As a newbie to the SEO game I am constantly reading anything related to this industry, but I am not going to lie, I do spend lots of time playing with slotzo roulette games, it’s so fun . There is more information than you can shake a link at and one thing all the information has in common is nobody agrees about anything and everyone is guessing.

“In these matters the only certainty is that nothing is certain.”
-Pliny the Elder

SEO is a constant battle with the big, bad algorithm. More specifically, the Google algorithm that haunts the cubicles of offices near and far. It seems to me that the majority opinion of Google in the SEO world is that of “Big Brother”, intrusive and oppressive. Kind of like the Wal-Mart of the Internet. I understand why this is true but I also understand why Google’s algorithm has to be so intricate and mysterious. Reason is—-Most people suck and will do anything to get ahead.

I like Google’s moto of “Don’t Be Evil” although sometimes it seems they don’t follow their own advice as with the Orkut pedophile situation and releasing individuals private information. That being said, I like that Google will fight for relevancy and try to keep the organic search results “natural”. Kind of a strange position for me to take considering I get my beer money selling links. Although that is what I do, my company is by no means black hat and we spend countless hours selecting the most reputable and relevant links available.

Obviously Google is doing something right and I believe as their algorithms become more and more advanced the end result will be a more relevant, informative and useful Internet. Algorithms are complicated, SEO doesn’t have to be. Just create good content, solid site architecture and relevant links and let the Page Ranks fall, or rise as they may.

I was first going to give an extremely confusing title that parodies the common generic linkbait titles you see everywhere, but then decided to make it super generic. I think I’ve read this particular title, or some variation of it hundreds, if not thousands of times. Matter of fact, ‘Beat Your Competition’ is found over one hundred thousand times!

Here is where I stray from the generic title, but give some key suggestions that might help. I’m not saying it will do the job, but they’re just obvious observations I’ve made the past few years. They are more mentoring tips that I would give to anyone, so before you think to yourself, “He’s giving away his secrets”, think again.

• Keep Your Secrets to Yourself! – I realize that sharing your knowledge and proving your ability by speaking your mind helps potential customers see what you’re made of, but there is a fine line to not cross. I think bloggers thrive to appear like wizards in their particular field but all they’re doing is giving away their secrets to competition or even creating new competition.
• Don’t Be So Social! – This one makes my head ‘sphinn’. People try so hard to be involved in every single social app that pops up, but the problem is, just one social app is time consuming. Save that time for helping your customers or bettering your product or service. Also, most social apps allow others to see who all of your contacts are, a sort of window into your soul that your competition has easy access to.
• Take off that Target shirt! – throwing your weight around about how popular you are or who you work with has it’s pluses but it also has it’s minuses. If I came on here and stated we were an approved G00GLE vendor (which I will neither confirm nor deny), sure it could bring business our way, but it also puts a huge target on our back. If you steer your ship down the right path, you’ll be successful and there will be no need to make such a big splash. Take a step back and let your competition wear the target.
• Don’t be so damn picky! – We’ve all witnessed it, businesses would rather hand pick their customers, aka deep pockets, and leave out the little guy/girl. You NEVER know what the future holds. Turning down someone that only has $100 to spend today might be the same thing as turning down someone that has $100,000 to spend in a year. And another downfall to large accounts, if you have 10 accounts that gross your business $25k each, then your competitor has 100 accounts that gross $2500 each, while it seems to be even, all it takes is one lost account and you’re down a big chunk. I remember a college instructor that told us one day, “God made more poor people than he did rich people.” In other words, it’s a lot easier to get a million people to give you $1 than it is having 10 people give you a $100,000.
• Don’t Become Complacent! – Think about how lions hunt their meals. They feed on the weak, or the one’s that appear to be weak. Same thing goes for the business world. No matter how nice you think your competition is or how friendly they are to you, the minute they have the opportunity, they’ll crush you. Stay ahead of the curve and don’t be content with where you are. Think of ways to make what you do even better, or maybe come up with a completely different way of doing it. Don’t be scared to take chances because that’s where success happens. You may fail several times, but eventually the odds will be on your side and everyone will be following your lead.

Ok, I feel like a motivational speaker now and it’s making my stomach upset. Again, these 5 tips have nothing to do with our industry specifically, it applies to any company or market. If you were hoping to learn how to crush your competition with relation to what LinkWorth offers, I would recommend calling 866.LNK.WRTH and one of our Account Managers can lead you down that path.

Everyone puts their thinking cap on at one time or another. When do you know if it is the right thinking cap? When your thoughts actually come to life?

If there is anything I can pass on to someone trying to think of new ideas, it is the correct thinking cap to wear. The following thinking cap below allowed me to put the pieces together for LinkWorth. If you need any assistance in how to create this specific style, please shoot me an email and I can help:

Based on the post just made on Microsoft to buy Yahoo, it made me realize that this news made about 1,000 people extremely happy.

Yahoo was talking about laying off 20% of it’s workforce, which roughly came out to around 1,000 people. While I have no idea where that decision stands, it had to make about 1,000 Yahoo employees some of the happiest people in America.

Here we are, the office has skipped out a little early to prepare for their big night to welcome in the New Year, Matt and I are still working and 2007 is about to be gone in the blink of an eye. Something tells me that in my mind, I’ll be making another post just like this in what will seem like a couple months, asking, “what happened to 2008?”

Overall, 2007 was a great year for LinkWorth. Sure there were bumps in the road here and there, but what doesn’t kill you can only make you stronger. Luckily the business of online marketing is going nowhere, so that means we’ll continue to morph into a better marketplace for our advertisers and for our partners. We definitely want to thank “ALL” of our customers that continue to make LinkWorth one of the biggest and best ad networks in our industry.

To keep this interesting and not so sappy, because that is so not my style, I wanted to send a few 2007 farewell’s in bullet style:

• Farewell to: All of the conferences we attended: SES, SMX, Pubcon and Affiliate Summit. . .
• Farewell to: All of the cities that put up with us: Seattle, San Jose, Vegas, New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, D.C. . .
• Farewell to: American Airlines and their HORRIBLE delays, the special emergency landing, decent 1st class and pitiful coach seats. . .
• Farewell to: Our departed staff: the good, the bad and the greedy. . .
• Farewell to: The almost $2mm in payouts our partners earned!!. . .
• A special thanks to: All of our wonderful advertisers who helped LinkWorth continue on. . .
• Farewell to: Greg “The Hammer” Williams, aka Motorcycle Greggo, aka Sweet Greggo, aka Robot Greggo, aka Common Man. . .
• Farewell to: The horrible scoring system known as PageRank. . .

As we send 2007 out the door, let us welcome 2008 in along with a few bullets for what to expect here at LinkWorth:

• 08 Outlook: More blogging with tips, tricks and secrets to making LinkWorth work even better for you. . .
• 08 Outlook: Create new ways for partners to gain more exposure to Advertisers. . .
• 08 Outlook: Improve our daily spider check to cut down on “not found” messages (already in progress). . .
• 08 Outlook: Introduce new advertising products with a focus on vintage methods. . .
• 08 Outlook: New contests with new prizes. . .
• 08 Outlook: The purchase of Google and Yahoo with my next few saved paychecks. . .
• 08 Outlook: Growing the LinkWorth staff with new smart and exciting people. . .
• 08 Outlook: Spread the LinkWorth brand to new markets attracting new advertisers. . .
• 08 Outlook: Making 2008 better than 2007 and having a great time doing it. . .

Obviously, both lists can have loads more bullets, but this is what came to me before I walk out the door for the evening. 2007 was such a great and big year for our customers and our company, anything short of what we’ve already experienced isn’t really an option.

Directly from the LinkWorth crew, we wish everyone a very safe and happy new year!

LinkWorth and its staff would like to send out warm wishes to all of our customers and readers.

We hope you have the best of Holidays and definitely an awesome 2008.

Can’t wait for ’08 ! ! !

Christmas is a time for celebrating, eating good food, opening gifts and being with the ones you love. Most would say it is the most joyous season of the year. However, others might disagree. Simply put, although some of us are fortunate enough to provide gifts for people we care about, the lady that lost her husband and is working to support her three kids making $20,000 a year is not so fortunate. To her, it is a time of struggle and a time of disappointment because she can not provide what she would like to for her children.

Fortunately, there is a program called the “Salvation Army Angel Tree” that makes it all possible for families like this. The Angel Tree was created back in 1979 by Majors Charles and Shirley White. The Whites had each child write their gift needs on Hallmark greeting cards with pictures of angels on the front and place their cards on a Christmas Tree at the local mall. The first year it was created, over 700 children received gifts and had a happier Christmas.

Since then, the Angel Trees are now located in 9 metroplex areas in shopping malls, churches, corporations and other organizations. They are now helping over 41,000 children each year to have a better Christmas. It’s a very admirable program and LinkWorth is pleased to say we were able to participate in it this year for the first time. LinkWorth, along with Easeley McCaleb, Multigraphx, Cornerstone Staffing, Minister Search, Mercy Hospice, Z Option, Pepperidge Farm, Ameriprise Financial, Roch, Paycom, Select Insurance Agency and Orbin and Cooper Wealther Management, Inc. were able to sponsor 40 children this year. It’s a great feeling to know that you are making a difference in someone’s life like that. What’s even better is that we actually were able to have the angel tree in our office and had all the angels hanging on the tree.

Once we had all of the gifts bought and bagged up, we took them down to the Salvation Army headquarters of Dallas and actually walk around the warehouse where all of the magic happens. It was quite an experience. I have never seen so many toys, clothes, etc. in my life.

If you are considering a generous deed during the holidays to participate in, this is a great organization that I would highly recommend. It is a well recognized organization and the volunteer staff are very helpful. After the positive experience we had this year, I know that we will continue on with the “Salvation Army Angel Tree” for years to come.

A hypothetical I feel is worth a mention. Everyone is so worried about Google and their idiotic pagerank changing, but lets look at the big picture here people. It’s all about where you’re listed in the search results. Lets say your company name is TechCrunch and you’re selling or buying text links. According to the “official confirmation” Google is cracking down on people. Right now it’s just the lowering of Pagerank and some are worried it will result in where they’re listed in the SERPs.

With that in mind, think about how many people have been hit with this change. Imagine all of these sites, Problogger, TechCrunch, John Chow, Weblogs Inc and so on then get penalized as people are worried about. Think about how horrible the search results will be for Google. They are aiming to make their search results better? If I search for a specific company name and they don’t show up in the first page, what is so great about their results? Just because they are crying about webmasters trying to make their online businesses better? I can guarantee you the search results will produce what you’re looking for at Yahoo, MSN or Ask. They don’t seem to be bullying webmasters and pulling money out of their pockets.

***UPDATE***
I forgot to leave this example. If you go to Google and search for “John Chow“, look at the results! Not quite what you’re looking for, right? How does that make results better?

Yahoo! came to the world and became the phenomenon of search. Then Microsoft slipped in somewhere. Of course, the internet was blind sided by the biggest name of them all, Google (or should we say “Interpol“) with their version of how to search the net! Others have given search a shot, but lets be honest, unless you’re someone with some pull, you’ll go nowhere.

I believe the original interest in Google was the fact there were zero advertisements and it produced good results quickly! It was merely a huge virtual encyclopedia that could regurgitate other websites that spoke of anything you needed to read about. Years pass and the ads creep in. The ads creep in and the money flows in. The money flows in and all the sudden Google owns the largest majority of search of all engines combined. With this power comes the ability to tell simple webmasters, the same webmasters that make them who they are, what is and is not acceptable to do on their sites and/or blogs.

I also understand that rules are put in place to create a fair playing ground, but lets make them fair for both sides. In my opinion, telling webmasters they’ll be penalized for participating in programs to earn more money is just not fair at all. I see poor innocent webmasters getting their livelihoods stripped out from under them because Google decided they are participating in another ad program (not AdSense) and somehow it goes against their terms. I know what you’re thinking now, these programs are meant to game their system and produce horrible or even “spammy” search results. Yes, there are times when this does occur, however, the majority of the time what a user searches for, the searcher will find. Webmasters are constantly having to walk a fine line and listen to the horrible propaganda Google throws out through their friendly faces. Of course, if you’re a huge name and do a no no, you’ll be told what is wrong and to fix it, then bam, you’re back in. Why would Google want a user to search for BMW and see no results for bmw’s website? That makes them look stupid, and according to Shoemoney, DON’T MAKE GOOGLE LOOK STUPID!

This leads me to the point of my proposal to Danny Sullivan. I think while Google may be the biggest in search, I think Danny Sullivan is the most popular name in search. Why? Well I think he understands why the engines want to push things a certain way, but he also understands why webmasters feel there should be common meeting ground. I feel he is the perfect arbitrator between what a search engine should do and what webmasters can do. Look at his history of work, success after success, not to mention all of the subsidiaries that spawned from these great companies. I think that Danny Sullivan has the touch of gold when it comes to launching new projects in search, much like his recent Sphinn. And lets not forget the biggest conference in the biz SES and now his newest we’ll be attending next week in New York City, SMX.

I think that while it is a huge project at hand, if there is anyone in this industry that has the power of the people, the resources to get it developed and the proper rules that would make both sides happy, Danny Sullivan is the one person I’d go all in on. Just think, you could call it “Sheerch” and put it into your fun happy land.

I heard an interesting fact on the radio the other day regarding the planets in our solar system. Mind you I’m an astronomy nut, so I’m all ears when I hear something like this.

Were you aware that all planets in our solar system rotate counter-clockwise, except for one? Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise. Interesting, huh?

So my thought of the day is, if the normal rotation of everything in our solar system is counter-clockwise, why wouldn’t it be the other way around? Why wouldn’t watches rotate the other way since everything else does?

I guess the only normal planet in our solar system is Venus. (Hey, maybe that’s the name of our next release! 🙂

Venus – Argus