The Scribe SEO WordPress plugin appealed to me immediately. Let’s face it, optimizing copy for SEO has to be about as exciting as an episode of the Kardashian’s – painful, and excruciatingly boring.

I have a reasonably good handle on SEO copywriting, but, with a business hell bent on world domination, a 20 month old son, and great surf beaches just down the road from my house, and home office, when I finally do get some time to write the last thing I want to do is spend hours on SEO copywriting.

The Scribe SEO plugin turns the job into a five minute, easy, task. Seriously!

It took me while to find and settle on the Thesis Wordpress theme. Finally I had something stable, easily customized, that didn’t break every time there was an update, and that’s set up well for SEO optimization, at least as a platform.

The missing link, of course, is the SEO optimization of the content itself. That’s where the Scribe SEO WordPress plugin becomes a perfect companion to Thesis

How does it work?

Easy. First I write my post, with a general idea of keywords and subject matter but really quite freely and without regard to SEO.

Scribe SEO Plugin for Wordpress

Then, I make sure the Scribe Content Optimizer gives my Title Tag, Meta Description, and Content the green light, meaning simply that they’ve been done, then I click the analyze button.

The Scribe plugin then gives a report that looks something like…

Scribe_Analysed_SEO_Content

…as you can see I did pretty well myself but with a couple of minor adjustments I get…

Scribe Analysed SEO Content report

The Scribe SEO WordPress plugin also provides me with a set of tags I can simply cut and paste into my post and I’m done. All of this SEO Copywriting has taken me approximately ten minutes. How good is that?

If you’re like me and you know that SEO copywriting is something that has to be done, but you don’t want to spend half your life doing it, then the Scribe SEO WordPress plugin is something you should seriously consider. I’m glad I did.

UPDATE: I Googled the phrase “scribe SEO plugin” (without the quotations) at 9:30am the morning after I published the article (less than 12 hours) and found my post on the 1st page. I’m searching from Australia, if that makes a difference.

Affiliate links were used in this post.

{ 5 comments }

Mark Hurd’s tenure as HP’s CEO continues to raise a passionate response. It’s almost one year since I wrote my original post about HP under Mark Hurd called HP Pay Cuts – an unfair act of economic opportunism and greed so with that, and approximately 1300 comments later, I think its fitting to round out the conversation with a look at HP’s SEC filing for 2009.

I have no intention of continuing to write about HP or Mark Hurd from this point on, all I’ve wanted to say has been said in previous articles, and I want to write about more interesting subjects. The HP, Mark Hurd situation is not an isolated issue, it’s symptomatic of a bigger problem with Corporations in general, and it will take a lot more than a few blogs from me to make any difference.

Lets have a look at the salient points of the SEC filing.

  • Mark Hurd, Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer and President (the guy that makes the decisions, approves them and, supposedly, keeps them honest, all rolled into one), earned total compensation of $32, 332, 527 in 2009. When you look at it further it’s interesting to note this includes over $400,000 for 401k company matching, personal use of HP’s corporate jet, and security. Update: Also check out
  • Catherine Lesjak, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, earned total compensation of $7,585,775, including over $200,000 in 401k matching, security, and personal use of the HP Corporate Jet.
  • Ann Livermore, Executive Vice President, HP Enterprise Business, took home $13,424,406 in including around $184,000 in 401k matching, security and personal use of the corporate jet.
  • R. Todd Bradley, Executive Vice President, Personal Systems Group, $12,538,329 in his personal coffers including about $248,000 in 401k matching, relocation expenses, personal use of the company jet, and security.
  • Vyomesh I. Joshi, Executive Vice President, Imaging and Printing Group, a package of $11,644,691 including $183,000 odd of 401k matching, security services and use of the corporate jet.

Update: Mark Hurd also cashed in aproximately $11m in share options during 2009, check out Yahoo Finance HPQ Insider Transactions for the specifics. (thanks to a comenter on this post).

There we have it, Mark Hurd and four other people in HP took home $75,525,728 in 2009. Admittedly it was significantly less than the previous year, but if you consider the circumstances, and what they stooped to to "earn" it, it’s still questionable, which ever way you slice and dice it.

I invite you to read the SEC filing, it makes interesting reading in terms of the executive compensation in HP’s peer group of companies, and the "performance" based compensation scheme.

When I look at it I can’t see any real top line "performance" at all, just, in my opinion, a company that’s exploiting it’s employees, compromising Customer service through its best shoring program, and that has sold out on it’s corporate values, all for the sake of putting shareholders first.

I think it’s only a matter of time before people more significant than me start asking Mark Hurd hard questions about real growth, rather than the illusion caused by acquiring and consuming other companies. In the meantime we, as consumers and/or employees can vote with the two most tangible things we have, our labor, and our chequebooks.

{ 33 comments }

An easy explanation of Derivative Markets

by GuestAuthor on November 23, 2009 · View Comments

I have been kicking this around for some time and I think I have finally narrowed it down to an explanation intelligible to all. “An Easily Understandable Explanation of Derivative Markets”

Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit . She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar. To solve this problem, she comes up with new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later.

She keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans). Word gets around about Heidi’s “drink now, pay later” marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi’s bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in Detroit.

By providing her customers’ freedom from immediate payment demands, Heidi gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages. Consequently, Heidi’s gross sales volume increases massively. A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognizes that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Heidi’s borrowing limit. He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics as collateral.

At the bank’s corporate headquarters, expert traders transform these customer loans into DRINKBONDS , ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS. These securities are then bundled and traded on international security markets. Naive investors don’t really understand that the securities being sold to them as AAA secured bonds are really the debts of unemployed alcoholics.

Nevertheless, the bond prices continuously climb, and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation’s leading brokerage houses.

One day, even though the bond prices are still climbing, a risk manager at the original local bank decides that the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at Heidi’s bar. He so informs Heidi.

Heidi then demands payment from her alcoholic patrons, but being unemployed alcoholics they cannot pay back their drinking debts. Since, Heidi cannot fulfill her loan obligations she is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes and the eleven employees lose their jobs.

Overnight, DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS drop in price by 90%. The collapsed bond asset value destroys the bank’s liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans, thus freezing credit and economic activity in the community.

The suppliers of Heidi’s bar had granted her generous payment extensions and had invested their firms’ pension funds in the various BOND securities. They find they are now faced with having to write off her bad debt and with losing over 90% of the presumed value of the bonds. Her wine supplier also claims bankruptcy, closing the doors on a family business that had endured for three generations, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 150 workers.

Fortunately though, the bank, the brokerage houses and their respective executives are saved and bailed out by a multi-billion dollar no-strings attached cash infusion from the Government. The executives are granted multi-million dollar bonuses and celebrate with a company paid junket to Las Vegas.

The funds required for this bailout are obtained by new taxes levied on employed, middle-class, non-drinkers.

Now, do you understand?

{ 2 comments }

Kevin (so 07) Rudd’s climate “war”?

November 8, 2009

I read an article in the Sydney Morning Hearld today, titled

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Mark Hurd, could he be America’s most toxic CEO?

October 31, 2009

Mark Hurd, could he be America’s most toxic CEO?
I read a post titled The Campaign against Mark Hurd, a somewhat tongue in cheek article, with serious undertones, and I was thinking just that.
If you′ve read my previous two articles on HP Pay Cuts and HP′s contribution to the GFC, you′ll know I′m no fan [...]

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Intense Debate versus Disqus, the clincher…

October 17, 2009

Intense Debate versus Disqus, wow, what a quandary that turned out to be, obviously if you′ve noticed, I ended up deciding to implement Disqus, it wasn′t an easy decision. Until the clincher.
In case you don′t know Disqus and Intense Debate are comment management systems that integrate into a number of popular blog applications, including stand [...]

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Affiliate Marketing – If bullshit was music…

October 11, 2009

Affiliate Marketing is one of several revenue streams in our business, in fact it was the initial source of revenue that allowed us to get CogentAds off the ground, albeit with challenges, without seed capital.
It comes with the territory that every day I’m bombarded by offers for this or that product, promising amazing income [...]

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Snatching defeat from the clutches of opportunity

September 28, 2009

This week, in the context of a "how are you doing" email conversation with a friend I got the following reply (edited for obvious reasons)…
You are a lucky man. No more trips for me this year. Still no work but have had enough small jobs to pay the bills. … Tried my hand at an [...]

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Social Media, blowing the winds of change

September 5, 2009

Social Media, to me, is a nebulous subject, constantly on my mind because of the business I′m in, more importantly, how I choose to conduct my business and my life in general.
When I traveled to New York a couple of weeks ago to attend Affiliate Summit my mind was swimming with thoughts about the [...]

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Mark Hurd contributes another 6000 unemployed to the global recession!

May 24, 2009

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”
On May 19 Mark Hurd announced Hp’s results for the second fiscal quarter to April 30th 2009 and, surprise surprise, the results were down on last quarter. Revenue slipped three percent to $27.4bn, and most importantly for this article Q2 net [...]

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