A few years ago I got the pleasure of going toe to toe with an internet SEO Guru and when he was put in his place he threatened legal action for stealing his serps.. I’m convinced that every year we need one or two of these fabulous people to come forward with their misconceptions, and self imposed guru status, to show us all just how wrong we are.. Well, at least that is their plan.. Unfortunately their plans seldom go as, well, planned..

Fortunately it wasn’t me that they found this time, they found my friend Dave Snyder. And his special buddy is none other than the SEO Champion. How cool is that?? An honest to goodness champion!!

If you want a good laugh at just how committed some people are to what they believe in, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, you’ll enjoy the post about the SEO Champion.

Wow, look at all the categories this one drops in to.

Just a quick note to let the loyal readership, all three of you, that I’ve decided to expand my company again and branch out from a single customer jeweler / web guy and hang out my developer shingle again..

Large Orange Pop is the name of my new internet marketing company and will be a sub division of SG Design Studio.. I’ll be offering internet market help, SEO, and web development as appropriate and needed.. While I have no real intention to stop “doing the jewelry thing” I find I miss the fun of helping build up a new business online and look forward to working 90 hours a week again.. Well, maybe not that last part so much..

I expect the marketing / SEO parts of this website to be absorbed in to LOP shortly, and hopefully this site will go back to being a little more fun with some geek stuff and generic weirdness..

I’m off to get my intravenous caffeine port hooked up -

I suppose that a necessary evil of ranking well is hunting out links for your website.. And with more and more webmasters getting very tight with the link you end up forced in to looking more and more at link directories.. But how to find decent directories to use??

I started a new directory of directories the way they should be done the other day at DirectoryRecap.. The directories are grouped by type and they have a rating system to allow people to rank them in a 5 star system.. Also included is the PR and Alexa rankings of each directory number of inbound links and more.. All updated roughly weekly, of course.. Between the listings and the ratings it can be a pretty straight forward process to find the good directories to submit to..

On top of that, we are also providing the entire directory listing, broken down in to niches and categories in a DigiXMas format.. You can download the list from us and dump it straight in to digi for doing your link submissions.. How much easier can we make it??

I also found a decent Deep Link Directory as well.. It’s run by a friend of mine so it wasn’t very hard to find.. It’s not much right now, but the deep links are cheap and I know that he is putting a lot of effort in to it to make it a useful resource.. For $2 it’s kind of hard to complain in either case..

If you know of any other good link building resources feel free to let me know without being a spam whore about it..

Ok, so I may not be completely up to speed on all things Wordpress so a lot of people already know about and use this great title tool.. But I just discovered it and wanted to share the love a little more..

The SEO Title Tag plugin for Wordpress allows you to override the default titles for pages and posts, and allows you to have decent titles on your pages.. Best of all it can be used to strip the blog name from the individual posts and pages allowing for a much cleaner title..

SEO Title Tag for Wordpress

I am constantly seeing articles and blog posts from internet marketers touting the discovery of being friendly online for sales. Advice on how to join a community and be active, for sales. Or simply not being rude, for sales. Why is this news?

There are huge numbers of us that have been, and continue to be, active members of all sorts of online communities, not just because we happen to get a few sales, and maybe a few links, but because we actually enjoy hanging out with the people there. I’m an active member of several online jewelry communities. (Bangles and Brides - Better than Diamond - etc.) I’m actually friends with quite a few people there. And as a nice side effect, some of them actually buy jewelry from me.

But I didn’t go in there hoping to sell them something. I went in there to share what I know, and talk about something that I enjoy doing. To do otherwise is simply using those people to try to make a buck. And, big surprise here, it’s easy to spot when it does happen. I don’t care how subtle you think you are, when you come in to a community with the intent of whoring yourself or your product, it is spotted and the hidden part of the community sees you for what you are, a common shill. And just about any chance you had of selling your product is reduced to almost nothing.

And believe me, we do talk about you and spread the word.

So if you want to join a community, do it. But do it for the right reasons. Go in with the intent to share your knowledge and help others. To share your experiences and your hobbies. Not to try to separate the members from their cash, or their linkjuice. It just makes you a dirty whore.

I finally managed to get a site built on Bad-SEO.com.. I’ve been sitting on the domain for a while and just never quite got around to doing anything with it.. It now has a pligg interface and freely welcomes any and all harassment, flaming, and general torture of those that claim to be SEOs but really don’t have a clue..

Come, have fun..

SEO Professional - 72%

Are you an SEO Expert?

Not bad for someone that follows SEO as a hobby and makes his living making jewelry..

With the recent release of Windows Vista a whole new world of potential, preinstalled, customers has been opened up.. The Vista sidebar gadget is an easy to install program that resides on the desktop and provides some small service to the user.. In some cases it may be a small program, an RSS feed, even an interface to a useful tool..

We decided to give it a run ourselves and hired the guys over at Gadget Spark to create an RSS feed gadget that pulls our Tip of the Day wedding and jewelry tips from bangles and brides.. So far we have been very happy with the results.. Since it was uploaded at the microsoft gadget site 24 hours ago we’ve had it downloaded and installed right at 200 times.. And it is driving traffic.. Our jewelry forums have seen more guests than ever.. Now if we can just convince them to sign up and join the community.. .. ..