Remember the last post? I was mainly complaining about fake gurus and just before the end mentioned Dave Taylor, who (imho) is a great SEO guy.

This post is going to try and keep it positive, and not talk about all those “gurus” that has sent me (and others) digging for gold in the deserts with outdated tools and tricks that worked really well 6 months prior to appearing on their videos, course documents and seo instruction books.

The thing is that while almost anyone in internet marketing wakes up each morning to an exploded in box with at least a few launch emails, affiliate emails about that same launch, and some other marketers just keeping in touch with their list subscribers.

I will cut to the chase right now. Jerry West. That’s the guy, and if you do not know who he is, you should. Probably the best advice I ever got on anything SEO related came from Jerry, and I am not talking about one or two tips but significantly more, with honest and true answers on questions most marketers dont dare ask Jerry is, hands down, the best SEO guy out there today – and has been that for a long time now.

This is the perfect example of someone who knows what he is doing, being very honest about it, sharing what he likes to share and working on his own projects without launching stuff, making a big hit and running to the woods, or hyping his name out to the IM industry. Jerry West works, day after day, and you know what? his processes and methodology works too.

So thanks Jerry, SEO would not have been the same without you.

Time to talk about a selected few people who make the SEO world a better place, naturally I am not going to go on too long about them, but I thought it would be nice to mention the names of two experts who are helpful, friendly and just good guys.

As most people who come in touch with SEO find out there are many (and I mean MANY) frauds out there, many BS and con artists, who would befriend you just to get you into a membership plan and then disappear. There are also those who love the word “Guru” and refer to themselves as such, they preach and teach but almost always neglected to tell their followers what it is they do to make money (most times its by being gurus), keeping the students in the dark is somehow the leading principle in SEO teaching.

Most of those fancy PDF’s an Ebooks and special courses are just old news, published by people who used to make money with those systems and now, well, it doesn’t work all that well anymore, so lets squeeze another few bucks of this dead system by selling it for $1,000 a pop.

So you learn to admire and like those who stand out from that crowd, honest and intelligent people who help others some times, and in most cases just do their thing and make money with good, proper SEO.

One such man is Dave Taylor, smart and funny, this guy could teach most of us how to use the internet and be good while doing so, he also has a fantastic take on life and work, and the best advice I can give you is to simply follow him on Twitter (http://twitter.com/DaveTaylor)and see how this guy answers, communicates and helps out a bunch of people, almost all the time.

That’s it for now, I think I will talk about the second great SEO guy in the next time I post…

Here is a thought I had following the reading of what (someone sais that) Apple CEO told listeners about Google, Adobe and other companies, not at all sure that the man really did say this, however still had a thought.

Looks like Google’s “Don’t be Evil” mantra is stretched in terms of the truth, and it almost reminds me of Tiger Woods pre that sex scandal that hit him post November. Trying to be super human is not possible, not doable and not truthful. Just the same as Tiger was human in more than one way, Google is a huge company, with millions of costumers each and every second. They can not – not be evil, whatever they try and do.

how can they compete with MS with cloud computing, offer a great email service, invent groundbreaking chat technologies and do many other things, without being evil?

Apparently Apples CEO and main magic person, CEO of the year, Steve Jobs, told many of his emplyees and workers that the big G is full of BS in a closed session of Q&A with the founder of the company. Beyond the gossip value of this news (?) piece lies something much more profound, the real competition between Apple, Google and Microsoft is starting to heat up, the phone business, apps and cloud computing, as well as the good old OS platform wars is now one step forward.

In todays Wired they reported someone saying they heard Jobs say that Google’s “don’t be evil” famous philosophy is bullshit, and to be honest I can’t blame him, how can you say that not being evil is what you are all about when you get into everybody’s faces (and business) all the time, close deals with major companies and sites to have your algorithm basically ignore their mistakes or faults, and assign certain importance to individuals or companies that simply share the goods with your company, after all that, can anyone really say that the big G is clear of any evil? So Jobs (apparently) called it for what it is, and his workers loved it.

The article also said that Jobs told his people that Google went into the telephone business, Apple did not go into search. That alone inspired such thoughts in me like I never even dared dreaming, if Apple would go into search, a third (some say forth) major player on the search field, and if it could be done Apple’s way (fast, pretty, cool) that would be something to experience, I wish they would go into search, but will not hold my breath…

Those of you who read some of the earlier posts know that one very serious issue came up a couple of months ago, following a certain blogger rant on SEO’s and the way they do things. To make a long story short, eventually it did make sense to me, many web pro’s out there view SEO as a kind of bottom feeding semi fraud trade, with most of the people who call themselves SEO experts targeted as lazy and very simple minded internet marketing people.

Without saying if I agree to this or not, I did find a lot of the arguments very convincing and also thought long and hard about the feature of web promotion. The final conclusion was that to have a real position in the internet world one would do best to distance him or herself as far away as possible from the term SEO, and educate himself fiercely on as many marketing hardcore facts as possible, as well as go into every small detail of code that could effect rankings and user interface. Needless to say the study of conversion and on line sales methods should be very clear to anyone who wishes to engage clients for now could be called Site Optimizing Expert.

Step one is to have a simple conversation with a site owner, find out what he or she needs and wants and examine the situation as it is (the site, what condition its in, how does it do in the ranking world, traffic and conversion), and it is step one that will determine not only the scale of the work but also the real first milestones and goals. And this is where the problem usually appears.

Lets ignore big companies for the moment and focus on small businesses, these small business could significantly grow out of a successful internet promotion, a plumber could get up to 15 leads per month only by having a good geo targeted page on his site, a lawyer could get business from the internet if he manages to position himself as a local expert on some legal area. These people know this, and they go out and buy a site, not a domain, a site.

By buying a site I mean they go to a web designer and give this person 100% control over everything, and so we find ourselves in step two (trying to figure out the promotion needed for the site to rank and succeed), slowly realizing that the domain has been purchased by the designer, the hosting service was picked by the designer (or worst, the designer is hosting the site on his server), the template used, the keywords, tags, number of pages, titles and headers, colors and scripts all decided by one person – the designer.

Now it is possible that once every 100 cases the designer actually did a good job at all of this, however they charged the small business $9,000 for the whole thing, practically leaving nothing else in budget for the day after the launch. So you find yourself in front of a very happy site owner (“all my friends say the site is beautiful”) that wants to work commission based (“why should I pay you if I did not make a single sale from your work?”) – without a tracking system in place, without any clear keyword strategy, without any budget to test different page design.

And that’s when you need to start changing their minds. Because web design is important, but if it robs a business of all its budget, than its like buying a Ferrari with all the money you got, without money for gas, you aint gonna move that car out of the dealers lot.

On January 12th an earthquake struck Haiti, killing dozens of thousands of people, and changing lives of this whole country. This is a news item as big as it gets on an international scale, looking at the Google trends charts from the 3 days following this crisis, made me think that we humans are not so bad after all, and that maybe the internet does sometimes fill in the need for a fast source of information about things that are really important (unlike Barry Manilow’s plastic surgery for example).

The first days response on search trends is clear, and maybe predicatble – Haiti is all over the first places in search terms.

On the next day, the trends is even stronger

Now the 14th, (notice the mention of Jimmy Kimmel on Jay Google Trends #14)

Conclusion, the world does really care (the US actually, its only for the search within the USA), however minor rumor like items and celebrity nonsense has been pushed down by this real and tragic event, which, for once, can make us proud.

This past few days have been full of media attention to the scandal around NBC’s timetable changes, insults to talk show hosts and a very personal involvement of all the main players here (NBC executives, Jay Leno and Conan O’brien). It is interesting to check out the search trends and volumes for the names of the involved, as the previous post demonstrated Jimmy Kimmel’s appearnace on Jay Leno’s show got the Jimmy Kimmel show a nice wave of interested searches. Right now it looks like anyone who wants to have some media attnetion should tie themselves to this story, its one that people like to follow.

So comparing Conan to Leno, here is what we can see -

The first thing you can easily spot is that both get more attention starting January 3rd, and that Leno gets much more in search volume compared to Conan, even when the interest in Conan grows the same thing happens to Leno’s search. Next take a look at the actual search terms for both hosts – starting with Conan

And Leno

It looks like Leno is just winning all the catogories here, notice how the prime search for Leno is for his show, while for Conan is for his conflict with Leno. The exposure that Leno gets is more than double what Conan gets, and the assumption in this case is that just more people know Leno’s name, they respond to it, and they are spread over most of the country, while Conan is more liked and known in the edges of the country, and also is directly linked to Leno. So maybe the executives in NBC know something about their audiance and are willing to take this bullet to the leg (or head) and go ahead with this move, since it looks like Leno is still very popular and makes more people interested.

Personally I will keep watching Letterman, and will probably check out Conan… whenever he is back on his feet.

While watching Jimmy Kimmel butcher Jay Leno, on Leno’s show (!!!) I had a thought, this fiasco must send some title waves on the search oceans, and on to the wonderful world of search trends I dived (a little poetic today, must be the weather).

This should be a first out of a few posts on this issue (I hope), the first here is actually the last one in the order of things, it Jimmy Kimmel destroying Leno, and doing it on Leno’s show. Just the idea that Leno invited Kimmel to his show and that Jimmy took advantage of that stage and just kept beating Leno in front of his own audience is a yellow enough kind of makes you wonder piece of television that people do not want to miss.

However a lot of people miss it. So they search the net. And here is what happens.

For Mr. Kimmel in the past week -
AND – the search terms

Now here are numbers that show you one thing, Jimmy Kimmel has just broken into many new households, and many more people know him (as they should, because he is very funny and doing a great job, not to mention that what he did in Leno’s show is nothing less then heroic)

Next post will be about the main players, and what the stats say about their own private late night war.

Many SEO’s have been doing some soul searching in the past few months, and the writer of this post is no different. The increasing attacks on the SEO industry in the past year have brought the level of market resentment to an all time high, which should make everyone in the industry a little worried.

Personaly I got worried when I saw 3 blogs mention the same idea with different wording, the idea was that SEO is simply a fraud and that people who did SEO were not to be trusted. Since I hold a better self image of myself, and since my work experiance have proved time and time again that a focused talked with an experianced and educated SEO can change a website and its productivity in a profound way, I really did not want to listen to what these bloggers were saying.

However these things were being said, by many out there. So I took some time to think and it all started with chnaging the name of what we do, “SEO” is not associated with the right kind of service, and if the only thing you do is “SEO” you should definitely start looking at other things to learn and understand on the net, because SEO in 2010 sounds like “Hacker” back in 1999,  and not only it sounds bad – it does not delevier what web sites need, and what they want. They need and want a profound change, they want to understand the market better, they want to know who is thier average visitor, when he or she visits, what they are looking for. These sites want to know which are thier strongest pages – and why are they better than other pages, and they want to make more, more money, more visitors, more email lists, more of anything.

SEO will not do that, and with the bad vibe around that name businesses will turn away, and ran away from you.