New Year, New Blog

A new year brings the opportunity to have a little fun and try new things. It allows you to take a look back, laugh at all of last year’s blog silliness, refocus and start anew. And that’s exactly what we’re doing here.

Last year the Bruce Clay, Inc. blog had a great year. We were able to use the blog to bring our own professional insight and opinion regarding search engine optimization in a new way, making valued connections with the other voices in our industry and bringing a little humor to the SEO world with our patent-worthy Friday Recaps.

Looking back we can’t help but notice the evolution that took place. The blog went from taking a news-oriented "did you know" and "he said this" approach, covering strictly Internet marketing and search engine optimization topics to becoming virtual society pages of the search engine optimization industry. We like what we became and miss what we were. We want to have our cake and eat it too, especially all the yummy frosting flowers.

We attribute last year’s evolution to a number of things, but primarily to the transformation that blogging made in general. Last year the uprising of social media affected how we and others blogged. The idea of blogging was focused less on the actual content and more on creating a community. We noticed more bloggers engaging in personal conversations using their blogs as their medium. It was a love fest of bloggers and links.

But we’re sure we don’t have to tell you about all the changes that took place. You already noticed. We know this because we get emails.

To date we’ve received emails that our blog often feels a little unfocused. Sometimes posts are a little too scattered and it’s difficult to determine the theme of our blog. Are we about search engine optimization or are we about stalking ponies (or Luck Dragons)? Are we an Internet marketing company or do we specialize in outing adorable male SEOs? We want you to know that we hear you.

We’re making a commitment to you to give you a more focused Bruce Clay blog. This means more posts dedicated to trusted SEO and search marketing practices and maybe a little less of Lisa’s coy staring. No, that won’t work. She likes her staring. How about the same Lisa PLUS additional SEO news?

We’ve also received emails that people want to know more about the people behind the blog. In response we’ll be adding an About the Bloggers section to help you learn a bit more about Lisa and Susan. We hope this won’t send you running away scared; remember, you asked for it.

Lastly, we want you to know that we heard the loud whispering and downright demanding that we add comments to the blog to give you a place to respond to BC opinion. And we’re going to do just that. Today we open up comments.

When trying to come up with our own comment policy we decided that many of our colleagues have already said what needed to be said, so we wrote ours with inspiration from theirs and added our own Bruce Clay flair. With that, we present you with the Bruce Clay, Inc. blog comment policy, cheerfully adapted from ideas already expressed by Matt, Barry and Lee, with a few of our own for good measure.

• Links in comments will be nofollow. No one gets spammy credit for this; comment for the joy of contribution.
• Comments are moderated based on:
• Comments must be on-topic. Off-topic comments will be pruned. However, you may consider the Friday Recaps your playground to express all your inner search silliness. God knows Lisa does.
• Comments should add value. One liners or "me too" comments add little to the conversation and we reserve the right to delete them.
• No personal attacks, profanity, soliciting, or impersonating anyone else.
• No defamatory or libelous statements.
• We will not tolerate spamming or commercial promotion of any kind. If you’re linking somewhere, make sure that the value is obvious.
• Handles and nicknames are fine, but no name keyword stuffing.
• Relevant links are encouraged; irrelevant links are annoying and are not.
• No signatures will be allowed. Please leave them off.
• HTML is enabled but please don’t post images.
• We reserve the right to edit, delete or moderate any comment at our discretion.
• On the first night at all SES conferences, you can deliver your comments in person to Lisa at the hotel bar, but only if you buy her a drink first.
• We’d really like to keep the discussion here focused, so we’d appreciate it greatly if conversations in the comments were kept to a minimum. Our intention is not to turn the blog into a forum. As such, please make this an intelligent rebuttal or support area, and not a rambling conversation. Unless it’s about ponies or cute boys. Then it’s totally okay.

With that, we invite and encourage you to comment often and join in the conversation. We hope you’ll make your presence known. Get going.

Happy New Year, everyone,

Lisa and Susan

Lisa Barone is a writer, content marketer & VP of strategy at Overit Media. She's also a very active Twitterer, much to the dismay of the rest of the world.

See Lisa's author page for links to connect on social media.