This isn’t a blog post I write happily – I’d intended to respectfully stay quiet and avoid bringing attention to my stressed relationship with Mark Attwood however since false information is being disseminated, I do need to tell my side of the story. I’ve been sitting on this post for quite a few weeks, I’ve given Mark many chances to make things right.

It goes to show all is not as it seems – we in the marketing game are very good at creating an image. It also goes to show how fickle personal relationships can be, and that for some people greed is a great evil driving force.

I’ve learnt a lot from what I’m about to write about – and a few of my biggest learning lessons are:

1. Promises and agreements mean nothing unless they are written down.
2. It’s all bullshit until the cheque hits the bank.
3. Beware of bullshitters, charisma isn’t integrity.

Some of the details in what I write are contested (as you can imagine) and I am writing from the best of my knowledge, however considering Mark Attwood’s legal prodigality, this writing is based on my perspective. I have good documentation for what I’ve written, but for the sake of covering my arse, this is based only on the best of my knowledge.

In an agreement with Mark Attwood and Kenny Goodman – then joint directors of Venturebase Ltd, it was agreed that I would receive 15% share of Venturebase Ltd in exchange for a £xx,xxx investment. I was young, optimistic and naive – also overly trusting apparently, and this investment was never formalised on paper because we were “too busy making money.” Rather I relied on trust, integrity, handshakes and gentleman’s agreements.

Having parted with that investment, and under this pretence of shares in Venturebase Ltd, I continued working with Mark Attwood. Following the demise of Top Triangle Ltd, I worked for a period of four months for both Venturebase Ltd and Perfect Associates Ltd (which bought Top Triangle Ltd out of pre-pack administration) without a wage. I’ve always focused on long-term value rather than short-term cash and I had visions of fantastic growth of the companies, so working for nothing and living off savings was a way to show my commitment.

Venturebase Ltd is the company under which Mark Attwood sells Internet Marketing services including seminars and consulting services. I’ve spoken at many of those seminars, and the Off-page SEO Services that Mark was offering, are my brainchild.

To date, I don’t believe I’ve received a single penny from Venturebase Ltd, be it in the form of a wage, or profit share.

All profits seemed to be swallowed by the Attwood’s lifestyle and debts. I supported them by not questioning this because I felt it was important that they were financially stable and I knew they had a lot of debts following TT Ltd’s collapse. Of course I’ve never been included in the finances of the business, so I’m unaware of exactly how much we made or where it went, but as a business without many expenses I can’t begin to imagine where more than £10,000/month could go. I’d been lead to believe that at the time I left, Venturebase Ltd was grossing £20,000/month.

Mark has told people that I’m crazy – that I wanted 50% of his business – that he fired me – etc… I’m a very level headed and reasonable person. I suspect he’s also been bullshitting the current managing director of Top Triangle Ltd regarding the promises and agreements he made with me.

I simply asked for my investment and shareholding to be formalised at which point Mark and Katy Attwood denied any knowledge of that investment, those agreements, and stated that our working relationship had become “untenable.” – go figure…

I found this exceedingly upsetting and left the office on November 12th in tears.

I’d thought I had a very close relationship with Mark Attwood and Katy Attwood – we’d spent many nights over more than a few bottles of wine. Mark had declared his brotherly love for me, and vice-versa. I’d supported Mark and Katy through the administration of TT Ltd and the subsequent fallout (financial problems, threats, etc) and I’d been very generous to them. I only took a wage when my own savings had run out, and that wage was absolutely minimal.

When I left the office on November 12th, I had less than £300 left in my bank account.

While my skills aren’t really employable, and while no employee works the 120 hours/week that I found myself working, my “wage” at £15k/year still falls short of the £45k+ positions I’ve been offered (and declined) since. That’s about £1.90/hour, before taking into consideration that I’d contributed more cash to that business than I’ve ever received in wage.

When it became apparent that the agreements of shares wouldn’t be honoured I presented endless alternatives of arrangements in which the working relationship could continue – including commissions and back pay. However generous those proposals were, not a single one was given any consideration.

Mark Attwood’s ego doesn’t leave any room for anybody else’s. In his mind I think he truly believes he is an “SEO Expert” – in truth the vast majority of SEO work done for both clients and in house projects (Top Skips, Top Toilets, Top Asbestos, Top Fence etc etc etc – full list on this page) over the past 18 months was devised and implemented by myself. I’d actually asked to be solely responsible for the SEO of those businesses in 2008, and that suggestion was agreed to by (then) directors Mark Attwood and Kenny Goodman.

Since November 12th I’ve had over half a dozen people approach me independently and without prompting say to me “but weren’t you the brains behind the operation?” – It was really nice to hear this from so many people at a time when I was feeling quite down about the whole thing. I always used to joke that I was the brains and Mark was the personality, but I’d never really given myself quite so much credit. I never had a problem with him claiming to be an SEO expert because somebody who is an SEO expert had always backed him up.

The image of the “Mark Attwood” brand was always Mark’s topskips story, backed up with a team of experts. This was the image I created and promoted, but following “The System” seminar in London, Mark’s ego (supported by Katy’s ignorance) had swollen to a point where it had become, and I quote, “The Mark Attwood Show”. Katy declared she owned “100% of (her) husband” and made it very clear she didn’t consider me to have any discernible expertise.
I wish the story remained this simple – unfortunately it gets worse.

On December 10th, my fiancée Vickie was sacked from her job doing the marketing for Sinks.co.uk, Venturebase Ltd’s biggest client. I know how good she is, and I also know Mark. I am left with very little doubt that Mark had strong influence over her sacking. While I understand this is simply speculation, I’ve made a rational assessment of the situation and it seems far too plausible. This is beyond horrendous and shows a deplorable malice.

The timing is appalling – Christmas is around the corner, then Vickie and I are having two wedding ceremonies (one in the UK, one in Australia) and we won’t be back until February. She isn’t able to find another job before we return and I’d walked away from “The Mark Attwood Show” unable to pay December’s rent, let alone fund two weddings, a four week holiday and a honeymoon.

(Since writing – We had a very lovely “white wedding” ceremony – We leave for our honeymoon tomorrow.)

Mark has been getting a lot of bad press – I had made it my business to manage Mark’s online profile/reputation and defend his integrity and knowledge.

But Mark is retorting the bad press on the one hand, and abusing a relationship and reneging on agreements on the other. It’s just asking for trouble.

Here’s a snippet from an email Mark sent to his list on December 16th:

“Katy’s going to kill me for sending this email, but…

I’ve been through shock, and then hurt in the past two months.

Now I’m pissed off…

Do you feel ripped off by me in any way?”

Mark – Yes I do!!! – and my dealings with you have been closer than pretty much anybody other than your wife. Not only do I feel ripped off – I feel used, abused and discarded. I feel you’ve taken advantage of a young optimistic entrepreneur and you’ve proven you just don’t care about anybody other than yourself.

Here’s a little list of articles critical of Mark.

• Here – the director of an Internet Marketing company calls Mark Attwood out. I defended Mark strongly – my first comment now seems oddly ironic.

• Here is an article posted on Rip Off Report about Mark Attwood

• Again, I defended him in a number of posts on the UK Business Forums First Post Second Post

Quoting myself “Also, when you get Mark, you don’t just get Mark, you get lots and lots of other peoples expertise, including my own. Mark isn’t a one man band, he’s a big personality with a big team.” – ok so when I said “Big Team” I was creating an image and exaggerating on the truth. The only person with any discernable SEO knowledge besides Mark Attwood, still involved with Venturebase Ltd, is a guy called Steve – A really top bloke, but he’s only been intensively involved with the Internet Marketing stuff for about 4 months – He’s learnt everything he knows from myself and Mark, and it’s fair to say his knowledge is, by his own admission, limited.

At a high profile Internet Marketing seminar in London run by Ken McCarthy, Mark was asked to give two presentations. In the first he told his story “I was a poet, then an actor, then a pilot, etc etc etc, topskips, etc etc etc” – Then I had prepared the second presentation, and also ended up presenting the content too. Listening back to the recording here’s how it starts – Mark: “So lets put the power point up please Vince… Take Over.” – and off I went…

Following this presentation I had suggested to Mark we buy a remote control buzzer which he could stick in his pocket, and when I could see he didn’t have an answer for a question I could “Buzz In” – I’m not joking!

I’ve had a very big part in building the “Mark Attwood” brand – I created the membership site and at the time of writing (December 17th) there has been no new content added for over a month and a half – even that last entry was written by myself on November 2nd.

I’ve since noticed Mark’s father-in-law writing about me on his blog, with a comment that I believe illustrates Mark’s general lack of respect and his false portrayal of our relationship.

“a chap called Vince Samios who is misplaced ambition personified, no doubt emanating from the fact that he is Australian. I thought that they were only good at cricket and serving penal servitude.”

In retrospect I’m amused by one of Marks “life lessons.” He’s said many times that he lives his life by a poem called “If” by Rudyard Kipling, and that humility is his greatest lesson.

Humility:
• “Someone who has humility is not proud and does not believe they are better than other people.”
• “a disposition to be humble; a lack of false pride”

I’ve always struggled to see Humility in Mark Attwood, and now more than ever.

In regards to my personal effect on Top Triangle Ltd – Mark’s claim to fame – here is a quick example of solid results.
• From 1,320 pages indexed on topskips.com, to 121,000
• From 240 pages indexed on toptoilets.com, to 7,900

Since my departure these numbers have plummeted to 10,700 and 5,520 respectively, in less than two months (at the time of writing)

I could rabbit on about various rankings etc, but these are two of the most profound and obvious public results. They affected the business in a big way and I believe the results I personally produced are the only reason that company is now profitable.

Naturally I expect you to come to your own conclusions – I’m not giving you any emotional drivel, I’m simply giving you what I believe to be the facts. Considering Mark Attwood’s propensity to go after anybody who comments about him negatively with legal hounds, I’ve checked my facts very carefully. I write to the best of my knowledge, and I’ve been careful to back up what I’ve written with documentation should Mark’s legal prodigality continue.

In regards to my relationship with Mark Attwood – He’s cut his nose off despite his face. I wish him the best of luck with his career, and I wish you the best of luck in your dealings with him.

IC stands for “Indexed Content” – but does it matter?

In a word – yes!

But it isn’t the be all and end all in regards to competition research, and it’s a very hard metric to judge.

IC (number of indexed pages) only really begins to matter if the competing website is entirely about your niche subject.

More pages on a website means more chances to capture backlinks, and page rank. Based on googles original patents, every page creates a small amount of page rank. Both factors together result in more potential for authority, on a subject, for a website with an large number of pages.

Further - more pages means more chance for keywords to appear site wide, and more opportunity for a clever webmaster to do some clever internal linking (which can be powaaah-ful!)

Websites in the top 10 results with a high number of pages will either be general websites, or authority websites. General websites can be relatively easy to beat, where-as authority websites can be a nightmare.

Loading the IC figure seems to slow down Market Samurai a lot, and since it’s such a difficult metric to take into consideration, its probably best not to load this metric until you get down into the real nitty gritty.

There is still one metric bitterly missing from Market Samurai – Domain PR… the page rank of the home domain.

I’ve written more about this in the post “what is page rank“

Reading a recent article from SEOMoz which talks about PR Sculpting with nofollow links. While the article concludes that PR Sculpting with No-Follow links is still effective, I beg to differ. I also don’t believe the test platform was comprehensive enough to come to any definitive conclusions.

• Only 50% of the results were in favour of no-follow linking.
• One set of results declared no-follow as least effective.
• Four page websites aren’t relevant test platforms IMHO.
• Where’s the “More Links for PR Sculpting” test?
• Differences in text on each site will result in differences in rank.

If we give each method a score from 1 to 5 depending on how relatively effective they were, the points score like this:

• Nofollow – 29 points
• Consolidation – 24 points
• iFrame – 23 points
• Control – 22 points
• Javascript – 22 points

Statistically there is no definitive trend. The differences seen could be the result of chance. If you roll a five sided dice, you would probably come up with similar numbers and results.

“Control” was most effective twice, and least effective twice. But “javascript” was NEVER least effective, but also never most effective. Whereas “Nofollow” was least effective once, and never second most effective.

In the SEO Guide for 2010 there is a section relevant to this discussion– “PR Sculpting in 2010” – a method which wasn’t tested in the SEOMoz test.

I remember having a conversation with Robert Somerville (AKA Guru Bob) two weeks prior to Google announcing their changed stance on how page-rank flows through no-follow links. I had been operating a number of large silo structured and no-follow pr sculpted sites and I’d began to notice a negative trend resulting from the use of No-Follow links internally.

The effects were nothing short of profound, to the point where removing all no-follow links resulted in massive average ranking increases, and when the web-designer accidentally over-wrote the modified include files, rankings fell out of the sky. During that conversation I’d said something along the lines of “I don’t know why, and I can’t prove it, but no-follow linking doesn’t work anymore”

But a piece of logic seems to be eluding the general conversation about no-follow linking.

Why would internal no-follow links be treated the same way as external no-follow links?

1. 1. Why would a webmaster even want to use internal no-follow links unless they had user generated content, or they were trying to game the system?
2. 2. Why would external no-follow links carry zero weight? And why would a website be penalised for external linking (PR Leakage)

The first implies that the internal page is either not trusted by the webmaster, or that the webmaster is trying to engineer search results. If the former, Google would naturally de-value that page, and if the latter, Google would prefer to rank sites based on relevance rather than clever linking structures.

The second would devalue Googles search algorithms significantly, as it revolves around linking. Its back to the old Wikipedia links question (Do wikipedia no-follow links still pass juice?) and its worth raising a new point… twitter links are no-follow, however twitter is having a massive impact on search results. This is massively incongruent!

I speculate that the weight has shifted in favour of external no-follow links, and against internal no-follow links. Further I’m suggesting and that both operate independently of each other to a certain degree.

Also, I believe the SEOMoz test was nothing more than a joke, and does not represent a scientific approach to SEO.

Happy New Year

The Problem:

A very common mistake small businesses are making with their websites is having multiple web addresses by which to reach your home page.

If you go to www.yourdomain.com, the search engines often feel this is a different website to yourdomain.com (without the www)

While it isn’t critical, and most search engines are able to cope with this common problem, you may find you receive significant SEO and traffic improvements by sorting it out.

Potentially your website is being penalized due to duplicate copies of your content, or you have backlinks pointing to four separate pages.

Try each of these on your own websites, obviously replacing “yourdomain.com” with your actual domain name.

www.yourdomain.com

yourdomain.com

Both of the above should redirect to the same location, most appropriately www.yourdomain.com – if you find this isn’t the case, you are presenting at least two copies of your website to the search engines.

Note: If you find one of the above results in a 404 (page not found) error it is best to speak to your web host or website team about resolving this.

In addition – one of the following may also show a duplicate copy of your web site. Three of the below should result in a “page not found” error. The 4^th should ideally redirect to www.yourdomain.com

www.yourdomain.com/index.htm

www.yourdomain.com/index.php

www.yourdomain.com/index.asp

www.yourdomain.com/index.html

If you find one of the above shows your website without redirecting to www.yourdomain.com, you are potentially presenting three or more duplicate copies of your website to the search engines.

As per above, one of the four following may be yet another duplicate of your home page.

yourdomain.com/index.htm

yourdomain.com/index.php

yourdomain.com/index.asp

yourdomain.com/index.html

If you find that you can access your homepage via more than one of the above links without being redirected to www.yourdomain.com, you have a little problem which needs to be addressed.

The solution:

Easiest: Contact your webhost and request “a 301 redirect of the non-www to the www, and from index files to the directory url.” – if they ask for further clarification you can provide a link to each of the separate ways you can view your website and say “I need these all to 301 redirect to www.yourdomain.com”

More difficult: DIY… While this depends greatly on your web host, the most common platform is a LAMP server (Linux, Apache, mySQL, PHP) – if this isn’t the case for you, you will need to research “Mod-ReWrite for <Your Platform>”

If, like most websites, yours is hosted on a LAMP server:

You will need to edit (or create) a .htaccess file. This is just a file in the root (“www” or “html”) directory of your web host which is named “.htaccess” – this file needs to contain the following text:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/ [R=301,L]

Replace “.html” with your index file extension, and “yourdomain.com” with your actual domain.

Warning: If you are using a CMS (Content Management System) you may have conflicting re-write rules. It is best to search for information about 301 permanent redirects that relates specifically to your CMS software. Most will have a plug-in which will take care of it all for you.

Time

The single biggest SEO factor is time. And not just domain age, but back-link age, back-link source website age, and even the amount of time you have been ranking in certain positions. This is why you can’t storm online markets anymore. (there is a trick which still allows you to storm markets un-noticed, but it still takes just as much time.)

But time is also conversely important. How long has it been since your website received new content? Adding new content keeps your website FRESH. You can do this automatically with RSS feeds.

User Experience

User Experience is already becoming an SEO metric itself – so not only is the content on your site important, but the level of engagement with your users is also becoming increasingly important.

This isn’t just a best practice recommendation, but a real, tangible, technical SEO variable.

If you can decrease the bounce rate of your site, and increase the average visitor time, chances are you will also notice positive ranking changes.

Google is smart enough to be tracking its users search queries, times between searches, and similar searches within a short period of time which may indicate that a user hasn’t found what he/she was after.

Black Hat, Grey Hat, White Hat in 2010

We need new definitions for these buzz words. Allow me…

Black Hat – Anything That will get your site de-indexed. Mostly on-page techniques and some large scale spammy back-linking.

Grey Hat – Techniques that are very effective but that may or may not be sustainable. Things such as PR Sculpting and Article Spinning.

White Hat – Techniques that will always be effective. Like links from other websites in your industry, press releases, etc.

I recommend making the most of grey hat techniques while maintaining a strong focus on white hat techniques – this way you achieve a short term return on investment without jeopardising the long term sustainability of your project.

Reverse Page Rank

A speculative theory in which linking to relevant authority sites will have a positive effect on your own rankings. My testing suggests there may be legs to this theory.

It stands to reason that a relevant website may link to other relevant websites. Don’t be afraid to link out of your website in 2010.

Variation

The buzz word for 2010 – Variation! Not only sprinkling your content with different related keywords (formerly referred to as LSI keywords) – but you need to backlink with variations on those keywords as well. You also need to link each keyword to multiple pages, such as linking to your homepage with your Longtail keyword, as well as to your Longtail page.

If you are trying to optimise a page for “Audi Car Insurance” you need to also link to that page with variations on the anchor text, including deep Longtail keywords and dirty anchor text.

Its like a champagne fountain – each glass overflows and helps fill each other glass.

You also need to get as large a variety in source domains for your links as possible. Focus on finding websites where you can get a link that you’ve never before had a link from. The more source domains you can get links from, the better!

Rather than posting 10 articles on ezinearticles.com, you are much better off posting each of those ten articles on a different article directory. Post 3 comments per blog, then find a new blog to comment on. Etc.

Also, a link is a link. Get links from high PR, as well as low PR sites. Get both nofollow and dofollow links!
Branding:

Build backlinks not just with your keywords, but also with your domain name as the anchor text. If I’m optimising for “SEO Guide” I will also link with anchor text including “Vince Samios”, “VinceSamios.com” and “http://vincesamios.com” – You need to get a nice ratio on this – with about 50% linking with dirty (traditionally bad) anchor text variations, and 50% linking with keyword anchor text variations.

Content

Content has always been one of the key factors to SEO. A sheer quantity of GOOD content is one of the most critical SEO attributes. A two page website will always rank better than a one page website, and a three page website more so than a two page website, etc.

Also make sure to interlink your internal pages as much as is relevantly possible

Ramp

Start slow and build up your SEO campaigns in a cumulative fashion. You are aiming for a parabolic curve. This is why I’ll start a new website and get a few links built every month. I then let the website stew, brew and bubble for a couple of months before re-visiting it with better content and a more aggressive back-linking campaign.

PR Sculpting in 2010

A big coop in 2009, the apparent death of PR Sculpting came about when Google announced its new approach to the much abused no-follow tag (By the way, in case you have any valuable comments, this is a do-follow blog!)

The alternatives won’t last – Using Javascript and iFrames – it’s like building a paper mache ladder in a thunderstorm. Google is getting ever more clever, indexing content within flash just a few years ago. When is Google going to be able to render iFrames as a part of a page, and when can the Google Spider crawl through javascript. Now? Yesterday? 5 Years Ago?

Never underestimate Googles capabilities and build everything for the future.

You can still funnel the love around your site, but the trick isn’t to limit the number of internally follow-able links, but to INCREASE internal linking. If page “X” needs more love, then link to it from pages “G” and “Q” – this is a sustainable way to sculpt your website.

Conclusion

There is a lot of hyped, out of date and egotistical waffle in this industry. Be resilient and focus on these things:

1. User Experience
2. On-page SEO & Internal Linking
3. Building Backlinks

It doesn’t get any simpler than that – with only three things to focus on your productivity will increase massively and you will save cash you would otherwise spend on the next hyped product or course.

Vince’s Links are a list of places where you can get links for free - I sent the first package out not long ago but I didn’t blog about it - since the response has been good I’ve sent out a second package and this time I’m blogging about it.

It contains not only more .ac.uk educational websites with PR4+, but I’ve also included a bunch of do-follow links and a couple of tips on how to get do-follow links from some of the biggest websites on the internet.

This second package also includes a little Christmas special offer on SEO services at 330% discount. I can’t tell you more about that here - unless you’ve signed up to the free links emails.

Get your free links packages here

Good luck with all the Christmas present wrapping and party preparations.

A very close friend became an auntie today – but something she said got me thinking.

And its no isolated case – everybody seems to forget the mechanics behind having children.

“Little William was born today – Mother and Child are doing well” – what about bloody dad?

Dad’s probably got a burst eardrum from all the screaming, a broken hand from all the squeezing, and he’s never looking at his wife’s bits the same way ever again. The poor guy is probably shattered mentally and physically…
… or maybe people prefer to ignore the negatives on such a happy occasion.

I wrote recently (just 1 month and 1 week ago) about some inspirational SEO results and I thought I would provide an update. To refresh your memory, I was looking at my ranking for a single word keyword with over 1000 daily searches. Heres the Market Samurai Keyword Research report for that keyword.

Not exactly a low competition keyword……

To refresh your memory here is the SEO competition matrix produced by Market Samurai from the original report:

There I am in 9th position…

And now for the update…

There I am in 4th and 5th positions…

Yahoo definitely isn’t reflecting the amount of back-linking that’s gone into this project, but the entire SEO campaign to date has been worth around £2000. And this isn’t the only ranking which was achieved within this campaign.

I’ve been tracking the top 25 highest traffic keywords for this market and here are the best rankings so far… 3rd, 5th, 6th, 9th, 9th 10th, 11th, 13th, 16th, 16th, 19th 27th, 37th, 44th, 78th, 197th

Tracking the top 100 keywords I’ve already achieved an astonishing 13 first position rankings and 44 top 10 rankings. All well and good if there’s no traffic - here’s the weekly traffic trends…

A pretty normal SEO Campaign Traffic Trend Graph on a hardcore SEO campaign… waves with ever increasing tops and diminishing troughs…

So where to from here? Well obviously I need to continue focusing on the top traffic keywords as well as broadening the SEO campaign, but I’ve just started to monetize this site with amazon affiliate deals - its also getting a whopping 13.53% adwords CTR (I miss-tweeted 13.35% this morning…)

Continual improvement is the name of the game, and following additional site changes and refinements I will be approaching drop-shippers so that I can take orders directly, dictating my own profit margins and thereby increasing profit percentages dramatically. I haven’t even considering CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) yet.

This is my new business workflow:

1. 1. Build an empty shop
2. 2. Get people walking through the door
3. 3. Hang some advertising on the wall
4. 4. Keep directing more visitors through my shop
5. 5. Stick some trinkets on the shelves
6. 6. Keep directing more visitors through my shop
7. 7. Replace the trinkets with bigger and better products
8. 8. Keep directing more visitors through my shop
9. 9. Find ways to make people buy and spend more
10. 10. Build another empty shop…

I will be publishing my methods in the “The Real Guide” but in the mean time I’m open to folks popping forward with investment cash and benefiting from my methods and implementation. I’ll do it cheap in a 50:50 JV deal, or expensively if you want to retain 100% shares.

An SEO for Firefox comparison with Market Samurai Review thing… (I just put this line in here for some extra keywords, whatcha gonna do about it? It’s a Market Samurai, SEO for Firefox comparison. Just wanted to make that clear…)

But…

What a bloody stupid comparison… It’s like trying to compare the steering wheel on your car to the drive shaft…

Both are VITAL!

This post was sparked by Aaron Wall’s Tantrum at SEOBook… Ed Dale isn’t a king of SEO Competition analysis, but at least he doesn’t claim to be. Here’s the offending Thirty Day Challenge video if anybody would like to see it, watch at 9:09mins in. It’s just about message to market, and Ed/Aaron’s audiences are polar opposites… Ed’s teaching is rubbish for experts; Aaron’s teaching is gobbledygook for thirty day challengers. Kiss and make up boys!

Main strength of Market Samurai for SEO Competition Research: Quick overview analysis for snap judgements.

Main strength of SEO for Firefox for SEO Competition Research (its only use really): Individual site analysis for detailed analysis.

Main Flaw of Market Samurai: Limited depth and metrics

Main Flaw of SEO for Firefox: Speed and Reliability.

Let me go into some more detail…

Benefits of Market Samurai: A much clearer overview picture of SEO competition for a particular phrase. With Market Samurai I can make a snap judgement of an entire market within two seconds. I can then make snap judgements on keywords within a further two seconds. Admittedly it’s a bit of an art learned through time, but just remember “red bad”, “green good”.

A very competitive SEO Market… Red Bad!

A very uncompetitive SEO Market - Green Good!

Benefits of SEO for Firefox: Daily browsing becomes an exercise in SEO Competition Analysis, and SEO for Firefox is able to pull in a lot of different metrics. While not all metrics are really relevant, SEO for Firefox is ALWAYS switched on in my browser. I love the absolute clarity in NoFollow link highlighting which has allowed me to really spot some great SEO opportunities. SEO for Firefox is my first stop on initial market consultation simply because I can just flick open a new firefox tab and google my phrase. Voila!

SEO for Firefox Example… Autoloading four metrics.

Failings of Market Samurai: Limited to just the top 10 results for a particular phrase and doesn’t pull in as much data as it could/should. In competitive markets I would really like to see the top 100 results for a phrase, and in my opinion Market Samurai doesn’t pull in all the data I would like to see. But neither does SEO for Firefox for that matter.

Failings of SEO for Firefox: It’s slower than Market Samurai, and trying to load the metrics too quickly triggers google bans. I’ve got a one second delay on each auto loading metric, and I’m only loading four metrics automatically to make the process faster (PR, YH Backlinks, YH EDU Backlinks and Site Age) – With this configuration I don’t get google bans no matter how hard I’m hammering it. My biggest problem with SEO for Firefox is that it is visually very slow to analyse a keyword.

A concluding comparison:
Having SEO for Firefox is like walking around with your eyes open, and stopping to look at little details on individual keywords, while having Market Samurai is for serious research sessions with a lot of keywords and pepsi max.

Comparing SEO for Firefox to Market Samurai is like comparing your legs – you kinda need both of them or you’ll have a limp…

Me out!

Here’s a list of 50 high PR article directories.

Enjoy!

Purportedly named after its creator Larry Page, and the foundations on which Google was built, Page Rank is a way to calculate the authority of a web page, based on links from other web pages…

Blah blah blah…

But what IS page rank? And why do we care?

Page rank is representation of authority by a number between zero and ten in comparison to competitors.

Search Engine Optimizers the world over tell people not to worry about page rank “It doesn’t mean anything” but they are blatantly wrong. These kind of statements come about when people make judgements based on an incomplete picture… things get misinterpreted….

Page Rank is a metric we DO care about – it’s a great indicator of how we are faring against our competition.

Against our competition… I just needed to re-emphasise that little bit.

In some markets page rank appears to be abundant, in others it’s a lot more difficult to attain. In the Internet Marketing field for instance, my site is currently a PR2 with 1500 backlinks, and some damn good backlinks too. However a recipe site of mine achieved a PR5 within 3 months of going live, with fewer than 20 backlinks. How can it be?

Markets behave differently.

While “recipes” is primarily a pure market, internet marketing is the one market where you would expect people to be gaming the system.

So the question is – are Internet Marketing sites given relatively lower page rank because they are about Internet Marketing? Or are Internet marketers as a whole, doing something very wrong?

The first is highly possible – trigger words might bleed page rank.

The second is very possible – consider the official line on “No Follow” links. The single industry where the most Page Rank will be bled is the Internet marketing industry.

So what is page rank?

• A great way to quantify SEO campaigns relative to competition.
• A representation of a websites relative authority within that niche.
• A fickle and unpredictable beast…

In 2009 Page Rank appears to be strongly tied to the freshness of a website. Stop adding content and your page rank may dwindle. The higher your page rank, the more often Google visits your website. Those two things are intrinsically linked.

The Web Site? Or the Web Page?

Each page has its own Page Rank – however the page rank of the home page (or root domain name) does have an affect on all sub pages on that domain name, regardless of the reported page rank. A link from a PR0 page on a PR8 domain name is arguably more valuable than a link from a PR1 page on a PR4 domain name.

What is Page Rank?

Only Google really knows…

Here’s a great little strategy for making money online, quickly and easily.

People new to selling online are faced with two major obstacles. First of all they need a product to sell, and second they need people to sell that product to.

An easy solution to the first problem is drop shipping – this allows you to sell real world solid and high value items, and it allows you to sell a huge range of products, without ever having to stock any of those products nor having to physically pack and ship products to customers. Essentially you sell a product, then you buy that product elsewhere and have them ship it to your customer directly, taking your middleman cut. This is the best way to hit the ground running without all the costs associated with warehousing, staff, stock, shipping, transport, etc.

To overcome the second problem I recommend online marketplaces, especially eBay, which is where I made my first money online when I was 16. That business bought me a top end computer system with RAID and dual 21” screens (back in the days when 15” was standard, and RAID hadn’t really been heard of) – it bought me a collection of 10+ remote control aeroplanes (back in they day when this stuff was really expensive) and a 6 week trip overseas with digital cameras etc. It’s fair to say I couldn’t complain about the profitability of that business as a 16yrold. EBay is such a massive marketplace but the magic lies in the visibility of products, in that every listing gets prominent exposure at some point in time.

So this is how to combine those two concepts together simply, quickly, easily and for free.

• Find popular products on Amazon
• Re-list them on eBay with a premium (20% mark-up is sufficient, but you can play around with this)
• When you make a sale, buy the item from Amazon and sent it “As a gift” to the recipient.

Simples!

They receive the item directly from Amazon, but there is no price attached to the item because it was sent
as a gift.

You can literally automate the turbo re-listing of Amazon products onto eBay, and you can automate the purchasing of a Amazon gifts and posting to your eBay customers.

People are making BIG MONEY doing this stuff – believe me!

If you appreciated this post – please take the time to Re-Tweet.

I wrote a while ago about an inLinks passive income strategy – while this strategy isn’t passive, it’s the closest thing to it. Its so simple!

More than 5 months in the making, WebRanks.net is a free web based rank tracking tool which I masterminded and which was designed and developed by a very talented web designer and developer, who is also a good friend from high-school days.

The very first public preview is available here in the form of a screenshot.

The first public beta will only be available to 100 people (as you may have noticed in the screenshot) and while there is no pre-registration option, you can follow WebRanks on Twitter and receive notification the instant it becomes available.

Without going into feature details, one of the biggest advantages of WebRanks over other products is that it is web-based, which means you don’t need to download and run software, and you can use it on both Mac and PC. Rank tracking is scheduled without you having to think about it, and you can login from any computer.

The rank tracking and graphing features rival (and often surpass) paid tools, and it will remain free.

I am extremely proud of the concepts behind this tool, and I am extremely proud of Dave’s exceptional development and design skills! This is the beginning of something very big and very special!

Again, if you want instant notification follow WebRanks on Twitter!

“Guru Marketing” – positioning oneself as a “Guru” in ones field.

Profit Driven

Guru Marketing is all about one thing… generating profits. Nothing else matters, not quality of content, not originality, not even truth. Sales funnels identify buyers from non-buyers, and push endless products on those buyers, regardless of the value being offered. And it gets taken to a complete extreme, like £24,000 weekends where the “Guru” doesn’t even personally contribute. A person of expertise doesn’t try to sell you things for the sake of selling you things.

Egotistical

“Guru’s” develop mammoth egos. You dare not question, disagree with, judge, contradict or discredit a Guru. Guru’s will only tolerate the groupies and approach resistance almost psychopathically. The holier than thou attitude displayed by the vast majority of “Guru’s” is frightening. They become unapproachable in their own self created celebrity. A person of expertise is not afraid of criticism and debate, and rather embraces it as a source of further development. “It’s through heated debate that we knowledge create”

Out of touch

Guru’s are simply making too much money being Guru’s and therefore lose touch with the subject matter they are supposedly experts in. I know of a Marketing Guru who has never had any business other than his self branding as a Guru teaching (regurgitating) marketing strategies which said Guru has never personally experienced. What is that about? I know of other Guru’s whose course content hasn’t changed for five years in rapidly evolving markets such as Internet Marketing. Guru’s who haven’t done any internet marketing for five years, save for marketing their internet marketing materials. A person of expertise should have continued experience and exposure to the subject matter they choose to teach, with proven success to back up relevant experience.

Rehashed

Because Guru’s are out of touch, and because Guru’s are so heavily profit driven, they end up Rehashing old content and re-selling it under a slightly different guise to the “buyers”. Guru’s also need to appear to be on the ball and fresh, so you often see a product with slight modifications being released as “Snakeoil 2!” or “Snakeoil Reloaded!” or “Snakeoil Supercharged!”.  A person of expertise doesn’t look to rehash old information, rather searches for new information.

Crowd Sourcing

A personal gripe of mine. Guru’s have a terrible habit of leeching from their following. If a celebrity asks you to do them a favour, many people would love to do that favour just to be associated with said celebrity. While the “Guru” is more than able to pay for the service (due to profits from rehashed crap) their overinflated ego’s make them believe they are doing somebody a favour by using that person. Egotistical reasoning being “Bob can do my dirty laundry because it’s a great boost for Bob to be in contact with me” – In crowd sourcing I’ve seen it all, from free road trips to free full time mundane secretarial work. A true expert expects to pay for every single service they require.

Bullshit

Guru’s are essentially bullshitters. If they say they are, and market themselves as such, the vast majority of people will believe it to be true. They fake their way to self declared Guru status. They are out of touch but declare themselves to be the number a cutting edge expert. Guru’s no longer practice what they preach. Rehashed products are sold as original unique material. Old information is sold as new. Using people who admire you via crowd sourcing is bullshit! A true expert can’t be accused of any of the above.

Conclusion

• A true expert doesn’t have to resort to professing to be a guru.
• A level of expertise is reached by peer review, not self promotion.
• An expert practices what they preach, and ceases to be an expert when they cease to exercise that expertise.
• A true expert is self assured enough in their expertise to welcome debate.
• A true expert only needs to release new material.
• A true expert pays for services rather than using groupies.

Here is some of my own data on the value comparison between SEO Traffic and PPC Traffic.

Its been widely widely reported that SEO Traffic is more valuable than PPC Traffic, and at least on the basis of these numbers (without tracking the conversion figures of each) this seems to be the case.

Its also possible that PPC is delivering more relevant pages to the visitor resulting in fewer required clicks, less time spent on site and a higher bounce rate, but considering these stats came from an online store with a call center, I know I would rather higher figures on each of these.

These figures are based on 40,000 PPC visitors and 60,000 SEO visitors, so they are definitely statistically relevant.

Interestingly Yahoo SEO traffic performed about as well as Google PPC traffic, and Bing traffic also compared with Google PPC traffic other than the average Time on Site being just 2:40…

Get these figures for yourself:

1. 1. In your google analytics go to the traffic sources page
2. 2. Click on “Google (Organic)”
3. 3. Write down these numbers
4. 4. Click on “Google (CPC)”
5. 5. Compare these numbers to the Organic traffic figures.

In a previous post I wrote about adding an IP address field into Contact Form 7 1.9.3

Since then there have been major updates to Contact Form 7, which renders the initial how-to inaccurate.

Luckily - in recent updates Contact Form 7 has added a new tag [wpcf7.remote_ip] which replaces the Adding IP part of my tutorial.

Two functions which haven’t been added and which now no-longer work with my old how-to are adding date and time to Contact Form 7, and adding the Source Page into Contact Form 7.

The function for adding the source page is still the same:

function curPageURL() {
$pageURL = 'http';
if ($_SERVER["HTTPS"] == “on”) {$pageURL .= “s”;}
$pageURL .= “://”;
if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] != “80″) {
$pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].”:”.$_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
} else {
$pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
}
return $pageURL;
}

But this time, add it to the bottom of the includes/classes.php file, before the very last “?>”

Next, in the same file (includes/classes.php) search for this line:

$enctype = apply_filters( 'wpcf7_form_enctype', '' );

Directly below this line, add the following code:

$curpageurl = curpageurl();
date_default_timezone_set('GMT');
$timedate = date('l jS \of F Y h:i:s A');

Now search for this line:

. esc_attr( WPCF7_VERSION ) . '" />' . "\n";

Below which you need to add a line and insert the following code:

$form .= '<input type="hidden" name="time-date" value="' . $timedate . '" />';
$form .= '<input type="hidden" name="page-url" value="' . $curpageurl . '" />';

The next step - actually sending those values with the form, is still a mystery…

If you check the form code after making these changes you can see the source page and time/date variables being displayed… but they don’t send with the email…

If you’ve worked it out, please comment below.

When designing the airblade hand dryer, which dries hands by forcing air out of a .3mm wide slit at over 600km/h to effectively squeegee the water off your hands, Dyson noticed that a huge amount of additional air was being drawn into the process.

Frustrated with the traditional fan, which creates buffeting by slicing at the air, and the inherent dangers of fan blades spinning around, Dyson investigated using the effect he noticed with the hand dryer to move air in other ways.

The bladeless fan forces air through a 1.3mm slit on the inside of “the ring” and out the back.

Only 7% of the air pushed out by the bladeless fan comes from an impellor (which has unevenly spaced blades and holes drilled into them to reduce noise) – the rest is drawn in by creating a negative pressure area within the ring and forcing it out backwards.

There are two stages of negative pressure, which work together to “multiply the air” – the first is a traditional aerofoil design (low pressure surface, or lifting surface, inside the ring) and the second stage is actually just a twist on a traditional aerofoil with a 15 degree slope which actually draws air in from the back. There is actually also a third stage of “air multiplication” which uses an effect called viscous shearing, which is used in jet aircraft to reduce noise, to further multiply the amount of air being forced backwards.

Effectively the original airflow is multiplied 16 times through physics. cool!

Even the tilt function of the Dyson AM01 rotates around the center of gravity of the fan.

Absolutely brilliant.

A commenter posted on my blog post Screenflow on PC mentioning its been 6 months 1 week since I first wrote about getting screenflow to run on not just windows, but PC (x86) hardware…

I’ve been meaning to do a physical demonstration video proving that screenflow was running on windows hardware, but I just blatantly haven’t had the time. This was essentially a hobby and I’ve had much more important things to do.

As such, I’ve decided to release how it’s done without teasing you anymore.

The reason I came up with this solution was because I wanted to do a demonstration of a software/hardware combination product which only worked on x86 and Windows XP.

There is no decent screenflow alternative for x86 hardware, and to be honest, screenflow doesn’t run 100% smoothly on windows hardware. But as it stands, it’s still better than any other screenflow alternative.

I definitely don’t have time to elaborate, but anybody keen enough is bound to be able to work it out from these super simple instructions.

1. 1. Load OSX on PC (x86/Windows) hardware (yes it is possible)
2. 2. Run windows virtualisation on your “OSX on PC” installation
3. 3. Run screenflow within OSX and screenflow your windows virtualisation session.

That’s how I did it… simple! (Not really, a lot of faffing)

There are some other solutions that also work, but not as well… and you need a mac for both…

If you have a mac and want to screenflow windows only software just run windows virtualisation on osx and screenflow on osx.

If you want to screenflow a windows and x86 hardware combination (software and hardware) and you have a mac, you can run screenflow on the mac, and then VNC into the windows machine.

I dual booted my x86/PC machine with OSX and Windows, but in retrospect only a single boot into OSX was required with Windows virtualisation running (obviously, duh)

There you go – cat out of the bag… enjoy.

btw, this works for anything you can get running in virtualisation which includes vista. That’s right! Screenflow for Vista! Even Screenflow for Linux!

Sorry its been so long!

A good friend of mine, Phill Mason has produced an excellent guitar training course (not released yet) and asked me to check it out for him…

Since I’m pretty much Phill’s target audience, and since I do want to learn to play guitar, I decided to buy a guitar…

That’s the back-story, but that’s not the point of the story…

I decided to buy an Electric Acoustic guitar, as a romantic I love the acoustic sound, and as a geek I like to record stuff. Perfect combination.

I didn’t look around long – I like the look and the price of these electric acoustic guitars from a company called Lindo LTD, and made the buy.

My new guitar… gorgeous isn’t she…

The usual ebay buying process goes like this:

1. 1. Choose Item
2. 2. Win Item (bid or buy it now)
3. 3. Pay for item
4. 4. Item gets dispatched and delivered

Lindo LTD adds a step in there… a step so profoundly forehead smacking I was floored by the obvious.

Step 3 ½

Lindo LTD phones the buyer, thanks the buyer for the purchase, confirms the shipping method and destination… and…

Upsells!

“We also sell a 15watt amplifier to go with that guitar for £39, which we can bundle in with the same postage charge.”

After I declined, I was then offered a further discount.

When was the last time you made an ebay purchase and you received a phone call from the seller? Never right?!?

When was the last time an ebay seller tried to up-sell you? Never right?!?

WHY NOT?!?

It’s brilliant! I don’t know if the guitar is going to be any good, it was a cheapie after-all, but I sure as shit know I’m super impressed with Lindo LTD’s after sales marketing.

Lots of folk are trying to start new businesses online and it just looks like one big brick wall.

And that’s fair enough, since the single biggest SEO factor is… TIME.

But there is hope out there, and there are quick wins. The trick is to go broad and target a market, rather than targeting just a few keywords.

Here’s some inspiration:

I started a new site not long ago, did some minimal SEO and got fantastic results - here at the vitals:

• The website is on a brand new domain name, and is just 45 days old.
• The domain name does NOT even include the keyword.
• The keyword is a single word with the following stats:
  • 1088 Monthly Searches with a PBR of 100% (Since it’s a single word it will always be 100% PBR, a slight flaw in this metric)
  • 1,270,000 competing pages. 152,000 of which have the keyword in the title.
  • Adwords average CPC of 42c

Not exactly a low competition keyword……

I’ve mentioned before in my post “Reading The Market Samurai SEO Competition Matrix”  the “SEOC” value, which is the Market Samurai acronym for “Competing Pages” doesn’t really come into the equation when analysing a market. Wordtracker.com has since come up with a much more appropriate value which can be read in conjunction with the Market Samurai Competition Matrix to give you a clearer picture of the market.

Here are the figures from WordTracker:

To explain, the “In Anchor And Title” value trawls through a database of 1 trillion web pages, to find pages which have the keyword in the page title, and also have a back-link to thatpage with the keyword in the anchortext of a backlink. The formula for KEI3 (Which is the number we are most interested in when trawling through long lists of keywords) is (KEI3=Searches/In Anchor And Title)

‘In Anchor and Title’ is a count of the number of pages for which the keyword appears in both the title tag and the anchor text of a backlink.

Based on this we are able to see that there are only really 3160 pages competing for this term, which still is no small amount.

By contrast, here is the Wordtracker data for “Car Insurance”

Just to illustrate the sheer weight of the data Wordtracker has exclusive access to, here is a look at the index growth compared to other search engines and web spiders.

Majestic SEO trawled this data.

So – with all the vital statistics taken care of… how is the page doing?

Here is the SEO competition matrix for my keyword.

There I am in 9th position…

The first thing I’m going to do, is shoot off and fix my meta description.

There are now two tools which are vital to SEO competition analysis –

The old gun Market Samurai, which was until last week, the only tool you needed. I believe in this product strongly, as always I want you to take my recommendation 100% seriously. You can show me some love and click this link with my affiliate code, or if it means you can take the recommendation more seriously if you don’t use an affiliate link, you can go directly to the sign up page through this link.

The even older gun, WordTracker. This is the grandpapa of keyword research which was providing keyword research data long before any more solid data was available. We still recommend WordTracker to people as part of the keyword net (catching as many keywords as possible) however WordTracker become an essential tool again last week by providing data nobody else is able to provide.

WordTracker have a database of websites which is as big as googles own!!! This allows them to provide the extremely valuable ‘In Anchor And Title’ metric, as well as the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) metric, and the even more specific KEI3 value. This is data that NO OTHER TOOL CAN GET YOU! Again, I want you to take this recommendation very seriously, so here’s the good karma affiliate link for WordTracker, or you can choose the non-affiliate link here.

It goes to show that “SEOC” is dead, and that the most critical aspect of SEO competition analysis is the Market Samurai SEO Competition Matrix. It also shows that you get a critical look at the full picture when you include WordTrackers brand new and extremely valuable KEI3 metric.

Don’t be discouraged by any market - if you have patience, produce content and build links, you WILL get rankings. The online marketplace is still in its infancy.

The System UK Intensive is a leading and prestigious internet marketing seminar which has been running reguluarly for YEARS. The man behind it is Ken McCarthy, also the man credited to holding the first ever internet marketing conference back in 1994

The weekend started in London, myself and compatriot Steve Wild decided it might be fun to navigate London simply by flipping a coin – heads left, tails right. Fortune favours the brave, and we ended up taking a nice tour of The Tower of London, and Tower Bridge

Vince, Posing on tower bridge

Summing up day one of the seminar:

• Mark Attwood raised the roof in the first session leaving a few Americans unimpressed with the use of comedy (and profanity) but an absolute riot to watch.
• A real treat, Drayton Bird gave us a great laugh with some great copywriting stories.
• The “conversion rate experts” also gave a presentation on… guess what… CRO…

But as per usual, all the best stuff comes out in the bar…

Mark Attwood speaking with Maine Copywriter Julie Eason about facebook advertising with Drayton Bird relaxing in the background. Julies pen is the most incredible thing on the planet!

Over dinner Mark Attwood and Author of “Save The Pixel”, Ben Hunt, cleared the restaurant of patrons with their hilarious antics.

The “bromance” blossoms with the exchange of product – Mark with Ben’s “Save The Pixel” and Ben with Mark’s “Internet Marketing for Businesses”

Day two of the seminar:

Super Affiliates Ben Moskel and Greg Davis rained streams of sweet possibility sunshine on the audience with affiliate marketing strategy, and in Gregs case, absolutely stunning affiliate marketing super strategy.

It has to be said, Greg Davis has the single coolest business card on the planet.

Greg Davis (Super Affiliate Rockstar) has the audience upstanding.

The highlight of the day, it has to be said, was the presentation by Mark Attwood and Vince Samios on SEO:SEM4SME’s (essentially back linking) – referred to as “a great double act” we spoke on a high level about complex link building and link building strategy.

Well – it was my highlight at least!

I was humbled to speak at The System, a young bloke like me speaking at a major event like that, a truly exceptional opportunity. And while nervous for about three seconds, the audience was so receptive and fantastic that the whole 90 minutes flew by smoothly and I felt we really delivered one of the best SEO talks ever.

Mark to the right, Vince at the lectern. “Backbone Link Building” on the screen.

Towards the end of the event, one of the most useful sessions was “What is the one thing you are going to do next” - groups were formed and information flowed freely.

See that man sitting next to Mark – watch this space, that’s Robert Palinkas, he is a super star mega legend! The Hungarians will rule the world!

Faculty and friends went out for dinner afterwards at a fantastic Indian restaurant. I believe this was Ben Moskels first taste of Indian cuisine.

I also had a truly bizarre experience. There was one guy at the table I hadn’t yet had the pleasure of meeting, so as the troops filtered off one by one I sat down and introduced myself.

Me: “Hi, we haven’t met yet, I’m Vince”
Him: “Hi Vince, I’m Mike”
Me: “What do you do Mike?”
Him: “Wordtracker!”

It was bloody Mike Mindel, a man I’ve known about for years and who I have great respect for. But I thought he was American, and really didn’t expect to randomly sit down beside him in an Indian restaurant. We had a fantastically geeky chat, and lets just say… Wordtracker is about to rock the internet marketing world…

A view down the dinner table – with characters such as Steve Wild, Mark Attwood, Ken McCarthy, Mike Mindel, Ben Hunt, Greg Davis and many others…

Most of the troops headed back to the hotel bar for cider and scotch (Lagavulin 16yrs is Amazing!)

Mark, Ken and Greg, and the accusatory finger “Mark, the profanity in your presentation was unnecessary” (That wasn’t the actual conversation, but it fits the photo.)

Bizarrely after the bar closed I ended up in Ken’s room until 1:45am talking about all things ranging from Jazz, to offline marketing for online business, to rosemary as a herb. A really really great guy!

One final thought. What is the difference between average people and successful people? IMHO: Average people dream in their sleep, successful people dream in reality.

Mark Attwood live blogged about The System event. Follow the link for his summary.

Come on people – I just have to write a pointed post about this.

NLP is fart… stinky hot air…

Yes – NLP is making a lot of people a lot of money, but they are the NLP “Expert Practitioners” (which means they spent a week in a room osmosing regurgitatable bullshit.) and they are making money by pyramid scheme style proliferation of untested unproven somewhat ridiculous wank.

“Neuro-Linguistic Programming” is one of those “The Law Of Attraction” style hype names with absolutely no scientific basis.

• You aren’t programming anything
• It has nothing to do with neurons

“Linguistic” could be used in a name for NLP, but that name would have to be more like “hyping deficient linguistic accuracy

Props to the manipulative illiterate cash greedy motherfuckers that came up with the name, making dyslexia glamorous – its brilliant! It sounds like a controllable science…

A few points I would like to make:

• Isn’t your life brutally sad if you need to manipulate people to your will?
• Aren’t you a bit of an arsehole to be offering people a serving of bullshit under the guise of helping them? (This goes both for teaching NLP, and “practicing” NLP)
• Have you ever read NLP’ed sales copy? It just doesn’t make sense! Further, to completely debunk the concept, it doesn’t perform anywhere near as well as real English and traditional (linguistically accurate) sales copy in multivariate testing!
• What does linguistics have to do with body and eye movement? Linguitics relates to verbal communication, not body language?

Non-Verbal Communication…
There is nothing linguistic about what is being communicated by this old lady.. except for the linguistic interpretation… “Fuck You NLP Scammy Bastards”

As per religions, “the law of attraction” and all these other bullshit hypes, it requires a certain lack of emotional intelligence to have any belief or faith – it requires a wilful ignorance.

Wouldn’t the world be lovely if we could turn people into whatever we liked (refer to my post positively ignorant) and then (using NLP) manipulate our creations to suit our will… I was thinking that could be quite fun, but really if everyone has similar abilities it could become a complete riot!

I’m all for placebo – But I can’t stand a placebo which professes to be anything other than a placebo. Homeopathy for instance…

Acupressure… doesn’t cure your cold… even most acupuncturists (the ones who believe sticking needles in your body helps, which really only has measurable placebo effects) use acupressure only as a guidance for acupuncture.

Acupressure
Stops you getting another cold by making you look like such a gullible fool that you will never go outside without a coat again, for fear of further public ridicule… “Dude, you’ve got seeds stuck to your ear”

Sometimes ignorance is a choice…

Stuart Maccormack asked a good question…

“Hi I was wondering what the red numbers in the Rank Tracker tab of market samurai mean. Sometimes they’re green other times red and sometimes in bold. I’ve searched everywhere and can’t seem to work them out.”

I had a lot of trouble getting any red up at all, I’m either ranking well, or not ranking at all (which is a sign of an authority site) – I do have this visual example.

Bolding appears to distinguish between phrase match and broad match results – broad match results obviously being the most valuable, hence bolded.

The Red colouring is there to identify clear weaknesses and negative moves. If you aren’t ranking in the top 600 broad match (approx) then clearly your site isn’t even being considered by the search engine – also if you have had backwards movement, that’s also indicative of a problem.

I disagree with the trigger point for this colouration. I personal believe if your site isn’t in the top 100 you aren’t receiving any SEO recognition on that phrase, and on “Phrase Match” search you would need to be in the top 25 before you could claim any search engine traction.

Which brings me to an interesting point…

Phrase match rankings should only be used as an indication of future potential rankings. They have no other value.

If you have decent optimization you should be able to appear in the top 100 results for any phrase in any market (Obviously the most competitive markets require your site to have existing authority, but you can still rank highly overnight)

If you have a question - try “Ask Vince” - or if your question relates to this post, please comment on this post.

Lets ask ourselves a question - since we have nothing to lose by using do-follow on every link, why do we still use no-follow on blog comment links?

All new comments on my blog need to be approved manually, and akismet takes care of the spam, so why do I still have no-follow on all links in the comments?

It simply serves no purpose anymore!

To promote and incentivise contributors to my blog, I’ve installed the do-follow wordpress comments plugin - I highly recommend you do the same.

So as of today, all past and new comments will no longer have the no-follow attribute applied to comments.

Happy times!

Maturity isn’t proportional to age, more accurately maturity (and a healthy immaturity), is proportional to intelligence.