Gaia Capitalist

There are several techniques that can be applied to gain visibility in the search engine rankings. The first necessary step is to present a content-rich site with legitimate links out and external links in. The site structure should be optimized to make it engine-friendly.

1) Although it is not possible to submit your site to search engines, it is recommended to manually submit your site to selective, relevant directories. Search engines use these directories as a base for network linking because they are human-edited. One such directory, Business.com, is highly recommended by experts.  The $299 yearly fee may be well worth it – something to check out if it applies to your industry and market.

There are also millions of industry-specific and crossover directories out there . Several of them are free submissions for noncommercial sites such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo Directory. It requires a human to do it manually as they are set up to resist automated programs from mass submitting.  Here are some more with good Google page ratings:

•  About
•  Virtual Library
•  GoGuides
•  JoeAnt
•  Business.com
•  Gimpsy
•  Uncover the Net
•  Wow Directory
•  BOTW
•  Skaffe
•  Web Beacon
•  Zeal Directory
•  LookSmart

2) Another thing you can do to gain visibility on Google is to join the AdWords program. These are the sponsored ads that shop up on the right side of the page. The left entries are called the “pure and organic” search results. AdWords is a click-through marketing program that lets you set your advertising budget (extremely reasonable) and other keywords you want to target but your site alone will never be able to capture. You pay only if viewers click through to your site (like 10 cents a click or something). Other engines and directories have their own marketing programs as well.

3) Another way to get into the rankings is to sponsor a news site. Eventually, your site will get picked up by engines for relevant keywords you’re not even targeting. It also helps anchor the site with strong external linking.

4) It is also important to go out into the Net to sites in your industry and make posts about your company and services. This helps the necessary external linkings but your comments eventually will also show up in the search engines.

Most of this is based on the way the engines have set their criteria for indexing and ratrings to keep search results unpolluted, pure and organic.  GC  04.02.07  19:20

Scenario: You are the public relations director for one of the world’s largest, most successful business enterprises. Your boss is one of the wealthiest, most powerful men on earth. After 30 years of hard work, he has built his brand into one of the most recognizable and valuable logos in history.

For some time now, your boss has been investigating, researching and investing in a new company and a new project. Let’s call this new company “Virgin Fuels” and the new project “Gaia Capitalism”, for arguments sake. Millions of dollars have been spent on planning, advertising, promotion, and public relations. Finally, the press releases have been sent, the interviews have been given and your boss is now on public record announcing his personal business philosophy (Gaia Capitalism) and his new bioenergy investment company (Virgin Fuels).

Unbeknownst to you, however, is the fact that your web and Internet department has not bothered to secure the domain names or publish a website for Gaia Capitalism or Virgin Fuels. An independent, enthusiastic web publisher notices this and buys the names and starts to publish an online “news” site promoting not only your boss and his new company but also his new passion – renewable and sustainable energy – all very important information.

Since your own Internet department did not establish a presence in cyberspace, the independent blogger’s sites start to rise – and hold - in the search engines for your boss’s identity, the Gaia Capitalist , his new business and personal philosophy, Gaia Capitalism, and his new company Virgin Fuels.

What an odd situation this has become. A poor, middle-aged, middle-class American single woman, struggling to survive in the Pacific Northwest, has assumed the identity in cyberspace of arguably the wealthiest man on earth. She even wrote a letter to your corporate offices introducing herself and telling them about her sites in the search engine rankings.

So what do your Intellectual Property lawyers do? They insult her, they patronize her, they demand she transfer ownership of her site virginfuels.org, claiming it has no value or purpose. They accuse her of cybersquatting and cyberpiracy and when she won’t back down, they leave an anonymous nasty personal comment on her blog.

The problem for you, as director of public relations, is that these sites are still online and are still in the top rankings. Whenever your boss even speaks the words now “Gaia Capitalism” or “Gaia Capitalist” or “Virgin Fuels” it is the independent web publisher sitting alone through the night working at her computer who has captured your boss’s identity in cyberspace. If he sat down today and Googled any of these keywords so closely associated with him in the physical world, he would find the Gaia Capitalist blogger documenting to the world that all is not as it appears ….

Out of over 1.1 million entries on Google, her site is #3 (after CNN) and the new company’s official website is #6.

Check out what she’s done on MSN search engine. For Virgin Fuels her news site has captured #1 and #2 and your own official company website comes in at #3 and the new company’s website closes at #4.

For “Gaia Capitalism” her site is #1 on Google and your boss is nowhere to be found.

This can go on forever.

Moral of this story? No matter how big and powerful you are, you can’t buy your way into the search engines and you can’t pay to get out of them.  GC 02.24.07  20:56

The Internet is not the same as the physical world.  Time accelerates in cyberspace.  Everything I've done as a white hat Interpreneur is perfectly acceptable and ethical in cyberspace. For the opposite extreme, check out celebrity trash blogger PerezHilton.com who's been  riding on Paris Hilton's fame and keywords while she gets free publicity. What started out at the end of September 2006 as one independent global bioenergy news site and then one blog promoting the importance of the changing capitalistic process, has now morphed into  the "Virgin Fuels news site domain name registration discussion" mentioned on at least eight sites.

When I got the Virgin's cease and desist letter, I immediately stripped virginfuels.org of direct references to virginfuels.org's original purpose.  It fell out of the search engines top listings.  Virgin Corporate, apparently, issued another press release because Virgin.com is now #1 on Google for "virgin fuels".

Then, I split out the blog Gaia Capitalist from the website GaiaCapitalist.com, which I'm holding in trust until this discussion is resolved. 

Next, I had my server guy (Thanks Don! ClearLight.com) clone the virginfuels.org cms directory into three new sites: worldbioenergynews.com and bioenergyworldnews.com and bioenergynewsworld.com.  It's not ethical to present mirror sites for indexing, so I am in the process of breaking out bioenergworldnews.com and rewriting the tags to focus on Africa, Brazil and China BioEnergy News specifically.

Since everyone else is writing their tags leading with Bioenergy news ... I've written my meta tags and links to  WorldBioEnergyNews.com using keywords "world bioenergy news".  While the new site hasn't shown up on Google top listings for "bioenergy world news", I have already captured the #1 Google spot for keywords "world bioenergy news".

Since I've been blogging about the discussion, and even though I stripped the sites of tags I refused to use for ethical reasons, GaiaCapitalist.com and GaiaCapitalist blogger have now taken back the top listings for "gaia capitalsit" and "gaia capitalism"

All the work I'd done promoting virginfuels.org news site cannot be easily erased.  Some of the entries I'm seeing in the SEs, especially Yahoo, are referencing text I took out a couple months ago.  Now, this "discussion" has risen to the top since I have retaken #1 MSN for keywords "virgin fuels". 

Very interesting:   of the top seven listings, a blogger holds #1 and #2, a major news org. #3, an unofficial VirginBrand blogger #4 and #5, another major news org with Virgin press release at #6, and a blogger called TreeHugger (referencing a post I made months ago about the news site) coming in at #7.

Five out of the top seven MSN spots for "virgin fuels" are held by independent bloggers and web publishers. Since Virgin Fuels has chosen not to publish an official site or establlish an official presence on the Internet, it's just us bloggers blogging away in cyberspace about the details of the "Virgin Fuels news site discussion" now because that's what we do. I'm already seeing their posts surface in the SEs with leads like "Virgin Fuels not happy middle-aged woman does wild and crazy thing ... and Gaia Capitalism goes both ways."

I have over 176 subscribers so far to this blog "discussion".  This is not a good thing for Virgin's image and reputation in cyberspace.

Some time there will be the inevitable cross over to the physical world, and the print and broadcast media will pick it up. The issues raised and addressed by Virgin Corporate and the Gaia Capitalist blogger are interesting, relevant and timely for everyone on both sides of the veil. 12.31.06 18:56

Internet is pure Gaia Capitalism. Business, and the way it is conducted, is fundamentally different than business in the physical world. The Internet is based on open source code, copying & pasting and encouraging everyone to share and contribute.

The computer language of the Internet started out as free and open texting code called html (hyper text markup language). Based on standard printer typesetting coding, it is a very simple Internet computer language, allowing the means to control not only the data on a page, but how that data is presented to the viewer.

It all began with this:

<html>
</html>

and then to this: 

<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

Check it out -  View to Page Source or Ctrl+U  All the way up to YouTube, every page still begins with <html> and ends with </html>. <!not including comments>

When I taught html and web design and structure, my common line was, “I’m convinced that one 14-year old boy sat down in 1970 or so (?) and wrote the world's first web page – a blank page. No one remembers all the black pages with gold type we called web pages, but because the computer language they are written in is open page source code, everyone has since copied and pasted what they wanted or could use, built more and shared it back into cyberspace. Today, bits of that original source code, like mitochondrial DNA, exist now within the source code of every single web page in existence."

“It is simpler than you think and more complicated than you can imagine.” Goethe

Tips from a search engine savant: Pay attention to your search engine listings to see what people in cyberspace are doing with your keywords.

The Internet has created an entirely new way to conduct business, from the bottom up.  For example, as a long time white hat Interpreneur, I created a bioenergy news site project.  I purchased the domain name registration for virginfuels.org on 09.28.06, well after Virgin went public with news about their new company Virgin Fuels.

Virgin readily admits they chose not to purchase the registration of the domain name virginfuels with .org extension themselves, or any other of the hundreds of permutations of their name, relying instead on trademark and copyrights to protect their interests.

This bioenergy world news site was a totally unique and creative project. Because of trademark and copyright issues, I fully expected Virgin Group (virginfuels.org discussion) to visit the site within three days of launch 09.29.06.  I watched my traffic logs, waiting for their hostname to show up. Nothing. 

When the site hit the top of the search engines for their new company's name keywords "virgin fuels" in mid-October, I looked for Virgin's email and studied the logs. Nothing.

On 11.12.06, I sent Virgin Corporate a letter introducing myself.  Surely, I thought, Virgin would check me out when they received it.  Nothing. 

On 12.16.06 I finally see grain.virgin.co.uk hostname hit the logs for a total of 10 visits.  12.17.06, mail.virginunite.co.uk visited twice. 

Mark James, Virgin Enterprise Intellectual property manager sent the anticipated cease and desist email on 12.18.06, requesting immediate transfer of registration to Virgin for the reimbursement sum of $25. 

Without them knowing about me, or paying attention to me, I"ve been able to publish and operate a fully functioning cms news site in cyberspace for three months, on a domain name I legally own and now Virgin claims to be their intellectual property. I've spent three months placing external links and posting comments on relevant sites and blogs pointing to virginfuels.org, promoting Virgin Fuels, and the critical importance of bioenergy and renewable fuel sources. As an enthusiastic SEO, and because I regard Sir Richard a tue world hero, he inspired me to contribute what I can to the greater cause.

Alot can happen in cyberspace in three months.

Since 12.20.06 or so, as far as I can tell, no one from Virgin Fuels, Virgin Corporate or Virgin Unite has revisited virginfuels.org or my blog Gaia Capitalist. I've been working to put the details online for public discussion and comment on the Gaia Capitalist.

I'm a white hat.  Think what a black hat could be doing?

On 12.21.06 I decided to give virginfuels.org as a Christmas gift to the children of our world rather than transfer title to Virgin. 

On 12.25.06 Christmas Day, I launched the virginfuels.org project into the blogosphere for discussion through my blog the Gaia Capitalist.

As of 12.26.06, I am #1, #3, #4 and #5 on Google.co.uk for "gaia capitalist" keywords. I've stripped virginfuels.org of all meta tags, folders, modules and changed the page titles and descriptions regarding Virgin Fuels independent global bioenergy news, etc., the site listing is back on Google's first page. Now it's referencing the virginfuels.org Virgin Fuels domain name registration discussion rather than bioenergy news and the truly great work Sir Richard is doing in the world.

I have lost a great deal of my SE rankings for the three keywords that mean the most to me, however, the ones that started it all "world bioenergy news". I have to start over optimizing and placing this new site for SE crawling and indexing, which can only take time. I can get back to devoting virginfuels.org on behalf of the world's children only when this discussion ends.

I also need paying work , sponshorships, underwriting, seed money, Grameen-style loans, or some kind of financial support for BioenergyWorldNews.com . Now more than ever, please.

Alot can happen in six days.