Get a Free For most of us a High School experience occurred long enough ago that we have to dust off an old yearbook to remember the girl we liked, the guys we didn’t, the drama guys that were strange and then there were the geeks, greasy hair, glasses, tons of books they carried everywhere, out of place in gym class and today the guys that have made millions and even billions because they recognized opportunity long before the rest of us. So who is the geek now?
It strikes me that in those days being popular was everything. A zit on the end of your nose was enough to keep you from going to school, clothes that were out of style kept you eating alone in the lunch room and not being with the in crowd was the kiss of death.
Is it so much different now online? Popularity seems to be the BUZZ. Are you popular on Social Search Engines? Do you have hundreds or even thousands of online friends hanging on every word added to your daily blog? are there popolar sites that link to your site making you look better? See any similarities.
Search Engine Marketing today or real SEO has become a complex mesh of networking, social acceptance, usability, sophisticated link strategies and the ability to say things on your site differently than everybody else. The reality of unique content is not going away. In the old days you could start a website easily, those without imagination would find another site they liked and then steal their content, in many cases the content they stole was already stolen from someone else. Welcome to an open platform and the sharing of information.
Now stiff penalties occur to any site if you engage in the practice of content theft. Most online users have no idea how small the world has actually become. It takes seconds to find any other site online that has the same text as you or even if they have swiped your content and attempted to mix it up a bit. If you wrote it you can be assured they liked your site so well they copied it or at least they copied all that you had to say.
Search Engine Marketing and current SEO strategies today require that we take a look back at our high School experiences and find new ways to get others to like us and become more popular. If you are found on a search engine or directory and people like you then they talk about you to their friends, from here the world begins to change for whatever business you happen to be operating.
In my business of Web Design, Search Engine Marketing and SEO consulting. I have seen client operations go from 10% Internet and 90% everything else to 10% everything else and 90% Internet. The reality that a successful online operation can create fortunes and change a business in ways that nothing in history has been able to do.
At Utah Web Services we are all about being popular and making sure ALL of our clients are brought into our circle of friends so they too can become popular online. It’s all about relationships and hangin with the right people these days. Having been in the web hosting, web design and SEO business since 1998, we have hundreds of client sites across multiple industry platforms positioned at the top of Google in very competetive keyword categories. Now our SEO teams have to stay on top of the changes that seem to occur daily and the new tools available to evaluate it all.
THESE ARE INDEED EXCITING TIMES TO BE ON THE INTERNET. WITH GREAT NEW WAYS TO FIND NEW FRIENDS, BECOME POPULAR AND TO EVALUATE HOW YOUR DOING AT IT.
Good post. It’s very true that the SEO/SEM industry has become a huge name game. I read how when SEOmoz.org did their interviews they name dropped some of the SEO scene rats as part of their interview strategy to see if the search engine optimization specialists know who they were.
Also, duplicate content across domains is more theory right now. A theory that everyone’s almost sure is accurate. But it is FACT that duplicate content refers to having the same content or article on your very own site. Webmasters be aware that you can hide duplicate content from search engines by placing a robots.txt file on server root to tell the search engines not to crawl a certain page.
Robots.txt example:
Disallow: /folder/ # this would tell search engines not to index this folder
Disallow: /page.html # this would tell search engines not to index this page
Also, you can use META “noindex”