1. Go to KnowEm.com and register your brand name / business name / individual name on all of the sites in your niche.  Then use the accounts to build authority, trust and credibility.  Engage with the community.  Share your ideas and insights.

2. Write a press release about something / anything even somewhat newsworthy.  Optimize it and distribute it through PR.com, PRWeb.com, etc.  Upload it to Scribd and other such document hosting sites.  Email it directly to blogs, news sites, etc in your niche.  Get the word out.

3. If you don’t own yourname.com or yourkeyword(s).com, go to your favourite domain registrar and purchase one of them. You’ll also need some decent hosting; I highly recommend (MT)MediaTemple. Then you’ll want to install WordPress, and start building your website / blog.  You might want to check out Chris Pearson’s excellent Thesis theme, too.

4. Write a couple kickass articles, and offer them up to related sites for publication.  This is called guest posting.  Don’t forget to give yourself some good anchor text when linking back to your blog or website. Use Google News to find publishing partners in your niche, and try to establish a rapport with them.

5. For the weaker articles developed in step 4, give them a quick copy edit and distribute them via article distribution sites like EzineArticles.  Again, give yourself some decent anchor text in the body of the article and again in the footer.

6. Build a slideshow and post it to Slideshare, or shoot a quick video and post it to YouTube. Optimize the titles, descriptions, tags, etc to reflect your brand name / business name / individual name.

7. If you are a local business, be sure to claim your local listings at the search engines, review sites, etc. If you’re an individual, claim your Google profile and link to a handful of the accounts you set up in step 1.

As mentioned above, this probably won’t help you much if you are trying to rank for something competitive (think credit cards, mortgage insurance, poker, etc).  Tip: don’t be afraid to buy some links to the pages / content you’ve created above (aside from your own site, that is) to give them some extra ranking power and to help flow link juice back to your main site.  I mean, seriously…do you think Google is going to penalize Slideshare or PRWeb for buying links?

German government officials are concerned that “Google could conceivably create profiles of people that would include information about their interests, lifestyles, consumption patterns, political and sexual preferences.”  The crux of the issue appears to be “how much identifiable data is sent to and stored on servers located on U.S. soil.”  The US Patriot Act gives authorities the means to secretly view personal data held by U.S. organizations, and according to some it is “at odds with Canada’s privacy laws“.

In Canada, we have laws in place that are intended to protect the interests of Canadian citizens as it pertains to the transfer and storage of personal, private information.  PIPEDA, or the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, is one such piece of legislation that is commonly cited with regards to data privacy issues. The Privacy Act is another important legislative framework in Canada.

In light of the above, I was surprised to discover that the website designed by the Canadian government to address Canada’s Economic Action Plan is using Google Analytics to track and monitor website activity.  In simple terms, it would appear that the Government of Canada has been providing Google (and thus US intelligence) with metrics on the way Canadian citizens have reacted to and engaged with the Government of Canada’s economic action plan.

I’m now left wondering if the Canadian government is in violation of it’s own privacy legislation?  Is the undisclosed use of Google Analytics on a Government of Canada website contrary to the principles of PIPEDA?  Is this something that should be brought to the attention of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada?  Does the Canadian government have an obligation to provide a reasonable explanation for sharing sensitive political and economic data with US intelligence?  What are your thoughts?

At first, it was a difficult transition to make.  Twitter and (to a lesser extent) Facebook have become primary modes of communication for me.  Most of the people I connect with on a regular basis are members of one site or the other, and in many cases both. The greatest challenge for me was to break my own personal patterns of internet usage, and to act as if social media simply didn’t exist. Surprisingly, it was not as easy as one might think.

So what did I learn? I learned that, while we tend to think of the internet as ever-changing, very little actually changes day-to-day. I also learned that time spent on social media sites has very little impact on my general productivity.  While I may have gotten slightly more work done, I spent a lot more time researching things that would normally have been crowdsourced.  I was also reminded of the importance of maintaining a sense of balance with regards to work and life, and that it’s an especially important consideration for those of us who work on the web.

Perhaps the greatest lesson learned from my experiment is that none of this social media stuff really matters.  Social media may provide us with the ability to connect and communicate with our friends and business associates, but it’s not a substitute for real engagement with real people in real life. I think those of us who spend a significant amount of time online tend to forget that there’s an important distinction to be made between the *real* world and that which exists online.

As John Lennon once said, “Reality leaves a lot to the imagination”.

Now, I’m going to assume that you have a blog. If not, go out and buy a good domain, get some hosting and install WordPress. While you’re at it, I would recommend investing in Chris Pearson’s stellar Thesis theme. Once you’ve got your blog up and running, start working on content. And by content, I mean stuff that you think your market would be interested in. By all means, resist the urge to publish self-promotional fluff and try to write with the interests of your market in mind.

If you haven’t already done so, go get a Twitter account. Try to secure an account that either a) reflects your brand name, or b) reflects your target keywords. Theme your account along the lines of your website (logo, colours, background, etc) and link back to your main site from your profile. At this stage, you should also sign up for accounts at Bit.ly and TwitterFeed. Bit.ly will let you track clicks on links dropped in your tweets, and TwitterFeed will auto post your new blog posts to Twitter.

Then go build a Facebook page for your website / product / service. Again, try to be consistent with your use of colour, logo, catchphrases, etc. and be sure to cross-link your Facebook page with your blog and your Twitter account. Add one of the RSS apps that allow you to publish blog posts to your page, and submit your blog feed. You can also sync your Twitter account with Facebook, in one of two ways. Firstly, you can add the “Notes” application and import your blog posts or tweets via RSS. Alternately, I discovered another app by a company called Involver that allows you to add a dedicated Twitter tab to your Page. Note: the “official” Twitter Facebook app will *not* allow you to publish to a page; only to a personal account as far as I know.

It may seem like a lot of work, but once this system is up-and-running your blog content will be syndicated to both Twitter and Facebook automagically. While there is no direct SEO benefit to be had by using this strategy (aside from indexing and some minor link juice flow), it would be foolish to think that Google is not looking at social traffic patterns and other such metrics to determine trust factors; especially in light of Larry Page’s quote in the first paragraph.

While the example above is limited to Twitter and Facebook, it could easily be extended to social networks beyond those mentioned.  Friendfeed, for example, allows you to sync your account with your Twitter account for cross population.  For those willing to invest some time and effort, there are loads of opportunities for creative content syndication within social media.

Last Minute Update: As of August 20, 2009, Facebook Syndicates Updates From Pages To Twitter, Still Holds User Updates Hostage.

Cloaking is not unlike playing a game of Russian roulette. It’s a practice that violates the webmaster guidelines provided by the major search engines, and it is not recommended to those individuals unwilling to sacrifice their website for short-term financial gain. On the other hand if you have dozens of websites, none of which perform particularly well, what do you have to lose? Cloaking could provide you with the means of recapturing the investment you have already made in sites with little hope of ever making money.

A while ago on Twitter, Michael Gray asked his followers for topic ideas for a new blog post. I suggested that he put the gray back in @graywolf by writing a post on cloaking; the what, how, why, etc. He responded by pointing out that the post was not intended for his site, and that it wouldn’t be an appropriate topic for the site he was writing for. I suggested it to him because it’s a topic that I rarely see discussed on any of the popular webmaster forums, blogs and community sites. When such topics are discussed it’s usually in the context of webmaster ethics. Unfortunately, such conversations tend to become very juvenile, very fast. Ethics aside, I believe there is a strong business case to be made in favour of aggressive marketing for under performing websites.

Let’s say you have a small network of 25 websites, and you have invested 25 hours of your time into each of them. Let’s assume, for the purposes of this article, that you value your time at $25 an hour. That leaves you with over $15000 dollars invested in your sites. Again, let’s assume your network is under performing financially, and you are earning say $25 per day across all sites. That works out to $750 per month, and it will take you 20 months at those profit levels to recoup your initial investment. That’s almost two years before your sites become profitable! So let’s pretend that you’ve decided to cloak your content, serving adverts in place of your content, and your network is now producing $100 per day. That works out to $3000 per month, and if you can stay under the radar, you will have recouped your costs in 5 months. Everything after that is pure profit! In the time it would have taken you to break even prior to cloaking your content (20 months), you now have the potential to profit by $45000. To me, it seems like a reasonable gamble to consider. How many of us are ever going to make that kind of money from a small network of very average websites full of very average content?

In a previous life, I worked with a company that was willing to engage in aggressive marketing from time to time. In most cases it was for research purposes, but at times the profit motive trumped other considerations. It was business, after all. We had one site that ranked all over the place for a swath of brand-name-products in a particular sporting industry niche, and it earned around $30 a day from organic search traffic. The decision was made to start cloaking to see if we could increase revenue. Literally overnight, the site started earning hundreds of dollars a day. The only thing we changed was the positioning of our advertisements; content was pushed below the fold and ads were given prominence on the page if referrer=search engine x. In the months that followed, the site made more money than we ever would have thought. Eventually, it got smacked down, the cloaking was removed, a re-inclusion request was filed, the content got reworked, and a few new links were acquired. Everything went back to normal within a few months. It continues to earn passive income to this day, but it made a whole lot of money for a number of months. As they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

If you do decide to dabble in the dark arts in an attempt to squeeze more profit out of your websites, there are a number of things to consider. For starters, you will have to try to insulate your sites from penalty as best as you can. This means that you’ll have to be very thorough in your implementation. If you are are going to cloak, you cannot rely on simple user agent cloaking. Cloaking by user agent is really simple to sniff out. You can test this yourself by using the user-agent switcher for firefox. With this extension, you will be able to see a webpage the way it is displayed to specific user agents. If a page is displayed to you one way while your user agent is mozilla, and displayed to you another way when your user agent is googlebot, the website in question is most likely cloaking. If you want to be effective in your cloaking efforts, you might consider cloaking by user-agent, IP address, referrer, browser and perhaps even language or OS. I think it’s safe to assume that visitors from Mountain View are not there to read your very average content…

My response included a healthy reminder that SEO is a process, not a project. I ended up turning down the work, because I felt that their approach to internet marketing was short-sighted and contrary to the goal of developing defensible websites. While I was somewhat annoyed at having wasted a few hours of my time, the experience got me thinking about the disconnect that exists between people that understand the power of SEO as a distinct element within their marketing mix, and people that chase rankings for the sake of rankings.

What amused me most while looking at their sites was how incredibly well they were ranking. They were, on average, first page for all of their major terms across a small network of sites in a fairly competitive travel niche. Even more surprising was that they had next-to-no decent links from outside their own network of sites. I have to admit, I was shocked to see such impressive rankings built upon such a weak foundation.

At some point, it’s important to recognize that rankings for the sake of rankings are a wasted effort. Furthermore, good rankings built upon a foundation of low-quality links from within an easily identifiable network of partner sites will be short-lived at best. The goal of every forward-thinking publisher should be to build sites that are *not* solely dependent on search engine traffic. If you have top rankings for competitive keywords, and you still haven’t managed to acquire a self-reinforcing market position, you probably don’t deserve the rankings you’ve acquired in the first place.

I don’t consider myself a rockstar SEO on the level of @graywolf or @gregboser or @davenaylor or @aaronwall, but I’ve been in the trenches long enough to know what works and what doesn’t. Trying to build a sustainable, profitable business on a short-sighted SEO strategy is a recipe for failure, plain and simple. If I owned the sites referenced above, my primary focus would be on converting my existing visitors into proper customers. In many cases, publishers do not need higher rankings and more traffic. They simply have to adapt their mindset to focus on conversion. Ciao for now, folks!

Yesterday, the folks at Facebook announced that Digital Sky Technologies, a relatively unknown Russian company, invested upwards of $200 million dollars in their company. Business Week did an excellent summary of the news in a piece entitled, “From Russia With Love: Facebook Lands $200 Million.” Surprisingly, there was little mention of what this investment might mean for the security of your personal data.

When Microsoft bought into Facebook, some people had concerns about privacy, data security, and information sharing between the two companies.  Facebook and Microsoft are both massive global brands, but they are also American companies subject to American laws.  For this reason, I think most people felt comfortable with their partnership.  This latest investment, however, gives much cause for concern.  Digital Sky Technologies is a foreign corporation, and it’s debatable whether they are subject to domestic laws regarding privacy and user data security.

This investment becomes even more concerning when we explore some of the individuals involved with DST.  The Financial Times published a piece on DST CEO and Founder Yuri Milner back in 2000, that provides us with some important background information.  A cursory search at Google leads us to a document stating that Mr. Milner has held senior roles at the World Bank, in addition to working with various Russian government agencies.  Needless to say, Mr. Milner is highly connected in global political and financial circles.

Another interesting individual associated with DST is a fellow named Alisher Usmanov.  According to this article from MarketWatch.com, Mr. Usmanov is listed on Forbes as the world’s 450th-richest individual with a net worth estimated at $1.6 billion.  He has an ownership stake in British football club Arsenal, in addition to interests “in iron ore and steel producer Metalloinvest, telecommunications company Megafon and daily business publication Kommersant.”

Even more alarming than anything stated above, are the claims made by former British diplomat and Scottish human rights activist, Craig Murray.  According to his recent post, “Alisher Usmanov was jailed in the Soviet Union when he finally overreached himself and attempted to blackmail a Jewish KGB officer.”  At one time, Mr. Murray was the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan.  So confident is he in his claims about Mr. Usmanov, Mr. Murray has stated that he will “swear to these facts on oath before any court.”

This is truly scary stuff.  All of your personal data, as published on Facebook, may now be in the hands of individuals with suggested ties to international organized crime and foreign intelligence agencies.  It’s one thing to speculate on whether our domestic intelligence agencies are actively monitoring chatter and mining social media websites.  If that is the case, we might assume that it is being done in the interests of western defence.  It’s quite another thing to consider that everything about you, everything you have ever published on Facebook, has just been handed over to a foreign corporation. What are your thoughts?  Do you approve of Facebook selling off your personal data to a foreign corporation for $200 million dollars?

For the uninitiated, you can explore the origins of DemoCamp by reading the following post by David Crow.  As far as I can tell, this is the post started it all.  To quote David’s post, DemoCamp is “a light-weight, easy to assemble event with content that let’s you show off the things you’ve been working on.”  It’s quite an excellent post, and well worth reading if you haven’t yet.  The driving force behind the Guelph events is a fellow named Brydon Gilliss (of Brainpark and Band of Coders fame).  His tireless devotion to the tech community here in Guelph sets an important example for the rest of us!

I can’t recall offhand, but I *think* my first encounter with DemoCamp was in July 2007 at DemoCampGuelph2.  At the time, most of the people I knew in the local tech space were affiliated in some way with Geosign Corporation.  In May 2007, the company imploded under the weight of it’s own success and dozens of us found ourselves out of work and eager to make new connections.  Needless to say, we were nothing short of thrilled to discover the thriving tech community that was flourishing right in our backyard.

Initially, I thought DemoCamp was geared mainly towards the development community.  I was also operating on the assumption that attendees were required to demo the products they were working on.  In both instances, my assumptions were incorrect.  I have attended most of the events over the past couple years, and I’ve yet to demo anything.  That said, I’ve certainly been inspired by the stuff I’ve seen at previous events, and I look forward demoing some of my own stuff in the coming months.

It’s been interesting to witness the evolution of DemoCamp here in Guelph, too.  As far as I know, most of the events have been held at The Albion Hotel.  DemoCampGuelph9, however, is being held at the E-Bar (located above The Bookshelf; Canada’s oldest independent bookstore).  In addition to a new choice of venue, it would appear that DemoCampGuelph is rebranding under the name GuelphCamp.

As stated on the wiki, GuelphCamp “is a community of designers, developers, marketers, PR people, executives, testers, quality assurance specialists, consultants, recruiters, network administrators, business developers, venture capitalists, angel investors, policy analysts, etc. The goal is to build an open community of individuals and companies, and to provide open events to inspire and instill a sense of community in the Guelph technology scene.”

While I’ve made a number of professional contacts via DemoCamp, I’ve also been fortunate enough to develop some great friendships too.  If you are in the Guelph area on Wednesday, May 13, 2009, please consider joining us.  You can sign-up for the event via Eventbrite, and if you are interested in demoing something you are working on feel free to contact Brydon directly.  Regardless, it’s always fun to meet up with like-minded people and geek out over a few pints!  Ciao for now folks, and we hope to see you there

In the video linked to from his tweet, Matt states that he would support the removal of rel=”nofollow” for users that have earned a certain level of trust within the community. Fast forward 1:28 into the video, where he says “If a particular site does have trust in the person who is making a link, then there’s plenty of good reasons to make that link flow pagerank and take the nofollow off.”

Which brings us back to Twitter. A few months ago, Twitter implemented the use of rel=”nofollow” on profile pages. Rae Hoffman sums up the situation much better than I could, and she hits the nail on the head when she suggests that “it is time they realize that THEY are responsible for determining which of those individual pages is authoritative, trusted and legitimate enough to pass link popularity.” THEY = Google.

This is where things get rather confusing. Based on the comments Matt made in the video above, the onus is apparently on webmasters to determine which of their community members are trusted enough to create clean links that flow Pagerank. In real life however, we have numerous examples of Google pressuring companies to implement “nofollow” or face the prospect of being penalized. It would appear that we have two conflicting positions being forwarded by our friends at Google. What does this mean for webmasters and publishers? What are your thoughts?

You see, I am an internet marketer and I’ve been behaving badly.  I’m more than a little bit afraid that Google is on to me, so I’m going to come clean.  I’ve been selling links.  I’ve been selling a lot of links.  I have sold so many links that I could probably retire.  If I weren’t giving all of the revenue away to charity, that is.  Yes, you read that correctly.  I’ve been selling links that save lives.

A couple years ago, I got involved with Kiva.org.  It’s a wonderful service that has empowered thousands of individuals to rise up from from the depths of poverty and build a better future.  In essence, Kiva acts as a broker for individuals and organizations to provide microloans to entrepreneurs in third world countries.  From the Kiva website: “Kiva’s mission is  to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty. Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world.”

They are doing very important work over at Kiva, and I wanted to do what I could to support them.  As I thought about it, I realized that it was well within my means to help.  At that point I decided to commit a portion of the revenue from all of my websites to helping other entrepreneurs.  In the beginning, all of the sites were monetized with Google Adsense and weren’t making much money.  I guess that’s why it’s called webmaster welfare.  I then decided to max out the earnings of my sites by selling links, and it made a world of difference.  They started earning considerably more than I expected, and it allowed me to help others in a truly meaningful way.  So why the confession, you might ask?

Over the last couple of years, Google has taken an extremely hard stance against paid links.  They’ve threatened to remove sites that buy or sell links from their index.  They have conducted a not-so-subtle public relations campaign to repurpose the rel=”nofollow” link attribute to act as a flag for paid links.  They have openly declared war on webmasters and publishers who violate these *guidelines*, all due to the weaknesses in their algorithm exposed by paid links.

You see, links are one of the main factors in Google’s ranking algorithm.  Good links from good sites with good anchor text help websites achieve good search engine rankings.  Paid links are an issue because there is commercial intent; because they are not editorially awarded.  Google cannot make the distinction between links that are bought and sold, and links that are editorially awarded.  This is the crux of the issue, and hence the repurposing of rel=”nofollow”.  So if you buy or sell links that lack “nofollow”, you will be penalized and/or banished from Google.  This is the reason I can’t sleep at night…

I have made a commitment to help people and my ability to continue helping them is in stark contrast to Google’s self-interest.  I’m fearful that I will wake up one morning to discover that all of my sites have been banished, along with it the hopes and dreams of a generation of budding entrepreneurs.  I have decided to go public with my activities, in the hope that Google will understand that I am not a dirty, rotten spammer.  I am just trying to do my bit to help out some people in need.  Sometimes the ends justify the means, right?  Will Google actually penalize me for what I have confessed above?  It’s too soon to tell, but I would be very surprised if a company with the motto of “Don’t be evil” would undermine the prosperous future of budding entrepreneurs in the third world just to make an example out of me.  What do you think?

*Disclaimer: This post is complete and utter fiction, and I sincerely hope that Matt Cutts has a sense of humour. Happy April Fool’s Day