Renaming, Repurposing This Blog

It is now official: MatthewKeegan.com has officially been repurposed and is now an SEO blog. Gone is the vague business model — I’m now using this blog as the central point for my search engine optimization (SEO) work. The official name has been changed too: Matthew Keegan | SEO is now on the masthead.

What does this mean? Well, on surface you won’t see many changes as I’m not going to be adding scads of articles to this site in a bid to drive in traffic or to fetch new customers. I’m already managing ten other blogs and working very hard to help them rank high in the SERPs, pull in traffic, and convert customers. I’m a white hat kind of SEO guy, but if there are some gray areas to exploit, I might explore those as well.

Link baiting is, of course, the main way I help bring links in and this is only done through writing excellent content. To that end, I’ve been overhauling a few sites, taking a couple of others up one level, and using photographs and better layouts to help touch up some other pages. I’m not going to reveal all of my secrets, but I can tell you that as I track some of the changes I’ve made, the search engines love them.

So, join with me and link to this blog and if you are a customer needing some SEO assistance, then please consider me for your project. I can best be reached at matt AT thearticlewriter. com — to your success!

Update: Before I forget, anyone who leaves a comment to this thread with a link to a page they want stumbled, I’ll be stumbling that page for them to mark this blog’s transition. This offer expires at 5 p.m. ET, on March 7, 2008.

Just A Blip On The Facebook Radar

I just finished reading Marty Weintraub’s social marketing piece, “Is Facebook Bleeding Out StumbleUpon?” and was left with a sinking feeling. Could it be that my favorite social media tool, StumbleUpon, will eventually be choked out by Facebook? Perish the thought!

Ditching StumbleUpon For Facebook?

As horrible as the thought is, facts seem to be supporting what Marty has discovered: his online marketing contacts appear to be using Facebook much more than they are using Stumbleupon.

Specifically, Marty notes:

All of us only have SO much time each day and tend to focus on sending and receiving communications from email + one or 2 communities. I used to get 6-10 emails a day in SU. Now those same good friends communicate with me through Facebook.

50 Million Users v. 4 Million Users

I haven’t noticed the change myself, mostly because I have a minimal presence on Facebook. I still get plenty of stumble requests from my contacts and my list of friends continues to expand.

Yes, I know that Facebook is “where its at” but I prefer a more intimate setting then the 50 million user Facebook. With just 4 million registered users, StumbleUpon (SU) is a much more comfortable fit for the way that I work.

Although the 200 member limit on SU is kind of a pain, at least SU isn’t silly like MySpace where everyone wants to be your girlfriend. On the other hand, I’ve been bothered by Facebook’s web-monitoring feature which I find to be highly intrusive. I understand that this has been scaled back recently, but it still bugs me that they even pushed such nonsense.

A Call To Arms

Despite its faults, I’ll likely be stepping up my Facebook presence after the new year, but I have no intention of ditching SU. I also like LinkedIn as I have made some fabulous contacts through this business social networking community.

Like people concerned about Google’s huge growth (and resultant PageRank craziness) I don’t want any one company dominating social media nor do I want one search engine to rule. Therefore, consider this as my personal appeal to all stumblers out there to keep on stumbling even you use Facebook.

I can’t imagine online life without StumbleUpon, one of the best information and marketing tools available to web surfers.