I was looking through an ad last weekend and noticed they were using the Android Ice Cream Sandwich terminology. Normally you hear people talking about ICS or a version number but now they are promoting these sweet names. What was Google thinking when they came out with these version names?

Apple uses cool names like Panther, Leopard, and Tiger. Google goes with Ice Cream Sandwich, Cupcake, and Jelly Bean. I may be in the minority but I don’t think this is cute; it elicits visions of a sticky mess. At some point the poor electronics salesperson will need to explain the Android Double Fudge Chocolate Ice Cream Parfait version or, with Thanksgiving on my mind, Android Pumpkin Pie with Whipping Cream.

Maybe scam is too harsh but spam isn’t. Do you get these SEO emails all the time? I do. In addition to my SEO business with Marketing on the Web; shameless plug,  that you can read more about here, I also have a e-commerce business. Every couple of days I get a solicitation letter telling me why I need SEO. First off, any email I get from a gmail, aol, yahoo, etc etc account goes in to the trash. I wouldn’t do business with a company that solicits business without their own url email account; something jsut smells a little fishy. My favorite thing about these emails is that they always tell me I’m not ranking on page one for my important keywords. Hemmm, I beg to disagree. My e-commerce business get about $25,000 worth of SEO services every year from yours truly. Last look, the company was on page one for most important terms. If it’s not on page one it’s because it’s hard to bump Amazon, Wal-Mart, and others like that off.

If you receive something like the following, ignore it!

Hi Buskerdoo Team,

I thought you might like to know some of the reasons why you are not getting enough organic & social media traffic on your website.

Let me tell you that your website still does not organically rank on Google’s first page for most of the popular keywords, which means people searching for your products are not able to find you and you are losing traffic. Your loss is your competitors’ gain i.e. the traffic which could have generated quality sales, goes to your competitors as they rank well in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) organically.

Ever receive bad comments about your business? If they were on your Facebook page or comments on the product or service page have you been tempted to delete them. Read on

The First Amendment allows American citizens to say almost anything without fear of being thrown in jail by the government. The free speech it guarantees does not, however, mean your comments are protected from being thrown off a website. Read more

Reprinted from here.

I’ve got to admit there have been times I was really worried about the whereabouts of my kids. Normally a quick call or text took care of the worry and life was good. That is not so easy when you put your child on a plane bound for Grandma or camp. I’ve never wanted to let my kids fly alone because one never knows. I’ve seen kids flying alone and was always impressed with the airline and how they took care of those young flyers. United has a lot of explaining to so in this case. The lost this child and according to the story they weren’t that helpful trying to track her down. Shame on them for not only bad service but putting these parents through and hour or so of hell. Full story

I thought I heard crickets in the other room. Big loud crickets. But, alas, it was just the sound of my laptop hard drive crashing and eating itself. Back up your data world.

Wondering why in the world I would have an internet marketing post title CD Duplication? Well I making a few changes and doing some testing. Recently Google came out and said site wide links can hurt a site. I think this makes perfect sense when you have 25,000 links from one directory and, more than likely, they were paid links. What about when all those links happen naturally? Like, in my case, when the owner of a blog also owns another site. I seems pretty natural that one could do cross promotions of two sites. Google make the rules so I feel I need to abide as much as possible. I’ll remove a site wide link I have here and test something else.

I happen to currently own Buskerdoo LLC. It was my first baby step into e-commerce and internet marketing. Back in 2004, when I started the company, I had no idea that it would propel me into the internet marketing business, e-commerce businesses, and becoming a search engine optimization expert.  Buskerdoo has evolved over the years to a full-fledged, self-sustained, e-commerce business that sells CD supplies, short run CD duplication, etc. Much of the company’s success comes from good SEO efforts.

For those that don’t know, small run CD duplication is usually used by small bands, performers, people getting married, churches, and photographers. CD duplication replaces CD replication which is for much higher quantity runs. With the advent of recordable CD’s and printable CD’s, small run CD duplication became a high quality product that is financially reasonable.

What’s great about performing your own SEO is that you can concentrate on beating out the big guys. It’s also a lot more affordable. For years, using very natural and Google approved methodology; Buskerdoo was able to outrank the likes of Amazon and other big players selling CD packaging. Recently we decided to go ahead and add CD duplication services. I came from a background in CD replication and actually put off adding these services because of a been-there-done-that attitude. The bolster the company, last year we added CD duplication.

Buskerdoo ranks remarkably high for cd sleeves and mailers products and cd sleeve printing but is far behind the ranking curve for duplication services. Not too unusual for a product that has only been online for less about a year. But, it’s a new world for SEO and requires a lot of diligence and knowledge of Google’s ideals as to what should or should not be done. With all that background and random thoughts said, I’m removing a site link to Buskerdoo.

Maybe some of the frustration level will be relieved if we all know what to fix to improve the quality score. Higher quality scores equal better ad placement for the dollar. See more here: Google-Sheds-Light-on-AdWords-Quality-Score-with-Comparative-Indicators