Playful SEO: Demarcate Narrative as Internet Graffiti

by Wes Unruh

The stories we tell ourselves are often ways to understand the world in which we live. I've always been fascinated with the way that gonzo journalism can trade in metaphor and still generate its own kind of truth. Another aspect of this is the narratives that are culturally established around proper names online - proper names are special keyword phrases which cluster around the most culturally visible, and reputation management is a particularly valuable (if somewhat difficult) space for content optimization to challenge existing or established narratives. If that doesn't make sense, then think of it like this - names are gates through which you summon the most powerful single entity bearing that name to the top of the results. I've been thinking about this shit for years now ever since getting mixed up in that whole 23rdian nonsense years back and seeing how effective 'googlebombing' could be - internet graffiti at it's best. Doing standard industry content seo research is fine - it's the equivalent of painting dividing lines on highways, placing sign posts around a city - but to me it's a lot more interesting to take that paint and narrate a mural in an overlooked space.

I wrote about this a few years ago for Foolish People - back when I figured ScamLife would be around a little longer (quick sidenote, I see that Google's removed the word 'scam' from its autocomplete... and I bet I know why). Then, when I was playing with misspelling SEO I ran through quite a few hoops, playfully embedding links across multiple domains, tying several misspellings together, and tweaking the results over a few weeks to see what would happen. The misspelling I relied on for traffic was 'Embued Spaces' but today if you search, you'll find google replaces your search with the term 'Imbued Spaces' - nowadays it's much more difficult to work across more statistically dense words - words that have an espoused use across billions of indexed texts. Instead, to really get the search engine to respond the same way it did years ago I have to locate a word which is correctly spelled but contextually misspelled.

Last night I ran across one such word in the early comments on this Youtube link: the phrase 'demarcate party' embedded in an angry response to the video. Now, demarcate is a word in its own right, and in a poetic way does somewhat establish an approach to civic governance. But more importantly, Google does not default to Democratic Party as it does with other misspelled words which are not words in their own right.

So I decided to play around and create a narrative - already somewhat loosely established from some previous infictive gaming - which tied the term Demarcate Party directly into my blog, then deeper into the Infictive.com - and, thanks to the existing structure I've put in place, I actually hit #3 for 'demarcate party' four hours into the process.

This doesn't mean I'll stay there. I've put in some content on the blog's landing page, but even more importantly I framed the landing page with content on the previous and next blog post consistent with the Democratic Party current 'semantic' footprint - note two very small links to the previous and next blog post above the actual content - framing the landing page. Now, for it to stick for good I'd need other bloggers linked to my 'Demarcate Party' blog post.The links are tied into an infictive trailhead for a hypercard stack of sorts built around an investigation into team themis and the disappearance of the guy running for Sheriff.

Consider this an open invitation to play along with a game made up, in part, by using seo as a kind of graffiti.

One final note: for whatever reason, Google Images gave me this as the top result for Demarcate Party, so I include it here on the gut assumption that this might further solidify the connections I'm playing with now. Clicking this image will take you to the image's source post - another link which, while not containing anchor tags, is tied into the search engine algorithym in a way I honestly can only make out by fumbling around with playful experiments like this very post.



Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

Cultural Curation On A Chaotic Web: SEO and World-wide Content Strategy

By James Curcio Over the past few years, I've noticed that it is increasingly difficult to find what you're looking for online. Of course there are (or were? wow) services like delicious. But the issue I'm talking about is signal to noise. There's a ton of information on the net. As Carl Sagan would say in his Kermit-the-frog voice, "billions and billions of" interwubs. How can we parse it, and find what we need? What about when we don't even know what we need?  
This problem is of course how Google has built its empire, especially when it paired this with the concept of ad placement. (Though advertisers themselves are still primarily thinking in non-interactive ways, even when they call it "interactive." subject for another post.) Every time Google puts out a product/service that helps with that, it seems to do well, and whenever they try to enter the social media sphere... well, that's yet again a subject for another post.
Here's the situation. Maybe you can relate: I'm talking to a friend and want to find a video I saw the other night to show them. It takes thirty minutes trying to track down a video that I know is there. Kind of slows down the pace of the discussion, you know?
He says, "yeah, one day they will create algorithms that will make all of this easier."
I think this is precisely the issue: this idea that we should just rely on machines to sort through the noise and somehow know what we're looking for. That the entire brunt of the responsibility falls on our search devices. It's a simplistic view of how information is structured, organized, and how we can deal with it in an increasingly complex, chaotic environment.  
The problem is not a "lack of the right algorithms." 
The problem is manifold. Let's look at it.

Dystopian Fallout Tunes in the Wake of the 1950's Nuclear Family; (Or, Why Purim, Elin Nordegren, the Supermoon, and Forever 21 are in this Title)

By Wes Unruh
If you want to understand social media SEO and figure out why I referenced Purim, Elin Nordegren, the Supermoon, and Forever 21 in the title to this piece, forget what gavin said about the 1950's - the 1950's were far from a wonderful time - though the rest of his piece makes sense and is a much more logical thing to read. Let me explain what I mean with these five songs which, for some strange reason, drip with dystopian essence for me, and which were all written by people trying desperately to escape the energies of the 1950's:

The Animals rendition of We Gotta Get out of This Place, recorded 1965.

Lyrics clip: Now my girl you're so young and pretty / And one thing I know is true / You'll be dead before your time is due, I know.

How To Do SEO Write: And Not Be A Total Douchebag

By James CurcioSome of what I say here are probably occult "secrets" that shouldn't be shared. Maybe I'm decreasing my "market value." I don't know. I just want to clue you in on just a few of the things I've picked up essentially living with a console of some sort glued to my nervous system for the last decade and a half.
There are, generally speaking, three kinds of SEO. I'm going to talk about two of them here. The third is "black magic" and I'm not going to talk about it. At least, not yet. 
1. There's the kind of SEO that you learn as a part of web design. This is how I first learned it, officially. It is what tells you to create all of your "semantic" content in HTML, and keep all design elements as CSS and graphics. Why? So you don't confuse the search engines. It tells you to create a hierarchy of priority using things like page titles, meta tags, and header tags. It is actually not incredibly complicated. It shouldn't be. It's simply "best practices" designers should follow to make their sites easy to spider. 
2. There is "SEO writing." This has two sides. 
The first is the writing element of what I just described: understanding how to format a document so that it is easiest for machines to parse. Hierarchy. Headers. Bullets. Proper image tags. Don't bury your key ideas inside some arcane table. Look at what words you use next to which words. Consider using but not overusing certain combinations of words, especially in regard to core concepts. 
The second is more complicated. This involves a mixture of timing, intuition, association, and having the kind of manic attention that can follow what thousands of people are saying at once. I'll talk about this last one first because it relates to the other three. 

I'm not kidding. Every morning, I scan through a twitter stream created by thousands of people, and mirror that activity on several other services. I ask myself, after a minute or two of that, "What stuck out?" 
If something really stuck out, you can best believe that thing is a high priority on the cultural mind right now, within the core demographic that you've selected to follow. This is, by the way, a reason why it is important to create lists of people to follow that represent different markets, if you want to keep your fingers on the thoughts that exist within the domain of several different egregores. 
Timing. Different stories have different lifespans. Especially on the Internet, the thing that is hot today might be boring tomorrow. If you scoop a story moments before it hits, you can expect to see tens or hundreds of thousands of visits. If you run it a day later, you will be lost in the noise. Signal to noise is a crucial concept to understand, and I think if you play with this stuff even for a little while you'll find yourself using a lot of "wave" and "surfing" metaphors. Comes with the territory, especially if you haven't been sober since 1995 like me. 
Intuition. This is the part that comes from practice. Yesterday I was sifting through feeds and my wife asked me what I was doing. "Looking for a tech story to spin on Disinfo.com." "Why?" "I don't know. I just know it's what I need to do right now." Well, I never found the story that lit the green light. But I am fairly sure if I did, it would've been the right thing to run, right then. And knowing I didn't find it was part of that intuition, also. Instead I found a drug story which, by the time they schedule to run it, might hit too far behind the crest of the wave to bring in a real surge of traffic. So it goes. Keep going. This leads me to-
Association. Say you manage to scoop that story of the minute. The things that you associate with it are going to help focus the traffic that you receive, especially on a story that's too large for you to hope to get top ranking. You can best assume that if you type in "xxxx + mythology," you will see modernmythology.net in the top 2 pages. That's because we work hard. (And/or are insane. You decide.) 

Know What This Is?
You'll be seeing more of them soon.

This also can be the way to garner attention for a project that deserves attention but doesn't have it yet - and it is by the way the question that "old school" news reporters will probably ask you if you are trying to pitch your novel or album. "What recent story can we attach this to?" I have yet to master this. How can you tell? I'm not on CNN right now. 
There is one final thing to remember about SEO writing that is probably the most important. So important that it deserves the feared ALL CAPS:
SEO GARBAGE IN IS GARBAGE OUT
Very few of the people that pay for SEO work have any idea what they're paying for. And they don't pay enough and the result is garbage. This is the same problem I've seen time and again in web design. I'm not going to turn this into a long bitter rant about this subject but trust me, half of that sour feeling you get in your stomach when you hear the word "SEO"? Don't blame it on the writers or even SEO "Professionals." The blame also falls on the shoulders of clients. I've taken SEO hack jobs and it feels dirty doing it, but doing this stuff right takes a lot of time and a lot of time means a lot of money. And people are often not willing to put a lot of money into something that they don't even understand. 
If, on the other hand, you do understand the kind of campaign I could wage for you with an adequate budget: I'm not hard to get in touch with. A little demonstration of what I'm talking about. Layne Stayley. Myth. Charlie Sheen Polyamory. Adonis DNA. Of course, these will shift up constantly. But at least as of the moment of posting this, Modern Mythology is not only on the top page but often in the top 3 of these search terms. I could list a ton more search terms that were all trending for a moment, which is the point at which we set our crack team of midget coke whore psychopath douchebags loose on their keyboards.
Look for "Crack midget coke whore psychopath douchebags" next week. 
But seriously. This is the final takeaway for all of you: SEO does not determine what you say about something. I ran several stories off of the "Charlie Sheen craze." A lot of people came to me saying that I had give them insights they'd never considered before- not just saying something about Charlie Sheen (Good God) that they hadn't heard said elsewhere in the noise, but ideas about culture and personality that they hadn't considered before. Period. In other words, if you use SEO to help you determine what to write for on the web, that doesn't make you a good writer. And being a good writer doesn't ensure that you'll be a good thinker. And you've got to be all three, and keep pushing, to ever hope to be a myth maker in these times. 
Which is the only game in town, so far as I'm concerned. And I won't pretend I've "arrived" or that I'm "on the level." But I'm going to die trying, and to try to help define what that level is. What about you?  Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

Fallen Nation Pharmaceutical SEO Games Destroy The World In Revenge Tsunami

You think this panda cares about fucking word counts?
I don't fucking think so. 

By James Curcio
Today has mostly been consumed working on fiction. I'm working on something of an intermission section, in terms of pacing, for Party At The World's End, which draws on material from Babylon Burning. Why? You ask. I know a lot of writers will tell you otherwise but apparently publisher DO care about wordcount. So if it's 55,000 rather than 45,000 words, that's apparently a potential deal-breaker. As if as a writer I couldn't kick up 10,000 words if that was the only thing standing between me and a six figure advance.
Yeah. Right. So let me kick a little of this prose at you even though that's not the standard on this site. Not the final draft but as they... as someone once said, it's "good enough for Jazz." I'll put some of it behind a cut. (And yeah, the protagonist is based on some people I know. Though I'll never say who. And yeah, I know the Pharma iz spooky evil demons out to fill our bodies with their poisons myth is from out in left field.)

So without more bullshit, Here's some steaming hot bullshit. 

How I Made My Millions

I'm reworking my cover letter, you know. Like you do. I know this has fuckall to do with mythology, but it's got a lot to do with modernity.

Technically, my role at my last full-time position was web designer. I’ve taken the liberty of adding “cyber pimp” to my job title, so as to give myself slightly greater leeway in terms of the tasks I can throw myself into. The way I see it, they hired me as an idea man. It's the role I've taken in partnerships in the past, and though some companies don't like hearing "ideas" from employees on a regular basis, TLA was unique in that regard.

This monkey is deadly serious
About Space Exploration.
Are you? 

Here is a new marketing incentive which I introduced at a marketing and design strategy session, early during the process of rebranding their network of sites:

"I want to push TLA to be the first movie distribution company to launch an ape into space. Forget for a moment that there is no connection between film and strapping a primate to the end of a Titan missile. (Did I say strapping? Placing. Gently placing.) Also forget that it would be an incredibly expensive venture- I imagine the net cost per pound of monkey launching could be in the millions. This is simply something that has never been attempted before in this industry. You want creative thinking? I'm thinking creatively. 

I recognize that this might be a hard sell to the partners. They will toss around words like "profit" and "lunatic." But American business is about taking bold steps. More importantly, it’s about getting there first... even if it turns out there was no sensible or even sane reason that we should have taken the journey in the first place. 

We will be the first media retailer to launch a monkey into space. And despite Blockbuster’s attempts to get into the space game, well. Clearly, they are outmatched. Because we have an edge they don't. The creative edge."

No, but seriously. I have worked as creative director, content director, web designer, SEO assassin, sex ninja robot assassin, and once I made an egg stand on its end with the force of my will alone. So pay me money to organize and manage teams that will help you do the impossible, or this poor monkey will surely burn to death as a result of inadequate funding. Because I AM going to strap him into this rocket I've made out of spare parts, if no better materials for this "space mission" come through.

(P.S. When it comes to attitude, I couldn't agree more with this sentiment... even if my fashion sense leads me to wear a lot of orange.)