SEO Xcellence Blog

About 2 months ago there was an incident online that culminated in a fairly well known online personality losing her gig as a spokesperson, two other people losing their jobs, and a fairly well known conference losing its luster. In the long run everyone was tainted, everyone was to blame, and it ends up giving us some lessons to learn about just how powerful social media can be. And, for once, it involved someone I know, so I hope I present this as fairly as possible.

F Delventhal via Compfight

Here’s the general overview. Two guys were at a conference sitting in the audience and saying some things to each other that weren’t quite proper in public. The person in front of them heard it, didn’t appreciate it, turned around and called them on it. They apologized for it and maybe all should have been over then and there.

But it wasn’t. The person in front, who happens to be the person I know, turned around and took a picture of the two guys and uploaded it to Twitter, with a brief report. That’s when things got out of hand.

The two guys were representing a company that was advertising at the conference. Once they were recognized they were fired.

The person who took the picture was representing someone as a personality who was sponsoring the event. Many people felt she went overboard with the picture, especially since the two guys had apologized, and that made the sponsor genuflect and relieve her. And since a lot of what she did involved some of the talent of the conference, the trickle down meant having to now scramble for someone else to handle what she’d been doing, someone not as well known and not as skilled.

Would you say that everything that could go wrong went wrong? Who’s at fault here? Is this cut and dry, or is it pretty complicated?

It is and isn’t complicated. Let’s run down a few things here.

1. In this day and age, people tend to believe they can say whatever they want to say whenever they want to say it. The loss of decorum is problematic, but that’s a separate issue.

2. The real issue is that almost everyone has a smartphone with a camera, and they could have been recorded being stupid as well as having their picture taken. If you’re in public, even if you’re not well known, you can’t afford to be saying overly stupid things. We never found out if it was sexist or racist, but if this person I know reacted that badly to it, it had to be one of those, as she’s a black female.

3. Based on what was said, did she go too far, not far enough, or not in the proper manner? It’s hard to say. As I get older I let more of that type of thing roll off my shoulders, though I’d have said something, but when I was younger I’d have gone for the jugular, knowing I was right whether I was or not.

4. Still, being in her position, she had to know that something was going to happen, at least to the two people. What she didn’t count on was the reaction of other people to what she’d done. Do apologies overcome all bad behavior? Not even close. Is there a time and place for everything? Absolutely.

5. The thing is that even being known by people at that event, she wasn’t on the level of a TV or movie celebrity where everyone would have immediately sided with her. Even so, do you think if it had been someone like Selina Gomez that she’d have been treated much differently?

6. The company that fired her; did they over react or do the right thing? They were not being tainted by bad publicity but did they stop to consider her feelings? Should they have? Did they consider the consequences of how it could affect the conference? Did it matter?

At this point there are no more answers to be found. The two guys were fired and their 15 minutes are over. The person I know has gone into a self imposed exile for awhile. The buzz has died down so the sponsor is probably going to be fine, and the conference will probably survive for another year but it’s been diminished a bit because even though there were some people who felt what the person I know did was wrong, there were a lot of people who said they’d have done the same thing.

The major lesson is that if you’re representing someone, even just yourself, in a public space for business purposes, your decorum has to be higher than normal. Even if you’re in the right, you could end up on the wrong side of things in the long run. Think about this cautionary tale; what are you willing to risk your reputation for?
 

Copyrighted content by SEO Xcellence © 2013

Way too often I hear of someone losing their blog or having someone hack into their website and destroy all the hard work that was put into it. Blogs are especially vulnerable, not only from those who try to hack into them but because of the different plugins and, sometimes, the people who leave comments with dodgy links.

J. Kleyn ∞ via Compfight

There’s also another issue with being online. You never know what your host is going to throw at you. One of my blogs is more than 7 years old. Because of that, I received an email saying that the had upgraded what’s known as MySQL to 5.1 and that I needed to upgrade any blogs that needed it.

I decided to start with my newest blog, just over 2 years old, as a test. I went in, upgraded, reloaded and went to the blog; suddenly my entire blog was gone. I was slightly panicked. I knew I could recover the content via Google if need be, but I also knew how much work that would take. That and I knew that I had probably lost my theme and would have to start a lot of things from scratch.

I hadn’t backed up anything; hadn’t even considered it; ouch!

Luckily, after a long conversation with the hosting company it turned out that my blog hadn’t been erased at all. Instead, a new database had been created that sat next to the original database. Once I put the old information back as the primary information my blog returned. I had to wait 10 minutes to see all my posts, but I had dodged a bullet.

Whether you create your website or blog or you have someone else do it, you need to make sure you have a backup copy of it on your computer. Basically a website is just a bunch of files, even the pages. Actually, the pages themselves are fairly small; it’s all the other stuff added later that adds size to a website.

So, make sure you have a copy of all files on your computer. If it’s a blog there are plugins that may work for you, but if you have knowledge it’ll probably be easier to pull a copy of your database from your MySQL files via your host.

Protect your files and your online livelihood. Your mind will be so much freer.
 

Copyrighted content by SEO Xcellence © 2013

Some weeks ago I decided that I was going to reduce the number of articles I was trying to have on this blog because, frankly, I was being stretched pretty thin. Some of you know that I actually have 5 blogs, and on only one of those do I allow guest posts unless I ask someone to do one. That means I write a lot for myself and sometimes it’s hard to keep up with.

*Kicki* via Compfight

I also write for other people. I write for 4 other blogs on a consistent basis, and get requests to do some maintenance on others here and there. It’s pretty cool being able to write about so many things, but sometimes there’s a differentiation one has to make between writing for oneself and writing for someone else. My thought was that this is not a blog that’s visited often, although I know it gets some readers, so if I backed off a bit and made sure to keep up with everything else I’d be okay.

So that’s what I’ve done, and truth be told I have lost some traffic. That was to be expected; it’s been proven that even without lots of comments or true visitors the more content one can put out, especially if it’s niched to some degree, the more traffic one gets. Actually, if it’s not niched you’ll still get a lot of traffic, but your bounce rate, meaning people who leave your blog, will be higher and people overall will spend less time in your space because you’re not giving them what they were thinking they might see.

Believe it or not, here’s the lesson part; what, you thought I was only rambling? lol My plan for this blog is to write at least one post a week. That’s 4 posts a month, and though it’s not the best way of driving lots of traffic, it still offers great benefits to both the blog and the website it’s associated with. The search engines see that there’s still consistent content, even if it’s been reduced, and thus they’ll keep stopping by, taking a look, and indexing the site.

Because I set up my Google authorship properly if someone does a search on Google on something I’ve written about I have a good opportunity to show up much higher than normal for folks who have Google accounts and my image will be next to it; that’s not so bad.

Meanwhile I’ve brought myself peace of mind, knowing that I can concentrate on other things while I continue to keep this blog and website doing what I want it to do, which is to be relevant and viable and, hopefully, drive some kind of business. Who working for themselves don’t want that?

Have you set up any kind of blogging schedule to get at least 3 or 4 articles out monthly? You should think about it.
 

Copyrighted content by SEO Xcellence © 2013

Something that many businesses seem to struggle with is whether or not to moderate comments on their websites, blogs or social media pages and spaces. There are some people who believe that no matter what a person says, businesses should leave the comment there because it’s honest, whether or not the company agrees with it. On the other side, there are companies who believe they deserve the right to control the message, even if that means killing what someone else says so that only positive things show up on their site.

Art Crimes via Compfight

My take is that there’s no one specific answer to this, but there are circumstances that drive everything. With certain policies in place, whether everyone else knows it or not, companies and individuals can navigate the minefield that someone is going to call censorship.

First, always remember that if you’re paying for it that you get to decide the decorum in your space. If you want to allow bad language, it’s your prerogative. If you want to allow insults and spam messages and sales messages and the like, go for it.

However, most people don’t want that stuff in their space because, if it’s for business, you want to be represented in a positive light, and unless you’re selling bikes to drill sergeants, you might want to keep conversations civil and clean because you never really know who’s reading and how they’ll react. Anything that can drive business away like that is a bad thing.

Second, if you put a product out or provide services or you’re giving an opinion about something, you need to remember that everyone isn’t going to agree with you and that you can’t please everyone, no matter what you do. As long as the conversation is civil, if people disagree with you or don’t like your product for some reason, you should allow those things to stay in your space. These are opportunities in more ways than one.

It gives you a chance to hear what your potential customers want and what they might not like. It also gives you the opportunity to address your potential customer where others can see the type of person or business you are.

If you get your message correct, no matter what the issue is, other potential customers could be impressed enough to either try the product or service themselves or at least give you a chance because they see that your company takes the issues of its customers seriously.

Figuring out the difference between common courtesy and honest critiques can be challenging at times, and you might have a tendency to overreact; after all, no one likes criticism against what they do. If what you do is for the betterment of the community, do it. I think it’s always best to post your commenting policies so that if you do end up having to delete something, that person and everyone else can’t gripe because you followed a policy they didn’t. And if they do complain, it’s on them; the customer may always be the customer, but the customer isn’t always right, despite what some might say.
 

Copyrighted content by SEO Xcellence © 2013

There’s been a lot of talk lately about SEO, or search engine optimization. The general consensus is that the world is changing based on Google algorithms and that things many SEO specialists did in the past will no longer work.

Angus via Compfight

I both agree and disagree with that statement. If you were using pure SEO principles, which means all you were doing was writing content that focused on what the business actually did without trying to game the system, then you’re fine and probably nothing has happened to you. However, if you were trying to game the system in multiple sneaky ways, then yes, those tricks may not work any longer.

Truth be told, the overwhelming majority of websites haven’t done any real SEO at all. Half of all business websites I visit don’t even tell people what they do on the main page. If it’s contained in their logo, well, that’s an image, and search engines don’t read images (they will real Alt tags but believe me, if the rest of the site isn’t optimized at all then no one’s bothered to do anything with an Alt tag). If the initial visit by a search engine ends without a definitive result, why do people think everyone else will figure it out?

There’s also the debate about whether highlighting keywords with links is appropriate anymore or not. Although the link back to SEOmoz talks about internal linking, something I believe in greatly, it’s position on linking in general is pretty standard. If your website or post is about writing online, then it makes sense to link to it using words to that effect. But if your link goes to gardening and you’re writing about writing online, that’s a major no-no.

Also, having lots of links to the same exact word on one page doesn’t endear your site to the search engines. Using one of my favorite examples, if I sell shoes of all colors and designers and I have a link to the word “shoe” for each one, the search engines won’t like that one bit, even if it’s an internal link. Some sites are set up to have all those links on every single page on their website; tell me that doesn’t look suspect.

The truth is that Google and other sites still give credence to sites that are listed on other websites via links. They expect it to be natural linking and yet some sites will suffer the wrath of Penguin, Panda and any other animal names they come up with without realizing why. Thus, not linking is bad strategy.

The best thing you can do is write your content in two ways. One, make sure it’s readable by anyone who stops by so they know what it is you do. Two, try to highlight what you do at least a couple of times in your content and use phrases that you think someone might go to a search engine to find you for. That will work no matter what Google or any other search engine throws at you.
 

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