What valuable lessons, if any, do we teach on Sphinn regarding SEO?

A high-level analysis of one week of Sphinn postings.

The Selection

I’m coming at this from an angle where a non-SEO site owner says "hey, I have to do something… now let’s learn from the best".

I sifted through the  900+ items posted between Friday May 9 00:00 and Thursday May 15 24:00, culling the ones that seemed to convey real value for a newcomer and dropping items like "30+ Weird, Educational and Stupid Search Screenshots", "Trolls or Upset Customers? Do You Know the Difference", "Exercises For Lower Ab Workouts" or "Is Bebo better than Facebook? Creating a profile network".

source: pcweenies.org

The Problem:
Have you ever had a client come to you in a state of desperation, begging for help to remove a blog post that ranks for their business name, and portrays them in less than a positive light?

Or perhaps you had a very contentious break-up with an old flame, and they’ve since decided to air their beefs with you in a more public forum, and these complaints now appear every time you type your name into Google. Maybe you merely made a mistake one evening after a few too many beverages, but the proof now appears in video form online and as a result has become part of your public resume.

In last weeks post wrote I that Local Search is predicted to be the killer app for mobile phones based on a Juniper Research report predicting that Local search is to account for 43% of cumulative mobile search advertising revenues between 2008 and 2013.

Hot off the heels of this study comes a new Nielson Mobile report showing a growing number of mobile phone subscribers worldwide are taking online social networking to the pubs, streets and subways!

The Nielsen Mobile report show that the U.K. leads Europe in mobile social networking with the U.S. showing similar numbers.

Image - CasualChatters.com

Retail therapy helps us to feel so much better when things don’t go our way, and it would seem that the same is true for large corporations with lots and lots and lots of big bucks!

Image Courtesy - lemetrosexuel.com

Since Microsoft’s offer to purchase Yahoo! didn’t seem to turn out, they have found themselves with all this money for acquisition available and a designer outfit that appears to be unavailable at this time. Like any savvy fashionista, they’ve decided it was time to head to the mall for some serious retail therapy to make themselves feel better about not getting what they’ve been holding all that lovely money for. LO AND BEHOLD! Like spying the first Abercrombie & Fitch store L.A. (and a demographic to match), Microsoft has decided to head on over to� facebook and see what fits.

Ever wanted to become a power Digger? Come on now … sure you have.

Here’s how to start.

Its a well known fact that Digg trusts content from some sites more than others. Why not … the larger sites are obviously more conservative and more sensitive to public scrutiny. Such sites are much less likely to publish rubbish for fear of reprisals, lost confidence, and reputation management fiascos. As I talked about in my post last week 4 Pillars of Social Media Algorithms - Trust x4, Digg rewards sites it trusts by permitting them to go hot at lower votes counts than those it trusts less. Makes sense right?

Ever wonder why some Digg submissions go hot at 25, while others don’t at 270+? Same with Stumbleupon … why do some posts do exceptionally well while others with similar numbers of thumbs ups get substantially less traffic?

One word … TRUST!

Trust plays a huge role in organic search algorithms, so why wouldn’t it in social media algorithms. After all, it makes perfect sense intuitively. Social media sites rightfully want the best content to rise to the top, so at the end of the day there are really only 2 considerations for a piece of social news/bookmarking content:

Its true! Matt McGee and I have had a long time bet who would be the last to join Twitter. Following Michael Gray’s session at SMX Social, we both saw the light and mutually agreed to join Twitter. Though in true fashion, we’ve still got to settle our bet, so we decided to each wager $250 … and merely change the terms of the contest.

Despite all the benefits of Twitter, its still a little bittersweet for me. I liken twitter to The Collective aspect of the Borg in Star Trek. A person can be easily overwhelmed with incoming information. That said … I’ve seen the light … I am now Borg. Resistance was futile!

If its in fact true that “actions speak louder than words”, and “problems are merely opportunities in disguise”, we should be able to read a lot into the personality and philosophy or various social communities by looking at how they behave when confronted with adversity (read scheduled maintenance).

Therefore below, find a number of ’scheduled maintenance’ pages shown by numerous social media sites. Which show the most personality? And which should be retired as boring an uncreative? Here’s the list:

Full Disclosure Confession: I don’t get the whole social networking phenomenon. Perhaps it is because I am a gentleman of a certain age. MySpace is mine and I have no real desire to share it with anyone beyond my other half… and my dog. I leave the Twittering to my parrot. I am not Facebooked as I have no overwhelming desire to make contact with my primary school cohorts. I am LinkedIn, but that’s about that.

And I actually don’t get it from a SEO/SEM perspective simply because there is far too much beyond my control which implicitly and necessarily implies I am a control freak. I am a control freak. And I like numbers that have relevance. Who. What. Where. When. Why.