologies like Flash or AJAX.

Google spiders are like little children, you really have to assist them to find stuff and understand it.

There are other search engines of course but they struggle even more so to keep it simple I will concentrate on Google, which is the by far dominant search engine in most of the western markets.

On a side note: “Trick” sounds like “black hat SEO” or cheating search engines. Well, take a look at them yourself and tell me whether I’m cheating or whether Google is making web development a pain in the back.

OK, then. Let me present to the top 7 CSS tricks for better SEO in no particular order:

CSS Pagination
Google has a serious problem with ranking long articles which are divided into several parts. Also long one page articles will outrank short ones usually. Apart from that the usability is key in making your visitors read the whole article so you don’t want users neither to scroll for ages nor to click a link and send a request each time they want to get to the next page of your article.
The solution is CSS pagination. Isn’t it hidden text though? Hidden text is one of the oldest “tricks” to cheat search engines, webmasters still employ it and my potential clients sometimes wonder why they don’t rank while using hidden text. So hands off hidden text! Well, if Digg, your number one anti-SEO site, uses it can it be “black hat SEO”?
Anyways this way you can divide the content into easily digestible parts while still having it on one page. Take heed to another limitation of Google: The crawler might not crawl a very large page in its entirety.

Absolute Positioning
The higher your content is on a given page the more it counts for Google. Google does not see a page like a human being, it crawls the code. Thus the higher your content is in the code the better. So if you have a complex site with lots of menus, scripts and other gimmicks you should consider absolute positioning otherwise Google might even stop crawling your page before it reaches the main content. You can place the actual content high up in the code, at the top, while the users will see it in the middle of the page below the menus.

Styling h1, h2, h* Headlines
In HTML the h1 headline appears huge by default, the h2 is still much larger than the rest of the page copy etc. Many web designers thus used divs and spans for headlines for years to style them the way needed. Now Google won’t know what the headline is unless you tell Google by using h* tags. It’s like in 1999: You really need to use h1, h2 etc.
Of course you don’t have to make huge h1 headlines like in pre CSS times. Just style the h1 the size you want, also you can get rid off the line-height etc. which h1 headline force upon you by using the display: inline; attribute.

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sIfr/Image Replacement for Headlines
Many people will argue that styling headlines with CSS is not enough for web designers. They are in fact right. I think it’s by now grotesque that we’re in 2008 and we still are limited to less than a dozen basic standard “web safe” fonts for web design. We were meant to have flying cars by 2000 and now we do not even have real typography on the web. Many people have tackled this problem with image replacement techniques for headlines, which in short will hide the original headline and insert an image in it’s place. Some of them are fairlydavnaced , others are very simple. No isn’t it hidden text again? Yes, it is! Also some of these methods will hamper your SEO efforts moredfirectly as the crawlers won’t recognize the headline anymore.
There is one popular image replace technique called sIfr which is by now officially approved by Google. It uses Flash to display the headline in any font you wish but in code the h* tags are still recognizable.

Using Lists (ul/ol)
Most SEO experts agree by now that so called keyword density is not a major positive ranking factor. It means that mentioning your keywords 20 times instead of 5 will not make you rank better in Google. You may get penalized for so called keyword stuffing though. Now what to do in case where you really need to use the same words over and over? Use an unordered or ordered list. Google allows repetition in lists without penalizing you.
With CSS you can style lists in any way you desire so that if you do not want a list to be clearly visible list style it accordingly. Some people do even a whole site design without tables and layers (divs) or even spans.

Nofollow Attribute
Contrary to what some people believe the nofollow attribute like in a href=”page.html” rel=”nofollow” does not prevent a page from being crawled by Google. As nofollow does not help against Spam whatsoever, as it was its original purpose at which it failed completely, what then is nofollow good for from the webmaster perspective?

Matt Cutts of Google recommends the so called pagerank sculpting. It means assigning PageRank to the important pages while not wasting it on a contact page for instance.

Yes, Google assumes that the page with the most internal links is the most important one so if you link from all your pages to the contact page it will be the most important page for Google. So you really have to tell Google: Do not mistake this page for the most important one by using the nofollow attribute (not tag!) on the links leading to the contact page.

Pure CSS Menus
While pure CSS menues are not really a trick most people still assume that you need JavaScript or other enhancements to make dynamic menus. Well it’s not true, many advanced CSS only menus offer slick interactivity while being the best choice for Google and other search engine spiders.

Now can you use this methods for cheating Google? Well, I guess you can, but these techniques are so low level that Google won’t count it anyway. For all those who mistake SEO with spam: Spam works on a whole different level nowadays so using stuff like hidden text is ridiculous by now. These CSS tricks can help you with legitimate SEO efforts. I do not like the term white hat SEO as it acknowledges that there is another kind of SEO (I don’t agree with that premise, I rather divide: Either it’s SEO or it’s spam). Nonetheless: It’s all white hat SEO if you ask me.

Now you might argue this is not SEO 2.0, these are SEO basics known for years but it’s not really the case, the web developer community is rather keen on web standards to the point of dogma where for instance absolute positioning is frowned upon. So most people won’t use it. Also if you want to learn more about advanced SEO 2.0 methods you might want to read more in this blog. It’s full of SEO 2.0.

How to Blog: 7 Writing for Blogs Guidelines that Define Blogging

6 Comments Filed Under: Blogging, Fun, Definitions

Many people just don’t get the differences between websites and blogs or more specifically between news and blogs.

You can have a Wordpress based site posting daily the latest news and still won’t be a blog.

How to blog then to really make your blog a blog? That’s easy once you acknowledge and put into practice the 7 writing for blogs guidelines that define blogging:

Character:
What character does the SEO 2.0 blog have? It’s daring, humorous, interdisciplinary, visionary, radical. I’m not sure whether everybody does feel the same about the it but at least these were the first 5 things that came to my mind. Do you have some adjectives to describe your blog? If you don’t or they sound more like “average, just another WordPress blog, bleak” you should change something. A blog needs a distinctive character. It’s not necessarily the character of the blogger. SEO 2.0 is just part of me.

Subjectivity:
The writer of a blog should always write what s/he thinks. Not what a company thinks (it does not in the first place) but what you, the blogger, like or dislike. Only God is objective. So embrace your subjectivity and write from your own point of view.

Imperfection:
A blogger is a human being, thus imperfect and that’s fine. You blog quickly and thus you often make mistakes. That’s fine too as long as you react to people who point out issues and you correct the mistakes you made. If your blog sounds as if a whole PR department has worked a night to devise a posting you should rather write press releases. So a blog thrives with imperfection.

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Non-commercial:
While blogs, especially corporate and business blogs often are dealing with business and there is nothing wrong with “making money blogging” the nature of the blog or there the blog posts is non-commercial. So the blog post itself can’t be a sales pitch. If you want to sell something, even in a blog post, the article must contain something useful for the reader.

Personal voice:
People read most blogs because they like the person behind them or the team if it’s a group blog. There are plenty of “blogs” where a bunch of no-name badly underpaid editors fill WordPress sites with content. This is not blogging. If you can’t recognize or imagine a person behind a blog it’s not a blog it’s a news source at best. A blog needs a personal voice.

Critical approach:
If you applaud just about everything nobody will trust you. This applies also if you will leave out everything that’s negative. So even self improvement blogs will deal with negative aspects of life. You do not have to negative yourself but yo can’t sweep everything under the rug. You need a critical approach to things. Tell people when something’s wrong.

Informal:
Humor, colloquial expressions or off-topic posting are part of blogging. Without them your blog becomes an official website. A blog must be informal to some point. Or it should be 10% informal so that it does not get too sloppy. Nonetheless blogs are informal and not 100% earnest.

Now said that I bet I forgot some other important factors but I prefer the number 7 to, 8, 9 or sometimes even 10 (less work so if you you think I forgot the most important blog writing guidelines prove me wrong in the comments.

Global Food Crisis: How Bloggers, Social Media Users and SEO Experts Can Help

8 Comments Filed Under: Self Empowerment, Blogging, Money, Social Media, SEO

Free rice.

In recent days I read news about the exploding global food crisis all over. It seems the whole world is starving besides us rich westerners.

Even worse: Much of it is our fault, not only IMF, WTO or World Bank policies that favor the industrialized nations but even more directly: Our green cars and alternative fuels are one of the most acute reasons why the food prices skyrocketed recently so that people in the “majority of the world”, the Americas, Africa, Asia who usually get by with almost nothing, now really starve.

Much of this mess is also due to us rich people messing up the climate via consuming way too many resources and producing far more co2 than hundreds of poor in the developing world. The ensuing climate change leads directly to poor crops due to draughts or floods depending where you are.

So now that we created this mess, what we’re gonna do about it?

Whine about the slow economy at home?
Go on buying cool stuff?
Ignore it altogether?

I can’t: Writing for a global audience made me even more aware of global problems and my advantageus position in one of the countries where people do not starve.

Also I’m not powerless, far from it, as a blogger with readers all over the world, a social media power user on several platforms and SEO expert I can make a huge impact on the way the people think, what they know and how they react to it. I’m an influencer. It’s time to use this influence for more than petty financial benefits.

Let’s fix the world. One link at a time.

So I want to join me and tell how we, the bloggers, social media users, SEO experts can help the world during the current crisis. Add your ideas in the comments below:

Drop in links to charities that fight the hunger outbreak
If you’re from India or China add information how we can help local people without the interference of governments or organizations based in the west
Ways of limiting our wasteful lifestyle

To start out helping to spread the world I added this NYT article to breaking news at Mixx so that people finally realize that these news of hunger, riots and desperation are really breaking people’s lives.

Also the first thing that comes to mind is the Free Rice project a wonderfully playful way of to support the United Nations World Food Program.

As a philosopher once said: You can’t be happy if everybody around you is miserable.

If you represent a charity tackling the current global food crisis contact me via email, mail to onreact at onreact.com - I will consider supporting your campaign for free (free of charge). Also take note that there are several SEO companies offering discounts for non-profit SEO projects.

If you’re from the countries that are affected tell us how bad the situation is. If you’re like me a well-fed westerner whose problem is rather obesity than hunger, act now, support us.

How to Get More Visitors for Your Blog Without Social Media Marketing

17 Comments Filed Under: Sphinn, Reputation Building, Mixx, Blogging, SEO 2.0, Social Media, Germany

Give. Image by Mr. Kris

Personally I hate the term “marketing” as well as combinations like search engine marketing. Even more than that I despise the term social media marketing which is an oxymoron in itself. I wonder why I forgot to add to this list of despicable terms.

In fact I do search engine and social media optimization instead of marketing.

In SEO 2.0 you do not sell to people, you inform, but they want to pay you anyways to get more.

The difference between social media marketing and optimization is like that of shareware and freeware. Marketing means selling the people stuff, optimization giving it away for free. In SEO 2.0 you get one step further: You give it away for free to get something else in return without tying both. So you do not just give away a freeware version to sell your professional software package.

SEO 2.0 is more like creative commons or open source: You give away everything to get something else: Reputation, attention, authority etc.

With these you can sell to other people while you do not take away anything from the people who have received from you.

So in SEO 2.0 you do neither sell not trade. You practice true altruism. Many people know already: Altruism is the better egoism. The more you give away the more you get back.

This is a fundamental rule of humanity ever since. Just think of your family or friends. The more love you give to your children the more you will get back. The more time you spend your friends the more friends you’ll have. Of course this rule has some limitations as you can’t just give everything to your children out of love as well as you need to identify who your real friends are and not feed people who start to exploit you (like most employers do). Nonetheless it works.

So how does this make sense for blogging, also regarding business blogging, especially to make social media marketing superfluous?

Let me tell you a little more about Germany: Here you do not have social media that really bring visitors to your site. Imagine no Digg, Reddit, Propeller etc.
The biggest German Digg-like site will bring you as many visitors as the still nascent Mixx community or a niche social site like Sphinn. Also you can’t submit most of the German content to international social sites.

So how the hell can you get traffic for your blog without targeting social media at all? Yes, it’s possible. I do it for my blogging clients as well as for my private blogs.

Here is a short list of actions you can perform to get more visitors without social media marketing:

Look for other bloggers who write about the topic of your post, link to theirs and ping or trackback them this way.
Comment on blog posts that cover a topic you already posted about explaining what is missing or why your perspective adds some crucial info. Add a link to the particular post. Bloggers and their readers appreciate that alike.
Find a topic everybody speaks about and write a resource or overview post with deeplinks to the posts. Do not trackback everybody, pings are OK, but people will notice anyway.
Look up Technorati and your referer stats to find out who linked to you and submit them to social media, of course only if the posting are more than just “look what I’ve found, click here”
Check which popular media support trackbacks and use them as your favorite news sources, refer to and trackback them once in a while (not daily)

As you see it’s basically about two things: Commenting and linking out. Becoming a part of the blogosphere. Your blog is not an island.

Blogging without using social media yourself for marketing purposes and the frowned upon self-submission has some major advantages. Just look at all the time you spend on social media while most of them even don’t respect you for doing it, either by their own policy, their hostile users, or both. So the ultimate goal should be to be able to stop using social media for SMM reasons at all.

The zen of SEO 2.0: Succeed on social media without self-submission.

As a proof of concept we do not submit our own stuff at the SEO 2.0 on Mixx although Mixx allows this. It works fine. In fact I almost never submit my postings, sometimes I won’t even vote for it. Still my blog posts have been submitted over 40 times to Mixx.

I use social media as they were intended: for fun, sharing and news filtering and get popular anyways. People know me and even vote for my stuff across different social media.

So skip social media marketing, do social media optimization. It’s not about what the blogosphere and social media can do for you, it’s about what you can do for them. The more you give the more you get.

Did you ever see a-list bloggers submit their own postings?

10 Commandments of Business Blogging

21 Comments Filed Under: Reputation Building, Blogging, Social Media, Definitions, SEO 2.0

Whatever you do, you need passion, image by fatboyke

What exactly is business blogging? To me, at least in this post, it applies to any blogging attempt that is motivated by the advance of any business or marketing endeavour. It may even apply to blogging for a cause what many green bloggers do.

Business blogging does not have to be blogging about business as some people apparently assume. This is not my understanding of the term.

Business blogging might be done by an individual who is a freelancer like I am a freelance SEO consultant in Germany but to me it sounds more like the blogger is part of a larger business or a company. Also you have to differentiate: Business blogging is not necessarily corporate or problogging but might be one of the two or both.

In the search industry bloggers Matt Cutts and Rand Fishkin are probably the best examples of business blogging I refer to. While Matt Cutts’ blog makes me stay away from it for several reasons it is along with SEOmoz nonetheless a good example for blogging semi-privately for a business, thus for business blogging that is neither really private nor really corporate as there are many “real” Google corporate blogs.

So while business blogging is used very successfully not only in the search industry there seems to persist a large amount of uncertainty about the nature of it to the point of some spectacular failures of business blogs.

So to establish a few guidelines for proper business blog behavior there arises a need for a set of “social values” especially in connection and to deal with social media. These are indeed fairly simple and self-evident once written down. I just did it: So take a look at the 10 commandments of business blogging and also make sure to read my introduction called the 10 simplest ways to boost your social media credibility right from the start:

1. Use your real name
If you want anybody to take you seriously you have to use your real name for your blog.

2. Disclose what company you are working for and what exactly you do there
Do not blog under false pretenses, disclose from the start who you are, whom you work for or who pays you, why you blog, what your exact position is, it’s a big difference whether you’re from the PR department or you’re the CEO.

3. Blog yourself
Do not use ghostwriting under your name. If you have not enough time do not blog. Blog for yourself in your own name not for your company, people will cite you and not the company. Above all be yourself, not solely a CEO, entrepreneur, engineer or consultant. Make people feel that you’re there as a person. Shoot pictures of your cat or dog. Do not cover your family though, that might be even dangerous.

4. Do not sell, inform
Do not attempt to sell your products via your blog posts. Inform people. Make your readers aware of them but mainly inform your audience on the issues of your trade or industry, not solely your own business.

5. Do not “blog” press releases, tell stories
Well, this is kind of evident although many people will do it anyways. Press releases are for the press, blogs are your interface to social media. You might even employ social media press releases but keep your blog clean.

6. Engage your audience
Blogs are defined by the conversations of real people. It’s about dialogue. Again, if you do not have the time to reply to comments, do not blog. If you start a monologue your business blog will fail.

7. Use casual language not corporate newspeak
Everybody hates corporate newspeak. Also many people do not even understand the meaning of it. Use normal casual language, but do not swear or ridicule yourself too much. Wearing oversize sombreros is OK though.

8. Do not demean others, especially competitors, but deal with criticism and other issues of your company
Positivity and honesty is key for a successful blog, even more for a business blog as people are wary of being lied to by corporate or business entities. So do not tell people how bad your competitors are or the rest of the world. Also deal honestly with issues, especially criticism regarding your work and company. Do not feed the troll though. React if it’s not slander. For the latter call your lawyers, but do not call your lawyers in cases of decent criticism!

9. Do not make your employees vote you up
Well, ever wondered why Apple stories are daily on the Digg frontpage? Well, voting up your company’s blog is vote fraud on social media. If you have more than 5 - 10 employees you should forbid it altogether.

10. Do not hide facts when you describe something
Telling only half the truth is like lying on blgs and social media. People will tell you anyways. So try to anticipate what others think and take a proactive stance. Show them your unique selling proposition like saying “we’re the first to introduce these features”.

Now will following these 10 commandments make you a great business blogger? No, they most probably won’t on their own, but without them your business blog will fail. To stretch my commandment metaphor: It’s not enough to play by the rules, you need faith. With blogging it’s more about the enthusiasm or the passion.

Disclaimer: While I’m a Christian myself I do not want to hurt anyone’s religious feelings. The metaphor of the commandments is not meant to disrespect the real ten commandments, in contrast, it’s to highlight the need for ethics in every discipline even such a worldly one like blogging for business purposes. To my Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, agnostic and other readers: This is also not a way to disrespect any other religion as inferior. It’s just a way of explaining things.

7 Misguiding Terms You Should Abandon

15 Comments Filed Under: Self Empowerment, Blogging, Definitions, SEO 2.0, SEO

Nowadays we use terms and expressions daily which not only bury the real meaning of the phenomenon they try to describe, they also misguide yourself and others.

Some words simply change your intentions to the negative by adding the wrong meaning or meaninglessness to some things.

I used most of them myself mistakenly without really thinking about the ramifications. These terms infuse hidden negativity into your approach. You have to purge them to change your mindset.

Check out these 7 examples of words or expressions that you should abandon:

Traffic: I wrote a whole article about that. In German you never say “traffic” you always say visitors. Your visitors are not cars or numbers. If you view them like an amorph mass you will never meet their expectations. Treat your visitors like guests. Offer them some tea and crackers. Also traffic reminds me of drug trafficking and such.
Link bait, Internet users are not fish and link baiting sounds like tricking people to swallow the bait. Why not speak about link incentives? I have come up with 3 different terms naming all aspects of what you call link baiting nowadays
Web 2.0 SEO: What could this be? SEO for AJAX apps? Social Media Optimization? It’s confusing. Use SEO 2.0 instead: Here it’s clear that this means a new phase of SEO and web 2.0 is implicit in it.
Blog monetization: To be honest, this sounds like “sell out”. It reminds me of going to the flea market or pawn shop. Why not “earn a living blogging” instead which sounds 10 times as decent? Or just blog advertising?
Make money online, yeah, make money online or blogging is the new “get rich quick”. It sounds like make money talking or sleeping. It’s one of the reasons people hate this. It’s bling, bling all over. Again “earn a living blogging” or “earn an income online” sounds 100 times more decent.
Black hat SEO - Let’s face it, what is black hat SEO? It’s search engine spam also called spamdexing. SEO stands for optimization, you do not optimize, you fool search engines, circumvent filters, you find loop holes in “black hat SEO”. It’s in no way an “optimum” afterwards, only for your pocket probably. Get real.
White hat SEO - By using this term, you acknowledge that all other SEO is not white hat, as well as acknowledging black hat SEO. It’s like saying there is good optimization (to make sth. better) and bad optimization (to make sth. worse), if it’s bad it’s not optimization at all, that’s an oxymoron. It’s either fixing or breaking things. SEO is fixing, spam breaking things.

Did I already tell you that I was a poet and linguist once? Language transforms reality. Master the language, do not use words that skew reality in the wrong direction and misrepresent things.

I think there are more terms like these that misguide you and others daily. Do you know some? Add them in the comments.

Case Study: How to Get a StumbleUpon Submission Reviewed 200 Times in 2 Weeks

14 Comments Filed Under: StumbleUpon, Social Media, SEO 2.0

While StumbleUpon traffic is not really reliable and I strongly advise you not to depend on it for your blog StumbleUpon is still one of the most valuable places to get attention on the Web. To show you how a succesful submission can generate overwhelming buzz I will take apart a recently hugely popular stumble I did myself. This is an article that was chosen out of 10 by my readers. People power is SEO 2.0!

So: How to get a StumbleUpon submission reviewed 200 times in 2 weeks?

Take a look at this image first:

The submission I am talking about is an somewhat artistic work of the “us” design studio titled “Free range workers“. It deals with “the similarities between many office work conditions and battery farmed hens”.

While it is a really weird piece and I submitted it because it deserved attention by the people interested in radical art (I am an art blogger for over 5 years in Germany, I even organized a whole festival in 2004) I would never have expected the huge amount of attention it got on SU. Why? I submit strange artworks all the time. Some of it gets some attention, some other stuff gets ignored altogether.

So when I discovered that the “Free range workers” had received 200 reviews after a mere 2 weeks I decided to take a closer look at it and compare it to other similar submissions. Moreover I tried to find a pattern comparing it to other wildly popular submissions.

I have come up with some characteristics that these have in common. While this is not a recipe to repeat this success whenever you want you surely can deliver a better suited type of content for the StumbleUpon community after reading this.

The right topic. A popular one
This is crucial for success on StumbleUpon: You have to offer a potential audience what it wants. In sports stadium the people want to watch a football game, in a movie theatre people prefer to watch movies, in an art gallery they want guess what? So what kind of content do people on StumbleUpon prefer? Well, art is not bad but you need to get more exact in your research. How can you determine the preferences of stumblers? it’s simple. Just take a look at which groups are popular. My submission fitted at probably 3 of the most popular groups of SU users “Awesome Pictures“, “Bizarre Hunter” and “Photography“. Of course not the groups themselves made it go big, but the groups can be used as an indicator at what kind of content will perform well on SU.
Similarly, one of the most popular submissions of mine was one about Firefox. It wasn’t something really important but the huge attention it got was due to Firefox being one of the most popular topics on SU. In fact the Firefox group is the single most popular group at SU.

Zeitgeisty but timeless at the same time
StumbleUpon is not social news like the infamous Digg or the bright upstarter Mixx. Nobody wants to read news there as it takes too long from sender to recipient. You might get served the news by SU long time after they were originally posted. Thus the events have probably unfolded in a different direction already. So StumbleUpon sumission must be timeless. the information must still be valid or make sense in a few days, weeks , months or years. What stumblers do want is that the submission reflect the current zeitgeist.

So here again: Timeless art but the currently popular Firefox come to mind. When I started using Firefox a few years ago (it was called Phoenix back then) it was a really light weight, fast and underground browser. By now it’s a monster which will eat up all of your memory. So I often use Opera for certain tasks. It does not matter. People are used to FF by now and they want their preferences to be respected. So you can’t post something about there being better browsers than Firefox which would fatal for your submisson. You have to accept the zeitgeist of the time which says that Firefox is the #1 to succeed on SU.

The free range workers are timeless in their attempt to make life worth living for both humans and animals alike while they are reflecting on the current zeitgeist of the webgeneration, living in offices without much daylight.

No bullshit
This is something more savvy users already know. If you use tons of distracting ads, widgets and there is portal like clutter on your page, social media users will hate it. If you take a look at the Free range workers page you notice that there is nothing beside the single work, not even a link. Basically it a frame based site so that I had to open the frame content to submit it. So it was done accidentally exactly right for the StumbleUpon audience. In fact I will “thumb down” submissions that have more ads and clutter that actual content.

So remove everything that is not necessary to get more stumblers to vote for you. Social media users do not click on ads anyways so using Adsense and other CPC ads does not work anyways. Correct me if you have different experiences. I don’t use Adsense at all so I only rely on what others wrote here.

Controversy
This in fact surprised me a little. Many people report that bad reviews result in less visitors etc. Not here or at least not if there is a good mix of both. At the beginning several people voted the Free range workers down, sometimes for no other reason than me submitting it as some people just vote down everything just because I submit it, “the evil SEO”.

It seems that negative reviews of this misguided kind motivate others to write a review of their own when they disagree. After a while only positive reviews followed suit because most stumblers think for themselves and do not take bullies seriously. So while it does not make sense to submit crap it works fine to submit stuff not everybody agrees on.

The fitting categories
I already made you aware that it is very important to submit a post to the fitting category. As tags and categories are mixed on StumbleUpon you can submit to several fitting categories by adding tags that match categories. I see the same mistakes on SU with categories over and over.

For instance most people fail to see that the Science/Tech category is not about “tech” in the sense of “everything about computers and Internet” but about science and thus technology related to real life, like in engeneering. Also “computers” is used for all types of content while it is in fact about, surprise!, computers… yes, the boxes with chips in them you use to access the Internet.

So if you have a post about Firefox it’s neither about science nor is it about computers. It really depends on what exactly you write. It could fit in “web development”, “software” or even “marketing” (Firefox plugins for affiliate marketers) or search (SEO plugins for Firefox).

In the case of the Free range workers I chose “bizarre”, “arts”, “food” (it was at about chicken wasn’t it? ) “vegeterianism” (Boys just wanna have fun!) and design. The category was later changed to “satire” which I didn’t realize existed before as SU some far too many categories to know them all.

Do not miscategorize. StumbleUpon is like watching TV. You do not want sports on the discovery channel do you? So people will switch off their TV set.
Now I hear you crying out:

My website is far too “boring” it has nothing to do with bizarre arts or Firefox!

Do I have to dress like a jerk,
make ridiculous photos
or make a list of the best Firefox plugins for plumbers?

Well, it sure would get some attention. You don’t have to though. It’s like in real life, banks and companies sponsor artists or art fairs, even have their own galleries.

Sponsor an artist or simply pay him to be able to display hers/his works,
hire a programmer to create a Firefox extension everybody needs etc.
or do not take yourself too seriously, make something ridiculous, the people love exploding iPods and the likes.

While doing all that always remember that social media is not a direct response channel, it’s about long term reputation building.

SEO 2.0 is Like Poetry

8 Comments Filed Under: Blogging

When I was young and idealistic, that is when I didn’t have to spend most of my time earning money to pay the bills, I used to write poetry. It wasn’t bad poetry at all, at least after a few years as with poetry it’s not only about inspiration but also about techniques. The problem with poetry nowadays is: Nobody reads it.

In the wild years around 1969 Lawrence Ferlinghetti sold millions of his books. Nowadays he’s almost forgotten. The Beat Generation he was one of the most prominent members of is mostly represented historically by Allen Ginsberg (”Howl”) when it comes to poetry.

So my poetry was not bad at all, I even had a publisher who wanted to print my first book. He contacted me. The idea of printing a book which will be bought or read by some 200 elitist book worms sounded far to bleak to me.

Poetry made me go online in 1997 as I imagined to be able to address the whole world here imagining millions of potential readers eagerly awaiting my poems.

Well, it didn’t happen. Remember that I wrote in German and nobody reads poetry in Germany, especially not modern poetry written by young authors a few years ago. Just visit any bookshop in Germany. It’s frustrating.

The story does not end here but I don’t want you tell the story of my life. Just this:

One of the reasons I got into SEO was to find out how to reach larger audiences.

I do not want to write for a small elitist circle, be it in poetry or SEO. I want to reach thousands, tens of thousands, maybe more one day

You probably know the “code is poetry” slogan by WordPress. Well, back then, before this one was coined I used to take it literally: I wrote JavaScript poems. They were poems which would function as a poetic script and be a poem in the source also. So they would work on many levels. In fact my web name, onReact stems from my JavaScript poetry days. The poems would react to user interaction.

Now, as a SEO, I still know most of the techniques used in poetry.

Most poets already fail at the title.

In SEO copywriting the same problem arises. Most people can’t write a proper title that will convert visitors to readers.

In fact, in SEO copywriting is the same applies but upside down. For instance most people who think they write a poem write a description instead.

They will start a poem with a title like “Autumn” or “Sadness” or “Rome”. I never read such “poems“. When you start a poem with a noun as the title you will in most cases describe the noun. I don’t want to read another poem about autumn and how sad it makes you. I don’t want to read another poem about your “Sadness” or another description of Rome.

In SEO copywriting on the other hand Google forces you to use the most boring title.

If you want your post about Autumn Sadness to be read you need to make the page title and h1 heading “Autumn Sadness”.

Now these Google requirements result in the poorest possible language used.

In poetry you shouldn’t describe what you see or feel with words which do not mean anything anymore, you have to evoke the emotions of the reader by any means possible.

Now SEO 2.0 comes in.

In SEO 2.0 you can reconcile SEO and poetry, you in fact can write SEO poetry.

Let me explain how with an example. One of my favorite poets in American literature at college was the post modernist John Ashbery. John Ashbery is renown for his highly structured and artificial poetry forms. What is less known is that he wrote a book of poems that were truly visionary.

These poems were so much ahead of the time that the book failed completely both with the professional audiences and the book buyers alike. Why? Ashbery removed all descriptions from it, they were using language solely to evoke emotions. Unlike the dada poets it wasn’t for it’s own sake though. It was not meant to be fun. He wanted to evoke the same feelings he felt at a certain time in a certain place in the reader.

My favorite poem by Ashbery thus is “Leaving the Atocha Station“. Atocha is a city in Spain. The title, while the only descriptive part of the poem uses the “keyword” Atocha Station.

The poem itself is a wild array of confused fragments. So confused that nobody “understood” it. The failure was not on he part of the poet though. The poem, like most great poems btw., is not to be understood with your head but to be felt with your heart. The fragments were only made to evoke certain emotions. ~~Sadly I can’t find the poem neither online nor in my Norton Anthology of American Literature.~~

Here it is: Leaving the Atocha Station.

Nonetheless I remember just one thing about the poem, there ~~were bees~~ was honey in it. Of course there ~~weren’t bees~~ wasn’t honey on Atocha Station itself though. The ~~bees were~~ honey was used just to evoke a certain emotion.

Now again how does this make you a better SEO 2.0? in SEO 2.0 you do not write headlines or titles for Google. You want to evoke certain emotions in your visitors. You want to make them want to read your post or article or at least to click the link. It’s not solely the head that decides which link to click, which post to read. It’s the heart.

The heart wants to feel the need of reading aparticular post. Thus you must evoke a certain emotion in your visitor to make her or him a reader.

Now poetry does not want to sell you anything besides itself. SEO works the other way around, it wants to convince you to visit, read and buy.

In SEO 2.0 that changed. SEO 2.0 is like poetry. It does not sell you anything directly but it does make you want to read more by the same author and to buy the whole book.

So do not sell in a blog post. Give away and evoke emotions but let the book sellers make the selling.

You can add a “buy book here” link but do not try to sell in the SEO poem itself.

How do you evoke emotions with headlines?

Read my “Top 10 Killer Headline Formulas for Tremendous Online Success” post again. Most of them use poetic figures like metaphors or metonymies to evoke certain emotions. headlines do not kill, so “killer headlines” is a poetic speech figure in itself.