I recently had a screening interview with Myspace for a new role of Community Manager based conveniently locally to me in Beverly Hills. Whilst I have come from a background of working with music artists and film industry, the prospective opportunity prompted me to revisit an old favorite social network.

Recently, the site was relaunched, with a new design, and a specific emphasis on allowing users to connect with each other, as well as with artists. The only problem, is that Myspace isn’t alone in what they offer. They also have the likes of Spotify, Soundcloud and Last.fm to contend with. Whether or not Myspace can make a comeback and secure its place in its market depends on how it can compare to these other services.

Myspace Vs Spotify

When Myspace relaunched, it was in possession of a catalog of music that was almost three times the size of Spotify’s. Since Myspace was relaunched as a “social streaming music subscription site”, this would appear to give it a leg up.

Both services are a little clunky to use. Myspace’s design is counter intuitive and it is difficult to connect with other people and bands. The positive is that actually finding and streaming music on your computer is fairly simple.

As far as Spotify goes, the free version has a limited number of ads and has no limits on the amount of music you may listen to each month. The downside to Spotify is that on your computer, you must download the application to access the service. While this is a drawback, it is easier to find music and share with your friends on other networks, like Facebook.

The comparison here is fairly even, and the newer generation of internet users may very well find the layout and experience on Myspace to be more to their liking. The problem lies in attracting the older users who cut their teeth on Myspace, only to jump ship to Facebook and other streaming music services.

Myspace Vs Soundcloud

The advantage that Soundcloud has over Myspace is a powerful one. While Myspace was launched as a new place for for artists and fans to connect, Soundcloud was already seeing activity from stars as big as Beyonce and others show up to run contests and place new creations on the site for fans to listen to.

Myspace’s lack of promotional tools for artists may also limit the amount of engagement they do on the site and with their fans. Even if fans enjoy connecting at Myspace, the new music creations and the artist activity is difficult to beat.

Of the field, Myspace is most likely to struggle when it comes to besting the experience Soundcloud can currently offer its users and artists.

Myspace Vs Last.fm

If there is a weak link, Last.fm is it. While the audio is of a high quality and fairly plentiful, the site lacks a unique feel that encourages engagement among users. The search is also based on what users actually input, rather than any sort of a back end suggestion engine, like the other services are able to offer.

When compared to the others on this list, especially Myspace because of its sideways scrolling design, Last.fm feels old and stale. The new online user is a bit fickle. If there is a new and shiny object, they are likely to be attracted to it and give it a try.

In this case, Myspace should be able to pull market share from Last.fm as its user base continues to (hopefully) expand.

Roundup

When compared head to head, it looks like Myspace should stand a solid chance of coming in second to Soundcloud, and ahead of Spotify and Last.fm. In a growing market, second isn’t a bad place to be, but none of these companies want to be known as second best.

Users should expect new services to emerge, and better features to be implemented by each of these sites. It will be an interesting competition to watch.

Do things that work for you is a motto that I love to live by, but you have to understand when certain things have to be taken a bit more seriously. For example, if you like to cook, there’s going to be a time in your cooking life that you’ll meet someone that does things so backwards, it ends up better than anything you’ve ever done. For me, this was the realization that tinfoil on baking pans makes cleanup a breeze.

Cooking aside, the reason for this necessity to recognize areas to take seriously is all in regards to places where people are self-taught. That night I learned about the beauty of tinfoil in the oven came from a night back in college where my friend had run out of any cooking medium. Instead of letting his chicken bake to the pan, he decided he’d rather cut off a centimeter of chicken that the foil attached to rather than bake it to his pan. Little did he know that it would also double as a cleanup dream?

Many SEO professionals are self-taught from other disciplines, and thus their skillset may deviate greatly from their resume. I have been on interviews with people with an impressive resume that had no idea what “rel=canonical” was, and also interviewed someone with no SEO experience desperate for a job that had elite-level server side cache experience. So here are a few things that every SEO should know about, and how to ask in an interview.

1) How do you keep Up with Changes in Search?

I love this question as an icebreaker, as it’s an easy one for the interviewee, and lets you get in his head a little more. For the most part, you’ll hear the Google Webmaster Blog, SEOMoz, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, and SEOBook.com

After they name drop, always ask about an article on one of the sites that really helped them move forward. It not only lets to check to see if they do actually follow those blogs, but it will give you a glimpse into what kind of SEO they are. Some people love to chase algorithms, while others try to find Paradigms that stay consistent through algorithm changes; the latter will always make for a stronger employee.

2) How would you handle this situation?

As much as I’d love to be able to sit someone down with a computer opened to Google Analytics and ask them to do a few things, most interviews don’t allow for this type of technical interface with a potential employee. Instead, I like to throw up a little something on the whiteboard, and ask them to take a look at it and give me their opinion. I purposely choose a topic that isn’t one of their strengths, because the point of the exercise to see how they get through a thought process.

For example, I sometimes put up this little doohickey:

Keyword Clicks PPC Conversion %

Brand 100 $100 2%

Umbrellas 70 $70 2%

Rain Coats 200 $150 3.5%

There is no right or wrong answer here, although I tend to like hearing people talk about the LACK of information in the graph. I like to hear people talk about Target Networks, Margin per conversion, and the basic inherent advantage of focusing on Umbrellas because of its 30% lag behind its more expensive competition. It’s nice to hear what the person has to say about a particular project.

3) What is Canonicalization? Why is it good? How is it Misused?

Google has a severe hatred for duplicate content; that much is pure fact. With every algorithm change we hear about more sophisticated filters that make better relationships between spun articles, and plenty about how the entirety of the link profile for every site is being examines.

The way to deal with this on your own site is Canonicalization, and if you consider how much Google hates duplicate content, it’s a necessity for SEO’s to know about. Canonical urls allow for you to designate duplicate content and aggregate it to a single source.

The wrench in the spokes is asking how it is misused. Many people can read and simply recite how something works, but when you make them break it, you really get a handle on how well they understand that piece of code. My ideal answer is to distinguish the use of Canonicalization as best for blogs and non-eCommerce sites. For the opposite, rel=next/prev is far more appropriate to help spread rank to interior pages for products and categories.

Pete Wise is a White-Hat SEO Jedi working for Customer Paradigm. The Internet Marketing team here are experts in SEO Optimization backed by some of the best Magento Developers on the planet.

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Business Card Front (286) Business Card Back (260)

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5550-A Peachtree Parkway, Suite 200 | Norcross GA 30092

I’ve put together some website design and development packages at 50% off standard hourly rates for a limited time. These offers are effective August 30th, 2011 and subject to change at any time.

Basic Website Design & Development | $1499 *

Includes custom design and layout (2 concepts + 2 rounds of revisions), development of up to 10 pages, content management system, search engine optimized set up, javascript navigation effects, branding integration, implementation of pre-developed content, contact form, and web hosting for 1 year. (Not to exceed 40 billable hours)

Professional Website Design & Development | $2249 **

Includes custom design and layout (3 concepts + 3 rounds of revisions), development of up to 15 pages, content management system, Flash video and image gallery manager w/ Mobile HTML5 fallback player (compatible w/ iPhone & iPad), search engine optimized set-up, javascript navigation effects, branding integration, implementation of pre-developed content, contact form, and web hosting for 1 year. (Not to exceed 60 billable hours)

Premium Website Design & Development | $2999 ***

Includes custom design and layout (4 concepts + 4 rounds of revisions), development of up to 20 pages, content management system, Flash video and image gallery manager w/ Mobile HTML5 fallback player (compatible w/ iPhone & iPad), search engine optimization, javascript navigation effects, branding integration, implementation of pre-developed content, e-commerce & contact forms, and web hosting for 1 year. (Not to exceed 80 billable hours)

Standard Rates

Our standard hourly rate is $75 and can vary widely depending on the project’s specific needs, including rush deadlines, project type, and other factors. Hourly rates for your project will be set based on an initial estimate after details of your project are delivered to us. Additional charges for services including design consultations, website maintenance and updates, copy writing and editing, travel time, image processing and post-production, project management services, and more are all billed hourly. Out of market travel will incur billing of additional travel costs possibly to include mileage, airfare, lodging, per diem, and other expenses as necessary. Hourly projects may require a retainer to be agreed upon before start of project. Withholding of relevant project information including change in delivery deadlines may incur additional fees to be charged at our sole discretion. Cancellation of project may result in forfeiture of part or full retainer amount paid. Refunds at our sole discretion. Travel time for video and photography projects is $75 per hour for auto travel, plus $0.75 per mile. Air travel is $75 per hour plus cost of airfare. Any project requiring air travel will also incur per diem rates of $150 per calendar day, plus lodging and transportation, and time will be billed at the all day rate. Working hours will be capped at 12 hours to include travel time. Premium rates may be charged if additional time is needed, to be agreed upon and paid before travel occurs. Studio Rental Rates may vary based on project requirements. Studio Rental may be sub-contracted & arranged by us for an agreed-upon fee. Rush jobs may incur premium costs.

Notice

Additional concepts are billed at $600 each, $150 per additional round of revisions, and/or $150 per additional page coded, upon request. Discounts for additional work may be provided based on original package rate. Refusal of included services in a package does not reduce package pricing. All features are available as add-ons where not included. All deliverable dates are dependent upon client review timeframes.

Legend

* Deliverable within 2-4 weeks from start of production (dependent upon client review timeframe).
** Deliverable within 4-6 weeks from start of production (dependent upon client review timeframe).
*** Deliverable within 6-8 weeks from start of production (dependent upon client review timeframe).

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The tide of consumer access to pro-level equipment has multiplied competition to professional trade. It has also obfuscated your client’s ability to find you, through the forest of people who call themselves professional – how can you stand out? Why is verbiage and not your qualifying imagery getting visibility?

Your business relies on existing networks which are all too soon exhausted, you must always be on top of replenishing new clients that are coming into the industry.

Fresh to the idea of marketing themselves, filmmakers and photographers accept the internet as being the most wide open course to starting the promotion of their business. The internet is choc-full of irrelevant competition, amateurs feigning the professional, who if left unanswered, may gain preference and steal away your visibility. My job is to get Google to notice your relevancy over theirs!

Do you want to know how the online rules work and give yourself a break?

When: Tuesday August 30th 12:30pm Where: Nextspace.us Culver City How much?  FREE to attend

Server problems like this do happen, which require a webmaster to always keep a health check on sites all the time. So apart from the obvious calamity of sending out hundreds of unwanted emails, where else can this be a problem, or even misused. The answer from webmasters in the know will surprise you.

First a mailserver mailbombing other services, mistakenly or not can become blacklisted. After this point any email sent from the server ends up in the spam bin automatically as all webclients, and webservers keep an eye on server IP addresses that should be blacklisted, and the list is updated constantly. You can check whether your server is blacklisted, it can be the case that your server is a shared host on which other domains also reside. Now if they were responsible for getting your server blacklisted, you will have a problem if you share the same IP class.

Secondly, what if you have your own dedicated mail server space? i.e., yourname@yourwebsiteaddress.com Supposing you just haven’t checked to empty all it’s contents since forever or since you owned it. Did you know that your server has a database of every single file, every email, each one represented by an ‘inode’. If you’ve never cleaned your server space, you could easily reach the maximum number of files your server can record in a file allocation database. This list simply tells the server where to look to find certain files. When that happens, things just stop, everything on your server will stop as it won’t know where to look for files to keep basic operations running.It will often have to write to the server to perform certain memory requiring commands, and if it cannot, these processes can’t function without being able to write memory to the server space.

It could be that you would have a limited number of inodes, these are like a list of geolocators for any kind of file on the server, and at some point you just reach the maximum and everything just dies. Inodes have nothing to do with file size, you could have thousands of records on your database, each the size only of one line. It could be that other people sharing your server, on the same IP class use up more than their fair share of server space, but use little amount of inodes. So keep a check on this, always keep your web email server clean, and be a good neighbour. Check if you have a POP3 email service, that emails are being deleted off the server also, or you could be growing your inode list by 100s a day.

Now knowledge of this information can also fall into the wrong hands and put any website owner at risk, to receive attack from an anonymous competitor. If you own a website domain, including various emails to that domain, then you should be aware and constantly on the vigil for such an attack known as mailbombing. The perpetrators will know that they have to instigate ‘mail spamming’ of a domain, without their own servers becoming blacklisted, so will often rotate their IP class, or start the attack simultaneously from different webserver locations to cloak their identity. The idea is, if the recieving server is encumbered with enough inodes at one particular time, then it will shut down. It may take 10,000 emails to occur, or simply 4000, depending if the server has a timed system for wiping old inodes. Perpetrators can usually only throttle down to 500 emails per hour from an account before they risk getting their IP class blacklisted, so will usually employ different webmail clients that cloak their IP address, and will apparently eminate the emails from many different IP classes.

In my last apology post I sent out a web strategy game I thought might act as a bit of kool-aid for the unfortunate recipients of my nut job server gone spammy. The game – bricks breaking II I thought was a simple but pretty effective analogy of your server trying to stave off email bombing. Check it out, the concept is simple. You can only remove three bricks at a time – analagous to the server only deleting emails once they are read – but there’s always more coming in…

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Here’s what my work often involves:

My work is often divided into chronological strategic milestones, and my estimation based on working with other clients, each plan usually takes around 6 months to implement, after which time my work can be relegated to more maintainable activities. This is based on each development requiring ‘gentle’ implementation, sometimes split tested, just to make sure no significant changes are pandarized by google. The implementation can’t be speeded through, simply because it takes 3 months for google to assign page rank before we really know we’re on the right path.

What is not written on any physical development plan is the less tangeable work I support the development work with, in terms of verifying the appropriate keyword research to be used in each interactive development. Continuous assessment of the SEO landscape, quantifying exactly what we are looking to ‘steal’ from our competitors – analyzing their routes for gaining traffic, and usurping wherever possible. I know for example how many competitors in your field may be spending between $5 and $8 per click to a combined total of $3700 monthly to gain wider business from across Los Angeles – and you want to achieve this organically where they are not and buying in their traffic…

The ‘SEO’ work normally quoted for by agencies, does not usually include the development plan given in part of my SEO report. You will take on face value that most SEO work is simply link building, much of it automated. You already know the drill. I do have link building strategy/software in addition to the organic one-way linking propogated by my own strategies, much of these links are ‘real’ though, and building relationships. It’s much safer than using software, and I tend to use the softwares alongside in support in short bursts, just to bolster the real link building.

My work is more of a developer combined with SEO tactics – I have the means to sculpt the ‘behaviour’ we want to achieve both on and off site, in order to gain the best organic relevancy.

My monthly fees for this level of development are not cheap! If you want link building, then go to an SEO agency, I work more alongside businesses in a web 2.0 consultancy and development role to implement overarching online strategy.

What you get is the safe implementation of your website sculpting, both in the back-end, off site bots, interactive strategies, and software to seed the internet with other people creating backlinks to you.
You will get my development and content generating abilities, as well as management, as I will help you to generate your content reservoirs and email responders. I work in the background self sufficiently, but will require your trust and support, I am proactive and will go ahead to edit and create any marketing materials from video/graphics and oversee production of testimonials content.
My consultancy and updated strategy/implementation guide includes staff training so we keep the approach to ‘finding new business from the internet’ on track

My overall target is to get your business the reach of more clientele, which means improving your impression count and website sticking power by multitudes of what you currently have.

I have attached an example of a strategy report in this post. It is specific to a techie local business operation located in Los Angeles, near Culver City. I have redacted the small business identity that commissioned this SEO strategy report. You can download this report as a template of what you could possibly implement to monetize your own business online channel. Each business may throw up a slightly different tailored SEO Strategy.

Confidential Document USD 9.99 / Download Copyright JR Online, 2011

Download an example of an SEO strategy report, specific to local Techie IT business Los Angeles $9.99

Hire JR for an initial consultation on discussion related to problem solving and identifying your strategy. The initial appointment requires her background research on your internet activity which you will receive as a preliminary SEO report to begin your first booked slot.

In the report you will discover a sense of;

• Your digital footprint on the internet
• A competitor benchmark
• Any Clean-Up work required

This invaluable report gives an SEO insight charging you with the knowledge of how you are perceived on the internet – against others. It’s so important to know how YOU can affect that perception.

“SEO insights are the first step to taking control of the way you are percieved online”

You will be billed for $297 to cover your first hour consultation with JR and inclusive of JR’s initial Background research. Further time during consultation will be billed at $97/hour prorated to the nearest 15 minutes. Please state your problem in the billing field, you will be contacted by email within 24 hrs to confirm your problem statement and timeslot for consultation no later than 2 weeks from clearance of your payment.

Any Questions?

JR will answer your queries now.

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1. Get a website – that no one can find
2. Make sure you have full creative control of the website, even though you aren’t a graphic designer
3. Pretend you have a ‘brand’, and don’t advertise it
4. Keep overheads down over and above service provision from your webhost (afterall you aren’t the one that deals with them)
5. Have a product idea, and do no research
6. Price everything too high, (or too low even)
7. Pretend that Facebook and all that Social Networking is free
8. Do no research on your customer (because after all your product idea is so great isn’t it?)
9. Do no research on your competitor (because they’re not as smart as you right?)
10. Overestimate how many people are going to buy your product

And there’s plenty more, but if you want to know more about how to make your site convert successful money in the bank while you sleep then contact me for a free appraisal of what you’re doing right, and where there’s a gap for you to glean more revenue:

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I’m based in Los Angeles 90230, right next to Sony Studios, where I spend much of my time working either online or at the local coffee shops meeting with local business clients from the film and media industry going over their local site build and SEO.

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