SOS Marketing, LLC.

I hate it when I get emails or see programs trying to sell something to businesses, especially the Internet Market crowd and they misinterpret the data. There are so many people out there trying to capitalize on the fact that Facebook get as much traffic as they do. Of course Facebook has a tremendous amount of traffic.

Do not delude yourself into thinking that Google will be replaced by Facebook.

Before you begin to take stock in all the hype about how Google is dying or dead and you must position yourself, so you will not see the death of Google… ask yourself a few questions:

How is that traffic counted, that you see in the stats they show?

How many of those people are actually searching for your business or the products and services that you offer?

How many of them are searching for anything other than their friends and family and photos?

The truth is, most of them are not searching for a single thing. People do not go to Facebook to find an eBook or to look for an iPod or to read reviews on the latest droid gadget. The fact is people go there to socialize and communicate with their friends and family. They go to share personal information. Then a certain percentage go to Facebook to play games, while a few people (as in a certain percentage) use it for business. Then there are those that refuse to click on any ads, because it is not a search tool.

Anyone who tells you Google or Bing or the principles behind a Search using a Search Engine is dead, really has no idea how those search engines really work. They have no idea how people who do the searches use them either. Mostly throughout this article, I am going to refer to Google more than other search Engines.

A couple of reasons why are Yahoo has yet to do anything new in the market and if I remember correctly, just before MSN Search became Bing, Yahoo was using the MSN search engine to run it’s own algorithms.

Although Bing, may be a player in the search engine game, they too are not the one that many marketers and advertisers talk about most when referring to search. They have been gaining more and more market share, which suggests that they will be a player for a long time to come. But my personal belief is they get a lot of their traffic via their other paid products.

The diehard Microsoft OS crowd and the new users that buy a PC for the first time and use the default settings, which are Internet Explorer and Bing Search. I believe that like Google and Bing will be around for quite a while as search engines.

Then there really are no other dominate search engines to compare.

So let’s look at a few other facts:

First, we must recognize that social media really is growing and no going anywhere. To that end, these marketers are not mistaken. Today, YouTube (a Google property) is the #4 search engine. Yes, that supports the claim that perhaps social media is taking over and Search Engines may have met their match. YouTube may be a social networking site, but as mentioned, it is also a Google Owned property, it uses Google search algorithms and the reason YouTube is not the #1, #2 or #3 Search Engine is, because it is not designed to only be a search engine. Not everyone searching on the Internet is looking for videos when they go online to find something. In fact, some people do not even watch TV, so why search for more videos online. Plus, there are plenty of people that barely have a handle on how to even use Google search or Bing as it is. How many people do you know, that really know how to properly use any search engine? How many people do you know that even understand how to use Boolean search terms or even what that means?

Second, Google loves video. Not only YouTube video, but other kinds of video too. This is one way that Google ranks and finds relevant material.

Third, Google gains a tremendous amount of traffic through the free tools they have available. This will continue to drive the relevance and usefulness of how consumers view Google.

Fourth, Google loves social media and even has one of it’s own, known as Google Buzz. But the true potential of this tool has yet to be completely known or understood by most users, as it has not yet been completely integrated into all of Googles other properties. There is also Google Friend Connect and integration with YouTube and the open source nature of Google’s API’s, as well as the integration with OpenID. So whatever you do, do not discount Google as a dominant player in the Social Media market just yet.

Fifth, Google is a debt free company, with a ton of extra money in the bank. How many social media companies can say that? Facebook has yet to become profitable. Twitter is much the same, they are still in the Red. As each of the now existing big social media giants works to catch up financially with Google, Google will continue to build and perfect it’s Google Buzz.

It is clear that everyone should be using social media and that means learning to capitalize as much as you can on Facebook and Twitter today. But another question you may want to ask yourself is how much stock do you want to put into any one single social media website. Look at MySpace, at one time it was one of the biggest social media sites on the net. But today it has lost must of it’s luster.

The beauty of a Search Engine is, it is not dependent on the whims of the people (i.e. doing what is trendy or whatever the current FAD might be) and it does not depend on the success of failure of one social network. Even if Google Buzz fails or never picks up, Google has plenty of other properties and plenty of other ways they can stick with their company mission.

Google is dependent on maintaining proper algorithm’s in order to create relevant results and it is dependent on continuing to create an audience, which businesses will pay to reach. As long as they do that, Google will always have relevance in the marketplace and people will continue to use it predominantly as a tool to find what they want.

So do not let the fear mongers convince you that the writing is on the wall and Google is on it’s way out. Do not let them convince you that you must change all your business over today and you need to buy some program to teach you how, because the proof is in the stats of page visits or usage.

Whenever anyone says that, look deeper into what the results really say and think about how people are using the networks mentioned. Then you will have a much clearer picture, that is not marred by your emotions or even a little bit of naivety, that you might not want to admit you have.

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At this point, it’s hard to write a really detailed review on the Platinum SEO Wordpress Plugin. The reason is, I’m not sure exactly how well it works compared to working without it.

Here’s what I can say. There are a lot of options in the plugin, most of which are easy to figure out. If your a complete and total newbie on the internet some of them may be a bit out of your understanding, but that doesn’t mean you still can’t use the Platinum SEO Wordpress Plugin. It just means, you may not immediately be able to set everything up in the best way.

As far as that goes, I as a veteran of the Internet and marketing, don’t think I even understand all the options and I’m probably not maximizing my usage of the plugin either. Perhaps better descriptions or explanations of things would be helpful to those (like myself) that need or want a little more information as to what a feature or setting actually does.

I do like the extra options and the extra feeling I have of being able to control what is going on from an SEO point of view on my site. That alone, makes me keep installing it on nearly every blog I set up. There is a time issue that comes into play, because you don’t just set it up once time on the settings page and then forget it. There is an option on every Add New Post page that allows you to customize your SEO options. If you really take the time to do this every time, I’m sure that in some way the Platinum SEO Wordpress Plugin, has to have an effect.

The things I don’t like. Well, once I got rid of the stupid smiley face that was up on the top left corner of my blogs, I felt a lot better. But there is actually a much bigger pain in the rear, that on one hand I get, since this is an open source plugin and the author is actually giving it away and that pain is, every time a new update to the plugin comes out, which seems fairly frequent (and this is usually a good thing, because it means it is actively being developed), it automatically selects the checkbox at the bottom of the SEO options page, saying to promote the Platinum SEO Wordpress Plugin by showing a link to the page….

Problem with this, two-fold. The link is ugly and huge and totally misplaced. On some themes it shows on bottom right corner of the Wordpress Site and on other themes it shows in an even worse position, on the top left hand corner. That means, every time you do an auto-update you must also go in and uncheck that setting and getting annoyed. There are times that I even consider deactivating the plugin altogether, so I don’t have to deal with it. Especially when I must do this on 5 or 10 blogs… grrr….

But ultimately I keep the Platinum SEO Wordpress Plugin on most of my wordpress sites, because I think they just might be working. I have noticed that several of my articles are getting picked up very quickly by Google’s search engine and that is a good thing. But can I say it is because of the Platinum SEO Wordpress Plugin?

No, not with any certainty at all. It might be the quality of the article, it might be the sitemap that is auto-generated every time a change occurs to my site. It could even be the MBP Ping Optimizer that sends a ping of every post to all the major search engines and pinging sites on the internet. It could be because every post I make on my site also posts on 4 or 5 other blogs/sites across the net and those other sites or blogging networks are heavily spidered by the search engines, getting caught in an hour or less most of the time. Then I also have status updates posted at the same time to at least 5 or 6 of the major Social Networking websites, speaking of the post I just made.

So the reasons for being found by the Search Engines could be for many, many reasons.

There is one more dislike that I have of the plugin. It has a few computability problems with themes, that render a blank page with activated. If you are familiar with the now popular ‘Paper’ Theme, that is most commonly used as a sales page or at least by Internet Marketer’s Online, then you don’t want to use the Platinum SEO Wordpress Plugin.

In conclusion, the plugin surely makes me feel better and I will probably keep using it for some time or at least until I find a better option to do the same thing. I don’t find it perfect in any way, nor do I like forcing me to post a link to the plugin on my blog without any real control of how or where it is put. Then finally, I have no idea whether it is really doing anything extra for me, outside of just helping me to feel much better about my SEO on my website.

Go ahead and give it a try though… test it out, at this point I don’t think it can hurt, I strongly believe all it can do is help.

Is the FDA insane or just stupid? Barely a month after the U.S. Department of Justice sued Forest Labs, maker of blockbuster and potentially suicide-inducing antidepressant Lexapro, for illegally marketing the drug for children when it wasn’t approved for use in children, the idiots at the FDA approved this highly dangerous drug for use in…you guessed it….children.

Hopefully, doctors won’t be stupid enough to prescribe it to children in the newly approved 12-to-17-year-old population, or to kids even younger. But we can’t count on that – especially considering that the DOJ suit alleges that the Big Pharma firm essentially bribed doctors to prescribe the drug to kids.

And it’s not like the danger of death isn’t widely known. On the Forest Labs own Lexapro website, you’ll find this very clear warning:
Antidepressants increased the risk compared to placebo of suicidal thinking and behavior (suicidality) in children, adolescents, and young adults in short-term studies of major depressive disorder (MDD) and other psychiatric disorders.

Bottom line: If your child is depressed, Lexapro could send them over the edge to suicide. If your doctor recommends this dangerous drug for your child, walk out of his office and find a new doctor immediately.