I love stories like this: A half clueless SEO “accidentally” spams a cnet.com email address with a reciprocal link request and instead they do a feature story about link building INCLUDING a link to the SEO’s client.

Here’s a link to the article: Link Exchanges: The poor man’s SEO

The post starts out explaining why links are important and includes a few good, general pieces of advice from Danny Sullivan.

“if you’re a new site, absolutely you want to be doing link building. But you need to be doing that in a smart fashion.”

The article later explains how the SEO came to send them the link request:

“…[the email] was a mistake, he said; the result of prematurely hitting send on an e-mail template. Duffield compiles his targets by searching for sites that are related to finance and stock trading, and attempts to contact a general e-mail address to pass along his site’s information and offer a link exchange.”

The best part of this whole article is that he actually ended up getting a nice (one way) link from cnet.com for his client after all.  Who knew?

Microsoft's Bing Search / Decision Engine Just Don't Belong

“Friends” was a great show.  It had an incredible run, and when it was at the top of its game, it could be called the best show on television.  I like to think that I’m a witty guy with an acerbic wit and I’ve been called Chandler a number of times by friends and acquaintances.  The reference is to Matthew Perry’s character on “Friends”… Chandler Bing.  And to be honest, that particular Bing is probably the only Bing that will make it into the historical pantheon of pop culture.  I’m afraid that Microsoft’s new ‘Bing’ will pale in comparison.

I use the reference in pop culture to help me address the true issue that Microsoft faces.  You see, Google is much more than a search engine.  It’s a verb.  It’s part of the vernacular.  It’s become a household word.  So much so, that my Grandmother (God bless her soul) knew what it meant.  And isn’t that the litmus test for the true popularity of anything?  If your Nana knows about it, then everyone must.  This is the problem that Microsoft’s Bing must face, and the obstacle that it must overcome.  In my very modest opinion, I just don’t think that it can.

Estimates are coming in that Microsoft is employing a marketing campaign with a budget upwards of $100 million.  It seems that Microsoft subscribes to Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder’s business philosophy.  “If you throw enough money at it, no problem is too big.”  They’ve taken the lackluster search engine, Live, and they’ve reengineered and rebranded it in an attempt to sell it to the mass population as a fresh new take on internet search.  And while it may in fact be a ‘Decision Engine’, the problem is that it’s just not Google.

I recall taking a sales management course some years ago and the lecturer discussed the fact that there exists a keyboard with a layout that is dramatically different than the standard QWERTY layout.  The Dvorak Simplified Keyboard was so efficient and successful that it was adopted by the American National Standards Institute in 1982.  Why then, you ask yourself, has it not become the standard keyboard on all PC’s?  The answer is because of one universal and predictable concept.  Human beings are generally averse to change.  Even if something is far more difficult and cumbersome, if we’ve become accustomed to it, then we will likely continue to have it that way.  Now I’m not suggesting that Bing represents a more streamlined and efficient approach to search engines.  I’m just saying that even if it did, chances are that few people would navigate away from using Google.

Bing is going after the fact that the Google algorithm is not perfectly effective.  According to Abbey Klaassen,  in a recent AdAge article, Microsoft found that 42% of searches require refinement, and 25% of clicks are the back button.   But do searchers REALLY CARE about a slightly more effective SERP?  Probably not.  Going further in the article, Klaassen reports that Google conducted their own research by presenting searchers with results from other engines but presented them as their own by placing their logo and formatting on the page.  The end result?  Regardless of the query returns, consumers still preferred those results which were presented as ‘Google results’.  The lesson here is that most people are enamored with brands.

You know that a brand has become too big for competition when its name has taken a life of its own.  When you need to clean your ears you don’t use a cotton swab, you use a Q-Tip.  Whether or not it is actually made by Q-Tip is irrelevant… that’s just want you call it.  And when you blow your nose, you use a Kleenex.  Different product, same point.  When a brand becomes that big, it really doesn’t have any contemporaries.  When the name of a company or product has become a synecdoche for an entire industry the no amount of marketing dollars can do anything but scratch the surface of the market share.

I don’t know how well Bing works.  As of presstime for this article, I haven’t yet used it, not even for curiosity’s sake.  I imagine that given the amount of R&D and Marketing dollars thrown at it, it probably works quite well.  But what I do know with a clear certainty and evidential proof is this;  When I was looking up facts for this article I didn’t Bing the queries… I Google’d them.   And that’s the point.

I’m a Firefox kind of guy. Long before IE7, I was in love with the functionality of multiple tabs in the same window. I was introduced to Firefox by Todd when we first started working together some years ago. I was lustful for all the add-ons, and I relished the rapidly vanishing programs cluttering my taskbar that inevitably accompanied any long day of using IE. My love affair with Firefox has lasted for quite some time. But as much as the functionality of multiple tabs has engrained itself into my psyche, there was a wonderful tool out there that had eluded my attention until recently. And having recently begun this labor of love of a company, I came to realize that this beautiful, buxom tool had seduced its way onto my computer; and into my heart. That tool, my friends, is Digsby. And like any true love, what started out as an infatuation has rapidly become a soul-mate. I’m starting to wonder how I ever lived and loved without it.

A few weeks back I was chatting on AIM with Shawn, our resident Social Media Manager. I don’t recall exactly how the conversation came about, but I was mentioning something about the confusion of having multiple chat windows open in multiple messengers. Shawn mentioned something about Digsby. Little did I know that this small conversation would be my introduction with the love of my life. Shawn went on to discuss what Digsby was essentially explaining that it was a one stop portal for each and nearly every e-mail, messenger and social media account that one could ask for. I began to salivate when thinking about just my hotmail accounts alone. I have one that I created nearly 15 years ago while in the Navy, one created by my College, one that I run various fantasy leagues on, one that I …. you get the point. For this reason alone, I was looking forward to not having to log in and then out to check multiple accounts. It was only after I downloaded and began running Digsby did I realize that this was only the tip of the iceberg.

I downloaded Digsby and began the set up process. I started adding my accounts. The process to me was reminiscent of a third date after you’ve had a great meal, enjoyed a nice film, and have gone back to her apartment for “coffee”… it was really starting to get hot and heavy. I was telling Digsby all my innermost personal secrets. I was letting her into all of my e-mail accounts, and my Social Media Profiles. She in turn undressed to reveal to me everything that she was made of. Within minutes, I was ready to propose. Short of packing me a lunch with a cute note for work the next day and rubbing my back after a tough day, Digsby appeared to be to be the perfect Soul-Mate.

A great visual interface aside, the true beauty of Digsby is the fact that I have everything in front of me in real time. One click. That’s it. One single click. With that lone solitary click, I had in front of me a real time view of every e-mail account, Social Media profile and instant messenger. I was flabbergasted. In real time, the virtual world of contact and Social Media was presenting itself to me in a number of innocuous pop up windows. Instant message from Shawn_Rosko about an upcoming presentation… check. @WebMasterRadio is now following me on Twitter… check, check!! I have an e-mail from my pop mail server from a perspective client… check, check, check!!! All of my accounts were right there, neatly displayed on a sidebar with great functionality. A simple mouseover showed me my message. A click allowed me to reply, or tweet. Now, I’m not going to lie here, I started to cry a little bit. The same kind of “triumph of the human spirit” victorious tears that one may find upon watching the final 10 minutes of “Rudy.” I was in love with a girl named Digsby and she was treating me right.

I tried to quantify what kind of tool Digsby really was, so I did some timing. Using a Dell Latitude D520 on a Cable DSL connection, I found that it took me 40 seconds or so to log in to one Hotmail account, browse my inbox, log out, and log back in to a 2^nd account. I had been doing this approximately 3 or 4 times a day for a total of 3 minutes. Logging into Twtter from the same tab and scanning that inbox added another 20 seconds. Moving over to LinkedIn took another… you know what, nevermind. I’m not going to bore you. The bottom line is that I was saving 10-15 minutes a day for simply logging in and logging out. That’s about 60-90 hours a year! Seriously, that’s between 2-4 days of your life every year spent logging in and out of accounts! I wondered what to do with that extra time that Digsby has afforded me. So I decided: I’m going to take a long weekend and go to Sandals and I’m going to propose to Digsby!

Welcome to our website and blog! We are officially open for business and ready to take on the world of SEO and Social Media!

For those of you who don’t know us, we are two former link ninjas & SEO specialists: Todd Heim and Shawn Rosko. We’d worked at WeBuildPages with Jim Boykin for about 3 years a piece; and now (after a brief 3 month hiatus) we’re ready to start taking on clients of our own.

Ok, I know what you’re thinking: “Yet another WBP ’spin-off’ company. And this time the name is even cheesier than the original!” And, yes, we have a LOT to live up to. Being in the company of: Todd Malicoat (aka Stuntdubl), Rhea Drysdale & Lisa Barone of Outspoken Media, Christina Gleason (fka QualityGal), Patrick Sexton, and Justilien Gaspard leaves very little room for error. But we’re up to the challenge!

We’ve been honing our skills for the past 3 months and have some very interesting new linking strategies that are already showing promise. Shawn, meanwhile has been killing it on social media. His brand new blog will probably see around 100k visitors this month while he networks in the social arenas.

There’s so much we want to share, and this blog will be our portal! Make sure you stay tuned (that means subscribe to our RSS feed)…2009 is going to be a very good year!