Archive for the Category ◊ Rants ◊

I joined the U.S. Navy in the fall of 1984, arriving at boot camp in April of the next year.  Shortly after getting settled into the barracks, there was a pretty common joke that I heard from a lot of my fellow recruits;  “How do you know when your recruiter is lying to you?  His lips are moving!”

I’m growing concerned that pretty soon people will be thinking the same thing about SEOs.

What if you were number 1 and nobody searched for you? Are you still number 1?

A while ago, I wrote about how to hire an SEO, and more recently about what questions you should be asking about your web measurements.  Both of those should help you become a more intelligent SEO shopper.  I’ve stumbled upon the site of Austin SEO company that made me realize there is still more you need to know in order to protect yourself from the snake oil salesmen. more…

To borrow a phrase from Lisa Barone; I’d rather stick a pen in my eye than read another story about some company doing a good job of customer service on Twitter.  Ever since Comcast went viral with “Frank’s” ability to solve problems the people on the phones couldn’t, it seems every company under the sun has been getting their support teams on Twitter and attempting to solve problems that way.  A Google search for “customer service twitter” returns only about 150 million results.

I’d say that horse is dead, can we stop beating it now?  Customer support reps are SUPPOSED to provide great service…it’s like, their job, right?

Who should we be talking about?  The people who earn their living doing something else, but still step up and try to help when they sense frustration directed at or about the company they work for.  I recently had such an experience (Guess you figured that was coming) more…

Frames used to be cool

If you’ve been surfing the web for more than a few years, you may remember the days when seemingly every Web site was constructed using frames.  I built more than a few of those myself.  On the surface they seemed to be an ideal solution to many of the problems both coders and marketers had with non-framed sites.  For coders it meant you didn’t need to copy your navigation, headers and footers into every single page – saving you lots of time.  For marketers, it meant that your menus. logos and other branding information was always viewable by your site’s visitors, no matter how much scrolling they did.  In the days of Yahoo and other directory pages, it was a perfect way to build pages.

Then came the next generation of search.  Instead of relying on human provided data to build a huge list of web pages, these new search indexes used “robots”, “spiders” and “crawlers” to automagically navigate the internet.  Following links, they located pages and read their content dynamically.  This is when using Frames become a bad way to build pages.

more…

. . . and bloggers are liars and cheats. That’s what the U.S. Government seems to think anyway.

The U.S. Government has started rattling its sword at bloggers, saying it thinks bloggers should disclose when they have been paid (or given a free product) for a review.

The FTC guidelines concerning endorsements and testimonials already contain this text: “endorsements must reflect the honest opinions or experience of the endorser, and may not convey any representation that would be deceptive if made directly by the advertiser.”  In other words, anyone that does an endorsement must tell the truth.  If we, as bloggers, choose to endorse a product or service, we are already bound by this guideline. Why must we also tell people it’s a paid (or traded) endorsement?  Why the second rule?  Is the Government foolish enough to think that a blogger who is already breaking the honesty rule will think twice about breaking the notification rule?
more…