I Will Stand on My Head, Till my Face Turns Red, and I am Dead, So Give Me Your Bread!

Everybody who has ever taken an extension course at UC Santa Cruz is now an internet marketing expert.

“Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, be there for an all rubber burning  AAA fuel elimination grudge match between pay per click and organic search.  See the page rankings fall by the wayside under the awesome weight of our totally unique methods of search engine optimization.  WE CAN GUARANTEE YOU A NUMBER ONE (ORGANIC) PAGE RANKING WITH GOOGLE!”

Well no kidding you can guarantee that.  All you have to do is make their URL their company name, like I did with BayIntegratedMarketing.com.  If the URL is available, it is the ONLY ONE – Duh!  As long as you enter that URL exactly, it IS the only result in position one.  Thanks for the guarantee.  I guarantee that it will rain if you locate yourself in the middle of a rainstorm.

Make sure the company you are dealing with has legitimate credentials, explains to you what they will do for you in understandable language, and takes the time to meet with you to understand your business before spouting a bunch of promises.

Goodness gracious great balls-o-fire.  This is an actual e-mail that my wife got at work, not a Bill Maher parody, honestly!  Talk about snake oil salesmen:

I thought you might like to know some of the reasons why you are not getting more organic (FREE) search engine traffic for yoursite.com

1. Your home page rank is 1 , this can be improved further

2. Open directory listing is not available.

3. Your site has 1  Yahoo back links, this can be improved further.

There are many additional improvements that could be made to your website, and if you would like to learn about them, and are curious to know what our working together would involve, then I would be glad to provide you with a detailed analysis in the form of a SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO) SITE REPORT.

 To brief you about our company, in addition to SEO, we provide Social Media Optimization (SMO) and reputation management for our clients. Our efforts on behalf of our clients have brought thousands of keywords to the first page of Google organic search results with excellent conversion rates. I will be happy to provide you with a list of clients with contact details, keyword rankings, etc. Our clients will be happy to talk with you about their experience with our services.

Wow, how original.  Doesn’t sound like an unsolicited bulk email to me.

 

When someone says “Ill pray on that” does it immediately piss you off? How will that effect what you post on the internet? – An egregiously politically incorrect editorial

I was struck with this question as I watched the Jim Harbaugh interview as he accepted the head coaching position for the San Francisco 49ers.  His was a simple statement, in the midst of many others, about how he had reached his decision to be their head coach.  It was surrounded by concerns for family, his professional potential, the love for his kids at Stanford, etc. but he did say “I prayed.”

Far beyond the rational separation of church and state, this statement seems to immediately raise the ire of a great multitude of the Bill Maher “Religulous” ilk that balk at any faint mention of spirituality of any kind.  It matters not that this vague reference indicated no particular faith, let alone religion, to which or with which Mr. Harbaugh might have communicated.

I, being brought up a strict Missouri Synod Lutheran, and still able to recite the Apostles Creed, Benediction, and Doxology after not having graced the doorway of a Lutheran Church for some decades, can relate to being somewhat recalcitrant regarding some religious practices.  Having survived a myriad of atrocities committed in the name of various Gods throughout the ages, from The Crusades to the Salem witch hunts, and Rush Limbaugh to suicide bombings, it seems that people are always willing to kill and die in the name of their particular loving God.  At the very least they insist on wearing some outward display of what helps them find inner peace, and more often than not share this belief with anyone willing to hear it, or too slow to run away.

My own personal space can best be expressed as spiritual but not religious; somewhere between the teachings of Jesus (not necessarily the teachers) and the teachings of the Buddha with room for the truths that pepper all other teachings.  Those truths are all there, but far too often clouded by the egoic rantings of those who would seek to turn them into fear for some sort of personal gain.

Isn’t it fears after all that keep us all separate?  Isn’t that what drives us all to compete rather than cooperate?  Isn’t it that which makes us rile when we are afraid that someone might be ready to proselytize by the mere mention of the word pray?  He didn’t, after all, have scriptures written in his eye black like Tim Tebow formerly of the Florida Gators.

Isn’t, after all, religion nothing more than man’s impossibly feeble attempt to explain the unexplainable?

In my opinion, man’s supposed dominion over this planet can only survive to the extent that we can view each other’s commonality as part of the great “all that is” and seek ways that we can help; to “do the next right thing.”  We cannot burn fossil fuels indefinitely without impact.  We cannot blindly consume resources without impacting the rain forests from which they are harvested.  We cannot “become an internet millionaire” without first paying forward some good honest content and hard work without consequences.

Our internet is one of the greatest experiments of man beyond Malthus.  It is largely unchecked, self policed, organic, and fertile.  Take the example of Wikipedia;  Sure there are some inaccuracies in the billions of references it posts, but we now have a free database of information that dwarfs the totality of all encyclopedias written before it.

Be responsible for what you post.  Take care.  It is our cyber-world and your opportunity.  Think before you post, and if necessary, you can pray on it.