“I ain’t sayin’ I beat the devil, but I drank his beer for nothing…Then I stole his song.”  Kris Kristofferson

“His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.”   James Joyce, “The Dead”

“Keep your eyes on the prize…hold on.”…Bruce Springsteen

Many of the paid search accounts that I’ve worked with contain a geographical component and I have a well-used spreadsheet that contains the names of the biggest U.S. Cities, States, and State Abbreviations for those accounts. I often combine this list with my “core” keywords so that my ads can reach the geographical paid search long tail.

“Oh cheeky cheeky
Oh naughty sneaky
You’re so perceptive
And I wonder how you knew.” 
…Brian Eno ‘Dead Finks Don’t Talk’

“I’m an insider, I been burned by the fire
And I’ve had to live with some hard promises
I’ve crawled through the briars–I’m an insider.”  Tom Petty

I have no problem stating publicly that I don’t feel that…’s prison sentence fits the crime committed (though I admit I don’t know all the facts and know that many other people I respect don’t agree with me).  What I find interesting is that in my mind, even though his transgressions had nothing to do with SEO, his incident brought up for me some very salient points that touch upon SEO client / contractor relationships.

I’ve had terrible luck getting and keeping good and reliable handyman for my house.  I have a great plumber and a great painter that I work with and but with handymen, I’ve encountered either incompetence or unreliability with several different people.  So, after I realized that this social media trend is probably here to stay, I decided to tweet my need to my network to see if I could get any leads on a reliable Portland / Beaverton Handyman.

“I think it’s time for some tough love here…”  Google’s Adam Lasnik

When my wife and I went house shopping back in 2002, we viewed a house in Sherwood that I didn’t think much of but my wife really liked.  She expressed quite openly how that particular house would be really awesome for our family.  My realtor took her aside and within earshot of both myself and the homeowners expressed to her quite directly and forcefully many different reasons why purchasing that house would be a terrible mistake.  My wife was a bit taken aback with his behavior but in that one moment, he earned my business for life.

“Men with insight, men in granite
Knights in armor bent on chivalry.”
…Van Morrison, Tupelo Honey

I’m probably getting 6-10 new Twitter followers a day and, unless it’s an obvious bot, I always check out the page of each new follower in order to decide whether to reciprocate.

Here’s the criteria I use in making my “follow” determination:

If the account has the default avatar and or haven’t done any @ tweets yet, I won’t follow back unless I know them.

“What is the price of Experience?
Do men buy it for a song?
Or wisdom for the price of a dance in the street?
No, it is bought with the price of all Man hath, his house, his wife, his children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy, and in the wither’d field where the farmer ploughs for bread in vain.”…William Blake

I’m long overdue to post SEO t-shirt photos, so here goes:

Hayley is modeling the EasyTweets t-shirt which is a service offered by my friend and fellow Sahara patron Alexander Barbara. EasyTweets is a web-based marketing tool that makes it easy to use Twitter to promote and grow your business.

Cade is showing off the BigWatah.com t-shirt. Haven’t heard about BigWatah? Make sure to check out the site. I plan to write something more in depth about BigWatah sometime in the future.