Ok, I admit it – I’ve been addicted to search engines. I thought these had something to do with “getting traffic”, “getting conversions” and “making online sales”. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

If’ I’d only been reading my own stuff.

I did a book last year on online marketing, called Online Sunshine Plan – and another on scams called Get Your Self Scam Free. And I should have taken these to heart and seen their cross. Even though there are mentions in each about the other. Of course, looking up my old stuff, I was predicting SEO problems over two years ago. And another about how social media are taking over, leaving search engines in the dust.

Now, it’s a given that you are going to be talking about search engines when you are figuring out how to design sites and so on. And while a 700 pound gorilla in the room deserves respect, it doesn’t mean you scrape and bow down and kiss feet, etc.

I wrote about how search engines are basically scams because they survive by selling advertising, which is a scam. That has proved out in the last year as I found out you can get better search engine standings by 1) putting adsense ads on your site, and 2) buying PPC ads. Both help your “organic” results.

Which means Google simply skews the playing field to suit itself.

And anyone in SEO can tell you that they have a perfect job that doesn’t quit, since it’s a constantly moving target. Recent research has shown that even inside Google, no one person knows all the algorithms on how the searches are done.

My last advice on this is to write good content and label it so that people can find it. Not search engines, but people.

Two things prompt this – First, as outlined above, search engines are playing catch up to social media – and are trying to become social media engines themselves (look at Googles’ Buzz and the aquisitions both Google and Yahoo have made, meanwhile Facebook is poised to take over the whole scene – if they don’t implode, anyway).

Second, the whole point of marketing has never, ever depended on search engines – it’s always and forever depended on word of mouth. What your neighbors, spouse, friends, and associates talk about is what really determines your buying habits. That, and your actual budget.

Advertizing has been much bally-hooed, but just look at the results of their industry award “Clio” to see their actual results. It’s a scam and always has been. All their psychological studies don’t change this.

When you throw out credit cards, advertizing, and search engine PPC campaigns, what do you have?

Social media, your friends – all the old standbys.

This came to me when I was studying my own analytics and trying to get Google to tell me what actually was going on. Google Webmaster tools won’t show you all the incoming links to your site. Nor will their Blog search. Even though they are there. Because they have this thing called supplementary results. And there are ways to find out how many pages of your site Google actually has indexed and how many of these are in their “supplementary index”.

Problem is, this isn’t accurate either. I’ve got more people finding and going to my pages than Google has listed. And this is where I started seeing my own stupidity.

A website isn’t there to get traffic, it isn’t there to get high SERPs. It’s there to provide service. You are there to give great service and to help others with solutions to their common problems. The better you do this, the better you get paid.

But the service you provide has to be something you are fascinated with, utterly captivated by. Because you have to keep this up. Going the scammer route of searching for “long tail niches which have products which people will buy” is a scammer’s paradise. The bulk (at least 97%) of what is being sold as Internet Marketing is pure scam bunks. Rubbish. Trash. Ripoff.

So just leave it all alone. They are just telling you the “latest and greatest” and they are just making money off your ignorance.

What I realized looking over my actual logs is that I wasn’t applying my own metaphysical principles to my life online. While it was true that about 60-70 percent of my traffic was coming from search engines, what it also said that my spikes were completely independent of search engines – and didn’t show up because of them. In every single case, someone put a link direct to one of my pages and their readers came to see what was happening. In no case did they use the search engines (well, maybe to begin with a teensy bit…)

And that’s the point. Be social and find your community. Contribute to that community and there’s your site traffic. Continue to give valuable solutions that you can be repaid for and there’s your economy.

The bottom line to search engines appears to be getting remote, one-way links back to your site. Again, this is where people find your stuff good enough to link back to. This is community. Sure, you can work this a bit by publishing articles and leaving comments on sites where you can post your website link – or social media like Scribd and YouTube and Flickr where you can leave a link to your site. And Identi.ca for those shorturl links. But that doesn’t mean other people will find your stuff valuable just because you link it. (I found one scammer company who has had most of their back-links go to the supplemental index simply because they were scamming the social engines to get those back-links.)

This is all in finding who is linking back to you and seeing how you can help that community. Yes, you use Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools to find incoming links – as best they will actually show you. At least they’ll give you the ones they consider valuable and you can go from there.

But the real rule for getting links, traffic, and everything else: “You have to give before you can get.”

You have to give links in order to get them. You have to give great value before you are going to get paid for it. (Look at some of the top blogs out there – how much they link to their own stuff compared to how much they link outward to others is balanced heavily on the outward side – like 12-1 or better.)

And as I transition from blogging about scams and cults and self-help over to grass fed beef and cartoon parodies, I’m writing my last self-help book ["Freedom Is - (period.)"] and after I get a ton of promotion out on this, I’m retiring to simply getting my own artwork posted and going along. And offer all my older books, plus posters and t-shirts, etc. with cartoons on them – plus collections of cartoons.

But making fun with people and their attitudes should be a lot more interesting than all the scams in the world.

And that’s what this universe is all about – enjoying the dance, not figuring out how to get to the otherside of the room through the crowd and music.

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If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable my continuing research.

Our latest upcoming release, “Freedom Is — (period.)”

One of the more interesting situations happened to me. I’m actually reversing what I know about SEO to actually hide a site from the Search Engines in order to make it much harder to find.

Of course, this is dead easy.

The reason I’m doing this is to simply have the time to get all this stuff on SEO and online marketing out of my head, down on a blog-site and  ready for othere  to use. It’s another step away from all that scamming reporting I’ve been doing lately – and several steps closer to simply being able to follow my own bliss of comics.

With this recent work, I’m finding it’s great to simply write and publish without having to constantly worry about search engines penalizing you for too much content too fast.

This new site is the Online Sunshine Plan – but you can only find it by direct link. But I keep it out of the search engines to keep it private.

And I’ll be so happy when that’s done. Or closer to my native happiness, anyway.

Practically, this is a nice test of whether search engines are even needed with all this social media around. And whether that site shows up on Google even though they don’t index it.

Great experiment. Visit if you like. You’ll find some neat stuff there, especially how to create a membership area without all the major hype most of them have…

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Oh: almost forgot (again…)

Happy Birthday to meeeee.

Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this entry.
If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable my continuing research.

Our latest upcoming release, “Freedom Is — (period.)”