Uncategorized

Header image via wikicommons. Do you doomscroll frequently? Read to the end; I promise you’ll leave the page with at least one tool to help make you a calmer person during this global crisis and the election. You’re stressed about the coronavirus or the election. You jump online and start scanning headlines on your favorite news website or social media. With each headline, you’re feeling more stressed, not less. What is going on? This article will tell you. If you clicked through to this article, you’ve proven the central thesis of the article—scary headlines hijack your executive reasoning. THE HIJACK It is objectively false that most of the information you’re consuming during this crisis will help you deal effectively with the crisis. In fact, most of it is making you less able to deal with it. News organizations (and bloggers) grab your attention by deliberately hijacking your brain’s limbic system. Writers and editors are in an hourly arms race to see who can most quickly heighten the arousal of fear in the brains of their readers and TV watchers. It’s actually quite easy to bypass the executive part of the brain that is responsible for judgment and directly activate the emotional limbic system (also known as the paleo-mammalian cortex) without your awareness or consent. The simplest way to do this is to arouse FEAR (even putting that word in all-caps can arouse the limbic system of sensitive people). The human brain evolved to pay more attention to threats than to signals of safety. Paying attention to that which scares you will keep you alive. (Scandal and sex work really well to grab your attention too but that’s a different post.) “Yeah but this crisis is real!” Of course it is. But if you can’t be discerning about the information you consume, you’re putting your health and that of people you love at risk. There is a way to be more discerning and I’m going to share that later. ALL HEADLINES ARE CLICKBAIT I can hear you now: “I ignore clickbait headlines.” Umm, no you don’t, and I can prove it—you just clicked the headline of this article. Even I have a hard time ignoring hair-on-fire headlines, and I know how they work. All headlines are clickbait because they have to be. Your attention span is measurably shorter than it was before the advent of the web and the competition for your attention is savage, even on a single page. A check of one digital newspaper’s front page today revealed one hundred headlines. News is a business and the business is selling advertising. Informing the public is not a metric...

Ceremonial Maloka, Nimea Kaya, Peru Maloca Thoughts This is my gift to you all. I hope it’s enough. If it’s not or if it doesn’t resonate, then my gift to you is the vulnerability expressed in the giving. As we leave, let us not long for the protective, warm embrace of Nimea Kaya. Let us not seek only harbors. Instead, let’s carry the following. Let the sounds and feel and smells of the jungle seep into you. Don’t grasp at them or try to hold them fast. Open yourself to them and let go of remembering. In the days ahead, let your tears be agua de florida being gently streaked down your cheek by the shaman. Let your ears hear icaros in a birdsong, in the creaking of a floor beneath your feet, even in the whisper of a passing car. Let your pain remind you that the work is ongoing but that you already initiated it with intention and courage. Remind yourself frequently of the astonishing improbability of the fact that, between the infinity behind us and the infinity ahead, we are conscious in this singular moment. Remember to breathe. In the incomprehensibly vast history of the universe, there has never been a night exactly like last night in ceremony—and there will never be another. But we lived that one. We lived it. Our living it and our sitting this circle together today is our collective song to the universe—our...

I’ve had clients ask if they could pay for an hour or two of SEO lessons. I laugh. Not to them. Silently. To myself. Then, I cry. SEO is not something you can learn by reading a book, not even a good one like Danny Dover’s Search Engine Optimization Secrets. Why? Because SEO is something learned by the doing. It is hardly rocket science but it is a massive ocean liner ever moving, with millions of moving parts, submerged icebergs in its path, other ships to distract from its being viewed from shore, and a regulatory body (Google) setting constantly-changing rules that must be inferred rather than read. While someone with a mind that cannot but analyze everything all day long finds this fascinating and even at times exciting, if you dread the kind of detail that can reduce an accountant to tears, run away. You’ll think you’ve done everything you know to move needles in rankings only to find a one-line error in a file somewhere has tripped you up. Or you get a client with reasonable rankings whose host service company has sworn they’ve redirected the clients old web pages only to find they never set up the redirects and your client’s sole source of income, their e-commerce website, tanks in the rankings for having lost nearly every shred of their backlink juice. So you set up the redirects and wait. There are no real secrets to SEO work. Yes, Google has secrets about its algorithms but the work of optimization is not a dark art. It’s just a lot of work and no businessperson who is spending the time to run their business can take on SEO as a hobby. N-o-t possible. Like hiring a good real estate agent to sell your home, hiring a good SEO agency or specialist is worth every penny, because SEO should provide a measurable return on your investment. It should bring targeted traffic to your site. And your website design should convert that traffic into leads and sales. Otherwise, all you have on the web is a pretty calling...

I’m officially amazed at how important both Facebook and local search are becoming. I shouldn’t really be amazed because all of who do SEO have been watching this train barreling down the track for some time. I have found, however, that most anything I read in the SEO world doesn’t become fact in my head until it affects websites that I’m optimizing for the search engines. First Search Results on Facebook Example, for the first time, I have a client whose initial visibility on the web is on Facebook. Given that his e-commerce site is tiny (five pages and a slowly growing blog), it’s difficult to get visibility because there isn’t much content there to optimize. But if you Google his product name, his Facebook page appears number three on the SERP (search engine results page). Need I say it: Facebook is important. Social is important. Google Places, Bing Local Listings The other example was optimizing my site for local search. Many searchers today include place in their searches (e.g., “copywriter SEO seattle”). It’s much easier to compete in local search because there’s not as much competition generally (depending on the industry) as there is globally. We always push Google Places and Bing Local listings on our clients. We want them to sign up and optimize those listings. They matter. They get you local visibility and that means traffic, either over the phone, on foot, or to your website. If you don’t already have listings in Google Places and Bing Local Listings, do it now. Make it as complete as you can. It’s free, it’s easy, and it will help you get seen on the...