Has anyone ever taken a job that was offered to them through spam emails?

If you are an SEO and would like to work in an SEO firm (sidebar: I do not know why any successful individual SEO would ever jump into a firm other than maybe greed) then perhaps this SPAM was sent for you! Good afternoon. NEMA Staffing Corporation is an information technology recruitment firm headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Please review the position description pasted below. You are welcome to reply with your resume attached in order to be considered for this opportunity. If you are not presently seeking an opportunity, please forward this message to any industry contacts possessing comparable experience.

Best wishes,

Nelsy Martinez
Technical Recruitment Consultant/
Client Manager
NEMA Staffing Corporation
773 296 9425 Office
Search Engine Optimization Strategist, Full Time, Downtown Chicago

o Previous in-depth search engine optimization and online marketing experience.

o Detail oriented, with the ability to multi-task. Must be highly organized.

o The ideal candidate will have a strong interest in the SEM field. Candidate should have the ability to recognize and apply evolving industry trends.

o Knowledge of HTML programming is required, along with experience across various platforms.

o Knowledge of paid-placement search engines (Overture, etc.) is a plus.

o Candidate must possess the ability to work independently. Must be a self-starter with strong interpersonal skills.

o Must understand how search engines and their spiders work in scoring/ranking Web sites.

o The ideal candidate has experience with the following SEM software:

· WordTracker

· WebPosition Gold rank reporting

· WebTrends traffic analyzer

PERSONAL TRAITS – A highly driven person

o A strong analytical thinker who thinks about issues from a business perspective.

o Strong work ethic and drive to succeed.

o Able to proactively work toward a goal without significant structure or rules.

RESPONSIBILITIES

The Search Engine Optimization Strategist will be the primary driver of organic search optimization for the corporate web site. They will utilize their understanding of search technologies to work with technical and creative resources in identifying and implementing improvements to the site that result in higher natural search listings.

o Perform detailed site analysis and document tactics to enhance web site presence in natural search results

o Must be able to document and streamline an improved process for optimal page/site creation. Will be responsible for implementing this new process across all impacted resources/departments.

o Manage the workflow of various team-members (i.e. HTML Developers, Site Architects, Software Developers) with regard to site optimization. Must communicate instructions, expectations and deadlines clearly and effectively.

o Perform optimization of various site components including code, copy, architecture, filenames, etc. Will also make recommendations and/or develop ancillary sites to supplement and increase quality traffic.

o Will serve as lead quality assurance resource, ensuring that new site pages follow proper SEO guidelines with respect to proper coding and adherence to established design templates and established copy/keyword standards.

o Will be responsible for setting up and reporting on overall SEO program success with regard to URL ranking changes, traffic changes, transaction changes, etc. Will be responsible for reviewing the data regularly and optimizing poor performing listings.

Most of the best SEO blogs have short and punchy posts (like the stuff Seth Godin usually writes.) I often am interested and fascinated by longer in depth pieces and interviews.

Recenlty I noticed a couple really cool posts over at Google Blogscoped:

• Doug Cutting Interview (see also Doug Cutting's blog)

• Context, Not Navigation

Cloaking is ok? It is for NPR.

Gmail is legal? Californian Senate just passed a bill that makes it so, but limits it's ability to store identifiable data.

Bush is a Crook? Yes (I could go into a ton of depth explaining my view, but this is not a political blog...there are hundreds or thousands of those to chose from.), Nixon would be proud! Also this new web based video game (0% work safe) is probably my favorite since MarioKart or Zelda.

Recently Brad Fallon noticed some sketchy looking Yahoo! results and I thought I saw something weird for a second too. One of my clients also asked me what is going on with Yahoo!.

Does anyone notice anything weird going on with Yahoo!, or have you noticed anything weird in the past couple days?

The whole reason I like the internet is user feedback and the ability to broadcast a message.

for example the Gmail is down message which told you to try back in a few seconds is now

"Gmail is temporarily unavailable. Cross your fingers and try again in a few minutes. We're sorry for the inconvenience."

I actually like SEO more for shaping social policy and pulling the flag on people who are full of crap.

Sites like this:
Winn and Sims.com,
posts like this:
Traffic Power,
and categories like this:
dmoz.org/Society/Issues/Business/Allegedly_Unethical_Firms/One_Complainant/
really make my day!!!

My roommate is to study electrical engineering, and I would like to think of myself as an eventual social policy engineer.

Track the Spiders: Find out when spiders spider your site free. free downloadable software from crawler-alert.com (not linked due to home page pharmacy ad) My opinions with making drugs easy to get are better tracked by glancing through Depression Blog.

New Name: GoToast now is Atlas OnePoint.

The Proogle search was disabled by Google. If you go to the Proogle website you will see that he has changed the name from Proogle to Prog. Prog works just like Proogle did, except you will soon need to include a Google API key to use it. Google API registration is free.

Gmail is allowing the beta testing of 1 Gig email accounts.
Yahoo! counters with an offer to make 100 meg accounts free.
Lycos Europe and SpyMac are giving away 1 Gig email accounts.
Google of course has to raise the bar again. Some of it's test users now enjoy 1 Terabyte email accounts.

or maybe the Gmail account size boost was an error. I would be willing to bet that the error was not accidental. Google probably has some smart marketing designed into some of their errors :)

For a laugh:

So this is going to sound absolutely stupid, but much of what I say does :)

I am going to take reality tv meets search engine marketer meets crazy diet trend and make it fun. I have been rather lazy recently and my diet has been aweful. I decided that I could create a blog about losing 30 pounds in 2 months and try to get the blog top rankings by the end of two months also.

A gimick you say? Only if it doesn't work. The name of my blog is Fatty Weight Loss (I am fatty, and I aim to lose weight). The goals are:

• to go from 222 lbs to 192 lbs by July 15

• rank #1 on Google for "weight loss" by July 15

My SEO Book PPC Accounts

So I have been having decent returns with Google AdWords (free £50 bonus) and my orders have went up noticeably since I started using Overture recently ($10 signup bonus)...though I do not get near the click volume I do with Google AdWords...I assume this is because most people interested in buying books about SEO are more likely to use Google & maybe I still need to add a few hundred to few thousand more keywords to my Overture account).

FindWhat & Customer Conversion (for them)

So I signed up for my FindWhat ($5 signup bonus) account and they had a couple features I really liked (such as bid by position).
Unfortunately their site does not follow some basic common sense customer conversion techniques. When I first tried submitting payment they had a database error (talk about a good way to lose customer trust with financial data!)

I used my back button to enter payment again. This time when I was about to enter I clicked the wrong button. I wasn't really paying a whole ton of attention and the cancel button was right next (really close) to the submit button.

After I signed up there were a few times when the text told me to click the link above when the link was above and off to the right. If you know what you want me to do then why not provide the link in the text right there? Why make me hunt for it?

I am not really wanting to use this post to bash FindWhat because I would like there to me many good outlets in the pay per click market. I am just wondering how a company focused on internet marketing could be worth over $400 million and have no user feedback and have done no user testing say what I just said. Anyway, I will let you know if / when FindWhat makes me hoards of money. And if not, I'll let you know that too.

I'm Blue,
I peed on a guy. I'm Blue, I peed on a guy? - Did anyone understand what Eifel 65 was saying when they sang that... um "song?"

It's all about community:

New WMW Forum
the SearchGuild Nigritude Ultramarine Contest is causing many groups to rally together.
Internet Marketing Research (Also:I am the new SEO type moderator guy at IMR)
SEO Chat is backing a couple people
SEO Book Readers...your cue to send millions of wonderful link to this page...I am begging here...jars of gourmet peanut butter work too.
See also

• the coolest nigritude ultramarine entry so far.

• Britney is the Devil?

Feel free to spam this specific post with your nigritude ultramarine entry.

With the growing commercial nature of the web it is becoming harder to get quality one way inbound links without spending a fortune. By submitting free or cheap press releases you can build link equity without spending a ton of money.

Many people do recommend donating to PR Web to help your PR get quicker handling and a better rotation.

"For $80 your release is also included in the Yahoo! FeatureExpress program where the full release is published under the Yahoo.com domain.

For B2B client releases that are keyword optimized, you can expect 20,000 - 60,000 page views in the first two weeks. For B2C clients it's higher, as much as 190,000." - from Lee Odden of TopRank Online Marketing

There are also a bunch of smaller press release sites on the web. Please submit any press release sites you find useful to this posting by clicking on the your evil Happy Thoughts Link.

Don't worry, be happy! (cartoon is worth playing at least twice) A few smaller press release sites that were listed are:

• www.free-press-release.com

• www.e-xl.com
• www.inthepress.ru
• www.pressbox.co.uk
• www.press-world.com/add

  found on HighRankings Forum

It's official.

They put up the Google Blog.

Whatever will they do with Page & Brin's old blog?

I wonder they are not running AdSense. Blogs are supposed to have AdSense.

Quite literally, Google AdWords to Add Words.

Stefanie Olsen notes that Google is preparing a new tool that will automate keyword list generation. Google will spider web pages of large advertisers to determine relevant keywords for each page.

This tool will save large companies hundreds or thousands of hours of campaign maintenance.

I realize Google needs to automate portions of it's ad service to maximize revenues, but this tool will be a huge disappointment in my eyes.

Why I Think This AdWords Tool Will Suck

• Google already places broad match terms before exact match terms. This does not allow smarter, smaller, hard working advertisers as much benefit as Overture does for doing deep keyword research. I have one client who does exceptionally well with Overture, but finds Google AdWords prohibitively expensive for this reason.

• This new tool will allow fat, and lazy advertizers to automatically lock out competition throughout the AdWords system.
• The automation will likely have many errors which decrease ad relevancy.

I hope Google will continue to add other features such as the local advertising feature to help small businesses compete in such a competitive landscape.

In any industry the most successful people can say things which are entirely true to them which may not be true to others.

• If I have a friend who is a meta editor for DMOZ it is far easier for my personal blog to get listed in the "Open" Directory Project than if I am unknown or hated by the editors. (hopefully I am unknown vice hated...)

• Content is king if you are known as "The SEO Copywriter."
• Reciprocal linking is dead if you charge people $200 / hr to find link partners.

Due to blinding success many SEO experts make blanket statements that are not always true. I like to call this concept Delusional Search Engine Optimization & SEO Tips.

Update: Backlink Analyzer is free link analysis software which has probably the best feature set of any of the link analysis software products on the market.

Recently Shawn Pringle launched PR and link analysis software by the name of PR Prowler. The first edition was a bit bulky and slow, but recently he launched PR Prowler V2.0 which has many needed upgrades.

PR Prowler operates in its own browser window similar to OptiLink. OptiLink still has a few more features (such as showing link text), but PR Prowler allows you to search for backlinks and keywords as well.

When you use PR Prowler with the Google link:www.evilcompetitor.com function it will return their backlinks and allow you to manipulate them in multiple ways. PR Prowler allows you to organize the links by site or PageRank or by how much the link should boost your PageRank (estimated). The best part about PR Prowler is that it primarily operates in the background so that you can do other business while it is collecting data.

Any software which runs in the background, checks backlings to the full Google database search depth (1,000), and will sort the results by PageRank is easily worth well over $100 to most webmasters, but PR Prowler only costs $97. View the official PR Prowler website.

Google has made a change to it's algorithm which is making it much harder (or more expensive) to outright manipulate it's search results. I believe the discussion started by SEO Guy over at SEO Chat. From there he posted it on the Search Engine Roundtable weblog. The idea has since been talked about at most of the major SEO forums.

Garret French of WebProWorld wrote a synopsis article quoting some of the more common theories.

John Scott had a talk with a fellow who used to work with Krishna Bharat (Google engineer who worked on Hilltop) at another company (not Google).

"The probation does not apply to new sites. It applies to links. When the algorithm was deployed certain older links were grandfathered in. After that, links will be (are being) given partial credit, and be essentially on "probation".

It applies to links, not sites. And the age of the link is not the only factor. The IP range of the links and other considerations are made, and the person who I discussed this with said that Krishna Bharat is at Google primary to develop and implement this new algorithm. It is supposed to radically change the way links are evaluated...

Disclaimer: This is my opinion and that's all it is."

This will allow new sites to still quickly gain PageRank as displayed, but ranking for competitive terms via quick link purchase is becoming exponentially more expensive.

So Gmail has had some intermitent faults, but generally operates rather quickly and has a ton of cool features other email providers do not have.

MSN does business backwards, not only am I looking at stupid irrelevant dating ads which tell me that I should try a Jewish or Christian dating website (I am neither), but now they are openly selling their users to the highest bidders. MSN will guarantee their bulkmail gets delivered to your inbox to anyone with enough money. If it sounds stupid, it's because it is.

If you are sick of Hotmail and would like a reasonable free email account I have one Gmail invite left. If you want it, be the first to send me your email with Gmail in the subject line. You can also be randomly selected to try Gmail if you have an active blogger account (which is free to set up).

[update: thanks for all the entries, my last invite has been given away.]

The DarkBlue affiliate network is partnering with SearchGuild SEO forums to run an SEO contest.