How pathetic is this? Forbes runs a link bait story called The Web Celeb 25. It’s a list of the “biggest, brightest and most influential people on the Internet.”

Andy Beal ran a notice about it in a post called Who’s Missing From Forbes’ Web Celeb 25 List?. It took me an instant to see that the Forbes list is targeted to men. The majority of the names of the list are men. I counted three women out of twenty-five men.

What do they use for an image to illustrate the piece at Forbes (and Andy’s site, but he only followed Forbes’ lead)?

A woman in a strapless red gown!

On top of everything else going on this week, I have to compete with a well-known search engine marketer in an industry I technically don’t even do any SEO work for anymore. I cover the search engine marketing industry and I run a forums for it. I drink girlie drinks with its top experts and gurus at their search engine marketing conferences.

I used to teach SEO online with my old Cre8pc Website Promotion website and Yahoo! club, but you have to be old to remember those days, or at least over 25. I know “the life” so well I work for SEO/M’s providing the usability side of their campaigns, and they know I won’t do anything that conflicts with their strategies.

I wear a Wonder Woman headband at Cre8asiteforums. That scary fact alone qualifies me for the “What’s with that chick?” award.

I raise funds for search engine industry education and drive the Cre8asiteforums moderators nuts with my stubborn resolve on that.

I write for Search Engine Roundtable.

I eat granola.

Does that count?

I know that Jill Whalen deserves the title more than I do. Does the runner up get a cute prince anyway? I’d be cool with that.

Other Fun

David Temple has written Who said what and who tagged who in that meme?. Remember the who tagged who thing? He tested folks on it and the winner, my friend Abhilash Patel, won “a sponsorhip on the China Search Marketing Tour”.

My friends win stuff.

Hot SEO Events

Even though David had declared Jill the winner already, I will still attend a small gathering of SEO’s in the Delaware Valley area of the States tomorrow night, hosted by Liana Evans of Search Marketing Gurus.

Book your flight for Australia! They’re hosting Search Summit - The Australian Search Marketing Conference, running March 1st and 2nd, 2007. Says Michael Motherwell, from his private jet, specifically to moi because I am a search engine industry reporter godmother (Gentle reminder. There IS a poll going on.)

“Search Summit aims to provide a comprehensive course for all attendees, irrespective of knowledge levels, and provide the sort of learnign experience that, whilst common in the USA and UK, has been lacking in Australia.”

In Real Life I’m a Mom

For those who are not new to this blog and who’ve met me before one of my posts was dugg 1747 times, you know I have a son who is Mr. Sports Guy. He signed up for another year of baseball last Saturday. He’s now with the Juniors at age 13. He relayed this conversation to me today that happened when his Dad took him to register for the next season.

Stefan tells it this way.

“Yo Mom. (I stop everything, on command.)

There was this, like, Junior Coach I didn’t know and he walks up to me, eyeing me up and down and he says, (Stefan lowers his voice to that of a scary adult male), ‘You pitch?’

(I smile. Nice imitation by the kid.)

And like the whole room gets dead quiet! Nobody says anything and finally some guy says, “Yep. He pitches alright.” And all the men nod and laugh at the Junior coach for being so stupid for not knowing.

So I walk away a little bit and the Junior coach comes up and says, ‘How fast?’ The whole room gets quiet again. I’m looking at Dad and he’s smiling. They’re all just staring at the Junior coach like he’s an idiot. I tell him I pitch about 65-70mph. All the other coaches start nodding and chuckling. I don’t know what to do, so I just keep looking at Dad.

Then the Junior coach says, ‘I’ll be timing you.’ And the whole room nodded and laughed again. It was really wierd.”

It takes so few words to make a room filled with testosterone make all the sense in the world.

Everybody has their take on being “Slashdotted” or experiencing the “Digg Effect”. Most website owners would give their right pinky for the kind of traffic that grinds servers to a dead halt. If the end result of all that attention gets you what you want, all is well. Question is, is everyone getting what they really, really want?

Matt Bailey, search marketing analyst, usability and accessibility guy and expert on a bulldozer (long story), thought to crunch some numbers, including mine after this weekend’s events here to have a look underneath the social media hood.

He starts the discussion of his findings in Social Media – Under the Microscope

Social Media provides a “sugar-high” approach to building links, much less an online business. It provides a lot of traffic, very fast. However the vast majority of that traffic is not engaged, rarely stays for more than a few seconds and can sometimes be rude. If page views are the goal for a site, social media will provide a lot of one-off page views, but rarely more than that. Comparatively, good external links provide traffic that will view multiple pages – typically many more than social media traffic.

His data confirmed my experience.

Despite the higher rates of conversion and engagement by visitors who are referred by external site links, social media site links consistently yielded the lowest rates of engagement and no conversions.”

He hopes to gather more data. There’s much to explore. If you are a website marketer, what can you promise your clients that will pay off for them in the long run?

Counter point - Social Media Traffic Isn’t Useless by Rand Fishkin.

More perspective - Techmeme vs. Digg - Knowing Your Audience & Client by Liana Evans

More:

Not All Traffic Is Created Equal by Scott Karp

Beyond Google: Social Media Engines First, Other Search Engines Second by Danny Sullivan

The Digging Debate: Is Social Media Worthless? by Tamar Weinberg

Social Media Too Sweet For Websites by David A. Utter

One of the new things we launched last year at Cre8asiteforums was the idea that in addition to free website reviews from the public in our Website Hospital, we would also offer free software testing for Internet applications in BETA or after launch.

The debut test application is called Ask3, a little survey application that sits inside a web page. It packs a wallop of a back-end, despite its innocent front-end. Designed to ask three questions, no more, at a time, in a rotating, random basis, this survey gathers data that is later analyzed, cross tabbed, and run through the measurements dishwasher in ways you never dreamed possible.

It’s targeted to folks like Ebay store owners, for example, who deal with a lot of people and who want to get deeper into their customers’ experience.

Ask3’s backend is based on an existing motherload of an application developed for a telecommunications company for collecting call center data. It’s developers are customer satisfaction survey experts.

To enable a robust device for anyone to use, the folks at JustAskThem.com sought to create something that website owners could simply cut and paste into web pages in a few seconds. Not only that, they wanted it to be something that blended into the page, rather than stood out or was terribly distracting.

They wanted a way to ask questions during the conversation on the page, for those who wanted something like this. This is a little different than an afterthought survey or poll.

Those who tested it had a lot of feedback and suggestions for improvements, which is just what the programmers of this small company wanted to receive. They’ve spent the past few months applying that feedback.

Now they are back. This time they want to offer free accounts for beta testers, as well as general feedback. If you like to test new applications, and like to QA applications for a hobby or as a passion, or you do it for a living and just want to lend a hand, JustAskThem has asked for help again in beta testers for ASK3.

Everything is desired. Accessibility feedback, user interface, functional testing, understandability…you name it. By helping members with their projects at Cre8asiteforums, others have the chance to learn from you.

Clearly, I’m about to ruin the true point of this new “Who’s the Coolest” contest running, and I should probably apologize right now, but it’s cold as hell in my office and the first funniest thing to see online in SEO-land since last week has just showed up.

Andy Beal has written The Godfather of Search? What About the Godmother? He writes,

“Last week I received a quick email from Jeremy Shoemaker, asking me who I thought the “Godfather of Search” was.

Andy got to wondering (*taking lessons from moi?) where the heck the women are in this idea? So, he made a poll with his picks for “The Most Powerful Woman in Search” .

Vanessa Fox
Marissa Mayer
Jill Whalen
Kim Krause Berg
Elisabeth Osmeloski
Heather Lloyd Martin
Jennifer Laycock
Christine Churchill
Dana Todd
Shari Thurow
Barbara Coll
Jennifer Slegg

That’s some stiff competition there. Frankly, I can think of several reasons why I shouldn’t be on the list, but why ruin the fun by being practical?

Now, where are my mice men and where’d I stick that pumpkin?