Sugarrae - Never Mess With a Woman Who Can Pull Rank

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Rhea’s required intro:
My name’s Rhea as in Dia-, Gono- and Pizza. [ew] Yeah, my parents doomed me to playground hell. In 2004 I stumbled into the acronym-filled SEO world and have since grown to love it. I write occasionally (emphasis on occasionally) for Search Engine Journal (check it out here) and work full-time as an Internet Marketing Manager for a staffing and recruitment company.

I’m guestwhoring it up, because my buddy, Graywolf wants me to babysit for him and the Mrs at the next Pubcon. Rather than pay for my mad big-sis skills, he begged Rae to give me a shot while she basked in the sun and consumed copious amounts of alcohol. I might have blurred the lines on that, but the point is I’m here and you’re reading this.

Like every guestwhore it’s stressful trying to carve a niche into the colorful world of obscenities that is Sugarrae. Following in the path of Aaron “TheMadHat” Chronister’s drunken debauchery, Gyutae’s sheeple and Susan’s self-deprecating Girl’s Guide to Getting Ready for Conferences, what’s this girl to do?!

After a few weeks of thinking, “f*ck, I should really get a head start” the time has come to put out in unflinching guestwhore fashion. For the task, I turned to my bestfriend - my husband, Brad Cornelius.

Rhea: Say hi Brad!

Brad: Hi. Does anyone actually read this thing?

Rhea: I’ll let you talk to Rae about that.

Brad: Who’s Rae?

Rhea: Nevermind.

My theory is that by testing Brad on the fundamentals of SEO, I’ll see how much information he’s retained through osmosis. A quick side note, Brad’s a freaking genius that just tried out for Jeopardy, so if he doesn’t get everything right, I’m chalking it up to the uncanny ability of all husbands to block out their wives.

SEO Osmosis Quiz:

Rhea: What does search engine optimization stand fo-…. dammit!

Brad: What?

[pause]

Rhea: I mean, what does SEO stand for?

Brad: Um… and I was worried this test was going to be really hard.

Rhea: Shut up!

Brad: You’re as bad at this as telling jokes.

Rhea: Ok, so we know I’m stupid. So, what does SEO mean?

Brad: Helping a website or client rank as high as possible in search engines for keywords that they choose.

Rhea: How does a search engine work?

Brad: It uses computers…

….

I guess search engines look at sites and classify them for certain things based on other things like links and text and stuff like that.

Rhea: Now who sounds like the idiot, huh?

[pause]

I meant to say I love you and thank you for doing this with me.

Ok, what elements of a website are most important to SEO?

Brad: [long pause and frowny face] I know links seem to be important because people sometimes pay for them.* And then I would just guess text, too.

*Shut up Brad! Matt Cutts, my husband is just saying that because he heard it somewhere else.

Rhea: What kind of text on a website?

Brad: I don’t know what you mean… like headings and stuff?

[pause]

Rhea: Anyways, what’s a 301 redirect?

Brad: It’s telling you that the thing doesn’t exist where you’re looking for it, it’s at another URL. I don’t know, something about it being somewhere else and I know there’s 300s, 400s and 500s. What’s the one that tells you the page and stuff has been moved?

[pause]

Rhea: You’re getting warmer.

Brad: Oh, it’s on a different server now!

Rhea: Let’s go to a different question. What’s page rank?

Brad: Something you don’t want to lose once you have it.

Rhea: Exactly. How do you get page rank?

Brad: All I know for sure is the length of time you’ve been around helps and I’m guessing traffic contributes as well. That and your links as well.

Rhea: What’s link juice?

Brad: You mean linkbait?

Rhea: What’s a link condom?

Brad: I have no idea, but is there something you’re trying to tell me?

Rhea: Ok, fine, what’s linkbait?

Brad: Something you put on your site that you think will be popular that people will want to show to others and link to it. Something that will be viral in a sense. Is that a good answer?

Rhea: You’ll get your grade at the end.

[pause for kinky look]

Name four search engines.

Brad: Google. Yahoo. Ask. Ask Jeeves… is that the same thing as Ask? Um, I think doesn’t MSN have a search engine?

Rhea: What’s social media?

Brad: Websites that allow people to interact with one another and create an online presence.

Rhea: Can you name five social networks?

Brad: Facebook. MySpace. Digg. Twitter. Is Stumble a social network?

Rhea: What’s a sitemap?

Brad: It’s where it shows you everything on a site in an outline form. So you can see everything on one page.

Rhea: What’s a robots.txt file?

Brad: A what? I don’t know.

Rhea: Why is Wikipedia ranked so high on Google?

Brad: Because each page has a million links to it and other pages.

Rhea: What’s the universal search model?

Brad: It’s a new reality show where they’re trying to find models.

Rhea: How does Google make money?

Brad: I guess through Pay-Per-Click, through paid results.

Rhea: What’s an old SEO technique that people used to use to get their sites ranked well in Google that doesn’t work anymore?

Brad: I can think of a recent one. Your friend that sent out a quiz to a bunch of people and it had a link embedded in it that had nothing to do with what the quiz was about. And Matt Cutts was pissed.

Rhea: I think that’s a good note to end on. Your grade: D- for quality and A+ for your ability to forget everything I’ve ever told you. Seriously, we talked about 301 and 302 redirects for ten minutes the other night. You have an unreal memory, what the hell? Do you want to redeem yourself?

Brad: How?

Rhea: When was the Battle of the Bulge?

Brad: December 1944… more precisely, the week before Christmas.

Rhea: Who was the King of England during the War of the Roses?

Brad: There wasn’t one, that’s what it was about. The Yorks and Lancasters were fighting over it.

Rhea: What’s the butterfly effect?

Brad: More precisely known as, sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

Rhea: Nevermind. We’re done here. Just wait until you get on Jeopardy and there’s a whole category on Google!