6 Ways to Learn SEO

Posted by randfish One of the most common questions we receive here at SEOmoz is “What’s the best way to learn SEO?” There are

Review of Flip the Funnel | Small Business Trends

Independent review of the book Flip the Funnel by Joseph Jaffe, about getting more sales from existing customers.

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Review of Flip the Funnel | Small Business Trends

Wait, Me Too! I Am Also Secretly A Deep Cover Russian Spy

“On Monday, federal prosecutors accused 11 people of being part of a Russian espionage ring, living under false names and deep cover in a patient scheme to penetrate what one coded message called American “policy making circles.”” They weren’t particularly good spies, apparently. They were directed to gather information on nuclear weapons, American policy toward Iran, C.I.A. leadership, Congressional politics and many other topics. But at least two of them chose to pursue these goals by working at tech startups. But statistics don’t lie. Based on recent espionage data we’ve rigorously gathered (from the NYTimes article), fully 18% of all Russian spies also work at tech startups. Amazing. It seems mathematically improbable to say the least that two of the people accused of being Russian spies are in our relatively small tech community. One is Anna Chapman, who was recently pitching her startup NYCRentals.com to just about anyone who’d listen. The other spy (lol) who is also a tech startup employee is Tracey Foley: In Cambridge, Mass., the couple known as Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley, who appeared to be in their 40s and had two teenage sons, lived in an apartment building on a residential street where some Harvard professors and students live. “She was very courteous; she was very nice,” Montse Monne-Corbero, who lives next door, said of Ms. Foley. The sons shoveled snow for her in the winter, Ms. Monne-Corbero said, but they also had “very loud” parties. When Foley wasn’t throwing those very loud parties, Foley pursued her spy career by working as a field agent for Seattle-based Redfin , a real estate startup we’ve covered often. Foley’s job consisted of showing people houses for sale when a lead agent was taking a long lunch or something. Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman sort of argues that his customers deserved to know the truth in a blog post he wrote disclosing Foley’s employment with the company: “since she has been accused of a grave crime, we have disclosed the facts of our relationship with Ms. Foley here.” But what Kelman is really saying, of course, is “HFS, how cool is it that one of those spies worked for us! Redfin FTW!” I mean it’s not like he now has to worry about thinking up interesting anecdotes at cocktail parties for the next twelve months at least. He’s all set. I just wish someone at TechCrunch – me for instance – was actually secretly a deep cover spy. Blogger by day, but at night I throw on a tuxedo and zip off to North Korea in a stealth jet to kick some serious communist butt. And then get the girl(s) and take off in the rogue nuclear submarine I just stole. My God, the links we’d get once I was finally arrested would be worth millions. And the book and movie deals…priceless. err, sorry, back to my point. Which I do have one I think. And it’s basically this: WTF?

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Wait, Me Too! I Am Also Secretly A Deep Cover Russian Spy

As Part Of Its Kindle Everywhere Strategy, Amazon Prepares An HTML5 Web Previewer

Jeff Bezos wants Kindle books to become ubiquitous and the standard in digital reading. “Buy once, read everywhere,” is his motto . He already has the various flavors of the Kindle e-reader, as well as an iPhone app, an even better iPad app , a Blackberry app, a new Android app , and desktop readers for the Mac and PC. But what about the plain old Web? Amazon is inching in that direction with a soon-to-be-released “Kindle Previewer for HTML5.” When you buy a Kindle device or download the software, you can sample a free chapter for any book in the Kindle store. With the new previewer, those free samples will be available on the Web as well, with the option to buy the Kindle edition. It sounds like it will be similar to the “Look Inside the Book” option on Amazon’s Website, except this will be for Kindle editions and be in HTML5. What is not clear, however, is why Amazon is only making the previews available in HTML5 and not the entire book. One argument could be that it is not ideal to read an entire book on a desktop or laptop computer. But, in that case, why offer Kindle software for Macs and PCs with full book downloads? On the iPad and other tablet devices, the HTML5 preview will be available right on the browser, creating another way to promote Kindle editions when people are just surfing the Web. The HTML5 previews will also be linkable, as opposed to the sample downloads locked inside each app. But ultimately, there is no reason why Amazon shouldn’t offer full HTML5 versions of the entire Kindle library. Once it does that, it really won’t matter what device you are on as long as it has a browser. CrunchBase Information Amazon Kindle 2 Information provided by CrunchBase

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As Part Of Its Kindle Everywhere Strategy, Amazon Prepares An HTML5 Web Previewer

Book Review: The Winner’s Brain

The Winner’s Brain: 8 Strategies Great Minds Use to Achieve Success by Jeff Brown and Mark Fenske (with Liz Neporent) intrigued me because it brings up the nature vs. nurture argument.

Review: Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect Is A Wonderfully Biased History Of Facebook

I’ve read David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect twice now. I’ve also interviewed him about the book twice on stage – once at TechCrunch Disrupt and a second time this evening at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. On a side note, as far as I know Kirkpatrick’s publisher Simon & Schuster is still planning on suing us for copyright infringement. I never heard back from them after their initial legal volley. I’m not holding that against Kirkpatrick, though – he’s a long time friend. So I’ve spent a lot of time with this book. And I’ve spent a lot of time covering Facebook over the last five years, since my first post in 2005 when the company told us that 85% of college students at covered schools were logging into the site at least once a week. About two years ago Kirkpatrick decided to write a book about Facebook. At the time the site was growing extremely quickly but it certainly wasn’t clear that it would become the 800 lb cultural gorilla that it is today. But he walked away from his position as one of the most senior tech writers at Fortune to pursue this book. And the end result is a fascinating read. Here’s my recommendation: If you are interested in startups, or how marketing and advertising are evolving, or just how Facebook is changing the world, buy this book. It’s very readable and gives great insights into how Facebook grew from a dorm room to a huge company. There’s no other book out there that gives such a complete history of the company and of Mark Zuckerberg. But if you’re looking for an objective and true history of Facebook, this isn’t it. Kirkpatrick really, really loves Facebook. So much so that I’m not sure he’s even close to capable of being objective about the company. He’s Bella staring at Edward, the vampire, with those puppy dog eyes full of deep, meaningful, painful adoration. Edward/Facebook is awesomeness in a bottle. The result is a book that not only celebrates Facebook’s truly amazing accomplishments, but it’s also a book that makes excuses for, or denies, Facebook’s stumbles along the way. And that’s fine. But it isn’t really the truth. And what we need, eventually, is a book that tells the absolute, brutal truth about Facebook. Facebook isn’t just a social network or a potentially huge business, says Kirkpatrick. It might also bring world peace. In the prologue he ponders: “Could [Facebook] become a factor in helping bring together a world filled with political and religious strife and in the midst of environmental and economic breakdown?” he adds later: “[Facebook] is altering the character of political activism, and in some countries it is starting to affect the process of democracy itself.” Oh boy. I mean, historically speaking all this may certainly end up being true, and more. But it just seems a little early to be talking about Facebook in these terms. In our conversation this evening Kirkpatrick also compared Zuckerberg to Bill Gates, noting how both have a strong desire to mold the world to their vision. That may also eventually be true, but we need to let a little time go by before we put Zuckerberg in the same category as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. I’d forgive Kirkpatrick’s love affair with the company if he was a little more circumspect and careful with the historical facts. The two famous lawsuits that fell out of Facebook’s early days – ConnectU and houseSYSTEM – were characterized more as nuisance lawsuits than real questions about the integrity of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. We don’t need Kirkpatrick to shy away from the ugly details about the early days of Facebook. Sausage making is never pretty. But he gives such a one-sided view of the story that it leaves me wondering what details are being left out. And plenty of details are left out, apparently. Kirkpatrick says he never actually spoke with the Aaron Greenspan, or the Winkelvoss brothers, or any of the other people who sued Facebook and Zuckerberg. Instead Kirkpatrick relied on the legal documents filed in those cases for their side of the story. That’s just not a good way to get to the truth. “Zuckerberg clearly stole from the Winkelvoss brothers,” Kirkpatrick said this evening, “but the Winkelvoss brothers clearly stole from everybody else.” That’s a great conclusion, but Kirkpatrick should have interviewed all of those people, and told the story from their perspective as well as Facebook’s. I think most readers are intelligent enough to look at both sides of the story and draw the right conclusions. Perhaps even the same conclusions that Kirkpatrick came to without even interviewing the people involved. They say that history is written by the victors. In the end The Facebook Effect reads more like an authorized biography than anything else. It’s the story of Facebook as Facebook wants the story told. It is a wonderful, if flawed, story about the creation of a company that half a billion people interact with regularly. I highly recommend you read it, and then wait for the book that will tell the whole story. You can buy The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World at Amazon here . CrunchBase Information Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase

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Review: Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect Is A Wonderfully Biased History Of Facebook

8 Reasons In-House SEOs Hire SEO Consultants

Posted by Lindsay When I was an in-house SEO I hired outside SEO consultants. Now as the outside SEO consultant I often work with in-house SEOs. In the comments of my most recent post, an interesting question came up, “…why would a company who has an in-house SEO expert hire an external company?” Here are 8 excellent reasons why talented in-house SEOs often bring in outside help. 1. Specialized Expertise Not too long ago, SEO was a niche marketing specialization. I remember when even Internet Marketing was considered a highly niche specialization. In fact, my college marketing instructor tried to talk me out of Internet Marketing because it was too niche and I ran the risk of limiting my prospects down the line. Times have sure changed. As the search engines have matured and the SEO industry has evolved along with them, it is becoming increasingly difficult to be on top of every SEO related factor. Even something as specific as SEO is segmenting into specializations. Experts have emerged in social media promotion, local SEO, mobile SEO, copy-writing for SEO, link-building, and so on. “I hired the external consultants simply because they had more experience in the area I needed support in. Everyone needs to learn new things, so you’re rarely an expert in everything at once. Hiring the external consultant gets around a lot of hurdles and ramps up your program much quicker. Their deeper domain expertise allowed me to focus in areas I was strong in, while our entire SEO effort moved forward at the desired pace. Why reinvent the wheel when someone else already has an established, productive program that can benefit you? ” Duane Forrester is an in-house SEO with Microsoft, running their program for MSN .

Book Review: The Recipe: A Fable for Leaders and Teams by Amilya Antonetti

Headed to the beach?

What Has Kai-fu Lee Done Since October?

I visited Kai-fu Lee’s Innovation Works while I was in Beijing last week to see how things are going. When I last visited the ex-Google China CEO’s incubator, it was little more than empty, expensive office space. (Next to Google…prime poaching?) Now, the offices are teeming with more than 100 people, most of whom are clustered in a nine very early-stage startups. Most of them are targeting mobile, but everything else Lee told me was off the record. (Sorry.) Suffice to say, the incubator is bursting at the seams and Lee doesn’t seem content. Expect more news soon. Lee is well known in China—see if you can spot his book on sale above in a train station of a second tier city. But there’s some healthy skepticism about how Innovation Works will do. There’s the critique that Lee knows multinationals more than he knows startups, and the critique that he gets too much press in the West. (Yes, I know I’m adding to that here.) There’s also the critique that with so much money and entrepreneurship in China now–especially in Beijing–there’s not a huge need for an incubator. I shot a quick video with Lee and asked him some of those questions. There’s a cool small-world moment at the end (which is hard to hear over my spazzy laughter) when I randomly meet one of Lee’s crew who says he met his partner at the Beijing TechCrunch meet up we did about a year ago. We’ll just take our stock whenever it’s convenient. CrunchBase Information Innovation Works (China) Information provided by CrunchBase

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What Has Kai-fu Lee Done Since October?

Can Indonesia’s Ciputra Prove that Great Entrepreneurs Are Made, not Born?

I’ve long argued that great entrepreneurs are born not made. I emphasize the word “great” for a reason. A hot market can convince someone to become an entrepreneur but such fortune-seekers are rarely the ones who build lasting, billion-dollar companies. What about those who say they never intended to start a company but circumstances lead them to success? I’d argue that they may not have always realized they were entrepreneurs, but if you asked their friends, parents and siblings, they would describe them as having always been the kid with the lemonade stand, the kid working an angle, the kid creating something where there was nothing. Like a cylon, something just switched it on later. Seeing an idea through to become something huge is too hard. You simply have it or you don’t. One person has made me question this—a bit. I met him in Indonesia and like Madonna, he’s mostly known by one name—Ciputra. That name is on universities and city subdivisions the country over. (That’s him to the right in front of a large painting from his impressive modern art collection.) If Ciputra is the Indonesian Donald Trump, Jakarta is his New York—a city that quite literally has his fingerprints all over it. Now in his late 70s, Ciputra has lived every painful chapter of Indonesian history from colonial times to Sukarno to Suharto and finally to what the country hopes is a stable democracy. And that ride has taken him from obscurity to success to bankruptcy and back to success again. Ciputra is an architect who describes his aesthetic as “grand.” Most of his properties have huge statues of horses, caught mid-air in granite galloping wildly with all their might, nostrils flaring. That, or statues of buxom women who look a bit like the painting at the beginning of “Good Times.” He started his first company—a development consultancy—in architecture school but he was frustrated not controlling a project from start-to-finish. Soon after he started developing buildings himself, he grew weary of that as well, moving onto developing whole streets. But that still wasn’t enough. He started developing cities within cities. Now,he has 50 under his belt, spanning several continents and some 25,000 hectares. Since his 70th birthday, Ciputra has been thinking even bigger. He wants to redesign the country. And he wants to do it by creating thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs. Right now, his team has estimated that Indonesia—a country of nearly 250 million people—has just 400,000 entrepreneurs who build scalable, innovative companies. That’s less than 1% of the population. Compare that to 13% for the United States and 7% for nearby Singapore. Ciputra isn’t greedy; he figures his plan could change the country if he could help encourage, create and mentor 4 million entrepreneurs or 2% of the country’s population. How do you do that? Not with venture capital, but by changing the country’s mindset, Ciputra says. Here’s where the born v. made debate comes in: Ciputra says in Indonesia universities don’t train entrepreneurs—they train people to be employees. He wants to train people to create jobs, not apply for them. He thinks a change in a university’s mindset can change who comes out of it. He started by opening up a university for entrepreneurship in Surabaya called Universitas Ciputra . The university follows the national accreditation guidelines, but every Wednesday the curriculum is all about how to start high-growth, innovative companies. It was a $10 million dollar investment, and he says he’s already ready to open a second one. He calls this the best kind of philanthropy for a country like Indonesia that was held down under colonial rule for a whopping 350 years. The University has some nods to Silicon Valley, with role models like Google, Amazon and Yahoo splayed on the walls of the IT department. And its student housing is in a building called Berkeley, so kids can tongue-and-cheek say they’re at UC (as in Universitas Ciputra) Berkeley. But like other Ciputra developments, this is a huge project that includes not only a school but housing, a hotel, a golf course and one day, a waterpark just behind the school– to beat that brutal Surabaya heat I suppose. (The picture at the top is part of the complex’s model in the lobby.) The school can influence several hundred new students a year, but that’s not enough for Mr. C. That’s why he partnered with the Kansas City-based Kauffman Foundation to help train the people who train entrepreneurs. (More on the collaboration here . Disclosure: Kauffman also partially funded the book I’m writing.) Those trainers train other trainers and suddenly the country has thousands of people teaching kids how to be Western-style, high-growth entrepreneurs. This year, he convinced the government of Indonesia to send about a dozen university teachers from colleges outside his purview to Kauffman’s six-month training course that entails trips to Boston, Silicon Valley and other American entrepreneurial hot spots. I visited the university in Surabaya during my trip to Indonesia a week ago, and was impressed at the students’ enthusiasm. I got peppered with questions about monetization and motivation not only in Silicon Valley but around the world, and afterward one kid told me confidently I’d be writing a book about him one day. The university is about to graduate its first class and out of 166 kids, more than 100 have started companies. More surprising: Nearly 50% of the students are women. “We select people with passion,” Ciputra says. “Don’t come here if you don’t want to be an entrepreneur. I told them at my first lecture to get up and leave if they wanted to be an employee.” But back to this question of whether entrepreneurs are born or made. As Ciputra told me about his grandkids and his friends’ kids who started mango stands and cake stands in Indonesia, I asked him whether he thought most kids were naturally entrepreneurial and whether a societal fear of failure—which is more pronounced in some places than others—somehow beats it out of us. He nodded. But he added that if that were true, kids need either a parent, a society or a school to encourage that feeling. Because all universities in Indonesia require government accreditation, school is the one of the three that can be centrally fixed, by fixing the curriculum and the teachers. “Ah ha!” I said, having read that Ciputra grew up in a poor, remote Indonesian village. “If that’s true, what explains your success?” Ciputra says his father—a shopkeeper—instilled the entrepreneurial spirit in him when he was young before he was captured by the Japanese during the country’s occupation of Indonesia. But he adds he wished he’d had more encouragement. “Who knows? If I’d gotten it from school, I might be 10 times bigger today,” he says. “The richest Indonesians have maybe $5 billion. Bill Gates has $50 billion.” In a country of 17,000 islands and 240 million people this is hardly a small job. But Ciputra clearly feels this is his legacy. He’s got the money, determination and influence that few others in the country have—or would be willing to spend– on this vision. It’s a project only a man bored with building cities could dream up.

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Can Indonesia’s Ciputra Prove that Great Entrepreneurs Are Made, not Born?