Zack Williamson |

Guest Blogging Ain’t Dead Yet

After Matt Cutts’ post about guest blogging sent a ripple through the webmaster community, I wanted to clear some of the smoke and explain why I think Matt Cutts is just trying to use scare tactics and discourage hardworking SEOs.

“So stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done” -Matt Cutts

As we say back home in North Carolina, If you believe this, I got some oceanfront property in Tennessee selling REAL cheap! If guest blogging hurts your rankings, that means every time someone else writes about you on their blog or site, they are actually hurting you and this just cannot be the case. It doesn’t take an SEO genius to be able to see that Google could never implement an algorithm that would effectively put a stop to guest posting.

Here’s a Real World Example

When I was working at NYFA.edu I noticed hundreds of articles being written about our organization every week. Being one of the most famous film schools in the world with several thousand students and international locations, this is just bound to happen. I even set alerts to notify me of each one so I could track them down and make the most out of each posting and mention. That being said, according to Matt Cutts, this kind of activity should have killed our rankings!

How to Guest Blog Effectively

You can be caught violating Google’s link scheme guidelines via guest blogging and penalized! However, the trick is to not get caught so this means you have to do it in a way that looks “natural” and compliant.

Don’ts

Don’t send mass mailers- If reported as spam, it will raise red flags with Google. Manually write each email to be unique and customized to each outreach scenario.

Don’t ask- for links that pass PR in your email exchanges. “That’s a clear violation of Google’s quality guidelines.”

Don’t use EMAT- Using exact match anchor text is a thing of the past anyways and a clear signal of ranking manipulation. Less than 20% of your inbound links should contain EMAT.

Don’t post on crappy sites- Stay away from splogs, bad neighborhoods and spammy networks. Only do guest posting exchanges with high quality relevant sites that will increase your credibility and authority not pull it down.

Don’t allow bad placement- Make sure your posts are not specifically marked as “guest post”, “sponsored post” or even put into a sponsored category or archive.

Don’t worry about even getting a link! Instead, a mention of your site or brand can be just as effective via citation building. You can also get great exposure and link juice from your Google Authorship account or from linking to your Twitter, Facebook and other social media accounts.

Dos

Think of legitimate ways to engage and collaborate with relevant sites.
Provide high quality content from authoritative Google Authorship accounts or known bloggers.
Pick up the phone or try to contact people on other networks such as Linkedin, Twitter, FB or even face to face within your business community. Relying solely on emails can be view as spam.

EXIF Data Optimization

How ironically crazy this is… I was trying to research some new image optimization techniques for an SEO report that I have to present this Wednesday for a customer. I was specifically looking techniques that would give our photosharing website a competitive advantage to outrank our competition. Just as I was looking into how-or-if Google crawls EXIF data in images, the Google Gods were reading my mind and Matt Cutts posts this video to answer my question. Nice Timing!

The Gand Opening of ClarkOutsourcing

I am excited to announce the launching of a new full service BPO company, ClarkOutsourcing.com and with it, a new 5000sqft, 150 seat, offshore facility located in the Clark Economic Freeport Zone of the Philippines. This new office represents a culmination of over ten years of hard work and experience.

With this new facility, I have expanded to offer full service BPO at costs up to 60% lower than in America. Our verticals include inbound and outbound call center services, software development, digital media marketing and outsourcing consulting. Our main focus is to bring global resources to our customers that were previously only available to the Fortune 500. We do this by offering flexible solutions BPO incubation services such as “seat leasing” and BOT programs to help incubate and facilitate the transition.

What Can We Do For You?

The chances are that if you own a business, there’s some where we can help you grow! Our BPO Services include but are not limited to….

Software development
In/outbound contact center
Digital media marketing
Web/App Development
Accounting
HR services
Back office tasks

Outsourcing Consulting Services:

Business organization and corporate filings
Commercial real estate leasing and purchasing
International business contracts
Call center infrastructure
Network setup and administration
HR recruiting and training of employees
Outsourcing Philippines tax code
Philippines import export regulations and logistics

Hire me as Your BPO Consultant

As a BPO consultant, I strive to be at the forefront of global trends to provide the best outsourcing solutions that are customized to each customer’s needs. I’m your “Boots on the Ground”. Bill Gates, IBM and 90% of the Fortune 500 have been using BPO for over 2 decades. What has changed is the availability of outsourcing infrastructure. Previously, BPO resources were only attainable to large firms but due to technology, globalization and people like me, these same advantages are well within reach for small and mid-sized companies.

My BPO Experience

Since 2006, I have setup, managed and consulted business processes in Romania, India, South Africa and the Philippines for small and midsized companies as well as a handful of large firms including Wells Fargo, New York Life, Countrywide Financial and AIG. In addition, I also maintain my own outsourcing facility in the Clark Free Port Zone of the Philippines.

My Expertise Include…

database management
call center outsourcing
lead generation
search engine optimization
web development
software development

My services include…

recruiting
training
payroll services
corporate filings
global tax law
property acquisition
IT infrastructure
global logistics

Save Time and Money

Whether you are looking to open your own offshore branch office or just looking to outsource work overseas, hiring me and my team will dramatically lower your startup costs while getting the job done in a timely manner. Having a 3rd party consultancy firm from individuals that know the local business culture and know how to cut through the local red tape can be a valuable asset to your company. You don’t have to learn things the hard way, contact me for a free consultation instead.

Philippines Seat Lease Outsourcing

You can open your new office in the Philippines for as little as $150 per seat! Seat lease outsourcing is an ideal solution for any small to mid-sized company looking to expand operations or lower overhead costs. Simply put, seat leasing is the fastest and most affordable way to get your campaign up and running in a flash.

What is Seat Lease Outsourcing?

Seat leasing is when you rent or lease a workstation in an already established outsourcing facility. In this model, the lessor provides the office, work station and the necessary infrastructure to run your campaign or process. In addition, other services such as call center dialer, telco, IT support and human resources can be provided. It is up to the lessee to fill the seat and manage the staff. Most seat lease packages are charged at a flat monthly rate based on the number of seats occupied.

Cold vs Warm Seat Lease

A cold seat is where we provide just the office workspace and infrastructure to run your campaign and a warm seat is where we provide the employee as well.

Which Option is Better for Me?

It depends on what you are trying to accomplish. If you already have staff and “boots on the ground”, you can just lease the seats and bring your own employees. If you will need recruiting and/or payroll services, you may want to lease a warm seat. That being said, both of these options give you full control over the outsourced process and the ability to sit in the captain’s chair because both options allow you to manage and monitor the operation with full transparency.

Infrastructure

We are proud of our lynx-based dialers and telco configuration with redundant backup servers.

Our connection includes E1 fiber optic connections with two backup 2 business lines to assure 99% up-time.

Our network is managed through a Juniper network router with traffic shaping to insure steady load balance.

Each workstation has 1 to 1 wiring and networking and comes equipped with 3rd generation or greater PCs with 19″ to 22″ monitors.

What’s Included?

Colorful 5000sqft office, biometric time cards for tamper free access and attendance tracking.
Spacious workstations and chairs with widescreen monitors and 3rd generation or higher PCs.
Outbound ViciDial phone system and 24/7 support.
Conference room, classroom style training rooms and dinning facilities.
Our business park includes a private fitness center, basketball and badminton courts, billiards tables and dining areas.
24/7 security staff and CCTV.

What’s not Included?

The employee, but recruiting and payroll services can be provided for an additional charge.
VOIP charges, but we have providers as low as .008 cents per minute back to the States.
Transportation, but public shuttles and jeepneys provide 24/7 service delivering over 10,000 workers to Clark daily.
Headsets, but we have an abundant stock that you can acquire at cost. Many agents don’t like sharing headsets for hygienic reasons.
Food, snacks, tea and coffee.

Call Center Outsourcing Consultant

I have been a call center consultant since 2006 working in India, Romania, South Africa and the Philippines. This puts me in a unique position to offer superior and innovative consulting solutions that are guaranteed to improve your company’s functionality and profitability.

I currently own a 150 seat facility in Clark, Philippines. This being said, as a business owner myself, I fully understand the importance of ROI and therefore will happily provide a free consultation to make sure that will you see a generous return on your investment dollars before I accept the job. Having a good set of eyes and ears on your call center floor can increase productivity and the bottom line!

Call Center Outsourcing Consulting

I specialize in offshore call center consulting in and have helped launch new call center outsourcing facilities as well as conducted tactical business analysis on existing infrastructures. Even though most call centers observe an EOP (English only policy) I feel that it is important to connect with your workforce on a cultural level and this is why I have gone above and beyond by learning vernacular languages and cultural differences. I speak fluent Tagalog and mediocre Romanian. Magaling ako Mag-Tagalog si vorbesc Româneşte.

Upon my first visit to your call center, I can help find the most suitable and cost effective dialer and technology solutions, help with training and management, optimize employee moral, increase production, assist with human relations and lastly, improve business development strategies. With over 11 years of direct telemarketing experience and 6 years of call center outsourcing consulting experience, I can render real results that will increase your bottom line.

How Can I Help You?

Dialer and telephony systems
Training and management enhancement
Motivational speaking
Campaign production analysis
HR and Recruiting
Business development strategies
Foreign corporate filings
International tax codes

Take your Business to the Next Level

Where will your business be in 1 year 5 years or even 10 years? Top business consultancy firms are predicting that 90% of all companies, whether mom & pop or enterprising will use call center outsourcing consulting by the year 2016. The world is getting smaller and the global economy is becoming tightly interconnected. That being said, those individuals that fail to engage and take advantage of international resources will be left behind.

Contact Zack today for a free consultation and if you have any thoughts on Call Center Outsourcing Consulting please feel free to comment below.

Reddit has Become so Politically Biased

The American Socialist movement has managed to overrun Reddit, shutting out all opposing ideas and ending the debate.

I’m concerned that r/politics has become so pro-socialist Left that it appears simply, unnatural. The movement satirically mirrors what happened in Russia and the Eastern Bloc.

I’ve spoken with some of the mods of r/politics and they all claim, “it’s just the demographics of the subscribers.” But if this is the case, that means people on the Right either don’t use Reddit or have just opted out of the discussion altogether?

Either way, its a sad day for us Redditors who thought this was a place for fair and open discussion.

What Does Google Consider a Bad Link?

We will soon find out, or will we?

Matt Cutts just announced that Google will have a new feature in WMT that will give examples of bad links. If this happens, we’re gonna have a shock wave ripple through the global SEO community. Millions of people worldwide are involved in SEO; building links, blogging, social media and more. Now imagine that Google actually revealed this information as they claim they will, it would put a lot of people around the world out of work. Tons of people make a lot of money building crappy links and the average business owner just looks at the volume not the quality but once they see that 99% of these companies just get the low hanging fruit and rarely focus on quality hard-to-get links.

I usually don’t blurt out comments to Matt Cutts but I couldn’t help myself this time so here’s what I commented…

I can’t believe it?!?!?!?!? I never thought you would divulge such info at least not this early in the game. I can’t wait to see the long lists of links pages, footer links, networked sites, directories, content farms and other garbage showing up in WMT. I ain’t from Missouri but you’re gonna have to show me the links before I believe it…

Why You Shouldn’t Be Everywhere on the Web

The debate between whether SEO or social media is more important in marketing an online service has waged for years, but the case has now been closed by default: very soon, they’ll be one and the same.

With Google increasingly factoring in social media activity into the very heart of its ranking algorithm, a business that refuses to play the social game is pretty much doomed to obsolescence. Even putting the traffic considerations to one side, there are many other benefits to engaging with your audience online – in a nutshell, anyone ignoring social media is doing themselves a disservice.

That said, it’s quite possible to over-do it. Over-extending yourself is just as disastrous as never participating to begin with. Regardless of whether you’re a film student at NYFA trying to get noticed or a marketing guru for a media conglomerate, you have to learn how to balance your message with your resources.

There are a lot of social media sites out there, and new ones are added every day. And while it’s tempting to try and build a presence on every one of them, that strategy simply won’t work. You might have an account on every site, but you won’t have the time to fully engage with your audience – and without reader engagement, you might as well not even try.

Choosing Your Battles

A media and marketing entrepreneur who everyone should be aware of is Pat Flynn. One of his most popularized concepts is that of ‘being everywhere’ – that is, hit every single channel available for maximum exposure.

At its core, the Be Everywhere idea is sound. But unlike most of his brilliant advice which is easily actionable, this one assumes you have infinite resources to execute it.

Of course, you have a finite amount of time and energy that can be invested in any activity. Within that limited time, you can either pour a lot of effort into maintaining a single account, or you can spread yourself thin over multiple platforms. If you go through multiple platforms, you run the risk of diluting your message or simply not being able to engage fully with your audience. It’s pretty simple: If you can make one post on 10 sites, you won’t engage as many people as if you can make 10 posts on one site.

People don’t like to feel like they’re being advertised to when they’re on social media. They want to feel like the brands they follow are their friends, or at least trusted sources of useful or entertaining information. With that in mind, doesn’t it make more sense to build up a rapport with your readers rather than sending out a shotgun blast of information to anyone who will listen?

How to Build a Smart Web Strategy

Your best bet is to hold down just one or two strongholds on the web. You’ll want a personal blog or website to direct customers toward, and a social media platform to cross-post content on and interact more directly with fans. To decide which social media outlets will best fit your project, consider the following:

– Which Sites Do You Really Enjoy Using?

Social media is supposed to be fun. If posting to a site feels like a chore, your lack of enthusiasm will be obvious. Choose the media platform you like the most and find ways to make the most of it rather than trying to fit in with what you’re “supposed” to be doing on the web.

– What Kind of Content are you Going to be Sharing?

If you want to be able to post long-form text or links to articles, you’ll have different needs than if you’re going to be sharing images. Don’t try to shoe-horn your way into a niche that doesn’t work for your project. If you’re a visual artist, pick a site that will let you showcase the art rather than relying on text to get your message across.

– Where is your Audience?

Although many people have multiple social media accounts, the odds are good that they primarily favor one of them over the others. The population of a site like Reddit is very different from that of Pinterest or Facebook, and if you’re trying to engage the wrong audience, you’ll just end up being frustrated.

– What’s the Call to Action?

Simply engaging with your audience is a perfectly acceptable goal, but you’ll ideally want your time spent on social media to do something more – like encourage viral marketing or increase sales. Depending on what you want your followers to do, your platform will vary.

Lastly, but certainly not least…

– Don’t Neglect the Big G

Without wanting to contradict any of the above points, be sure to factor in Google+ while thinking about your action plan. It may be one of the newest platforms out there and the learning curve is famously steep, but it’s quickly gaining in popularity. Perhaps more importantly, however, is that it will be hugely influential on your general search engine rankings. In fact, Moz just released a great article about the correlation between +1s and rankings and since they own the search engine, it makes perfect since.

No single strategy will be successful for every social media campaign, but being smart and choosing your battles will help you keep from getting spread too thin. If you still find that you don’t have the time to fully engage with your audience, you can always outsource some of that work. Knowing your audience and platform intimately will make it easy for you to guide your admins and moderators into keeping in line with your brand message.

Get Your Own Wikipedia Page

Having a Wikipedia page about you or your company will add real notability to your brand but more importantly, it will add serious SEO authority and some of the highest quality links and citations you could possibly obtain! This is also a great way Inoculate Your Website and protect you from future updates like the Panda.