I just watched The Big Lebowski again. It’s not for everyone; it did terribly in the box office back in 1998. Now, it has a massive following worldwide. There are festivals, message boards, even a recognized religion with an official website for followers of dudeism.
The Dude talks of takin’ it easy, man. What will come will come, and when it comes – you just take it and move on. It’s a philosophy that has served me exceptionally well during my years in marketing. There’s a lot of literature out there talking about what works in marketing, where it works, what doesn’t work, what works to what degree. There are hundreds of discussions debating the validity of one method over another.
Debating the validity of one method over another is, well, kind of pointless and not dude-like at all. Everything works. If it didn’t work, it probably wouldn’t exist. There are varying levels of effectiveness, though I don’t think one can debate what that is without trying it. It’s a marketer’s responsibility to learn and experiment with whichever disciplines they want to specialize in, because when you can prove your answers to the questions of viability it’s easy to get work.
If you don’t know the answer to a marketing question, it’s ok. Have a seat, take a sip of your white russian and think about your options in terms of time, money and risk.
If you have the time, you can do the thing yourself.
If you can’t do the thing yourself, you’ll need to scrap the idea or pay someone else.
If you find a cheap and fast solution, it will be accompanied by a massive risk.
There’s nothing wrong with risk, or spending time or money. If black-hat SEO didn’t work (cloaking and scraping for example) people wouldn’t keep doing it. Sure, it’s insidious, but it works. It works most effectively when seasoned hatters sit at the helm of the spam-train. It works least effectively when you have to search for “how to do black hat SEO”. It will probably destroy your brand and your reputation, but it definitely works to generate revenue. White hat SEO takes a long, long time but there’s virtually no risk and the payout always happens, eventually.
This is where Dudeism is helpful. There is a path of least resistance, and there is a path of utter improbability. The path of utter improbability contains great treasure and great rewards but is a hard and dangerous journey. The path of least resistance is cool, meandering, easy and breezy but the pay is terrible.
What about you? Would you rather take massive risks for a possible quick payout? Would you rather pay for perfection? Or take the time and do it yourself? Whichever you choose, the Dude abides.
This entry was written by Sean Enns, posted on February 12, 2010 at 3:09 pm, filed under Search Engine Optimization and tagged Marketing, SEO, Tips. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
As the marketing arm of the Extreme Website Makeover project, it’s my responsibility to arrange and organize the marketing and SEO for Robbin’s Wreaths.
Since I started looking at Magento last year, I’ve been extremely impressed with it as an eCommerce solution; I really thought it would be a great tool for Robbin’s Wreaths. The eCommerce framework is sound and there seemed to be a lot of extensions and add ons for it.
I say ‘seemed’ because I didn’t really spend a lot of time looking at it; probably an hour all told. Knowing the the design for Robbin’s is on it’s way, I decided to have a look at the SEO options for Magento. Thankfully, the kind folks at Hosting Nation allowed me to use their Magento demo to experiment with the options available.
I have to give a tip of the hat to Yoast, who did this amazing article on SEO for Magento. If you’re a novice, the steps might be a little daunting. I’m a salty old SEO dog though. I’ve done SEO for Joomla and Virtuemart. I’ve done SEO for WordPress and other custom PHP sites, even coordinated on a strategy for a giant .asp eCommerce site.
This is the first time I’ve ever done SEO for Magento, or used the system at all. I’m going into it virtually blind, counting only on Yoast’s tutorial to guide my way.
Step one: Configuration
This part is simple. Once logged into the admin area of Magento, I follow Yoast’s steps to set global configuration and SEO settings. Next, he recommends canonicalizing your domain – basically redirecting the WWW to non-WWW version (or vise versa). No problem there, I can just refer to my URL Canonicalization Script and copy the rules over to a new file. I continue with the tutorial and complete the configuration by installing the two extensions Yoast provides for meta management. The whole process has been a breeze up to this point, much less complex than installations I’ve done with other content management systems.
Step two: Optimization
Easy. Navigate through the upper menu to the page, category or product you want to add keywords for. Open the meta information screen for the project and add the keywords you want. Save, and your titles are added.
Now, there are a lot more steps to optimizing your site laid out in Yoast’s post and I haven’t finished about 90% of them. I did accomplish what I set out to do, check my options for Magento SEO and make sure I had it down before tackling Robbin’s Wreaths. No problem, within 20 minutes I had my first title entered into the system. The most amazing part is that I’ve never used the system before. Now that I’ve started, I’m really looking forward to more. Thanks to Yoast, and Magento, this is going to be a pleasure.
This entry was written by Sean Enns, posted on February 4, 2010 at 5:00 pm, filed under Search Engine Optimization and tagged SEO, Tips. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
The Google Bloggers have reported on the State of the Google Union, creating this post titled Helping computers understand language. I’m a big fan of Google, but in this case (and in a previous post titled How I Know that Search Engines Haven’t Mastered Semantics), I have to take the side of the devils advocate and disagree.
It’s not that they don’t understand semantics, I think they do a fine job of interpreting queries and suggesting alternative meanings, but they do an awful job of organizing results from synonyms and related terms in a uniform manner. My evidence suggests that Google can understand terms that are actually synonymous, but not implied relationships that exist only in human language.
In their example, they cite that they glean the relationship between photos and pictures as applied in 2 queries, photos developed with coffee and pictures developed with coffee. The results jive for me, but then again – If I just search developed with coffee, I get the same results once again. One could infer from this that Google is not actually understanding anything, but that they’ve cherry-picked a site that happens to have great presence for a shorter phrase.
It’s not a stretch to say that film developed with coffee is synonymous with photos developed with coffee, but for this query the results are different. Imagine my surprise when a thesaurus shows me that “film” is not necessarily a synonym of “photo”.
Perhaps that’s why Google didn’t give me the same result they favoured for the #1 position for three other queries. One could also infer that the site, optimized for “photo” and “picture”, didn’t have the same optimization for “film”. My conclusion, unscientific as it is, tells me that while Google can use a thesaurus as well as anybody, possibly better, they’re no closer to understanding natural language.
This entry was written by Sean Enns, posted on February 3, 2010 at 3:19 pm, filed under Search Engine Optimization and tagged Google, Search, SEO. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
I’ve been having an unrequited love affair with semicolons for some time now. Oh, if you look through my posts you won’t be likely to find any; I haven’t been comfortable that I’m using them correctly when I write. That is, until now. Inspired by a 2009 post on Daggle titled conjunction complex sentence misfunction that Danny Sullivan twote this afternoon and a recent comic by The Oatmeal titled: How to use a semicolon: The most feared punctuation on earth, I’ve decided to bring semicolons into my life more.
5 ways I’m bringing the semicolon into my life.
Ok, that’s only two. I’m sure I can come up with three more. Follow me on Twitter to see what they are!
You may be wondering what this has to do with link building. Stay tuned, I’m making my next post about it.
This entry was written by Sean Enns, posted on February 2, 2010 at 7:40 pm, filed under Copywriting and tagged Blog, Copywriting. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
If you haven’t heard, I’m involved in the Extreme Website Makeover project. Extreme Website Makeover is a joint project with Hosting Nation, Oceanside Web TV, Fusion Creative, Square Eyes Media, and Harbour City SEO.
We’re currently working with Robbin’s Wreaths of Parksville and providing them with a FREE state of the art e-commerce system for their small wreath manufacturing business. The site will include a custom design built on the Magento framework, hosting and a domain, graphic design, development, programming, internet marketing and search engine optimization. As we work to complete their new site, we’re taking applications for new contenders.
If you have an engaging story to tell about your company and the challenges you have faced to get onto the web, we’d love to hear about it. You never know, you could be selected to receive a custom website valued over $5000, absolutely free!
How do you apply? Well, drop me a line through my contact form or visit extreme website makeover to get the complete application.
Incidentally, items like this are a great way to promote your business. Getting involved with community driven projects and coordinating with other agencies work wonders for building your online presence.
This entry was written by Sean Enns, posted on February 1, 2010 at 4:33 pm, filed under Link Building. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.