I’ve never been an early-adopter of new technology, but when I first saw images and info on the iPhone when it was first announced, it was love at first sight. I was too scared to get it right away as it was very much untested, so I figured I’d wait awhile to see how those who first got it liked it. By most accounts, it appears that people love it!

Still, I wasn’t in a hurry to get one, as I’m never very far from my laptop anyway. But a few things happened to spur me into action and let me know that the time was right. The first was that my husband’s cellphone bit the dust. He doesn’t use his very much, but it comes in handy so he really does need to have one. Since my daughter Corie uses hers a ton and is always complaining that hers doesn’t work great, we figured she could give him hers and she could get a new one as his was ripe for an upgrade from ATT and hers wasn’t. However, when she went to buy a new one, it appeared that due to Cingular changing back into ATT and our account being a Family plan, we were going to have to all upgrade to new phones. (We just did that last time when ATT turned into Cingular!) That sounded like way more trouble than it was worth, especially because one of our phones is in Hawaii with my daughter Jamie.

So I thought, hmm…if I have to upgrade phones anyway, it would be silly for me to get something other than the iPhone that I was eventually going to get anyway. Plus, I thought it might be possible to keep our current plan and not have to switch all our phones if I got the iPhone as it works somewhat differently than their usual phones. (I called them and this appears to be the case.) But, the other thing that told me the time was right was when I read that the price came down $200! Between that and everything else, there was just no way I couldn’t get one!

Corie’s not thrilled that she won’t be getting a new phone, and my husband isn’t too thrilled that he won’t have a flip phone, but both of them can live with it for now. And meanwhile, I’M GETTING AN iPHONE!!!

It still feels like somewhat of a frivolous purchase to me, as I rarely buy anything just because I like it or want to (other than my Mini Cooper!).  But what the heck?  It’s only $20 more a month and a business expense.  Plus, I believe I may be able to cancel my ATT wireless card that I use for my laptop once I have the iPhone, and that’s about $60 per month.  So in the end, I will actually be saving myself money.

My sister Beth, CEO and President of a niche HR Software Company, Nobscot, Corp. is on a mentor-me-meg-mission! She didn’t tell me about this, I just stumbled upon it when reading her blog today.

But I do think it’s a cool idea, and I needed to post to my blog here at some point in 2007 anyway!

Beth is experimenting with a variety of social media during ther quest, and is going to be chronicaling it on her blog.

So if you know Meg or are Meg, or just want to help get the word out, please contact me or Beth immediately!

I didn’t think that there would be anything to say that you haven’t already heard since I generally tell all in my newsletter, and have been for years. But I did manage to come up with a few tidbits you may not know.

So without further ado, here are 5 facts you didn’t (hopefully) know about me:

1. I’m not a copywriter, nor have I ever been one. For some reason, people think I am, so I just wanted to clear that one up — again! (Copywriting is way too hard for me.)

2. I’m a moderator at Steve Pavlina’s forum in the Psychic and Paranormal category.

3. I collect toads. Stuffed ones, plastic ones, glass ones, etc. (Most are actually frogs, but I pretend that they’re toads.) Oh, and they have names too, but sometimes I forget who’s who!

4. Lately, I seem to attract lawyers into my life. It’s not as bad as it sounds! You probably already know that my husband is a lawyer, but over the past few months it seems that everywhere I turn and every email I open up is from a lawyer. Thankfully, only a couple of them are ones I’ve had to pay. Some even pay me! Plus, my daughter is probably going to go to law school when she graduates college, and her boyfriend is applying right now to law school, so I suspect I’ll be surrounded by lawyers for quite some time!

5. I’m so bad at making plans that my kids never had any birthday parties (or even friends come over when they were little) unless they planned it for themselves. Which basically meant that only my oldest who is a go-getter, had any birthday parties!

That’s it. Nothing very exciting here!

Seems that everyone and their brother is already tagged, but I found a few untagged bloggers. Take it away Erin Pavlina, Randy Cullom, Shel Horowitz, Laura Young and Gurtie. Let us know 5 things we didn’t know about you!

1. Dinner is burned because she’s been running back and forth between the computer and the stove, but got wrapped up in a very “important” forum post about cloaking.
2. The entire house is woken up at midnight by the sounds of her laughing hysterically on MSN messenger with her other SEO women friends.
3. You miss your school bus because SEO Mom was too busy deleting the morning spam to get you to the bus stop on time.
4. She pays friends and relatives to chauffeur you to your various school activities so she doesn’t have to leave her computer for more than 10 mins. at a time.
5. Your friends think she’s cool because she talks on IM all day like they do, and she is also up at all hours of the night.
6. She’s always saying, “If you work hard in school, one day you may grow up to run a Search Engine!”
7. She insists her friends provide her with links in exchange for her advice.
8. You come home from a hard day at the office and want to go out for a drink with your SEO wife, but she’s still in the same sweats from 2 days ago and it would take her way too long to get cleaned up to go out.
9. She spends more time in bed with her laptop than in bed with you.
10. When you go out to eat, she mentions that a restaurant review would make great content.
11. Instead of calling your name when you’re having sex, she calls out “Take me to #1 Google!”
12. When she goes away to speak at a conference, she puts a cardboard cutout of herself at her computer chair, and nobody notices she’s gone until day 3 when her husband can’t find his keys.

[Special thanks to Scottie for some help on a few of these when I got stuck with only 7 done!]

I’m used to most online SEO articles being very hard to read because they’re not written by professional writers. But, for some crazy reason, I was astonished to see the same poor quality writing from an actual magazine! I would certainly expect a glossy magazine to have some sort of editing process before they publish any articles, but apparently they don’t.

I’m not even talking about the content of the articles being poor. The content may or may not have been good — I’ll never know, because I couldn’t read them!

Has the Internet by its very nature of allowing anyone and everyone to become a “writer” killed good writing?

I’m starting to wonder.

1. Select interesting projects. Favor projects I enjoy implementing vs. only looking to the end result.
2. Add variety. Break up long stretches of repetitive work. Work in different locations. Take field trips.
3. Improve balance. Blend solo time with social time. Balance physical work with mental work.
4. Create a pleasing work environment. Relaxify my workspace so I enjoy spending time there.
5. Involve others. Find a way to get friends involved. Form a mastermind group. Involve my wife.
6. Solve problems creatively. Favor creative off-the-wall methods when the obvious solution is too dull or tedious.
7. Enjoy plenty of downtime. Keep motivation high by avoiding overwork. Take vacations. Enjoy rewards for achieving mini-milestones.
8. Avoid the unpleasant. If a step can’t be done enjoyably, find a way to delegate, outsource, or eliminate it.
9. Use intention-manifestation. Focus intentions to gain assistance from the Law of Attraction.
10. Design for flexibility. Allow daily choice making where order of task completion isn’t critical.

I can’t say that I do everything exactly as he lists here, but it’s very much inline with my philosophy, and it’s cool to know that I’m not the only one who manages to get a lot of things done while still avoiding the unpleasant work that I dislike!

Tim got it right away, and I could see the wheels turning in his head as he thought about it and put it all together with what he already knew. I said something to the effect that he could now go back and explain it to all the other kids who probably didn’t get it either. He just laughed and said that most of them didn’t really care if they understood it or not, they were just happy to just “learn it” and be done with it. Which of course is fairly typical of most kids.

It made me laugh, because we see the same thing in SEO also. Everyone wants you to simply tell them how to do it, but half the time they never understand the reasons why they’re doing it.

Build links. Put keywords in Title tags. Create “great content.” But why? Because that’s what Google’s “guidelines” say? Bah. That’s one of the reasons I tell people never to even look at Google’s guidelines. They don’t teach you how to optimize, and they especially don’t explain to you why you’re optimizing in the first place, nor why you need to do what you need to do.

I’ve always said that the best SEOs need to think like a search engine (or search engineer).

What are search engines looking for?

• Search engines are not looking for the pages that use a keyword a specific number of times.
• Search engines are not looking for the pages that have 250 words.
• Search engines are not looking for the sites with the most number of pages.
• Search engines are not looking for the sites that are the most tightly “themed.

And the list goes on and on.

What search engines are actually looking for is this:

Search engines are looking for the pages that best satisfy that which the person typing words into the search box is looking for.

Sounds simple enough, but for some reason it’s a concept that is extremely hard for many people to grasp. However, once you come to grips with what that means and you really understand it, you’ll know exactly what SEO is and how to use it to bring targeted visitors to your site. You’ll never worry about keyword density, how many words you have on your page, and all those other old SEO wive’s tale things people are so fond of talking about.

Unfortunately, it’s not an easy concept to explain to people.  Let me know if you want me to try to clarify it further for you!

They sent us some preliminary info about their goals and what they were looking for with an SEO company, and I immediately saw a few red flags shoot up. The main thing that I saw as a potential problem was that they were mostly interested in ranking highly for one or two one-word keywords that were important to them. They know their space, and they do a lot of PPC and they know for a fact that these particular general keywords are great converters for them.

Their CEO had mandated that they become #1 for those keyword phrases, and now it was up to these in-house website folks to make it happen one way or another.

Considering the company and what they did, I am quite sure I could have helped them achieve those goals, plus many, many more. But, something inside me wouldn’t allow me to seriously consider the job knowing that the real goal was simply to obtain #1 rankings for those couple of individual keywords. Even though I was confident that we’d certainly get them to top 5 pretty easily with a redesign and good optimization (assuming they implemented things as we recommended them) I just couldn’t do it.

It was a strange one, that’s for sure. That wasn’t the only reason we bowed out…it was also partly because I have my seminar this week and wouldn’t have the time to really invest enough time into a good enough proposal, and they were on a fast track to choose a company. (I don’t like being rushed on these things either.) But, we certainly could have worked around that aspect if I felt more comfortable with the goals.

But I didn’t, so we decided to bow out.

Still seems weird though, becuase I really would have liked this one. I had it all figured out in my head exactly what to do, and I know it would have worked. Oh well…their loss. I don’t blame the guys we talked to, they were just stuck measuring things the way their CEO said they had to measure it, but I do wish we could have perhaps educated the CEO a bit.

I’ve been in SEO for what, like 10 - 12 years now, and writing about it for at least 6 or 7. Sure, I have been very outspoken about working with the search engines as opposed to against them in a way that makes the Internet a better place for everyone. And yes, I’ve said some pretty nasty things about search engine spammers over the years. I make no bones about the fact that I’m not a big fan of spamming the engines as I think it ruins them for everyone who is a searcher.

But it’s one thing to be a practitioner and teacher of best SEO practices, and another to be some kind of crazy pointy white hat supremicist zealot. Anybody who actually reads what I write, truly reads it, would know that I do not tout the lame white hat guinea pig SEO that a lot of others in our industry promote, and I never have. I’ve stated quite a few times that defining search engine spam is easy. All search engine spam is, is simply the act of deceiving a search engine into ranking your site when it wouldn’t otherwise rank it. Basically, using tricks to make the engines think something about the site that isn’t actually true.

That’s it. It really is that black and white, and there are very few shades of gray. With that logic, a ton of stuff that some white hatters call spam, is not spam at all in my opinion. Using perfectly legitimate coding techniques for the purpose they were intended to be used, will never be considered spam. But using legitmate coding techniques to deceive the engines is a different ballgame.

Tonight I read a post at Threadwatch from RCJordan in reference to me, that was completely and utterly false. Obviously, RC has never actually read what I have written for years, but instead has probably read what others have written that I’ve written. (Did I lose ya there?) If it were just this one instance with this one person, I would just shrug it off. But, lately, I seem to get this sort of thing a lot.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve branched out where I post now, so I’m reaching a wider audience of people who never actually read what I wrote, but what they thought I wrote. Even Rand recently seemed to have his socks knocked off by something I posted in my forum, and it wasn’t anything I haven’t been saying for years.

What do I have to do to shed this crazy image some people have of me? How much more can I write and how much more precise do I have to be with my writing so that it’s perfectly clear where I stand on all things SEO?

Let’s get a few things straight with what I believe and don’t believe about SEO and spam, since there are still a whole lot of people out there who seem to think that I believe a whole lot of crap that I don’t believe:

1. I don’t believe that “good” code, or code that validates to some arbitrary specifications has anything to do with SEO, nor will it have any effect (good or bad) on your rankings. I personally wouldn’t know good code if it bit me in the ass, as you can tell by looking at pretty much any of my sites.
2. I don’t believe that one should optimize for keyword phrases that are easy to get ranked for, but have very few actual searches. (Bah Humbug to the long tail.) If you’re gonna optimize, optimize for keyword phrases that will bring you real traffic. Nothing wrong with covering your bases with the 4 and 5 word phrases, but if that’s the core of your SEO, well…you suck. (It’s what I have been calling guinea pig SEO for many years.)
3. There’s nothing wrong with buying links. Does it surprise you to hear me say that? If so, go to the back of the class, because I’ve certainly never said there was anything wrong with it. It’s ADVERTISING…duh.
4. I don’t believe that my way of SEO is the only way. I just know it works, if you have the time and inclination to learn it and try it out for yourself.
5. I’ve never felt that “good content” is all anyone ever needs to have a successful website.
6. I’m not now, nor have I ever been a copywriter — SEO or otherwise. That’s waaaaaaay too hard for me.
7. I believe in the separation of SEO and search engines just as I believe in separation of church and state. I don’t report sites, and I don’t ask for favors from search engine reps. In fact, I believe that a lot of what search engine reps tell us publicly is propaganda through and through. It’s what their ideal would be, but not what’s happening at the moment.
8. I don’t think all search engine spammers are scum, nor do I think all “white hat” SEOs are ethical. In fact, I’ve seen the opposite to be the case far too many times. I try not to judge people at all, but when I do, I do it based on merit. I always assume people are basically good until they prove otherwise.

I could probably go on forever, but that’s enough for now. If any of those things surprised you, well then you really just never knew me at all!

According to Steve:

“Social drag is what happens when you undergo a significant personal shift, yet everyone around you still treats you the same.”

For many years, my online persona and my business persona have not at all meshed with my real life social persona. Online in forums and in my newsletter and articles, as well as with most clients, I seem to have this personality that is “bigger than life.” Yet in real life, especially with family, I have anything but a big personality.

I grew up very quiet and shy, and still prefer to stay fairly quiet in most group settings. It’s always seemed to me that people are always vying with each other to see who gets to talk the most, yet very often nobody is actually listening to anyone else. I’ve never wanted to compete for that sort of “non-attention” so I would just sit quietly and watch the rest of them duke it out. I never felt that I had much to add to the conversation anyway, as most people talk about stuff that I wasn’t very interested in (e.g., politics, sports, their latest medical procedure, etc.).

Expressing my true self online for the past 15 years or so in one form or another, has taught me about who I am as a person. I now realize that I do have interesting things to say, and that other people actually can learn from me. Speaking at conferences and becoming friends with so many people who only knew the online side of my personality, has enabled me to carry over some of that big personality to my real life. Even though I still prefer to be fairly quiet in social situations, I can and do speak up more if I feel I can add something to the conversation. But more importantly, I have a new found confidence that family members who I don’t see all that much have no idea about.

Take the purchase of my new bright red Mini Cooper. Those who know my SEO persona see it as a perfect fit for my personality. My Search Creative business partner has told me as much, and she knows me from real life, although in a business sense. Yet, I’m sure some family members (especially my husband’s family) have to feel like there’s a bit of a disconnect there! So my social drag experience had to do with my husband’s family. For the past few years, one of his aunts has been having a monthly get together so that the family doesn’t grow too far a part. It’s been really great, because none of us would make the time to do that otherwise. The latest one was yesterday, and I was wearing a new shirt which had a martini glass embedded in rhinestones on it that I had purchased before the last SES conference in NYC. When I wore it in NYC during my off hours at the conference, it didn’t really get any comments other than “cute shirt!”

Apparently, to my husband’s family, however, it was out of character. I got comments such as “Wow, Jill, you’ve changed! Is this the new you to go along with your new Mini? That shirt isn’t like you at all.” I was somewhat taken aback as I wasn’t expecting that reaction, and simply said, “I guess you just don’t know me then!”