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So...Is anyone else at TeamLiquid involved in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or online marketing?
This is going somewhere, but I've got a little backstory to share, so bear with me. :D
I first got into SEO about a year and a half ago when I started getting my first real pangs of financial inadequacy. I came back from college on Xmas break a little shell-shocked over how much money my peers at my pricey private university had to blow on junk they didn't need. At the time, I was dating an international Chinese girl For those of you who don't know, international college students in the United States are generally loaded, since they don't qualify for financial aid, indicating they can afford the full price tag of a prestigious private university. She went on a shopping trip on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving with the awesome SALES) and spent something like $1400 and it just blew my mind. But I digress.
In any event, possessed by rage-money-inadequacy, and dissatisfied with the slow profit rate of my work-study job, I started Googling "how to make money online" and other such random phrases. This resulted in me running into a lot of useless crap, a lot of "HOLY COW I MADE $234,900 IN DAYS!" type websites. Bit by bit, however, I began to settle into the world of internet marketing from a more legitimate perspective. I discovered the concepts of 'site-flipping' (building up a website to be slightly valuable and then sell it for profit based on its potential) and things like "SEO" (Search Engine Optimization, or figuring out how to make Google rank you for the things you want your website to rank for.
This led to my first experimentation with traffic generation. I started a number of free hosted blogs on Blogger.com and set about trying to make money with them, mostly with Google Ads or promoting affiliate products. They did OK, enough to convince me that the model worked, but not to make any real cash with them.
I went through a lot of trial and error with my website construction and slowly moved from quick and easy 'fly by night' type websites and into more legitimate online business models. Last summer I founded my first online business, which of course never made a cent, but taught me a lot about website construction, business construction, and traffic generation for websites. I ran out of time to work on the website when I got back to college, but I maintained the domain and the interest in internet marketing. Around this time, I also modified my career plans. I was originally planning to go to graduate school for psychology. Now I still want to get the undergrad psych degree, but also take business classes on the side and study consumer behavior with an eventual MBA in marketing as a goal.
Over the course of this last year, my interest and expertise in internet marketing and online business has grown, especially with regard to SEO. I succeeded in obtaining an internship this summer at an internet marketing firm (from which I am currently writing and posting this). We're about as legit as it gets as far as internet marketing is concerned, as we represent some major companies and brands like Terminix, TruGreen, Navy Federal Credit Union, and Blair. The legitimacy of this industry has convinced me that I could actually make a career out of this. Plus they really like me and my work :D
As I enter the business world, networking has become more and more important. This has gotten me wondering if anyone on Team Liquid is involved in IM or SEO. If you are, I'd be really interested to hear from you and maybe connect on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you have an interesting online business or internet marketing story to share, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.
Sorry this ended up so long. Thanks for reading it, if you're still with me :D
 
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Wow, good luck with this! I think it takes real balls to be an entrepreneur, especially on the internet.
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See you're just like those rich people you talk about except instead of money you have these deadly skills. What about us plebs????
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I've always thought that SEO was a bit of a scam industry / pyramid schemy. I never understood why people pour so much time and money into it. Am I wrong?
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SEO is a bit underhanded since no matter how you put it, you're trying to manipulate how search engines see your site (rather than humans) in order to increase your ranking. I haven't done SEO on any of my pages yet I'm ranked highly on Google just from consistent use of valid HTML, good structure and accessible pages. There's many more darker sides to SEO such as link hiding, link farms, content spamming / stealing, etc that don't improve its image.
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On July 13 2010 06:32 R1CH wrote:
SEO is a bit underhanded since no matter how you put it, you're trying to manipulate how search engines see your site (rather than humans) in order to increase your ranking. I haven't done SEO on any of my pages yet I'm ranked highly on Google just from consistent use of valid HTML, good structure and accessible pages. There's many more darker sides to SEO such as link hiding, link farms, content spamming / stealing, etc that don't improve its image.
Agree, This is what I generally perceive when someone explains they're in SEO.
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In my opionon SEO is pure nonsense. There´s companies who charge a ton of money just by "tricking" search engines into thinking your website contains more, and more important, information than it actually does. I work at a webdevelopment company and when you just produce clean, semantic, HTML you're fine.
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On July 13 2010 06:39 Sins wrote:Show nested quote +On July 13 2010 06:32 R1CH wrote:
SEO is a bit underhanded since no matter how you put it, you're trying to manipulate how search engines see your site (rather than humans) in order to increase your ranking. I haven't done SEO on any of my pages yet I'm ranked highly on Google just from consistent use of valid HTML, good structure and accessible pages. There's many more darker sides to SEO such as link hiding, link farms, content spamming / stealing, etc that don't improve its image. Agree, This is what I generally perceive when someone explains they're in SEO.
It's unfortunate that a lot of people perceive SEO to be some sort of snake oil internet trick. It's been given a terrible reputation because of all the fraudulent companies and products out there, I agree. I liken it to something like Cutco/Vector Marketing. For anyone who has ever actually done anything with the company and tried to follow the business model (direct marketing of Cutco-brand knives), they understand it's a legitimate business model. Anyone unfamiliar with the business model thinks it's a pyramid scheme and some dirty MLM operation.
It's the same with SEO, I find. There's a lot of crap out there, but in the end, your optimized internet presence is becoming incredibly important to stay competitive in the online marketing landscape. Major companies (think Fortune 500 Major in our case) are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars each month to gain even the slightest edge over their competitors.
As an example, take one of our major clients, Rooms to Go (a major furniture chain in the Southeast US). We took over the Rooms To Go account about 3 years ago. They had no online presence. Today, they consistently rank in the top 3 in Google for the keyword "furniture". No one would argue that Rooms to Go isn't relevant for 'furniture' or that it doesn't belong in those search results, since it clearly has the products that consumers are looking to buy.
We have moved into a new age of marketing. Instead of manipulating print ads, TV ads, and radio ads, we now manipulate banner ads, Google Ads and search engine results. There's nothing shady about SEO, unless you harbor an inherent dislike for the marketing industry, which is an entirely different argument :D
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On July 13 2010 06:55 disco wrote:
In my opionon SEO is pure nonsense. There´s companies who charge a ton of money just by "tricking" search engines into thinking your website contains more, and more important, information than it actually does. I work at a webdevelopment company and when you just produce clean, semantic, HTML you're fine.
Clean, semantic HTML accounts for SOME of Google's algorithm. It can't possibly account for all of it though, and it hasn't for years. Google simply can't afford to trust webmasters to accurately report exactly what their site is about. You can optimize the meta-data and title tags all you want, in the end, there's always going to be more to the Google algorithm.
Think about it like this: If you tell everyone that you're the best doctor in town, is everyone going to believe you? Maybe, maybe not. That's what relying just on HTML and coding is equivalent to. Now if everyone ELSE says that you're the best doctor in town, are people going to believe it? Probably. That's the equivalent of SEO...getting everyone else to think and say that you're the best doctor in town. 
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On July 13 2010 07:15 Grim_Reaver wrote:Show nested quote +On July 13 2010 06:55 disco wrote:
In my opionon SEO is pure nonsense. There´s companies who charge a ton of money just by "tricking" search engines into thinking your website contains more, and more important, information than it actually does. I work at a webdevelopment company and when you just produce clean, semantic, HTML you're fine. Clean, semantic HTML accounts for SOME of Google's algorithm. It can't possibly account for all of it though, and it hasn't for years. Google simply can't afford to trust webmasters to accurately report exactly what their site is about. You can optimize the meta-data and title tags all you want, in the end, there's always going to be more to the Google algorithm. Think about it like this: If you tell everyone that you're the best doctor in town, is everyone going to believe you? Maybe, maybe not. That's what relying just on HTML and coding is equivalent to. Now if everyone ELSE says that you're the best doctor in town, are people going to believe it? Probably. That's the equivalent of SEO...getting everyone else to think and say that you're the best doctor in town.
I know Google is entirely based on backlinks. Which is why I think all the SEO "tricks" are nonsense. (By that I mean the cheap tricks that 90% of the "SEO specialists" use, such as hiding irrelevant but popular content in the source to trick search engines but hiding it from visitors).
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So it's kind of like abusing ladder?
Maybe this is why all the shitty summary sites (for books) result at the top of the search engine, even though they all demand you pay them for their badly written crap, and all the goods ones that are free and much more comprehensive, you have to just know, because they're too far down in the search engine.
You know, I hate you. Just because it's not illegal doesn't mean you're not a huge douche canoe for doing it.
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On July 13 2010 07:43 disco wrote:Show nested quote +On July 13 2010 07:15 Grim_Reaver wrote:On July 13 2010 06:55 disco wrote:
In my opionon SEO is pure nonsense. There´s companies who charge a ton of money just by "tricking" search engines into thinking your website contains more, and more important, information than it actually does. I work at a webdevelopment company and when you just produce clean, semantic, HTML you're fine. Clean, semantic HTML accounts for SOME of Google's algorithm. It can't possibly account for all of it though, and it hasn't for years. Google simply can't afford to trust webmasters to accurately report exactly what their site is about. You can optimize the meta-data and title tags all you want, in the end, there's always going to be more to the Google algorithm. Think about it like this: If you tell everyone that you're the best doctor in town, is everyone going to believe you? Maybe, maybe not. That's what relying just on HTML and coding is equivalent to. Now if everyone ELSE says that you're the best doctor in town, are people going to believe it? Probably. That's the equivalent of SEO...getting everyone else to think and say that you're the best doctor in town. I know Google is entirely based on backlinks. Which is why I think all the SEO "tricks" are nonsense. (By that I mean the cheap tricks that 90% of the "SEO specialists" use, such as hiding irrelevant but popular content in the source to trick search engines but hiding it from visitors).
Ohh now I see what your'e talking about. Yeah hidden text and link farms, junk like that, is quite frankly (and at the risk of sounding just a little pretentious) really amateur stuff. You don't get major companies and clients with garbage practices like that. You can't sustain a 40 employee firm with $6M in revenues with practices like that, and that's not really what professional SEO services are about.
There are no tricks, or silver bullets in web marketing. If I were to boil it as much as I could, I'd say it's just a lot of writing, really. The guys over in the Creative Department make the pretty websites and the pretty images to put on them, the guys over in the Copy Department write us a bunch of articles and content for the websites, and then in the SEO Department, we upload the content to the websites, article directories, do press releases, all that good ol' fashioned marketing stuff, just moved to the internet medium.
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On July 13 2010 08:01 Chef wrote:
So it's kind of like abusing ladder?
Maybe this is why all the shitty summary sites (for books) result at the top of the search engine, even though they all demand you pay them for their badly written crap, and all the goods ones that are free and much more comprehensive, you have to just know, because they're too far down in the search engine.
You know, I hate you. Just because it's not illegal doesn't mean you're not a huge douche canoe for doing it.
Yeah just like abusing ladder. Cause abusing ladder is a career.
I'm not sure if you really don't get it, haven't taken the time to read anything, or are just trolling for the sake of it.
Not only is it not illegal, but it's pretty certain that online marketing channels (and mobile) will surpass traditional marketing channels with the next 3-5, so you'd best get used to a lot of "douche-canoe-ing". I'm sorry that Google is failing at delivering you your book summaries. Personally, I would try reading the book.
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To anybody working in marketing - kill yourself.
-Bill Hicks
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Russian Federation3631 Posts
this has to be one of the funniest bumps I've seen in a long time
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Lalalaland34495 Posts
Ahaha this was certainly pretty good.
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EPT
