Discrimination Protest Puts San Francisco 49er Fan Spirit Into Question
Ever since Friday’s preseason NFL game featuring the San Francisco 49ers versus the Green Bay Packers, I’ve been hesitant to post to social media with the usual smack talking enthusiasm I normally have when taunting my fellow football maniacs. There’s been more attention paid to what happened on the bench than what occurred during the game as Colin Kaepernick decided to sit out the National Anthem in protest of police shootings and discrimination. His actions had a lot of negative repercussions that I wasn’t prepared to deal as the backlash took social media by storm and left me conflicted on whether or not I could still unabashedly support my favorite football team. But as I thought it through this past week, and began to gather my thoughts as I chimed in on a few posts discussing the issue, I have finally come to terms with the situation.
Does your branding effort convey more than one meaning? While “Release On Demand” is a clever way to state your company sends out press release on demand, it also implies something else entirely for those receiving a steady stream of male enhancement spam.
A few months ago I signed up to receive emails from a company called Virtual Press Office (VPO) to determine if they would have any value for my clients. VPO distributes press releases on their site and sends out emails with links to the press releases. After a little research on my own, I had determined there were more beneficial resources at my disposal, and never gave them another thought, especially after Continue reading A Case Of Mistaken Branding→
SEO: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”
The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated, SEO is alive and well.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had conversations with three different friends, each indicating that they had heard or thought SEO was dead. Wow! Nothing could be farther from the truth. With Google constantly updating its algorithm on a nearly daily basis, your SEO plan is more important than ever.
When I started in SEO, many viewed it as some sort of snake oil business, and in many instances they were right. Unscrupulous SEO hawkers were touting wins on long tail terms that were easily won because no one was looking for them, and provided little benefit to their clients. My association with them always left me feeling like I needed to take a shower with bleach and a power washer when I got home, so I always walked the straight and narrow. But the times they are a changin’, and for the better. SEO that works is now 100% legitimate and alive and well.
I believe the misconception regarding the demise of SEO is that Google has cracked down on those gaming the system, something that Google has frowned on from the very beginning. So my friends are right, link farms, crappy SEO gobbledygook content, bogus authorship and a host of other “Black Hat” SEO “tricks” have all found a one way ticket to the search results mortuary. But REAL honest to goodness SEO efforts are still vital to any business with a presence on the World Wide Web. They key to those honest efforts? The same thing I have always told my clients since day one: “Content is King.”
SEO is Alive and Well
The truth is, that although Black Hat SEO is dead (good riddance), real SEO is alive and well, and will be more competitive than ever now. No longer able to cheat the system, everyone will be on the same level playing field. Before it was enough to have good content, because the bad guys were focused on cheating, so your good content stood out from their crap. Now however, everyone is focused on good content, so a good piece of content alone is no longer enough. Now you need a content strategy.
What’s a content strategy? Well, while the bad guys scramble to play catch up in the legitimate SEO world and are focused on trying to win keywords with single pieces of content, you should be focused on a long term strategy focused on terms that are important to your business. These should be terms that make sense for your business, and naturally occur in your content plan over the course of several months. And it’s not just about the quality and readability of the content either. It needs to be unique, sharable content that will gain traction on social media and emphasize to Google and the other search engines its importance, giving each piece of content the real authority it needs to obtain proper weight when being considered for ranking position in the SERPs (search Engine Results Pages).
The bottom line is, if you have real, valuable content that provides a benefit to those who consume it, you don’t need a link farm, or to game the system. The linking will occur naturally. Where one piece of content once did the job, and may still momentarily gain you a jump in rankings, a plan of continuous content that reinforces the terms that are valuable to your company will give you the staying power needed to remain relevant and retain or make gains in your rankings with each crawl of your site, and Google algorithm change. Singular pieces of content may have been king, but to be a king is no longer enough; a content strategy is a demi-god.
Real content for real people is where the game is played now. Crafting good content, that is relevant, current, and engaging and naturally focusing it toward the conquests you want to win long term takes planning, coordination with your social media outlets, and timing it with your other marketing strategies and promotional efforts.
I’ve always taken pride in the fact that through valuable content I could provide my clients with wins for terms that mattered and that I brought some legitimacy to a trade often thought of as shady and unscrupulous. With the death of black hat SEO, the entire industry must be legitimate now or you risk being left behind, or worse, delisted. So this isn’t the death of SEO, it’s the dawn of a new age. A time where all the legitimate SEO strategists can stand tall, and finally come out from under the shadows of their black hat predecessors. So technically, my friends are right. SEO as they knew it, is dead. But real SEO is alive and well, and now more important than ever.
So, let the bells ring. SEO is dead! Long live SEO!
Avast! Ye scurvy scum! It’s “Talk Like A Pirate Day!” If ye can’t be dialecting like a true prince of pillaging, prepare to be boarded, have yer women stolen and your treasure ravaged before ye are made to walk the plank and yer miserable soul spends the rest of eternity swabbing the decks an’ planning bad Monkees reunions with that cur Davy Jones!
To avoid this fate, click on the link below and get your “Yar!” on and ditch that sissified sniveling excuse of a name for one your feller bilge rats will respect and fear… or have yer throat cut in yer sleep. Aye, the choice is yers, but choose wisely, Sleepy Jean, or you’ll find yer a Steppin’ Stone at the bottom of the sea.
A pirate’s life isn’t easy; it takes a tough person. That’s okay with you, though, since you a tough person. You have the good fortune of having a good name, since Rackham (pronounced RACKem, not rack-ham) is one of the coolest sounding surnames for a pirate. Arr!
Over the last few weeks, you may have noticed some new additions joining the white rabbits inhabiting Civic Center Park in Newport Beach, CA. It turns out that what looked like some origami bears raiding a trash can along MacArthur Blvd. and a colorful tiki doll watching the sun go down in the west are part of nine new sculptures scattered on display throughout Civic Center Park that made their Grand Opening debut on Saturday, September 13, 2014. A tenth sculpture is set to join the exhibit in 2015. Continue reading New Sculptures at Civic Center Park in Newport Beach→
Knee Defender, a device designed to save knees from reclining seats, makes hogs and jackasses out of cattle.
Just because you are flying coach and have been herded aboard your plane and crowded in like cattle, doesn’t mean you need to act like a hog. It’s not pleasant for any of us: the battle over the arm rests, staking your turf in the overhead bins, and being continually stepped on or having to get up to let those with weaker bladders make multiple trips to the bathroom during your two hour flight are just a few of the things we all contend with. But common courtesy Continue reading Knee Defender: Ban or Barn?→
I really like night time photography. Each photo takes on a quality all its own. But I especially like shooting old cars in historical districts where the buildings provide an era appropriate photo backdrop. The Temecula Rod Run has long been a favorite car show for me for this very reason, with Friday nights being my top choice for taking photos. Here are some of my favorite photos and cars from the 2014 Temecula Rod Run.
July 4th marked our final day in Yellowstone National Park. While we had made it out to see Old Faithful earlier in the week, we too a break from seeing geysers to make sure we saw the rest of the park and the Grand Tetons. Now that we had “glimpsed it all,” we headed back to cover what we missed in the Old Faithful area. A week is just not enough time to do Yellowstone, the world’s first national park, justice.
So we had to skip July 2nd and go straight to July 3rd as a cold I had been battling since Sunday finally got the better of me and left me spending the day in bed. At the time, I thought nothing is more painful than having to take a sick day while on vacation! Then while doing some fact checking , I stumbled across this story that occurred yesterday: “Child, 8, Falls to Death in Yellowstone Canyon.” I’d gladly spend my whole vacation sick rather than have a family have to end their vacation like that. My condolences to the family. With much less enthusiasm than I have had in my other posts, here are my pics that include the area where the girl fell.
On this leg of the journey we cut across the middle of the park on Norris Canyon Road and then headed south on the Grand Loop to the Grand Canyone of the Yellowstone to start our day. We then made our way around the Grand loop counterclockwise and out to the north gate to end our day with dinner in Gardiner, MT.
The below gallery contains the best images captured on our fourth day in Yellowstone National Park. The slideshow should start automatically, if you see an image you like, you can mouse over it to show the parts that don’t display in the viewer, or you can click on it and the full image will pop up. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed shooting them.
For today’s post, we take a break from Yellowstone, and venture southeast from the world’s first national park, and head to Grand Tetons National Park. We drove south along U.S. 191, stopping for photo opps along the way until we reached Jackson, WY.
The below gallery contains the best images from our visit. The slideshow should start automatically, if you see an image you like, you can mouse over it to show the parts that don’t display in the viewer, or you can click on it and the full image will pop up. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed shooting them.
