Chris Smith

Member since: Sep 4th, 2006

Chris Smith's Latest Comments

Blog Activity

Blog	# of Comments
Download Squad	1 Comment
The Jason Calacanis Weblog	2 Comments

Recent Comments:

CalacanisCast with SEO folks... (The Jason Calacanis Weblog)

Feb 8th 2007 7:13PM If you're interested in getting another perspective, I'd be game to join your broadcast.

I'm an "in-house SEO" who has been doing SEO since 1998, including for what was a Fortune 10 company for a while. "In-house" means that I'm an IT professional who has been the primary SEO expert for my company -- so I'm not aggressively promoting myself for SEO jobs like firms that specialize in this biz -- I do this as one of many different technical things I specialize in. So, I'm not emotionally tied to the label, and can maybe be objective about the generalizations attached to it.

I've vetted proposals from many firms offering to provide services to my company, and I've seen the snake-oil along with the good-quality work.

Why people hate SEO... (and why SMO is bulls$%t) (The Jason Calacanis Weblog)

Feb 7th 2007 11:29PM He *does* come across as one of those snake-oil salesmen on late-night infomercials, doesn't he?

Particularly funny to me is that this "optimization expert" managed to get his URL wrong on the opening and closing shots of the video!

Jason, one spot where I have to beg to differ with you is where you say that good SEO firms are just doing good web design. Good SEO is a mix of social engineering, technical savvy, statistical research, taxonomic analysis, and user-centered design. Putting the entire mixture together goes beyond merely good webpage design, and can mean the difference between ranking competitively or not in popular verticals.

You're right overall, though -- most people can't do it, including many professional SEO firms, so many devolve to trying tricks and shortcuts which are not likely to be sustainable over the longterm. Exploits to spam social media sites would be one of those unsustainable, slimey techniques.

Flickr adds mapping, geotagging (Download Squad)

Sep 4th 2006 9:03PM Flickr's got some great privacy features for the map settings as well -- great idea.

I've detailed how the geotag information (longitude and latitude values) can be found at my blog entry on the subject as well:

http://www.naturalsearchblog.com/archives/2006/09/01/flickr-adds-geotagging-features