Blogging Meetup Next Monday

The folks at Small Business Mavericks have created a Minnesota meetup group for area bloggers and those who want to know more about blogging, and have officially announced the first blast-off get-together in Plymouth on Monday, March 3.

I always enjoy these get-togethers, mainly because it gets you away from your computer where you can have fun talking to people w/ similar interests. Hopefully that huge group (ok, 3 of us) who attends “blogger hour” will be in attendance.

I might actually be in Rochester that day. If so, it looks like I’ll miss this first one but will definitely make future meetups.

SEO and PR. It Can Work. Really!

Here’s a perfect example on how SEO shenanigans work.The anti-SEO piece contains plenty of keywords within a popular debate. Because of it, it also provides a bunch of natural inbound links from SEOs who don’t like what he has to say. Steve, it turns out there is synergy between SEO and PR. :)  

 

News Feature on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has a pretty cool news feature that’s currently in Beta.

 

I used to work for FindLaw (part of Thomson West) and have many friends and LinkedIn contacts because of it. It does make sense that these news results would appear when I sign in. I was pleasantly surprised to see these news bits, especially the one that gives them an entry to social networking.

The one thing I don’t like about this feature is many of these news bits (possibly including the link above) require you to register to read the actual articles. I suppose that’s for a different post.

  

Local Results Between Fort Worth and Minneapolis

Not the best title, but there’s a point to this, really! Different local results appear depending on how popular they are in your area.

In November ‘07, I got to hang out at The Attorney Store with Akhil, David, Ken, Susan, Wes, and others for a couple days in a suburb between Dallas and Fort Worth.

Belt buckles and cowboy hats happen to be popular in Fort Worth, which was pointed to me while visiting Joe T. Garcia’s.

There are no local “cowboy apparel” results in Minneapolis.

There are a few in Dallas.

You got the ten-box in Fort Worth.

I’m guessing these results are very relevant.

Studying local results like these do present opportunities for you to really understand your geographical clients and how they buy.

Net Neutrality - Will it Influence Your Vote?

The presidential campaign is definitely a popular topic these days. One debate I haven’t seen regards net neutrality. It’s certainly a topic that I’m considering in the voting process. Google gives their own guide on net neutrality.

Fundamentally, net neutrality is about equal access to the Internet. In our view, the broadband carriers should not be permitted to use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content.

Here’s the long Wikipedia entry regarding it.

Bretton Jones also provided his input on Search Engine Guide almost two years ago.

What do politicians think? Here you go.

Any thoughts?

Schmap.com and Flickr Photo

I’ve only written about Schmap.com once. It’s a pretty cool local search tool that allows you to send local information to your email, phone, printer, etc. Unrelated, it turns out out that a photo I took of Miller Park w/ my Nikon point-n-shoot has been short-listed for the fourth edition of Schmap’s Chicago guide.

They did include the picture in the email they sent.

The funny thing is it’s certainly not the best picture. I took it on the fly while driving east on I94 towards Milwaukee. I doubt it will make the final cut though… unless they want Milwaukee’s Miller Park to represent Chicago. I’m guessing they found the picture within a Flickr set of last year’s Chicago Inline Marathon.

Hypermiling in the Winter

Almost a year after reading a couple posts regarding hypermiling from Ed Kohler, I finally decided to give it a try. Basically, hypermiling is using different tactics to increase your MPG.

In 2002, I wound up buying a smaller Mazda. It’s practical, has a few cool features and boasted at least somewhat decent gas mileage. That was a plus. It turns out W was up to something.

The end result was pretty cool. I drove 275 miles (half highway and half city streets) using a little under 9 gallons. That wound up being just under 31 MPG.

Considering over half of the miles were driven in below-zero weather, I was pretty happy with the 6-year old Mazda. I doubt a new Prius would do all that much better. A few thoughts…

Having a stick shift probably helps. It makes it easy to keep the RPMs down.

Hypermiling does not mean you have to drive like you live in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood… don’t-cha know.

You can even speed quite a bit, then coast in neutral for blocks down the slightest hill without going below the speed limit.

Portland/Park avenue between Minneapolis and Bloomington is a great opportunity for all this. The lights synchronize well. Another good route is Olson Memorial Hwy between Minneapolis and Golden Valley. This worked well for me since these are both routes I regularly drive.

Keeping the maximum tire pressure is also recommended and I never did check that out. That’s something to think about next time I fill up.

Favorite Posts of the Week - All Minnesota Based

Still all Minnesota based, part PPC, part local search, and part WordPress blogs.

Jeff Hudson of The PPC Book gets stuck in some chilly weather and provides a great example of a void when shopping locally online.

Heard about Google Local News? So has Erica from Metroblogging Twin Cites. What seems like a great idea isn’t faring so well with people just looking for local information. It has a way to go.

There’s quite a controversial post at Lee Odden’s Online Marketing blog regarding WordPress and how they categorize SEO blogs as crappy “sploggs”.

Here’s the new WordPress definition of an SEO blog:

SEO blogs: Blogs that are written for search engines instead of humans. These blogs are dedicated to trying to fool Google and other search engines into ranking them highly. WordPress.com is not meant for this type of activity.

Lee’s 100% right. There are great search marketers out there who provide quality content which debunks the above definition, period.

SEOs often naturally get a bad rep, and rightfully so. Many of these also use WordPress to manipulate search engines. Yeah, really. You just might be one of them.

I do a lot of SEO, and my peers often say that this blog sucks. It’s on a hosted WordPress domain, I don’t use plug-ins, and I don’t SEO this blog.

This is all fine because the readers here are cool and smart, and don’t care what the ranking-whore crowds think of it.

DirectoryM is Lookin’ Pretty Slick These Days

I’ve been aware of DirectoryM for quite awhile, but admittedly haven’t checked them out in detail. It’s not your average Web directory. They’re more of a hub that gives you advertising links on their own directory, plus some big players like…

There are nationwide ads available, but local ads do seem to appear pretty prevalent.

I think the $240 three month investment is useful for businesses who measure analytics. You’ll have the ability to track how many users come to your site from these referalls and see how they navigate your site.

For those still stuck on search engine rankings “only”, some of these links do seem to pass link juice, but it might not be worth your investment.

I hope to have more detailed info in the future.

Paid Links in the Non-Search Engine Marketing World

This is old news for search engine marketers, but I’m guessing the vast majority of Webmasters/marketers/small business owners who purchase links to their own sites are not search engine marketers, have no idea of of the Google paid link “penalty”, and purchase these links for potential quality traffic.

No worries - Google isn’t out to “get you”.

Back in April 2007, Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Webspam team) wrote a post on his personal blog on how to report paid links. 788 comments (and counting) later, the subject isn’t too popular with some fellow search marketers.

If you scroll through the post he gives some good examples of paid links that are there solely for the manipulation of search engine rankings. This is bad.

Here’s another example. Go to TwinCities.com and scroll all the way to the bottom. There are over ten paid links that are there solely for the manipulation of search engine rankings. This is also bad.

To be honest, I doubt that TwinCities.com knows this. They’re part of the RealCites Network who provides this, they’re making a little money and it’s easy.

When most businesses pay for links, they do it for the potential traffic and I highly doubt that they would consider either the RealCities links or Matt’s examples an actual source of decent traffic.

For those businesses who purchase links for quality traffic, it’s safe to say you can continue to do so. Again, Google isn’t out to “get you”.