Aaron Wall founded SeoBook.com in 2003 and has worked over 20,000 hours in the SEO field. His site is known for its popular online SEO training program and the SEO tools they offer. He has consulted for small mom & pop businesses right on through to fortune 500 projects. He also runs a bunch of sites that are not in the SEO space.

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I was in the military and loathed the lifestyle. On the submarine you could go month(s) without daylight and basically every aspect of your life was managed in ways that were arbitrary, illogical, and flat out stupid. One such example would be how they would allow oxygen to run a bit low out of spec & then disallow you from exercising because they feared running the oxygen scrubbers a bit more would create too much noise. Then the next day would be “field day” – a 4-hour clean up day where they would crank up the oxygen level & instruct you to use an industrial strength vacuum cleaner which was shorting the sound to the hull.

There were tons of other such examples, like on one underway when they lost all my stuff in Puerto Rico (offloaded it with the SEALs) & forced me to re-buy a full set of uniforms. On that same underway I came back to get told that my car was towed off base (into a ghetto, where it was broke into & I had more stuff stolen). The people who told me my car got towed told me it happened a while ago and that it would cost me a lot, while laughing at me. If you have ever watched the movie “Falling Down” that really encapsulated how I felt at that point in time. On that underway my pre-tax income was less than what the military cost me in lost or stolen goods tied directly to their incompetence. So they charged me to steal a few months of my life & I really hated everything about the military lifestyle from that point onward. When I got out of the military my first website was an ugly looking rant site about my loathe of the navy…followed quickly by a low quality affiliate website (hey, when a person is new, naive, and ignorant they often think their stuff is more brilliant than it is).

I tried to hire a person to do SEO for that affiliate site & of course nobody who was of any quality would want to work for dirt-cheap on a crappy thin affiliate website (if they were smart they would have built a better one themselves). The person I hired failed & so that was no good. That company is still selling garbage SEO packages to this day.

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Many bloggers feel that a blog is not a blog unless it has worth while comments. Unfortunately most blogs do not receive many comments or comments of any particular quality.

Just consider for example a good blog post by Aaron Wall on How To Make Easy Money On Google. This is a somewhat controversial topic as the following extract shows:

AdAge has a good post about how Google’s promotion of fraudulent advertising is undermining their brand… In a world of double-digit unemployment and old-line industries in mid-collapse, here’s a sales pitch tailor-made for the times: “Get Paid by Google.” It’s a pitch that’s compelling millions of people to visit sites such as Kevinlifeblog.com, Scottsmoneyblog.com, Maryslifeblog.com and Googlemoneytree.com, all promising some variation on one theme: Just buy our guide and we’ll teach you how to make thousands from Google, right in the privacy of your own home!

Despite the topic, at the time of writing some days later, this post has had only seven comments.

This post will explore blog comments and discuss what can be done to turn them into real conversations.
The Internet Can Support Communications

Via the Internet, you clearly have access to a huge inventory of information and knowledge. However that is not the most amazing aspect of the Internet. More importantly the Internet supports communications between different human beings. Having two people thinking about or discussing a topic is of much greater value than just one person’s opinion. That is why a number of people speak forcefully on how conversations can be supported on the web.

Sera Perez argues that blog comments still matter. Matthew Wingram points out that this view on conversations is supported by the New York Times. Louis Gray also suggests that blog comments are really conversations rather than just replies.

Along the same lines, you now have Disqus. This is a powerful comment system that strives to enhance the discussion on websites.

It is not just blogs that are involved here. Any online property where people may share with others or comment on what others have contributed can be enhanced in a similar way. Thus we see that the news feed aggregator, Google Reader, aims to start a conversation.

I’m a big fan of sharing (might be all those lessons I learned in kindergarten). And when I share something, it’s always nice to get a response like “Thanks!” or “That was the funniest thing I’ve ever read!” Whether you’re 5 or 50, you’re more likely to share other awesome things if you know people are excited to hear what you have to say.

That is certainly true. However other parts of Google may not feel exactly the same about these conversations.

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1. You have a big mouth about your SEO tactics
loud mouthA sure-fire way to get the attention of a Google engineer and potentially have your rankings manually reviewed, is to blabber away about all of the SEO tactics and tricks you’re using to get ahead.

For example, John Chow, the infamous make money online blogger, openly exchanged links with his readers on his blog to rank for “make money online”. While it did work initially, Google quickly made an example of him and penalized him hard. John recently got his rankings back after cleaning up his act, but for over a year, he didn’t even rank for his own name.

Similarly, a very well-known SEO mentioned to his readers that his affiliate links were designed in a way to pass weight back to his site. For whatever reason, someone decided to report this to Google spam king Matt Cutts, and unsurprisingly, those links no longer pass any weight.

If you have an SEO blog or are involved in the Internet marketing community, be careful what you tell others – either privately or in public. It could come back to haunt you.

2. Your sites are all tied together = easy target
network targetLike it or not, the big G has a lot of information about you and your sites. Google runs the most popular contextual advertising platform, owns a free analytics package that’s better than most paid versions, has access to all WHOIS information and IP addresses, and can analyze sites that you interlink. Not only that, but Google has access to your email, documents, and browsing history. Sound scary? That’s what I thought.

If you can, it’s best to separate your sites as much as possible (e.g. different IP addresses, no interlinking, etc). Why? If Google suspects something about one of your sites, they’ll probably look into your network for other sites you’re involved with as well. That’s definitely not something you want. If I can find your network of sites using a free tool like SpyOnWeb.com, you can bet Google can easily do it too.

Unfortunately, completely separating your sites isn’t always possible especially with Google’s growing dominance in so many verticals. This makes avoiding the other red flags even more important.

3. Your site is over-optimized for certain keywords
yellow flag refereeOptimizing the content of a page for SEO has always been pretty simple – target 2 to 3 keywords per page and place them in title tags (preferable the beginning), header tags, URLs, and on-page body content. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy anymore as Google automatically filters and penalizes sites that it thinks are “over-optimized”. This isn’t an exact science, but Aaron Wall of SEO Book explains how he got a ranking filter removed by mixing up the keywords and being less aggressive.

If you’ve tried optimizing a page for a keyword without much success in rankings, try taking this approach. Shift the focus away from your targeted keywords and don’t be so overly aggressive in your on-page efforts (i.e. forget about things like keyword density). Google actively tries to neutralize SEO, so this sort of filter is no surprise. You just need to be able to adapt to improve your rankings.

4. Your link profile is unnatural
link to meIn the same way that you can over-optimize for on-page SEO, you can also over-optimize for off-page link building. I wrote about this topic in my article, The Secret to Making Every Link Count For Your SEO Rankings, so be sure to read it before you move on.

In a nutshell, Google filters out sites in the rankings when it thinks the sites’ link profiles seem unnatural. Some examples include:

* too many links too fast
* link anchor text too similar
* not enough deep links to other pages
* too many links from low quality or unrelated sites
* too many reciprocal links
* all links are from the sidebar or footer of a page

Again, it’s Google’s goal to neutralize any sort of manipulation. If you want to be a successful SEO, you have to take this into consideration and appear natural in everything you do. Ask yourself the following question – how would normal webmasters with big sites obtain links? Then seek to emulate their links.

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Eight iPhone owners have joined an elite clan: Their Apple gadget is running a program that cost nearly $1,000.

When the iPhone first hit the market in June 2007, those who paid the $499 entry price — and signed the two-year AT&T contract — owned a status symbol. A year later, we have the iPhone 3G, Apple’s speedier, sleeker and, most important, less expensive smart phone, which introduced a section for downloading third-party iPhone applications. Now that the phone is affordable enough for a wider audience, a new status symbol has emerged: a seemingly useless application called I Am Rich.

Its function is exactly what the name implies: to alert people that you have money in the bank. I Am Rich was available for purchase from the phone’s App Store for, get this, $999.99 — the highest amount a developer can charge through the digital retailer, said Armin Heinrich, the program’s developer. Once downloaded, it doesn’t do much — a red icon sits on the iPhone home screen like any other application, with the subtext “I Am Rich.” Once activated, it treats the user to a large, glowing gem (pictured above). That’s about it. For a thousand dollars.

Apple apparently had some problems with I Am Rich. After initially approving it for distribution, the company has since removed it from the store. Heinrich, a German software developer, has yet to hear back from Apple concerning the removal. “I have no idea why they did it and am not aware of any violation of the rules to sell software on the App Store,” Heinrich said in an e-mail with The Times today.

Now that the iPhone is in South Africa, we all stand a chance of making some extra bucks by coding up some innovative applications!

Read More or download iPhone Applications here..