Utah SEO - Bryan Phelps

I was in the market for a new cell phone and service provider over the weekend and I had narrowed my options down to Verizon or Cingular AT&T. I’ve had both services in the past and haven’t really had any complaints about either. I was looking for a pretty basic plan, nothing too fancy. I am a little bit of a gadget junkie so a cool phone was mildly important. Here’s what I found.

AT&T

• Plans - Plans in my range were very similar to Verizon, no difference there
• Phones - Had their ups and downs, much larger selection online. I came in the day after the iPhone release and they were obviously sold out. I wasn’t looking to spend quite that much but after playing with the model in the store, I probably would’ve caved if one was in stock.
• Customer Service - CRAP. I go to the same AT&T store every time and its always busy so there was no surprise there. I meandered (yes, meandered) around the store for at least 15 minutes but it was so busy, I wasn’t able to speak to an AT&T representative. From my previous experience, the in-store folks are as helpful as AT&T will let them be. Unfortunately, AT&T makes you direct any further problems, questions, etc. through their phone system which is horrific.

Verizon

• Plans - The plan at Verizon with the same price was very similar. The only difference was instead of 5000 night and weekend minutes at AT&T (which I’ll never use), I get unlimited night and weekend minutes at Verizon.
• Phones - No iPhone here but thats probably a good thing for my wallet. Verizon offers some interesting features like mobile TV and navigation which is available for a fee. Verizon’s phone are similar to AT&T’s but offer some of these extra services if you subscribe.
• Customer Service - MUCH better than AT&T. First of all, we were greeted at the door. The Verizon store was equally as busy as AT&T but they must have had atleast 10 people working compared to the 4 or 5 at AT&T the day after the biggest event in the history of that company. Seriously…how do you only have 5 people working the day after you released the iPhone? I worked with the same Verizon representative the whole time. It sounded like they aren’t allowed to help other customers until you are done with them. I did notice afterwards that if they didn’t have any employees available to help you, they put your name on a list so they can help people in order which is something very irritating over at AT&T. In the back of the Verizon store, they also had a tech support desk which I had never heard of. You can actually bring your phone into the store, and they attempt to fix it there. I’ve probably sent 5 AT&T phones back to get fixed or trade for a refurbished phone. My sister-in-law who was with us, was having problems with her keypad. She took it in with us and came out with a refurbished phone right on the spot. That would be nice.

You can probably guess I went with Verizon and got a new phone and a 2 year chain contract. It’s only been a couple days but I am pretty pleased so far and would recommend my local Verizon store over the local AT&T store. Maybe they vary from city to city but the customer service and tech support at the store I visited was far superior to anything I have received from AT&T.

That’s right…BryanPhelps.com is finally ranking #1 on Google for [Bryan Phelps].  It’s  been a long time coming and Brian Phelps (radio disc jokcey) and his Wikipedia page can EAT IT!  I feel that I definitely deserve this number one ranking and I appreciate Google finally acknowledging that I am the most import Bryan OR Brian Phelps on the Internet.  Now let’s just see how long it stays….

There is a fairly new website around claiming that you can make money online by surfing the web. Which may or may not be true. The idea behind Agloco has been done before and some people have paid money. However, as far as I know, nobody has actually received any money from Agloco yet. I recently installed their toolbar to test it out. I’ve put in my maximum limit of 5 hours surfing time and recruited a few people. I can’t imagine the payouts will be much (if any) but I figured I had nothing to lose. You run the toolbar for 5 hours then close it. Is Agloco a scam?

I was looking around Webmaster Central today because Google announced some changes and found something new to me but not what they mentioned in their announcement. There was a check box to enable enhanced image search. I had actually never heard of it and while trying to discover more about it I found Google Image Labeler. It’s an interesting little tool Google is using to improve the quality of its image search results. Google shows you an image and you and another anonymous person type in words that describe the picture and you are awarded points when your answers match. Google then can be pretty sure that whatever word you and the anonymous person use is a pretty accurate description of what the picture is. It’s a great idea for them to improve their search results and its turning out to be pretty addicting for me as well.

This is probably the greatest video I have seen in a long time.

I’ve just recently (last couple months) started using Google reader to subscribe to all my RSS feeds. I’ve compiled a pretty decent list of blogs and news sites that track SEO news as well as some other things. Here’s some of the daily reads:

Alex McArthur - Utah based SEO expert
Copyblogger - Awesome info about content
Graywolf - One of the little edgier SEO experts out there
Matt Cutts - Google SEO engineer
Search Engine Land - FREQUENT industry updates
SEOBook.com - Aaron Wall’s SEO blog
SEOMoz - Love their back-to-basics type of blogs
TropicalSEO - Don’t remember how I found this one but good info

Any good ones I’m leaving out?

I had my previous WP theme for a few months so I thought it was time to change it up a little. The last one was a little too first-time-wordpress-user-ish. I think this new theme is pretty clean and straight forward. Enjoy.

If you use multiple messengers on a regular basis, Meebo is a necessity. Meebo lets you log in to multiple messengers with one log in ID and password. Plus, it’s all run through your Internet browser so you don’t have 3 different messengers taking up resources on your computer. You lose some of the little perks of messenger options but it is still worth it. One of my favorite features is you aren’t prompted to update your version of messenger every other day. Plus, you can log into your accounts almost anywhere you can get an Internet connection. You don’t have to worry about having the messenger programs installed. The only real issue I’ve run into is I’ve seen a few of my contacts just disappear. It’s kind of weird and I’m not sure if it’s something I’m causing or not. As soon as that person IM’s me, I can easily re-add them. Meebo definitely gets 2 thumbs up from this guy.

Utah lawmakers met with representatives from big companies such as Google, Yahoo, eBay, Microsoft and decided that they probably should have looked into this whole crazy keyword banning idea before they passed it. They announced that they won’t be enforcing this law which goes into effect today. Nobody is really surprised besides the people who originally passed the law. Makes you wonder about some of the other crazy laws they pass without researching….

Recently, SEOmoz wrote an article about the wonderful Stephen Colbert and his quest to be the Greatest Living American…or at least pretend to be in Google. SEOmoz is supporting a Googlebomb campaign by Alchemist Media to make Stephen Colbert show up #1 in Google’s results when you search for the term “Greatest Living American”. I’m pretty interested to see how this turns out. You can bet Google is aware of this. The questions is: Will they do anything about it?

***Update - Thank you Scott from SEOmoz for pointing out it was Alchemist Media, post has been updated to properly credit them.