Syzlak’s SEM

Best Preso Ever

Posted on: July 16, 2009 by Syzlak Comments

This is one of the best slideshows I’ve ever seen.

Also, sorry I haven’t been around much, but life’s been changing in so many ways. I no longer work in search engine marketing full time, and I’m swamped with trying to learn my new job. I’ll be back around when I have time to breathe.

Twitter – It’s not that hard

Posted on: April 10, 2009 by Syzlak Comments

So, while I still have a couple SearchFest recaps to post, and a ton of links to hand out to everyone that drank with me afterward – I’d like to take a moment to gripe.

Twitter “users” are beginning to annoy me. Bots are one thing, but the amount of real people that sign up and then fail to use Twitter is driving me nuts. Twitter is not a difficult product, and if you don’t feel like sharing, kindly leave.

If you are feeling like taking the plunge, here’s 5 tips to make it worth your and my time

1. Find tons of people
   The most daunting thing about Twitter when you first sign up is wrapping your mind around why all your friends have told you to sign up. When it’s just you and 2 of your friends that use Twitter it can be hard to have any other conclusion than all of your friends are mental. This is not the case (for the most part), in reality, we just have a lot of people that interact with us. More people mean more conversations, more opinions, more links, more thoughts and a more interesting tool. Go to Twitter Searchand find people that are talking about things you’re interested in.
2. Follow people that interest you even if you don’t know them
   What the hell? Really? Yes. This isn’t Facebook or myriad other high school reunion networks, this is a live conversation. Following people you don’t know can be the gateway to finding people that either you do know, or that are uncannily similar to you. All of a sudden you have more people to talk to on Twitter and more people that want to talk to you.
3. For God’s sake, stop following the Twitter prompt
   While it’s cool once in awhile, do not feel that you must be doing something. The most useless updates to Twitter are the “is brushing his teeth. Gonna get ‘em clean!” Oh? Well, good for you. I don’t give a shit. The problem when I don’t give a shit is that you’ve Tweeted yourself into a corner. If you do this sparingly, that’s fine. Doing it all the bloody time means you’re boring and are going to lose some followers – namely me. Give us something to work with, show us a cool site, tell us what you’re listening to, ask a question, say something witty, funny or depressing.
4. Do not use Twitter.com
   Twitter’s beauty and strength comes from the countless applications and plugins that allow you to post and read posts how you like. Get Twitterfox if you are on FireFox all day long, get TweetDeck if you want to be really organized, Twitterrific for a simple and functional app, there are hundreds of apps out there – find one and use it, you won’t be avoiding or forgetting about Twitter ever again.
5. Make use of the @
   You know what made Twitter take off for me? Replying to other users. All of a sudden the quirky thought bubble that Twitter had been turned into a constant conversation. I was no longer in my corner posting about how clean my teeth were going to be, but instead arguing back and forth with new acquaintences about topics that I’d not thought anyone else was interested in.

Oh and above all else, start using the damn thing and you’ll probably see people start following and interacting with you too. Which, in the end, is the point after all.

Pownce is dead

Posted on: December 2, 2008 by Syzlak Comments

Do you hear that? The last 15 people that used Pownce as their social media profile are crying. Meanwhile, the rest of us were confused when we opened an email from Pownce today. My morning went something like this:

Wake up

Check email

Notification that Pownce is shutting down

Ask aloud “What the hell is Pownce?”

Yes, it seems that everyone’s favorite robust Twitter has gone the way of the bison. Why? Well, like the bison, Pownce was a bloated version of Twitter. It didn’t have the quick and easy updating options of Twitter’s multiple apps, mobile apps, etc. In fact, I knew more people that updated their Pownce via Ping.fm, thus catering their Pownces to their Tweets. Kinda how those of us in PPC advertising have always written ads catering to Google’s format.

Why does Plurk survive when Pownce dies? One reason is that Pownce was purchased, and thus didn’t really die so much as get absorbed by another company and deemed irrelevant (which it was). I’m sure if you were to (harkening back to Physics classes here) put them in a universe with the same condiditions, no competition but each other, et cetera that Pownce would win. Which may actually be the crux of their failure. Because they are better, they will fail. The cost of supporting users outweighs their investment.

Another reason is Karma. Many of us don’t give a shit about that little tally at the bottom of the Plurk profile, but enough teenagers (hypothesizing) do that they can remain popular, yet not too popular. Shit, they’re no Twitter.

And thus we see one of the endless amount of social media profile whore machines die today. Be sure to export all your Pownces so you can upload them over on Twi–oh yeah, you use Ping.fm, you’re fine.

5 Reasons January Was a Bad Month For SEO’s Reputation

Posted on: February 5, 2008 by Syzlak Comments

Today, Danny posted about last month’s SEO Reputation debacle. While I think that it’s important for us to bring up our own image problems, I don’t think it really gets us to do anything about it unless we figure out why we have a bad image. Clearly, Danny got to see some of that after the gaffe involving Wired’s wiki and the subsequent backlash. However, I don’t think as many of us deal with our reputation, let alone SEO’s, nearly as well as Danny. This is probably because Danny has the presence of mind to view himself as an ambassador of SEO and all things search.

Thus, the first of our 5 problems:

1. We don’t see ourselves as ambassadors of SEO & Search

When we write blogs, post in forums, join social networks, we are immediately noticed. We do not blend in. We know and understand the inner workings of many of these networks, and thus immediately look foreign. Although we may understand how to get to the top of Digg or how get substantial traffic to one of our sites through StumbleUpon, we don’t understand how to not look like a shady marketer while doing so. Speaking of which,

2. We look like shady marketers an awful lot of the time

Take this guy from The Times (UK), he went around the web spamming the hell out of social sites. Right off the bat he exhibited the first reason we have a bad rap, while completely embodying the second reason. If this behavior is replicated often enough, we’ll never get a good reputation. Albeit a lot of this is comes from shady-assed marketers, one slip up by a clean member of the search community and we’re all in the same boat. For that matter, how many people outside of the search community do you know who even have an inkling as to what we do? More often than not, people I talk to think I work with pop-ups or at Google.

3. We’re only just past our infancy as an industry

Yet we seem to demand the respect of a well established auto manufacturer. At this point, we’re really just a blip in business time. However, how many people do we know, or are friends with, that seem to behave as though we’re going to last forever? That have a holier than thou attitude about what we do. Shit, I like what I do for a living too, and I’m glad to have started at a relatively early point in the industry’s life-span, but I don’t walk around with a chip on my shoulder as though SEO is a prominent aspect of everyone’s lives.

4. We don’t take the time to understand why we get a bad reputation

Recently my friend SEO-Hack was flagged by the StumbleUpon community as being a shady-assed marketer. They technically called him an SEO, and said there was no place for him on SU. While I don’t disagree with calling him an SEO (although I’d use the term loosely), I did disagree with this being viewed negatively. So much so, that I took one of the SUers to task for doing so. I got his permission to use our conversation for your information and knowledge.

Tyfus and I corresponded over a couple of messages, I think that the most important explanation for the onslaught of SEO hate is the following:

The last 6 months have seen a huge influx of aimClear-like miscatting, selfsubmitting, link-exchanging bastards, so for the moment and the foreseeable future SEO is a huge red flag. There are some really nice guys that do seo (Colincochrane, moojj spring to mind) but as long as every few clicks of the stumblebutton brings me blatantly spammed marketing drivel it’s my most hated thing around these parts. Apart from glitter and bad webcomics and lolcats and other things.

If the SEO-stuff wouldn’t invade our nice little community with a tsunami of boring crap you wouldn’t be hated on this much.

My general response was as follows:

Fair enough, and that does suck. I guess to me, people fail to see it isn’t a problem with SEO, per se, but more a problem with abuse of a system. I’d even wager that a lot of the people that submit useless sites have no idea what SEO is and just think that SU is a way to get traffic…which ends up being a pain in the ass for both you and me

See, by taking a half an hour, I was able to find out just why aimClear, SEO-Hack, et. al. were getting flagged. Why did I do this? I did it for the community (see reason 1), I hoped by getting this knowledge the community could start to regulate themselves, thus earning us a better reputation on SU. After that conversation, I went back through my old profile (as well as my current one) and “un-thumbed” my client’s sites and any other questionably spammy “thumbing” I’d done.

5. We whine about our problems instead of fixing them

After all, with a pinch of humor, they make great link-bait.

The community of SEO, I implore you, take the time to be a better person, a better search marketer, a better SEO, a better social member. Never forget to learn, discuss and adjust.

Dr. Hilker or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Social Networks

Posted on: December 7, 2007 by Syzlak Comments

Today Hilker studied the differences between blogs and social networks.  I like his graph, and I think it’s pretty accurate.  It is odd to think that 7 years ago, my friend Brian had a LiveJournal account.  I thought he was crazy, using the web as a journal and sharing with people!  Now, blogs are, as Hilker said, ’soapboxes’ or somewhat corporate propaganda; whereas Facebook and MySpace are hardly web journals and more accurately web souls where dignity slowly dies…and to think, I used to fight for social conscientiousness and fight against being a cog.  As more of us join MySpace and Facebook (which I don’t actually oppose) are we not mitigating our privacy, individuality and existence?