Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a service you can buy to boost your website's position on the search engine results page, when Internet surfers try to find certain keywords or phrases, like "Mesa Giant Red Nipple." If you plug that four-word phrase into
any of
the top
web search
engines, my site will come out pretty darn near the top. In cyberspace, I am considered to be *the* expert on Mesa Giant Red Nipples, and I've worked very hard to cultivate that reputation.
I've posted at least half a dozen articles on the subject. I've created a couple of blogs that mirror the phrase and link back to my website. I've done some social bookmarking on sites with memorable names like del.icio.us. Or is it deli.cio.us? I can never remember.
If I were really serious about maintaining my Number One ranking, I would hire a squad of Bulgarians and Pakistanis, at ten cents an hour, to find blogs with some "relevancy." For a keyword phrase like "Mesa Giant Red Nipple," they would probably come up with sites showing the difference between a mesa and a butte, or raving about NY Giants football, or offering Simply Red concert photos, or selling breast augmentation and nipple piercing services.
Or they might be less relevant.
Then I would tell the Bulgarians and Pakistanis to write comments and drop links on those blogs, cleverly disguised to blend into the existing conversational threads: "I make plenty big touchdown in my socker game less week. -Rogger, Mesa Giant Red Nipple [link]."
Or maybe I would hire Lithuanians and Vietnamese to do this part of the job. Everyone knows those darn Pakistanis can't blend in anywhere.
But perhaps you're pressed for time and have too much money to worry about small matters like SEO. That's when you go out and hire an SEO firm. They also list themselves under acronyms like SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and SES (Search Engine Strategists). If you don't know anything about hiring an SEO company, here's a list of pointers:
(1) The SEO CEO (Chief Executive Officer) must be able to dazzle you with dialect and baffle you with bullpucky. If he doesn't use jargon like "keyword density" and "backlink boosting," he doesn't know his stuff. On the other hand, if he can rattle off five or six sentences in a slangy SEO-ese lingo, and those sentences make no sense to you at all, he's probably the guy you want.
(2) Most of his staff should be in their early twenties. The younger, the better. In fact, if the CEO is older than 29, he probably hasn't been immersed in cyberspace for more than half his life, so his genetic sequencing hasn't mutated enough to provide the kind of service you need.
(3) Your SEO CEO should assure you that he performs only "ethical" or "organic" or "white hat" SEO. He should also warn you that his competitors engage in "black hat" SEO, and their efforts often result in search engine penalties. He should tell you that if you use those other guys, your site might end up getting banned by Google. He should really scare you. If you're not terrified, he's no freakin' good.
(4) He should offer to research the precise keyword phrases that people customarily use to find your business. Then he should propose "optimizing" your website for those keywords. "Optimizing" is techspeak for "charging exorbitant fees to insert one of your keyword phrases into each paragraph on your site."
(5) By the way, you can discover the same keyword phrases by casually perusing the free server logs provided by your website's hosting company.
(6) At this point, your SEO CEO should offer to sell you custom-written keyword-rich articles that link back to your website. He will tell you he's placing those articles on websites in his inventory that have been carefully selected for their "relevancy." Think nipple piercing.
(7) He should never characterize his inventory websites as "link farms." Even though they are, in truth, link farms.
(8) For the coup de grâce, he will carefully gauge your GQ (Gullibility Quotient), and perhaps offer to sell you "backlink boosting." Make sure to ask whether he uses Pakistanis or Lithuanians.
***
The SEO industry came into being approximately ten seconds after Google announced its PageRank system. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, says that "PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of measuring its relative importance within the set."
How much do you wanna bet that some hotshot SEO CEO wrote that sentence?
PageRank (PR) tells me your website's relative importance. If you're PR 1 or 2, I can't even risk being seen with you. But if you're PR 8 or 9, I will anxiously wait by the phone, hoping to be invited to your next party.
SEOers rely on PageRank like the rest of us rely on air. In fact, your average SEOer keeps a wary eye on everything that Google does, because Google created--and can easily destroy--his business. When giant Google takes a BLEEP, every SEOer minutely examines the steaming heap.
But some SEOers want to be ahead of the curve, so they don't wait until the golden turds hit the ground. They jump up, trying to get a view inside Google's butt. They want to know how the digestive system works. The express concern when Google experiences constipation. They offer suppositories for the occasional hemorrhoid. They break out their umbrellas when Google has diarrhea.
Every time Google pitches a puny pebble into the placid pond of SEO, the ensuing ripples can seem like tidal waves to an SEO CEO. If Google makes a tiny adjustment to the way it does business, a complacent SEOer might go bankrupt. To provide an extra security blanket, there's a whole additional layer of SEO practitioners, the SEO Consultants. An SEOcon makes his living by watching Google closely, while analyzing the speeches,
blogs, and public pronouncements of Google insiders. The SEOcon then sells his analyses to other SEO geeks via pricey newsletters and books. Some of those books sell for many hundreds of dollars. Good bullpucky ain't cheap.
***
So the primary objective in SEO today is to figure out what Google is thinking and how it operates. Some companies try to discover how a competitor's widget works through reverse engineering. They take apart the widget and analyze its technological principles, attempting to duplicate its function without infringing any copyrights. Some companies turn computer hackers loose on a competitor's system, to discover vulnerabilities they can exploit.
And some companies try to hack Google.
Most reputable firms want to avoid, as much as possible, paying for ads on search engine results pages. They want their websites to appear near the top of those results pages in a natural way... "organically." But good "organic" search results are not as chock-full of healthy goodness as the word might imply. To get a high organic ranking, companies usually try to spam the search engines. They pay an SEOer to put their spammy "keyword-rich" pages on inventory websites. They pay the SEOer to hire spam-generating Pakistanis. They pay the SEOer for "backlink boosting."
By the way, doesn't "Backlink Boosting" sound like a great title for gay porn?
acb links: bio ~ book ~ scripts ~ snoozeletter
(Extra Special 7th Anniversary Director's Cut Chartrooz-Ray
OCD Edition)
1) Slit the clear plastic shrink wrap with a knife or pair of scissors, being careful NOT to slit the clear plastic slipcover underneath. That's permanent... just like the long ugly slice that you just put into it, you stupid idiot. Worst Possible Case: the shrink wrap is stiff, rather than soft, and has been heat-sealed to the spine of the DVD case. If this happens, you will spend the rest of your life trying to scratch off the last vestiges of the plastic from the case, because every time you pick it up, you will feel little plastic remnants fluttering against your hand and they will slowly drive you BLEEP crazy.
2a) If the DVD case is cheap cardboard with a black plastic snap strip, you will need to use your fingernail to carefully remove the large round piece of clear plastic tape fastening the cardboard front cover to the long snap strip on the right side. Worst Possible Case: the plastic tape will rip a large hunk out of the cardboard cover image, which will drive you BLEEP crazy, every time you look at it.
2b) Alternatively, if the DVD case has been fabricated from molded plastic, use your fingernail to carefully scratch off the white title strip of plastic tape from the top edge of the plastic case. Worst Possible Case: if you don't painstakingly roll the edge of the title strip, just after lifting up a small corner with your fingernail, the title strip will split and force you to start again from scratch. Another Worst Possible Case: the title strip might be so sticky that it leaves a gummy residue on the DVD case, so you will need to re-apply the longest strip of plastic tape (it *has* split into many small strips, no?) to the gummy sections, and try to remove the sticky residue by quickly ripping up the re-applied strip, much like tearing off a band-aid encrusted with blood. Yet Another Worst Possible Case: the sadistic DVD companies often apply strips of plastic tape not only to the top of the case, but also to the side and bottom. In this eventuality, you will probably be left with a sticky, gummy, yucky DVD case, so please feel free to go BLEEP crazy.
3) Assuming you have successfully opened the DVD case, you will now feel an overwhelming need to remove the rectangular plastic security chip glued to the inside of the case. Resist this urge. Let it go. Deep breaths. Okay, you've just slipped your fingernail under the edge, to see if it will... oh, BLEEP. It's embedded under your fingernail, isn't it? Plus, that tender skin beneath your fingernail is bleeding, right? And when you lift up the chip, a glittering piece of foil remains stuck to the inside of the case, doesn't it? Didn't I tell you to resist the urge? Didn't I tell you to let it go? Didn't I tell you to take deep breaths?
You stubborn anal moron. You richly deserve to go BLEEP crazy.
Just like me.
acb links: bio ~ book ~ scripts ~ snoozeletter
During 1988's summer solstice, Swiss violinist
Paul Giger
was allowed to enter the crypt and upper church of the cathedral at
Chartres, France to record one of the finest... well, I can't write
enough superlatives about
Chartres. But other people can:
"Henry
Adams wrote half a book about it: `Chartres [cathedral] expressed,
besides whatever else it meant, an emotion, the deepest man ever felt -
the struggle of his own littleness, to grasp the infinite.´ But you
could listen to
Chartres
blindfolded and be impressed by the ancient/pagan power of Giger's raw
bow scrapes, madly-fiddled chords, high uninflected long notes, and
didgeridoo-like droning. He taps something deep, elemental, and
emotional, beyond or beside the brainbusting computations." --City
Paper, Baltimore
"Giger's music is undisciplined to the extent
that it sounds more like improvisation than a written-out composition.
In the range of its references it is unashamedly eclectic; the naive
and the rhetorical rub shoulders; traditional, experimental and
psychedelic happily cohabit; everything is embraced from organum to
Penderecki, from folk-fiddling to the song of the humpbacked whale. Nor
is a single trick of the violinist's craft missed. Harmonics,
glissandos, multiple stops, devil's trills, fancy bowings, the noises
of wood and horse-hair, all have a place in the design. This may sound
unpromising, but in fact Giger's spectacular technical control of his
instrument saves the day. In virtuosity he far outclasses many concert
violinists, and his resourcefulness and assurance breathe vitality into
the work. At best, in the concluding `Holy Center´ (much indebted to La
Monte Young and Stockhausen's Stimmung), there is a marvelous sense of
a man totally at one with his violin, voice and instrument
simultaneously lost in contemplation of the marvels of natural
harmonics." --J.M. Gramophone
acb links: bio ~ book ~ scripts ~ snoozeletter
