Meta-Keywords: Oh, how I hate the meta-keyword tag. Many of my company’s clients are approached by so-called ‘SEO experts’ who clearly have little but a [...]]]> Links: So, Google is helpfully telling us about links this week. Their conclusion? Make a decent web site with good content. If anyone needs me, I’ll be in the corner snoring.

Meta-Keywords: Oh, how I hate the meta-keyword tag. Many of my company’s clients are approached by so-called ‘SEO experts’ who clearly have little but a copy of SEO For Dummies under their belt, and they analyze the meta-keywords tag and proclaim my company incompetent.

The Natural Search Blog is suggesting that having lots of crud in the meta-keywords tag may be a negative signal to Google. If I can find a way to demonstrate this, happy days will be here.

GAudi:

I shall quote Susan, and proclaim the video-to-text indexing they’re doing at http://www.youtube.com/youchoose to be ‘Really cool.’ I’ll also say it’s much needed and overdue. The real question is going to be what happens as better indexing methods start showing up all the places people have the same video? The present distribution economy for video encourages people to upload videos on a billion sites. Speech-to-text can start identifying duplicate videos… then what?

A Day in the Life:

Speaking of incompetent external consultants, and video, the following fine YouTube video shows a day in the life of one of my most ninja-esque Search Marketers, unborking the borked:

One limiter of the study is that it seems to focus purely on PPC spend. I find some of what various candidates are doing from an organic perspective to be far more interesting. They’re all on [...]]]> Rolling into the three-decade long primary race, we have studies evaluating the search effectiveness of various US presidential candidates already.

One limiter of the study is that it seems to focus purely on PPC spend. I find some of what various candidates are doing from an organic perspective to be far more interesting. They’re all on all the social networks, YouTube, and Flickr, for instance, and then each candidate seems to have their own spins:

• Mitt Romney has a blog, ostensibly by his brothers, on a subdomain. He’s also been using his domain since 2002, and hasn’t done anything limiting like add office or year to the domain — smart.
• John Edwards has a freaking SPLASH PAGE. Ugh! But he uses wacky code to avoid having it indexed. Again, he’s using his ‘name’ domain, no wacky offices or years. Again, a blog. And nice rollover menu code.
• Barack Obama is more of the same, only he’s added a UGC section over at my.barackobama.com. Nice.
• Hillary Clinton, like John Edwards, has a dumb splash page with wacky code. Once in, it looks like she has a UGC section… but wait! DEAD LINK!!!! I’m also underwhelmed by her meta-description on a SERP.
• Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani is on a dumb domain (JoinRudy2008.com, registered 2006, and not reusable if he doesn’t get it this round, or if he DOES and needs to be re-elected later). He’s got some nice ‘add these widgets to your blog!’ for quick link-building.
• Sam Brownback officially makes me ask: WHAT IS WITH SPLASH PAGES THIS SEASON. Especially for a guy without a metric ton of name recognition. Interestingly, once you make it in, he’s got one of the cleaner designs and a text-driven home page — which most of the others just don’t.

Looking at bad political sites makes my head ache. I may go research nice places to go during the Republican Convention in 2008, happening right here in my home town of Minneapolis-St. Paul. I am SO going to be out of town, after having lived through the 1996 Democratic Convention in Chicago. I’ve had a full lifetime worth of Secret Service Agents preventing me from getting a coffee, thankyouverymuch.

Being an SEO means being self-conscious about your own actions and the actions of others on the Internet. At least it does for me, possibly because it’s semi-universal, or possibly because I am a freak with [...]]]> …or, “Just use the internet to do illegal downloads and porn like the rest of us,” says my pal Jawa.

Being an SEO means being self-conscious about your own actions and the actions of others on the Internet. At least it does for me, possibly because it’s semi-universal, or possibly because I am a freak with a degree in literature and in navel-gazing fiction writing.

A friend posts to their personal blog about the ‘worst online shopping experience ever’ and links the offending retailer? I comment and explain how to no-follow — because even if you go for negative anchor text, there’s still some link equity to it for the site targeted.

I like a book, or a restaurant, or buy a shiny new bike part? Well, I can post about it and no-follow, or post about it and not link it because I like it, but not in THAT way, kind of like being in junior high and liking my square dance partner but not like boyfriend-like, just in that ok-as-a-square-dance-partner and this-phys-ed-unit-is-stupid way.

My mom reads an online review? I do a text analysis to determine if it’s real or totally bogus, written by the owner, and then I tell her about inherent bias in user-supplied reviews.

A friend posts a picture of their cat? I suggest taking it to a LOLCat generator, or using the video feature on their camera phone to help further pollute the electrons of the universe with more grainy video/image of pets.

My bike club has web site hosting problems? I look at the domain headers and sigh a lot.

Life would sure be simpler if I did something sane for a living, like garbage collection.