Following the breaking news of president Obama’s first tweet yesterday I had a few social network thoughts, mainly, how come a person that used ground breaking methods on Web 2.0 and social space innovative campaigning use, for the first time, one of the leading internet applications today (Twitter) only one year into his presidency?. And why would he share this with the rest of the world, I mean he got like 40 million followers on Twitter, and I’m pretty sure that at least some of them at least thought that it was Obama tweeting away, and sharing his thoughts with them, live, via Twitter.

Not so.

No one is really surprised, it doesn’t mean that Obama is a black hat Twitter user that frauds people into following him, he just has better things to do, AND (and this is the important thing here) he doesnt really get it, it would take too much of his time to learn how to use this tool. He also got a country to run (some say the whole world).

“It was just way too much trouble so I gave it up”

The person who said that worked thousnads of hours building an operating system and than leading a technological change the likes the world has never seen. Its Bill Gates. He was talking about Facebook, and he said that when he left FB, only to rejoin Facebook – yeap, yesterday.

So what are we seeing here? Technology is first embraced by those who are keen to use it, only once there is a critical mass of users everyone joins in, it was the same thing with cell phones and the internet and many other things (check out Seth Godin’s Purple Cow) Facebook has been breaking records for a while and then it just stopped and wondered what we become of it, this was a year ago, now FB is back to leading the charts, even making some of the big G’s people fear its growth and potential, Twitter has become what it should be, a fast platform for fast notes, it has already made its mark on history with the Iran inner politics turmoil, both those sites are here to stay, even Obama and Gates get that.

Last thing, both cases mentioned about referred to the Haiti crisis, which is something that I wanted to look into here, on my next post (the next post will be the Haiti crisis on the internet)

Yeah, been away, work and other things. Now back, and got something on my mind.

“SEO”.

Now everyone is a SEO expert these days, I guess every 20 year old that finished reading 3 (free) PDF’s from that guru or this expert is now claming to be an expert. Not so, the experience (often painful experience) that real experts gain in their time on the job can not be replaced by anything.

The more I think of it the more I get the hunch that I should stop using this “SEO” term altogether, and stick to something a little more profound, and less abused, something that actually sets a barrier for entry by its name. I’m going to look for that and when I find it I will let you know…

You might have noticed that “giveaway” special banners, lets cut to the chase and shed some light on this thing. On average we get about 3 SEO work estimations per week, needless to say many of those requests do not see the light of day, and some relationships never make it past the proposal, during the past months we kind of started thinking that it was much more about the cost of the SEO work, and not its value.

To explain, lets just say that the value of being ranked on the top spots for the main selling keywords that describe a product or service is in 99% of all the cases we saw so far a killer (meaning a very good business thingy) and drives sales and brand recognition to new heights, however a business just starting to get a feel for internet traffic and possibilities might not have the faith that it will actually happen, and due to lack of vision or funds (or both) decide to skip the SEO (or as we now like to call it – Website/Internet Promotion)  altogether.

And for this reasons we decided that we will give away (free) SEO reviews, this means that we will go over a complete site, and provide our in-depth expert review on it (on search engine optimization, usability, keyword targeting, market positioning and even some competitive insight) for 2 (that’s two) sites, for two different businesses.

If you wish to try your luck and see if you will be one of the lucky two site, just add a comment to this blog, ask to be included and add your name and email, we do not publish these comments so no need to worry about your name getting out there, we also keep all our client information confidential, so no need to worry about us telling anyone about your business as we research and write our review.

We start reviewing the requests on November 2nd 2009, and will choose the two winners by November 30th, the reviews will be completed by the end of December 2009 (although there is a change it will take a little more time if the sites are big).

I have already talked about it in past posts, and started talking about it in my short post to the Trophico Posterous page,  in the past 10 days there was a heater debate regarding a post in Derek Powazek blog attacking SEO and everyone who is “selling” SEO. This spraked not only a debate and discussion, it also got me thinking about this crazy internet trade and how so many people out there claim to be SEO’s without knowing much about web optimization or helping out businesses on the net.

SEO's New Name?

With more and more posts in different blogs (including my soon to become favorite blog by Danny Sullivan) , about the ugly side of SEO I think its time to change the title, not that i was ever really connected it. Than it hit me, SEO’s need a new name,and I have been thinking about it ever since.

Now I think I got it – Site (or Website) Optimizing Expert, so just flipping the letters around and instead of SEO its now SOE, or WOE, and both sound uncool, hopefully un-cool enough to get the least amount of non SEO’s to want to own it.

What a week this has been… started with some controversial blog posts, and now it ends with very heavy reflection (mine) done over this Saturday. The harsh words of Derek Powazek about SEO’s first moved me to anger (which I expressed freely here), however as time passed my thoughts and internet surfing sent me sould searching ending with this conclusion – SEO’s need a new title.

If you are a web master looking to improve your site ranking you should probably still look for the SEO tips section on leading blogs and sites, however if SEO is your trade, you need to start thinking about how you will call your services and what you do.

There have been many reasons for my accepting the words of Derek, and please treat this post as an official apology and also appreciation of that post that sparked the idea.

Just like anything else in the world today (even Balloons) once a platform is popular enough for people to pay attention come the bad guys and abuse it, in todays short exmaple – Twitter.

Earlier this week I learned that Twitter is fighting duplicate content for a good reason, but if you are a Twitter user try and pay attention to the trend topics on the right side of the screen, you will sometimes see familiar names or terms there, but would be puzzled why they are there.

This morning Anna Frank made it to twitter, seems someone made a bad and tasteless joke about the balloon boy (we will get to him later) an compared him to Anna Frank (who was murdered by the Nazi’s – just in case you don’t know who she was), that joke got some attnetion, but then came the spammers. if you check the list of tweets with her name you will see how some are just bombing her name with no real connection to what they are promoting or selling.

Shame.

60 Years Later - Ann Frank is a Trend on Twitter

This has been one busy week, and two blog posts from Derek Powazek made me think long and hard about that thing called SEO, and how many people abuse it and slowly label it as sophisticated spamming or con art. At first I was upset at the very personal and aggressive nature of the posts, but after as while started to think of the reasons such a well known person would lash out like that an rant about SEO’s, this week provided more than enough samples to show me why he did that.

Powazek's Rant - Has A Point

SEO has a place in the world, it is an honorable and difficult professionals game, it did initially spread out from web development and mixed into marketing eventually to require enough resources and attention to be its own trade. However a quick search in Google or on Twitter will show you thousands of expert SEO’s and internet marketing gurus, some fresh out of high school (not that I am saying there are no young geniuses out there, but I noticed 15 in a 5 minute search), with that explosion of so call experts it is sure that the lame person would call this for it is – con art.

In the beginning of the internet age, or at least when I started using it back in 1993 anyone who could have created an HTML page and upload it to the internet was considered a genius, no one argued with that person, and no one negotiated too long for rates, people treated it like some magic thing… someone would work at him desk for a while et voila! a page was born. As time passed people learned that like everything else there are levels and ranks in any profession, and applied it to web design and development, SEO is at that stage right now, many people call themselves SEO’s but are cons, many say they know SEO but really know only a little HTML (like how to change title tags) and they all are very happy to give themselves the title of an Search Engine Optimizer Expert.

Who suffers the most? the real honest SEO’s out there. Because if this continues, just like Derek explains in his post, SEO will be a very bad word to be associated with, it might already be one.

The way to change SEO and the way it is perceived by the market is probably by doing an honest job and teaching people what a real SEO can and should do, which is a very wide service compared to link bombing, comment spamming and light HTML editing.

Work Hard and Show the world What's Good SEO

This should be the last post in today’s Powazek saga, now it seems that the whole thing basically boils down to semantics and (maybe) some a guy having a very bad day. This new post makes thing a little nicer and makes a little more sense (doesn’t take out the bad taste of name calling and serious insults at all SEO’s of the world).

So, bottom line, if you are a good SEO you will design good sites, you will plan them to be good sites from the get-go, and you will be called a web developer, not search engine optimizer.

The rest of the post actually makes a lot of sense, the part about not sticking only to (what some people think is) SEO and expand to other fields (like social media for example) and one good note to Google, making a point of the mess they created, and how they make people do anything in hope of getting the Google love which I support completely. In the end it seems that Derek Powazek does not like dishonest web masters and thieves (I do not like them either) and he calls these people SEO’s, the other people who do do what SEO’s do but do it right and in an honest way are, for him, web developers. Which is a much cooler name, and to be honest I think pays much better.

Danny Sullivan saves the day, speaking on behalf of the good and clean side of SEO, the kind that gets up to work every morning, that works hard for thier clients and gets the work done, that thinks and works within an ethical mindset and executes only when he or she are sure that its got real value to it.

Bravo to Sullivan, that took his time and sat down to write a solid clear answer to that “rant”, even though I am sure he had enough better things to do, and could have easily ignored that post.As long as we will have people such as Danny Sullivan on our side SEO will be a real and serious trade, one to be proud of.

I usually don’t post other people text here, but this I think should not be ignored, so I am copy+pasting some of the things, the rest you can find on Danny Sullivan post on Search Engine Land.

Derek Powazek launched an attack on SEO yesterday that really said nothing that others haven’t ranted about before. I’ve responded to many of these attacks over the years in hopes of educating people about mistaken assumptions. I’ve largely given up. But I figured this time I’d give it another go with some personal illustrations I’ve encountered recently.

In particular, rather than do an article to counterbalance Derek’s post, I started to write him a private email. But as I composed that, I felt it might better illustrate to everyone why SEO is indeed a legitimate form of marketing and those who provide the service are not all “scammers” who are out to “con” you.

So Derek, I saw your rant, and it was disappointing. Your post was based on “14 years of hits and misses.” Well, my response come from my own 14 years of covering search engines. Of having answered feedback from hundreds of people. Of having talked with hundreds of people personally. Of understanding that the “you just build it; you just put it out there” approach to search engines, sadly, doesn’t always cut it.

Let me be clear. I totally agree with your core advice. Build a site for visitors. Have great content. These are the keys to success, not just with SEO but with anything you want to do. In fact, we just had an article on our site here reinforcing this.

SEO Fights Back

Someone names Derek Powazek (OK, I know who he is) had produced a wonderful piece of text yesterday, attacking everyone on this planet that has something to do with the word “SEO”, apparently he met each and every SEO expert in the world, and out of this serious study he decided that SEO’s are cockroaches, bustards, con men and other words my 4 year old uses from time to time.

Among the reasons to his personal attack, are spamming methods, illegal server manipulation action, black hat marketing techniques and (maybe) some real bad nightmare of a morning he had before writing that text. Well, what can I say… just like everything else in the world some are good, some bad and some have no idea what they are doing (joined by a few idiots, who are trigger happy to mark anything as targets, Derek?), sadly no one can deny that some SEO’s are full of **it, that some want a quick buck and turn to black hat and that some are just pretending to know anything, but that is true to any professional I know, including the medical one.

What a shame that someone with so much attention chooses to lash out at a serious profession that helps businesses make a bigger mark and reach more clients daily, that the only real advice he gives out is to build something great and tell people about it, which is a given, although nice to hear that one (again). Just like saying that the fastest way to becoming a millionaire is to have a business that is worth millions, now go get it.

From the post - Guess he really does hate SEO's