SEO 2.0

Brisbane 1959 - image by pizzodisevo.

Who wants to read yesterday’s news? This might sound like a rhetoric question but it’s not: Google users or searchers want to read old news. They actually seek out your old, even archaic content right now. What do they find? Outdated information and dead links.

I just checked a blog of mine which turns 5 this year and noticed a short post which had 20 visitors from Google this month for being #1 for a specific but still not that seldom used term. It contained 4 external links and 3 of them were dead.

Do you think people who end up on your blog and click your links to find 404 error messages or worse domain grabbers cheap ad infested sites will want to come back?

Well I guess this is really a rhetorical question. So what to do? Clean up months or years of archived posts? No, this is obviously too much work also not really rewarding work.

Instead view it as a positive opportunity to get fresh content without actually writing it anew, just update one old post at a time.

Also you can earn additional credibility doing this as people appreciate well kept websites as valuable resources. Just mark the post as updated with the classic line from static websites in pre-blog times “Update [date]” and also describe what it was exactly that you updated. Many open source projects do it this way with their software. This method works fine and tells the visitors: This project is alive and kicking.

Now with blogging you could argue that the visitor will see that it’s alive looking at the latest posts or visiting the front page, but most people won’t, they will exit your site on the broken page they entered.

In the above mentioned case it took me less than 10 minutes to research the new links, some were on a different page within the same site, one disappeared altogether but I found a very similar one elsewhere within minutes. Then I changed the date in WordPress to the current one and added an

“Published at [date]. Last updated at [date]”

line at the bottom as well as an update notice above stating that the links have been fixed. That post now appears as “new” on my front page.

• So I did not have to write a new one today.
• Also a post from 2005 has most probably been not yet read by the current blog readers.
• Even if they either forgot it or the additional value of new links makes sense for them too.
  

So with a few minutes of work you can both get content and earn credibility for your blog with old news. Do not forget, your archive is your goldmine, when it’s full of rocks and dust readers won’t discover the gold though.

Classics in Lego by Balakov.

Starting and maintaining a flagship blog is not really easy. You need perseverance and the will to keep on blogging no matter what happens. You need passion.

You need to fall in love with blogging!

I have it, so I don’t need extra motivation or something. What I need though, like other bloggers, is a strategy or simply put adjustment to the 3 phases of blog growth.

You just can’t blog the same way for a completely new blog as for a blog which already has a significant audience or an established blog.

What is a flagship blog? A flagship blog is a blog created upon the premise of unique content of high value able to boost your online reputation. A flagship blog is a resource people will link to, subscribe and recommend to others on social media.

I want to outline the 3 main phases of flagship blog growth and how to deal with them in terms of

• content creation
• posting frequency
• topical relevancy
• social media engagement
• guest blogging

What are the 3 main phases of blog growth? These 3 are embedded in a holistic SEO 2.0 strategy including true blue social media participation.

1. Initial Frenzy
The initial frenzy is a hilarious phase of blogging. It’s like a new love affair. You’re agitated all of the time and can’t sleep well.

• You blog daily or at least as often as you can.
• You write guest posts for more popular blogs
  
• You try everything, several social media, widgets, Plugins and maybe even WordPress Themes.
• You create highly relevant topical content geared towards the social media of your choice audience
  
• You link out generously and you praise other established as well as new bloggers like you who you admire.
• You watch your first social media submissions eagerly
• and you are are glad about the first 100 visitors daily, then the first 100 subscribers
  

2. Establishing Mode
The establishing mode phase is a cool down phase. Like in a love affair you now discover whether you truly love blogging. You take a step back and analyze. You take a look at your audience and the workload of blogging. Now you need a focus and some lasting benefit of blogging.

After the initial frenzy ends there comes the establishing mode. It may be after 3 months or after 6 but it will come. You will notice it by the fact that you are posting less without really knowing why. You will more often take a look at your watch to find out how much time you spend with blogging.

• You blog less often but write longer posts
• You elaborate on topics you already covered
• You concentrate on your existing audience, you may have 300-1000 feed subscribers
• Your social media traffic either tends to become lower or you stop caring that much
• You think twice before you guest blog, some people might offer you money already for guest blogging
• You already have a significant network of like minded peers across several social media and people know your name or recognize your avatar
• You think more often about making money with your blog to justify the time spent on it
• People you never heard link to you in best of lists or as a source (”via”)

3. Final Boost
The final boost is in a love affair the equivalent of marriage. Now you decide whether you abandon your beloved one or if you’re really in it whatever it takes. You can do it you just need to want it. If your heart jumps each time you start typing a blog post you can really become one of those exceptionallysuccessful bloggers.

• You want to reach new heights each time you start a blog post, you want to write a short one but it does not work, you have so much to share
• You are the first or one of the first to cover or uncover topics others haven’t t thought of yet
• Your traffic is higher than in the initial phase even without being submitted to social media
• The no referer crowd becomes the biggest traffic factor in your stats on days you are not on social media
  
• Your blog posts get submitted to different social media just minutes or hours after you published them
• People you never heard of admire you or ask you questions
• Once you submit something to social media you get an initial boost of 10 - 20 people recognizing it’s you and checking out your submission because they trust your choices
• You get job offers via or because of your blog regularly
  

Now to reach the final boost phase or whil in it you can go pro for instance, and/or you create immensely valuable posts that will go bananas on del.icio.us, you can create an ebook or you just venture into other media like audio or video or even start a second flagship blog. You can start speaking at conferences. You will consider a professional custom blog redesign.

You want to keep inspiring people forever. You want to empower the people, you want o evangelize them and you even believe it because you made it so far. It’s wonderful!

Now I’m not yet at #3 or final boost, at least not entirely. I assume being in the final boost phase means having around 1000+ subscribers but I already experience the ramifications of it to some extent. I recognize the things others wrote about, like content creator Skellie, web designer Steven Snell or internet marketer Dosh Dosh.

Now will I get the final boost that will propel me to the next level? How will I do it? I’m not sure yet, I already see phase 3 unfolding. Maybe it’s not about doing anymore but watching it happen by now. Anyways, blogging is my true love!

CNN adds Mixx buttons, 5 of them! Couldn’t resist it Screenshot taken with Firefox 1.5

Join us at our SEO 2.0 group at Mixx before it’s too late.

Findability is a seemingly new term that has become a buzzword recently due to a book called Building Findable Websites by Aarron Walter (not to mix up with Aaron Wall, author of SEO Book). Now as a true SEO 2.0 I’m always on the lookout for new concepts and innovation. So I took a little time to find out more about findability, it’s meaning, roots, who coined the term and when.

The first thing I found out was that neither Aaron Walter nor renown usability expert Jakob Nielsen used the term findability first. It appears that the term findability and most notably ambient findability was coined in 2002 by Peter Morville who even published a book of the same title. First things first though, so let me explain what findability is about.

Website findability is the new and better SEO so to say or, on-site SEO without the bad rep of the SEO industry if you adopt the definition from Building Findable Websites.

Basically Aarron Walter says that building websites for findability encompasses not only SEO but a holistic approach with usability and web standards etc. in mind, a position I can fully support. One thing that Mr. Walter attempts to tell us though is:

SEO is bad, findability is good.

This is a good move from a marketing perspective as nobody likes SEO of course, the term is a stain in itself or at least is perceived by the majority as such.

When we go back to what Peter Morville wrote in 2002 we discover that findability and SEO are not contradictory but basically twin brothers. He acknowledges how

SEO contributes to a websites findability along with usability and other important aspects of information architecture.

Now that might be the problem of it not generating enough hype so that Aarron Walter took a more aggressive approach.

Also Walter reduced findability to websites build with web standards while Morville’s definition extends to the real world. Morville uses examples like looking for long term parking or restrooms on an airport which strike home very convincingly. Jakob Nielsen used the term in 2006 for the first time as far as I can see. Nielsen also limited it to website findability without denouncing SEO though.

Now am I angry at Aarron Walter for being explicit about SEO? No, I’m glad, glad someone makes a strong point on renaming the “whole problem”. In this sense I took the wrong approach with attempting to redefine SEO and having to deal with it’s reputation problem. Using another, better term is the by far more effective way of redefining something. Sadly it’s mostly used by political think tanks to manipulate the public usually. In this case the outcome of the manipulation is a positive one. People will acknowledge best practices and put them in use.

I don’t care how do you call it, SEO, findability or like myself probably SEO 2.0 as long as we have the same goals. Our goals match while the methods do just partly as findability refers in web development only to the on-site or on-page factors of SEO which is not enough to be found, especially in the Web 2.0 environment, but they match.

The single most positive aspect of website findability the teaching aspect:

Findability teaches designers, web developers and information architects what they condescendingly ignored for years, making websites findable.

Now as I am the garbage man of all these lazy designers, web developers and information architects and had to fix crap websites for years, I’m sick and tired of it. I want to do the real thing, the content, the SEO 2.0 the fun stuff.

So clean up your websites yourself guys and don’t rely on the poor Mexican migrant worker wit a sombrero to do it.

That said, I still prefer the approach of Peter Norville. So do not only read Aaron Walter book but also, or at first Norvilles “Ambient Findability”.

Btw.: Building Findable Websites only covers the on-site SEO basics, adding some microfomats and the likes, if you really want to do web design for findability you need to read the Web Design for ROI, a book that will change your professional life forever.


Findablity resources:

• The Age of Findability - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
• Ambient Findability
• Digital Web Magazine - Ambient Findability
• O’Reilly Media | Ambient Findability
• findability.org - by Peter Morville
• DonnaM » Blog Archive » Usability testing for findability
• A List Apart: Articles: Ambient Findability: Findability Hacks
• Use Old Words When Writing for Findability (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
• A List Apart: Articles: Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry
• Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond
• Findability Bliss Through Web Standards | An Event Apart New Orleans April 2008
• SEO and Findability blog: LJ Banks — findability expert

From now on please refer to me as findability expert, maybe this way I can outsmart the SEO haters

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?

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.

First off: The introduction of real links in comments via the dofollow plugin has been a huge success, especially as I am ranking high for both “dofollow” and “dofollow plugin” in Google by now because my article about the end of conventional SEO was so popular and has been reprinted or translated numerous times including my “dofollow” link.

Dofollow encouraged participation substantially, moreover what most people do not mention in this context: It made this blog a really friendly place.

Commenters who also want a link rarely will offend you. So by far most coments are friendly, helpful and adding some new perspective, update or information. In short: People commenting on SEO 2.0 are truly contributing. In many cases I even rank for long tail queries that are found only in my comments.

Blogging is like inviting people to your barbecue party: They get invited and receive free food while you enjoy a nice get together.

I use Akismet for spam protection and thus have rarely problems with real spammers who let robots comment automatically on thousands of blogs. There are sometimes problems with false positives in case of people Akismet markes accidentally as spam. Aaron Wall of SEO book was flagged as spam by Akismet and one of my eager contributors david deangelo has been filtered time and again even after I made him a “member” of this blog. This is a bug that sucks but I will de-spam your comments if you contact me by email, my adress is onreact at onreact.com

Many people complain about so called “manual spam” which is an oxymoron in a way. Spam is an unsolicited message and if you allow comments (by people) you can’t call it spam in this case. Thus comments made by humans not robots are not spam in 99% of cases. Nonetheless some things annoy me too:

1. People commenting with a name like “SEO Company” or “Real Estate California” because I want people to comment not companies or services, especially if the keywords have nothing to do with SEO or other topics of this blog.

2. One liners saying something like “thanks, great article” because I don’t know if they are made by robots or not if they do not refer to the post.

3. People who do not read the article but comment based on the title and it’s keywords because it’s just ridiculous to state “I also like three-way links” if I just wrote that I hate them.

4. People using German or other non-English keywords as their “name” because it is impolite to exclude the majority of my readers who do not understand.

5. Commenters linking to specific subpages like domain.com/my-new-product because I’m not your catalogue.

6. People adding a signature in their comment because you already got a link, you don’t need a signature, that’s greedy.

7. Commenters who disagree with me, because I never err you damn naysayers!

On good days I will just approve your comments, on normal days I will change your “name” to something which sounds actually like a name or remove your URL but on bad days I will spam your comment or delete it.

Spamming your comment means that you get flagged on other Wordpress blogs too so you probably do not want to risk that.

There are easy solutions or exceptions for most of these cases where both you and I can live with them or they even add some additional value. Tim Nash, a SEO consultant from the UK has a nice technical solution implemented: He added an extra text box for your favorite anchor text. This is really neat but I’m too lazy to hack my WordPress comment form and thus I prefer the easiest solution, introduced in part by my favorite blog consultant, Michael Martine. He just combines two things, his name and his job description.

So check out these simple rules of blog commenting netiquette, they might not apply everywhere but they will help you not be thrown out at SEO 2.0 and in other places probably too.

1. You can write: Michael Martine, Blog Consultant. You can also link to to an about page covering you. Also if you do not want to disclose your name or job position, you can even write something like Bob of Miller Real Estate or at least leave your initials to enable me to address you: AJ of Miller Real Estate but don’t write Miller Real Estate, AJ. Imagine being on a party again: You say your name first when you introduce yourself and then you tell people what you do for a living.
2. I appreciate people being thankful for a post but unless your refer to the specific post or I know your blog URL I have no way of determining whether you are a bot or not. So write something like “thank your for the post, it helped me with …”
3. If you want a piece of meat at a barbecue you don’t just drop in, take it and leave the party instantly. Stay for a minute to read the post, say “hi” and then leave.
4. Do you speak German addressing people on a party where nobody understands it? Try to translate at least. So do not write Web design Köln, but Mark of Dom Web Webdesign in Cologne
5. Imagine yourself on a party when asked about what you do for a living telling people, “Dirt Devil M110002!” So, as I said above, a page about you is OK, your homepage vacuumcleaners.com also but not a specific product page. Akismet will spam you in most cases you use subpages anyways.
6. A barbecue party is not a trade fair, you do not wear your name plate on your lapel. You just introduce yourself, that’s enough. So skip the additional signature.
7. Now imagine someone entering a barbecue party shouting: This place sucks, meat is murder, you dirty bastards stink! I guess such a person gets thrown out immediately. If you disagree, do it politely, with style after at least reading what this site is about. Of course I will delete trolls who offend me for all “SEOs being spammers“.
   

Did I forget something? Probably, feel free to add your take on the subject of blog commenting netiquette an barbecue parties in the comments below Introduce yourself and be nice to the other guest.

As a very active social media user, some would probably say power user already, I notice the same mistakes over and over made by new users on social media sites.

On the other hand it’s very easy to boost your social media credibility with very simple measures. So I collected the 10 simplest ways to boost your social media credibility from the start and with little effort:

1. Use a unique name or nick name which is truly a name! Do not use keywords as your name. Hello Realestate California, how are you? If you are not in it for the quick Google traffic but for long term reputation building change your name in order not to appear to be a spammer.
2. Use an avatar! On most social sites if you do not use one you will get ignored altogether. On StumbleUpon your stumbles won’t even be displayed without an avatar.
3. Submit your favorite sites and blog posts! Do not submit your own postings! Especially if you are new to a community do NOT submit your own website or postings as your first action. You’re dead on arrival this way.
4. Introduce yourself. Say something about yourself on your profile. Do not just start out of nowhere. Let people relate.
5. Do not vote for everything, vote for the good stuff. Nobody will respect you on social media if you just vote for anything, even crap just to become a power user. Quality beats quantity.
6. Add other community users with similar interests as your friends. Do not add only top users or dozens users at once.
7. Socialize across different social media sites. Add your existing Facebook or Twitter friends at the new network you enter. Do not overdo (see #6!)
8. Add your submissions in the morning or during daytime but not at night. International social news sites like Digg have largely US traffic so if you are in Asia or Europe do not submit at night where nobody reads it.
9. Submit real life or stories that matter for the broad public not just “blogging, SEO or make money online” only.
10. Be yourself. Behave like a human being not like a bot or salesperson. Do not sell people anything, give them something for free.

Once you master these ways and it works for a while, you can start thinking about personal gain.

I do not advocate self-exploitation on social media sites. I’m all about give and take but without giving first you can’t take on social media, unless you are not in it for real social media credibility and reputation building.

So use these 10 ways of boosting it and when people start appreciating you will be able to take as well.

More on similar topics elsewhere:

• 10 Basic Rules of Social Media Marketing — Esteban Panzera
• 9 Ways to Build Your Reputation as a Blogger
• Now Is Gone » Social Media Content Creation Process
• Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: Interview with Jonathon Colman: Social Media Secrets from a Green Geek
• Freelance Bloggers: 12 Tips to Promote Your Work With Social Media
• Social Media Will Change Your Business
• Every Social Network is Different for News Consumption » techipedia | tamar weinberg
• Local and Global Popularity: Successful Blogs | extreme webmaster evernerve
• Part Two: Why Use Yahoo! Answers » Small Business SEM

Image by CarbonNYC

The perhaps most important factor at work, independent of industry or kind of employment, is pride.

You have to be proud of what you do in order to create value and be happy.

Zen Buddhists and other beings not of this world will tell you that pride is not good though. Politicians will tell you that you should be humble and be satisfied with what you have. They will insist that you should be proud of your country instead even if you get treated like “human resources”.

There is one kind of pride which is indispensable though, the “you are what you do“-kind of pride.

Many people for instance approach me with prejudice or sometimes even some kind of disgust for what I do, mostly of out their own ignorance. While others regard SEO as some kind of dirty work, yes even SEOs themselves do it, thus they call themselves black hat SEOs, I don’t. The hats are black so that you don’t see the stains.

At the end of the day they might be able to buy more than I can but when their kids ask them what they do to earn money they will cringe or outright lie.

When my 5 year old daughter asked me what kind of work I do I explained to her with pride that

I help people finding stuff or being found on the Internet which is so huge that otherwise people would get lost.

So I ask you, are you proud of what you do for a living? You can ask yourself the following 10 questions to determine that:

1. Do you hesitate when asked at a party what you do for a living?
2. Do you use a job title that does not really reflect what you do?
3. Do you want to tell others what yo do by yourself?
4. Would you write a blog about what you do professionally?
5. Do you define your status a) by the things you do or b) by the things you buy?
6. Do you want your kids to do the same job you do in future, can you recommend it to them?
7. Do your friends (real friends not virtual ones) recommend you as a specialist in your trade?
8. Do you want to explain your trade to others?
9. Are you so proud of your achievements that you want to display them?
10. If you could choose your profession again, would you take the same a second time?

The right answers are no, no, yes, yes, a), yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! I hope you have at least 5 correct answers.

So this week I was approached by an international company from Scandinavia. The CEO (not SEO!) approached me by himself. He was in a constant hurry, I guess many CEOs are. So we talked very soon and he told me that he likes my style of presenting myself and he looks for a SEO who is 110% white hat. I told him that I’m 200% white hat, which is true and that because of this I am the right man for him.

The he told me a few things that made me suspicious though:

• He works with 20 other SEO companies all over Europe and elsewhere, well, nice to meet someone who knows what SEO is about [I thought]
• He will send me his contract, well, OK with me
• He wants me to review the contract and reply ASAP (meaning next day, as he understood it), I will as soon as possible but that doesn’t mean instantly
• The contract should be OK “for a white hat SEO”, well, so no problem with me here or is it?
• He wanted me to work parallel or together with another German SEO company, well, others wouldn’t but I’m more into cooperation than competition
• He wants to make millions after one year while he wants to pay me by the hundreds, well, hmmm, I’ll have to take a second look, sounds strange
• He wants to pay 15 hours but he wants me to work 30, 50 or 50 hours in the first month so that he can see results, well, hell no, I won’t do that, sorry, I told him

So today I reviewed the contract and what did I see?

For the little money I would have to guarantee a full refund for almost any circumstances of not working according to fuzzy “industry standards”, while the contract reserved almost no rights for me.

I wasn’t allowed to let anybody help me to do the work, I had to return or delete any data after the project ended. I would have to work clandestinely and wouldn’t be even allowed to mention the client in my portfolio among other cruelties.

I had already collected two pages of annotations to this “contract” when I realized that I was furious as how somebody can even approach me in such a disrespectful manner.

What’s most ludicrous: Basically the cost to let my lawyer rewrite this contract to fit even my most basic needs would probably excel what I would earn before taxes for the first month.

Pride is also the most important factor in gaining respect and becoming an authority.

Nobody will ever believe you in you don’t believe in yourself.

I learned to be proud of myself the hard way but in my thirties I know who I am and I’m proud of what I do so you can’t approach me in a condescending manner.

If you treat me like a dog I will bark at you. I will even bark so loud that all the other underdogs will hear me.

As nobody knows on the Net that you are a dog though you don’t have to behave like one. Be proud of what you do or change it. Do not let people disrespect you out of low self-esteem.

I don’t care who you are when you approach me. I want to know what you do and how you do it so that I know if I can be proud of working with you. I do not want to hide working for you and I do not want to be treated like “human resources”. Treat me in a respectful manner so we will both prosper.

In fact I reject probably more clients than I work for in the end and I will reject even more in future as I get renown beyond Germany recently. If you want human resources go to SEO India, if you seek SEO Germany don’t offend me.

It’s also not about the money you spend. The other day a sound designer called me saying that he only has 100 Euro (approx 150$) to spend. I told him no problem I can sell him some consulting on the phone to enable him to optimize his site himself, as he masters HTML or I can set up an XML sitemap etc. for “search engine submission” for instance.

The chance that you can work with me is even better for small business as I wouldn’t work for most corporations anymore anyways, for ethical reasons.

If I can’t be proud of what I do I won’t do it. Are you proud of what you do?

It sounds like a conspiracy theory but all the 3 services seem to be broken at the same time.

Technorati has eaten my authority of 330+ and does not display my blog altogether anymore. This way you also won’t notice on Technorati that I linked you.

Feedburner has has swallowed more than 100 subscribers (504 on February 20th, 393 February 21st) so the current state equals that of 6 weeks ago. When you look closely at the numbers you notice that only the Google Feedfetcher numbers plummeted almost exactly by the number of lacking subscribers. Yesterday I had 278 Google Feedfetcher subscribers while today only 153. I checked it in Google Webmaster Tools and 153 is the number of RSS subscribers. They have ignored Atom subscribers and other URLs (slightly different feed URLs like http://seo2.0.onreact.com/feed/rss or http://seo2.0.onreact.com/feed/

[Update February 22nd: Feedburner has been fixed, the subscribers are back to normal at 527]

StumbleUpon does not send me any traffic after an initial push of ca. 300 visitors after the first stumble aka discovery of my latest article about reputation management although 8 people (me included) reviewed the post and all in all 20 stumblers “liked it” until now. This is not the first time, SU reacts completely unaccountable for over a week now, posts with a few stumbles get much more traffic than highly popular posts for instance.

The Web 2.0 makes you rely on third party services which are not reliable or trustworthy.

On days like this you realize that you are very dependent on them. What alternatives are there?

• How do you measure your blog success aside from using Technorati, Feedburner and StumbleUpon?
• Have you also been hit by these bugs, outages and inconsistencies lately?
• Do you rely on free third party tools for crucial tasks?

I wonder if I was too naive using the above mentioned services. AideRSS seems to be a neat alternative to find out how your blog performs out there. It focuses on comments, del.icio.us bookmarks and Digg votes. I boycott Digg but the other two are good indicators. I’m waiting for such a mashup with Sphinn and Mixx votes.