Teh Chad

Someone asked me the other day what I mean by “I like people.” There are a couple of points I’d like to make about people and business.

> People are truly unique creatures, but many of them behave in similar ways. Understanding those things is VERY important for serious business people.
> People are HILARIOUS! They are silly and contradictory and crazy! These experiences are what build relationships.

To define my view of people, things would more closely fall under behavioral psychology.

In business, behavioral psychology often relates in the form of perspectives. If you understand your partner’s perspective, you can work more effectively with them. If you understand the perspective looking at you across the table, then you may save your company money.
For example, say you are negotiating the sale of a business. The seller’s perspective of you can be particularly important. Say he thinks you are a small business. He may be willing to flex a bit more than if he thinks you are a large corporation. Does he see you as genuine in your business relationships? Or does he think you are a corporate tycoon and you’re just trying to run him over for another business dollar? Knowing his perspective, or having a good idea, can be very beneficial.
Another example might be dealing with a quiet or intimidating boss. Few people want to be “called into the bosses office.” As a boss, you may have a style that is very intimidating. Reaching out and taking employees who seem scared of you might be an option. It may simply reaffirm their perspective of you.
As an employee, reaching out to that scary boss might show you someone that you really want to do business for. Or it could show you that a change in business may be in order!

To really enjoy friendships, laughter MUST be common. You must laugh at yourself. One of my favorite, things to say is “I swear I’m brilliant.” This is when I just happen to be driving the short bus at any given moment. (No offense to those with real problems.) It’s funny when I screw something up and “I swear I’m brilliant, but it’s just not right now.” I can’t even keep a straight face while typing that!

People are funny creatures!

Over the past year, I have worked towards understanding some web design and some SEO. Nearly every time I try to solve a problem, it goes back to the simple foundations.

So many people optimize their “content” and by that I mean their text. SEO includes more than that. There are a few things that SEO cannot optimize: javascript and flash. This is because Google does not index things on any website, much less any business website, like CSS and javascript.

Photos, however, CAN be optimized. Try a search that you are thinking about at the moment. Now, click over to images in the top left (if you’re on Google). A new screen is shown. Chances are that the images that you are looking at are from different websites than you were just looking at a moment ago on the “web” search.

So how do we optimize images for better SEO rank? Just like a regular page, but they’re called different things.
The three areas we should look at are:
> the file name
> the title
> the alt tag

But Chad! Doesn’t it have to be an “SEO image” since that’s what you write about? Doesn’t Google KNOW???!?!?! Well, I have a saying when someone asks me a q that I don’t know “Well, I don’t know, but Google does!” In the case of optimizing images, Google does not know. There are a couple of “picture” search engines, but they have yet to catch on. The point is that Google can’t really tell what the image is. It CAN, however, see the things mentioned above – file name, title, alt – the things you mention when you call the image in html.

For an example, I’ll put up my business logo – SEO optimized of course!

Google has this great tendency to experiment. They change things and then let us know a few days afterward. It appears that they are looking to compete with even more of the little guys and their ideas now.

Google has joined the ranks of Bit.ly, digg, and many others with their URL shortener. Aptly, their page is at http://goo.gl.

The short URL has really changed how we do SEO in the area of linkbuilding. Linkbuilding is simply getting links to your site on other sites. This can be done in many ways, blog comments being very common.

With the advent of Twitter (i.e. “a little bird told me”), mini blogs exploded. Facebook definitely contributed too. And social media was born! We found ALL of our friends! Then we shared cool links with our friends and business acquaintances. Why not share our new stories too?

Sharing our stories, posted on other sites of course, with business associates is really where social networking for SEO was born. Now we can share posts like this one with everyone we know in seconds. But who is really going to shove “http://tehchad.com/seo-google-entered-short-url-market/” into a tweet? When you’re limited to 140 characters, a URL like that is just too long. Ergo, we use things like bit.ly and goo.gl.