HOW YOUR LINKS ARE LIKE THE MARX BROTHERS

If you have Turner Classic Movies on your cable package, you have probably seen at least one Marx Brothers movie in your life. I hope it’s more. But in their heyday, the Marxes -- Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo – were extremely popular vaudeville stars who made their way into movies – some great, some average and a stinker or two.

The other day, I was watching Duck Soup – one of their best –and it suddenly hit me how easily you can compare the Marx Brothers’ on-camera personalities to your link building strategy . Check it out:

Groucho links: If you know any Marx Brother at all, it’s Groucho – the wisecracking, loud, “look at me” type that everybody can’t get enough of. Groucho can be funny at your expense, and you’ll come back for more, because you can’t wait to see what he’s going to say next, and you can’t wait to tell everybody else about it. Clearly, Groucho is link bait. A little stunning, very off-the-wall, of-the-moment and not afraid to tick a few people off. And you’ll send the link to everybody you know, if they don’t link to it first.

Chico links: By default, Chico had the second largest amount of lines in the movies (because Harpo didn’t talk), and was frequently seen as a smooth talker – usually trying to get into somebody’s good graces by charming the heck out of them, or just budging in until he got what he wanted. Chico is the perfect example of how most people attract one-way links to their site – explain why you’re so special and keep at it until they bite .


Harpo links: Harpo, as I mentioned, never said anything on camera. (He could talk in real life.) His effectiveness relied upon physical comedy. As a result, his silence was an asset. His jokes and actions were perfect filler that linked dialogue and even scenes together. Since he didn’t speak, Harpo could pop up at any second as needed support. Which is exactly what links from directories and press releases provide for your link building strategy -- quiet, dependable link support to your site.

Zeppo links: The fourth Marx Brother, Zeppo, left the group after the first five films because, while he was apparently very funny in person, his older brothers were Groucho, Chico and Harpo.
However, as many a film critic has said, Zeppo in his plainness added a certain something to the party that was missing after he left. He was pure bottom support, which usually meant appearing as a lowly assistant to big brother Groucho. He wrote messages for him. He explained Groucho to others. He told everyone whatever he could about Groucho – here he comes, there he goes, etc. In link building terminologies, Zeppo was a silo. Silo Marx, spreading the word as widely and unassumingly as possible.

So which Marx Brothers dominate your link building strategy? Are you the link bait-spewing Groucho, the patient yet persistent Chico, the quiet yet dependable Harpo or the supportive, don’t-mind-me, just-doin’-my-job Zeppo? Hopefully you have a bit of all of them. (And if you can come up with an analogy for Gummo Marx, the brother who never made a movie, I’m all ears.)
And now, hello, I must be going.

"I QUIT. BUT NOT TOTALLY."

Best unintentionally funny article I've read in a while:

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/189813/why_im_dropping_google.html

That's really good, guy. I'm swearing off drugs, except for the ones I HAVE to use because I can't quit drugs.

Nice.

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I'm making a determined attempt to start writing regularly here. Now that I know the business a bit better. Here's two times in one week! Wow!

TT

WHAT'S NEXT -- KNOWING WHAT YOU'RE WEARING?

Google's personalized search has a lot of people's panties in a ringer--now that the search giant has announced that they're customizing EVERYBODY's search experience with their Personalized Search.

Of course, you have a lot of paranoid paintball playing computer nerd types who think everything is a government conspiracy who exercised their option to turn personalized search off, amid the usual "nobody's gonna tell me" speeches and thinly veiled threats to shoot anyone who doesn't support the second amendment. (Trust me, it all goes together. Just go to a science fiction convention.)

Normal thinking people, however, have greeted the news of personalized search much as I suspected you (and I know I) did: Who gives a fuck? If I search for a pizza parlor, I WANT to see pizza parlors near me, and not some jackoff in Omaha who figured out how to buck the Google system.

The more I work in this business the more amazed I am at the geek-vs.-the-world gap. Whenever the SLIGHTEST move is made by Google, SEO companies all over the world shit a brick and start burning down the building to collect on their insurance. But what I'm finding is that SEO is a lot like politics: Extremists make all the noise, and nothing much happens one way or the other.

Personalized search isn't going to hurt SEO; it's just going to make the job more interesting, and as a result, BETTER. Isn't that what most SEO experts want?

TT

GOOGLE CONFIRMS IT: KEYWORDS ARE KAPUT

Well, once again Google has publicly announced something that most of the computer savvy world had figured out or suspected already: When the bots are trying to determine your search ranking, they're not looking at your Keyword Meta Tags. Haven't for awhile.

So all that time you spent intricately debating over keyword strings is for naught. For now.

This isn't surprising. It's like when you're a kid and your mother said "If you can't play nice, I'm taking your ball away." Except here, a bunch of keyword stuffers ruined the playing field for everybody. So Google took the relevance away.

Of course, when you dominate 90% of the playing field, you can make people follow your rules or go home.

TT

PRETTY SOON WE CAN ALL JUST STAY HOME

I am just as stoked about all the things computers can do as the next guy, but I came across this "PR Release" (read: New Article Thinly Hiding A Product Plug). It appears to be a piece of software that works with Google Analyitics and tells you, with the click of a button, what's wrong with your site.

If you want a second opinion, does it say, "Well, then you're ugly, too!"?

http://www.sbwire.com/news/view/31249

For an extra laugh, check out this company's homepage; what are you selling, people???

http://www.dizzyheights.com/

For more on the product, skip the homepage and go here.

http://www.analyticsseo.com

TT

THE LONGER I'M IN THIS BUSINESS...

Coming from a marketing and advertising background, there are obviously many similarities in what I do here in this creative marketing job. But there are a lot of differences, as well.

Perhaps the biggestt hing I had to get over was the idea that there is no difference creatively between marketing a company on line vs. in print or on TV.

Wrong.

On the internet, cleverness must always take a backseat to getting the message out instantly. Sometimes it gets pushed out of the car altogether. That's why I found this post from August 21 at http://www.seobook.com/blog so interesting. Copy, paste and read.

TT

OKAY, I THINK I'M READY TO START THIS FOR REAL

Learning the "ropes" of what this company does has been one daily discovery after another. After nearly 30 years in marketing and advertising, being a part of the marketing department for what was essentially a link-buying service exclusively was obviously going to take some time to get used to.

So for those of you who have no idea what a link-building service is, let me catch you up.

If you have a business, you probably have a website. You probably want people to find your website on line, and you probably want people to decide to use your products and services.

However, if you put up a shingle on the internet today, chances are your website will be competing with thousands of other businesses just like yours for page rank. Page rank is just what it sounds like; it's where you "rank" on the search engine lists.

For example, if you start a nude lawnmowing service in Minneapolis, you will have to compete with what I'm sure are thousdands of other nude lawnmowing services in Minneapolis and the surrounding area. If there are more than 10, your new business is not going to magically appear on the first page of Google. And most people don't go past page one or two on a Google search.

That's why you need link building. Basically, link building is coming up with creative ways to post links to your site from other pages. There are lots of ways to do that, and some are not very ethical. (We don't utilize those "black hat" techniques at this company, because Google is a smart robot and knows how to disqualify such things.)

Anyway, this company here is really good at link building. So good in fact, that customers started to ask whether the company did other things, like Landing Page Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, etc. Until March, that answer was "no, but we ought to."

Well, now this company has a marketing department to do all these things. There are four of us. Since this company had never had "real marketing types" in the office before, we had to get over the initial looks of suspicion and obvious glares from the sales department that said, "Why are THOSE people having so much fun back there in the corner?" But here we are.

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Interesting article today on the effectiveness of various types of links.

To explain (this is the kind of stuff ol' ignorant me is learning every single day here): "Organic" links refer to the search results you get that are not paid for on Google. In other words, the big list down the left hand side (the ones you have to build links in order to improve your ranking). PPC links stands for Pay-Per-Click. These are paid ads that run across the top of the search and down the right column.

You may now read the article with no problem. I think.

More in a few days.

TT