At Pubcon in Las Vegas and for a few days before and after Pubcon, I handed out my Signature SEO “Play to Win” business cards serialized. That is, on the reverse of each card was printed a unique serial number. Prior to that, I had picked a number of winners and written downthe serial numbers.

Now, we have the first “winner” and it’s number 43323. If you have in your posession an SEO Business Card with serial number 43323, let me know in the comments of this post. I have a prize for you. I’ll leave this post up for a while, and post the next winning number soon.

Hahahahahahahaha. Too funny. But Headline baiting seems to be the fad of the year as we close 2006, so I figured why not twist a positive mention on Search Engine Guru to my Headline Baiting Advantage. At least I put this honest disclaimer into the first 100 characters of the RSS feed. I’m not a complete arse.

SEO Guru named two top female Internet marketers, and one of those named my blog as quality. Thanks to Jill, who can’t seem to get past my Akismet filter, for the kind words. If I need to refer someone to SEO training, I know Jill’s High Ranking’s Seminar gets rave reviews.

It’s SEO reflection time. It’s that time of the year that you take a look back and examine (briefly) what you did and didn’t do for your SEO enterprise, in order to increase your awareness for the coming year.

Some initial reflections worthy of consideration:

• Had you sought out just one quality back link per month for that back burner quality content site you’ve been paying the hosting bill for, you’d have 12 quality back links today. Instead, you’ve got “Bad Credit?” ads showing on your Luxury-Luxury-Vacations site, “Cancer Treatment Alternatives” showing on your Buy-Baby-Gifts site, and “Buy Divorce Attorneys on Ebay” for your Cityname-Bachelor-Party-Planning forum. Sucks to be you, no?
• Had you written just one quality article per month, you’d have 12 quality articles on that site. That may have prevented you from switching gears and becoming a scraper mid-year, and those 12 banned sites of yours would be 1200 indexed pages right now.
• Had you added one blog per month to your network, you’d have a 12 blog network right now. That’s big enough to sell, and big enough to bring you significant SEO influence.
• Had you recruited one good blogging partner/writer/manager every 6 months, right now you’d have 2 high-quality blogs bringing you residual income every day, and 2 friends you could count on. Even if you took only 25% off the top, that could cover your two week holiday vacation away from the computer.
• Had you avoided building empty directories (you knew it was questionable at the time, right?) you would have 5 or 6 days of paid vacation right now. Instead, you’ve got thousands of pages in supplemental, a few dollars a day in AdSense earnings, and $100 from paid inclusion (along with the obligation). Oh, and your directory script has some new cross-site injection vulnerabilities exposed by Secunia this month, and your templates won’t work with the new version just released.
• Had you started those 4 other AdSense accounts over the past year, you would now have four productive earning accounts keeping your SEO site network under wraps. Instead, Google’s on to you, you can’t spread network internal link love no matter how hard you try, and you’re PPC “quality score” is pinned at POOR, making arbitrage a very high risk endeavor. Ah, to be able to go back in time…
• Had you posted one thoughtful comment to johnon.com each month since it launched in July, you would have at least 6 quality back links to your SEO/marketing blog by now.
• Had you executed one simple improvement to your blog template each month, you’d have a polished, professional looking blog right now instead of a half-baked, half-hacked wordpress template from 2004.
• Had you written up just one of your poor consumer experiences each month, you would have 12 quality user-submitted product review posts on your Made-For-Adsense gadget blog. Since you were earning decent coin from your other SEO activities, you would have bought yourself bleeding-edge toys like that hot new Windows Mobile phone from Verizon (worthy of a serious rant against Verizon and Winblows Mobile), a Zune player (does anyone really want a brown personal audio player?), a digital camera with a full 2 second shutter lag that misses every shot (pick one — chances are good!), a Bluetooth device that doesn’t really work, or works great for an hour and then needs recharging (pick one). Simply ranting on your real-world experiences would have been contageous, causing your friends and relatives to kick in their own opinions…adding more quality content to your site.
• Had you picked just one hackneyed phrase per month and blogged on how it applies to SEO (Time is Money, Opposites Attract, There are Plenty of Fish in the Sea, Old Dogs Can’t Learn New Tricks, etc. ad nauseum) your SEO blog would be popular and ReviewMe would offer you at least $30 per paid review. Instead, you’ve got an SEO blog full of “Bob says Tom pointed out a Neat SEO fact over at Tim’s Blog” posts that nobody (not even your mother) wants to read.

This is just starter material….this should really be a conversation. I’m siting here in a Starbucks with a Grande half-decaf w/whole milk. What are you having? Have a seat. Stay a while. And tell me, when you look back, what do you see?