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 It's easy to make a broad statement such as "people used to care about quality but now they just don't"... but like most broad statements, it's only partially true

The Lost Art (and Appreciation) of Quality

Today there's a quality divide... it does not always follow income or wealth (but it usually does). The problem is that because of the race to the bottom by some retailers and marketers our choices of quality for some items is limited, hard-to-find, or non-existent. This same shortsightedness has led to a lot of less than desirable things... back in the days of video tape, the Beta format won out over VHS when Beta was higher quality.

There are numerous examples, think the Wal-Mart crowd vs. the Neiman Marcus crowd. You may be temped to think that the shopper at Wal-Mart would prefer to shop at Neiman Marcus... in some cases you would be correct, but in a lot of cases you would not.

This race to the bottom has led to generations of consumers that simply don't know any better. They don't know that laminated particleboard furniture you assemble at home is substandard to solid hardwood furniture with dovetail joints. They don't care that their shoes or electronics are made in a toxic fume laced factory in China by pregnant women and young girls. They simply care about price and nothing else.

We live in a "disposable" age, where a good portion of the population is content paying for inferior goods and services.

What's My Point?

I'm glad you asked because I was starting to get off track!

My point is that when you're creating your products, web site, sales pages, marketing material, etc. you need to understand which segment you're selling to. You can't mix them up. You'll fail if you do. For someone only interested in the best price, you have to only prove that your product or service is good enough and that your price is the best. For the person interested in quality, you have to prove you have extraordinary quality, better then the other guy's product or service.

It's rare that one product or service would have both the highest quality and the lowest price - in that case you should raise the price! There are a lot of quality oriented consumers that will bypass a low priced product even if it was the best product simply because the price was too low. Too often price is directly associated to quality (no matter if it's a correct assumption or not) so don't try to fight that association..

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Knowledge without Wisdom is Dangerous

Knowledge without wisdom is dangerous.

This all too evident with governments.

It's also all too evident with businesses trying to save money and get ahead by hiring young and/or inexperienced (cheap) people in key, or even less than key, positions.

Knowledge with wisdom is unstoppable, unconquerable, and unfortunately rare.

It also cost more if you're trying to hire it - but it's almost always well worth it.

    

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11 Reasons You're Failing

I want to do great things and make a positive impact on other people's lives.
I want to be one of those people that other people look at and ask how on earth does he get all that done... and still write his wife love songs?

This post is going to be a post I look back to each week to make sure that I'm making progress in the direction I want to go.

Take Care of Yourself First!
Like the safety warning you receive when flying (to put the air mask on yourself first and your children second), you have to take care of yourself first. This means physically and mentally. This is not easy if you have children, a job, or any other responsibility! But it's critical that you do. If you're married, getting your wife or husband on board with this makes it a lot easier. Encourage each other to workout and eat healthy.

Unless you can help yourself no one will expect, or trust, you to help them.
You can't really imagine the disheveled drunk from the street corner walking into the Whitehouse and telling the President and Congress how to solve the debt problem (although he could do a better job than the current fiasco administration I'm sure)... You can't help anyone else until you can help yourself.

11 Reasons We Fail
God has given us everything we need to succeed... I'm not kidding, it's really true.
If we're struggling then we're have one, or more, of the following issues... at times I think I suffer from all 11!

1. We don't believe that we can - I call this the Eeyore syndrome.
2. We are filled with fear (related to #1). The thing about fear is that it usually does not appear as fear. It's usually masked behind well thought-out and polished sets of reasons and excuses. This also shows up as "we don't believe we deserve it".
3. We have underlying problems that are eating away at us. Financial, relationship, health, you name it. If we're not facing or dealing with it, then it's festering and fermenting and souring our subconscious. This undermines anything and everything we're trying to do. We may not be able to solve the problems, but the minute we start facing them we start making progress.
4. We don't see the resources and raw materials that we have available to us. This can be physical as well as thoughts and ideas (creativity).
5. We see the resources and raw materials we have, but don't see the path to use them.
6. We ignore God's plan in favor of our own: we want to be a ballerina and we weigh 350lbs and have bad knees (see paragraph about taking care of yourself!). If we're constantly feeling like a salmon swimming upstream then we're probably not doing what we're supposed to be doing with our life.
7. We are slaves to bad, detrimental, or time-wasting habits.
8. We are selfish.
9. We ignore or don't ask for help and guidance.
10. We listen to the wrong people. Satan succeeds by confusion and division... and he's very, very good at it. What? You don't think Satan is involved. Wrong. Evil is real: it does not want you to succeed and create anything good for yourself or the world - lest of all help other people succeed and create something good for the world.
11. We care about what people think or who gets the credit.

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Barney Fife Chases the SEO Bandits at J.C. Penny

The NY Times published an article on February 13th (the 12th online) titled The Dirty Little Secrets of Search by David Segal, that lambasted J.C. Penny for a massive paid link campaign. This included playing elementary school tattle-taleand reporting their "findings" to Google - which in turn got J.C. Penny's search engine rankings flushed down the toilet.

To me, and probably a lot of other SEO experts, the article is a joke. The condescending tone alone was enough to make me almost not read it.

There are flaws in their "investigation" but come on; they didn't investigate Obama this much... had they, maybe our country wouldn't be swirling around, and around, heading down the toilet. I don't think all the "expert" SEO opinions in the article are accurate... more on that at the end of this post.

Evidently Segal was irate that J.C. Penny was ranking so high for so many items they sold, and brought in an expert to do some research on why. This expert found that J.C. Penny had been buying links to boost their SEO rankings. Something Google says is against their rules.

The article refers to link buying as "Black Hat". That's a joke. If anything, it's little off white or gray: nowhere, I repeat nowhere near black. People that actually know and use black hat techniques would laugh at the whole article.

Woops...
Segal should have done a little more homework on some of the sites he quotes in the first few paragraphs of his article. As he's naming various things like dresses, bedding, sweater dresses, etc. and questioning if J.C. Penny is really the best web site in the world for that product, he links to sites HE thinks should rank better... the problem is, he links to at least one site that buys links! Yep! You got it. And he gave them a no-follow link from the N.Y. Times to boot... I'll take one of those please! I spent maybe 5 minutes and found the rug site he links to has what appears to be paid links in link directories.

J.C. Penny denied they were buying links, but subsequently fired their SEO firm. The SEO firm should have used other methods to build links and kept the paid links at a minimum. I'm sure J.C. Penny was paying big dollars to this SEO firm and the firm was being lazy and obviously didn't take the best care of their client.

Buying links is common... my guess is Segal or someone at NY Times had a beef with J.C. Penny, or, owns a company that J.C. Penny was out ranking.

Is Organic SERP Boosted by Massive PPC?
The Times article also questions if there's a link between J.C. Penny's massive paid advertising spend on Google and their seemingly unnatural high search rankings. I think there is a correlation, however, I also think it's a subtle side effect not an intentional benefit rewarded by Google. Google is not God. Google is not infallible. Getting massive traffic from paid ads probably triggers an increase in organic rankings, but it's probably not much of an increase at all. I don't believe that Google rewards big advertisers by giving them a big jolt of organic ranking caffeine. But if they do, it's their business. They say they don't, so I believe them. If they do, then they shouldn't say they don't and that's the extent of it.

My Take...
My take on this "investigation" is: Get a Life! Go investigate something important and let Google police their own company and rankings. It reminds me of Barney Fife blowing something way out of proportion and making a big deal over nothing - and locking up the whole town.

After all, J.C. Penny actually sells the products they ranked for - there was no trickery, you could actually get what you were looking for... and that's the point of searching for something.

I don't agree with all the SEO "expertise" that's bantered around in this article - something I address in SEO Secrets - there are a lot of experts who state this or that, but when I've tested these things, they don't actually matter, or, even worse, will hurt your rankings... in this article I didn't read anything that would hurt rankings, but I did read a few things that they claim to matter that do not.

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Have You Been Slapped by the Google Ranking Adjustment?

What, you didn't know they changed something? A lot of internet business marketing types get all upset anytime Google changes (or noticeably changes) their ranking algorithms. The truth is Google tweaks their rankings on a regular basis, sometimes they make public some of the changes, other times they do not. Below is an official link detailing some of the changes in this latest update that has a lot of Internet Marketers in a Tizzy:

Google Search and Search Engine Spam

As for me, I'm happy!

Why? Because as I'll show you, a lot of my sites have improved in ranking. The ranking for this blog has suffered in recent months, not because of anything Google has done, but because I've not been posting on a frequent basis like I used to, and that matters in a competitive environment.

So why are some people complaining and reeling while I'm happy? Because I practice what I preach, and I preach what I practice.

Google and other search engines are in the business of dishing up what people are looking for. Give Google garbage to dish up and you'll get slapped. Maybe you will get your garbage ranked well for a while, but eventually you'll get ranked where you should be and that's way back in the pack.

This latest update dealt with garbage and getting it out of the search results.

Recent months have brought the spotlight on Google for some questionable search results in some areas. One person who sold eyeglasses had found if he treated his customers with distain and anger, practically stalking them in some cases, he would get enough bad posts and comments that it kept his rankings high... and kept business pouring in... not exactly what Google set out to create.

Other items that were getting bad press were sites that were automated sites that "scrape" or copy content from other sites. These sites are generally not very human usable and low quality.

There's nothing wrong with copying content - a huge part of the benefit of the Business of the Internet is the ability to do just that. In fact, at the end of each of my blog post is a statement specifically giving you permission to copy and use this content - provided you keep the source, author, and link back intact.

A lot of high quality, very helpful sites copy content from other sites, either in whole or in part. It's all about quality and value to the user.

And that's the secret to maintaining good, consistent rankings: it's all about quality and value to the user. There are a lot of other factors too, but without a quality base you're open to being slapped around a lot.

Sometimes people follow bad advice (either free or paid for) and end up turning what would have been good work into something that gets flagged as spammy by the search engines. For example, if you're worry about keyword density while writing your web or blog content, then you need some better advice:www.pqSEO.com.

Here's one example of a site that is a small site, has unique, quality content... look at the jump in ranking position for Google on 1/27:

Date	Google	Yahoo	Bing
2/3/2011	11	38	185
2/2/2011	11	37	187
2/1/2011	11	37	308
1/31/2011	12	38	313
1/30/2011	13	38	315
1/29/2011	13	30	301
1/28/2011	13	30	169
1/27/2011	13	30	196
1/25/2011	156	31	280
1/23/2011	165	31	181
1/22/2011	163	31	166
1/21/2011	163	31	140
1/20/2011	163	31	157
1/19/2011	165	32	126
1/18/2011	163	32	148
1/17/2011	163	32	142
1/16/2011	176	32	135
1/15/2011	169	32	130
1/14/2011	190	31	123
1/13/2011	185	31	123
1/12/2011	191	31	87
1/11/2011	191	32	88
1/10/2011	195	32	83
1/8/2011	188	31	82
1/7/2011	190	32	82
1/6/2011	189	31	82
1/5/2011	187	32	77
1/4/2011	179	32	81
1/3/2011	187	32	86
1/1/2011	177	32	89

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