The lovely DazzlinDonna tagged me for another one of these meme things. Since I’m on lunch right now I guess I’ll throw out 5 reasons quickly.

1. Personal Brand Building – Like many other professional search marketers, I had been lurking in the wings and posting in a rather anonymous fashion. But after attending pubcon in November 2006, I realized that I really needed to start building my personal brand.
2. A Professional Requirement – As a professional SEO with clients who are starting to blog, I also needed more experience with WordPress and blogging in general. I’ve provided help in everything from blogging platform recommendations, style, theme, category selection, blogging optimization and marketing.
3. Expanding Reach Past Forums – Every now and again, I’ll want to share a little tip or trick I’ve found and blogging enables me to reach more than the regulars on the forums I frequent. For example, my post about the Google Analytics hack has received ~14,000 visitors since its publication mid January.
4. Fun Factor – With all the various widgets, plugins, chicklets, gizmos, thingies and whatsits, you can link to and share all kinds of information which makes blogging a lot more fun than publishing on a plain old website. I really like the fact that I know exactly who has recently been reading my blog with the mybloglog widget.
5. SEO Experiments – The previous version of my website had a page about my modified Volkswagen Beetle along with various Beetle related in and outbound links. Because of that, my related:www.reubenyau.com query shows Beetle related websites. Since changing my overall theme of inbound links and topic, I’m monitoring how long it will take Google to figure out my new link neighborhood. I’m also looking at how link popularity filters through my blog, as well as possible duplicate content issues with the category and archive pages.

Thanks to SoloSEO for setting up another meme tracker.

Here are the next 5 victims:

Randall McCarley
Pierre Far
GaryTheScubaGuy
Mike Blumenthal
Media Lizzy

According to the superhero quiz, I have personality traits like the hulk. Which superhero are you most like?
You are Hulk

Hulk 85% Iron Man 65% Superman 65% The Flash 65% Green Lantern 60% Catwoman 55% Supergirl 55% Robin 42% Wonder Woman 40% Spider-Man 35% Batman 35%

You are a wanderer with amazing strength.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

My wife has spent many hours gathering and updating the content on her website. Using copyscape, we found quite a few people blatantly stealing it, instead of linking to it. We do post a polite message at the top of the page asking people to provide comments, feedback, additions, and to link to it if they liked it.

Many people have just linked to that page and my thanks go out to them, however, it seems that every day there are more and more people stealing our images and content. So tonight I wrote a simple referrer checking script which displays a bogus image if someone tries to remote link to our images.

I know it’s not much but it at least it’ll make it harder for these people to upset my wife, which is something I don’t want right now.

DazzlinDonna tagged me.

1. When I was 5, my family and grandparents from Switzerland went on vacation to Fintry in Scotland. We rented some cabins on the grounds in a small clearing in the forest. They were private grounds so you could do all the hunting and fishing you wanted. My father brought his new shotgun and decided to take me out for my first adventure. We got up at 5am and got our stuff together and decided to head out into the woods to find some rabbits and pheasant. We hadn’t seen anything in a while, but then heard a noise somewhere in front. I dropped back behind my father about 20 feet away, since I knew the shotgun was going to be loud. We heard the noise again somewhere ahead and started creeping really slowly forward, Elma Fudd style. I took one more step forward and heard a huge rush of something right behind me. As I turned I saw a pheasant launching itself out of the bush beside me, taking off as fast as it could. It was then that I realized, I was between it and my father. I turned just in time to see 2 20 gauge barrels lining up level with my head. I ducked and thankfully my father decided not to pull the trigger.

2. Starting my second trimester in college, my roommate and I decided we’d compete in an Olympic distance triathlon. We trained for 3 months solidly, running, biking and swimming many miles each week in preparation. By the end of our training we were getting up in the morning, running 4 miles into college, taking class, going to the gym during lunch, running back home in the afternoon, then going for a swim or a bike ride in the evenings. We did this every day up until the event. I was certainly the fittest I’d ever been (and most likely will be) and was certain I would do very well in the competition. A good friend of mine loaned me his triathlon bike with the fancy aero bars on the front and I was all set.

During a downhill part of the race I had my head tucked down and was peddling as fast as humanly possible. The tears were streaming across my cheeks from the wind and I was sure I was breaking a new land speed record. I heard a whizzing in my right ear, turned to look, only to see some guy in one of the spandex suits wearing what looked like a giant tadpole on his head fly past me like I was walking. At that point I realized that it was just not in my genes to be competitive at that level. I eventually finished about 100th out of around 170.

3. Now, I am far from being a picky eater, my family used to call me the dustbin (American transaltion: trashcan). Having been to China a few times, I’ve eaten all kinds of weird and wonderful things including: raw oysters, raw octopus, baby pigeons, turtle, ostrich, kangaroo and a few other strange sea creatures, but the names escape me. When I was a baby my grandmother fed me raw calf’s liver in the belief that it had some beneficial purpose in my development. Having eaten all of that, I still cannot stand the taste of celery. If a raw piece his my tongue I start gagging like I’m possessed.

4. I have no piercings, tattoos or teeth fillings and I’ve never broken a bone.

5. My first car was a mini, very much like this one, but without the plate on the front. I drove that thing into the ground. I had such fun with it eventhough the heater was shot, the car would try to turn corners when you braked and the previous owner had fiberglassed part of the subframe. I remember picking up my first girlfriend and walking round to open the door for her, such a proud moment that was for me.

It’s such a tiny car that by American standards it really is like a circus clown car. The tire specs are 145/80/10. Yes 10″ wheels! It had a 4 gear manual transmission, manual drum brakes, a single carburetor, manual choke and weighed about 1500 lbs. It’s approx 120in long, 55in wide and 53in short. Compare that to my Jeep Grand Cherokee which is 186in long, 84in wide, 69in high and tips the scales at around 3900 lbs.

And now onto my 5 victims to be tagged:

Randall McCarley, Wit, GaryTheScubaGuy, Jrothra and Jocelyn

Here’s the tag tree for reference.