For active members of the V7N Forums, the announcement that I’ve stepped away from V7N’s daily operations is not new news. For several months now I’ve been less and less active.

Adam Smith, a friend I knew in Seattle who lives with his wife and children here in Tokyo, has taken over day-to-day operations. He effectively runs our Contextual Links service, and our customers give him rave reviews.

Reiko still handles the office and taxes and all those mundane things.

As for me, I must admit that SEO no longer holds my attention. That does sound like a horrible thing to say after the kindness the SEO industry has shown me, and the lifestyle it has afforded me, and the relationships which resulted from my participation in this industry. But the fact remains that SEO simply doesn’t interest me. At this point in life I’d be more interested in reading a user guide to a microwave oven than a Google patent.

Making money is good, and SEO does that. The Internet remains the easiest place to advertise and the largest market there is. But in the end, what does it matter?

For the past several months, I’ve been in “back to school” mode. At my age, going back to school is certainly not the norm. But the political issues we still face today interest me, and I’ve always believed that people do the best at what interests them. No, I’m not going into politics. But I do want to understand the issues, and see if I can’t add my voice to the chorus of voices that is required in a democracy.

What does the future hold for V7N? I really don’t know. I’ve considered selling. I still do consider selling. But for now, there will be no major changes. Adam and Reiko are running things nicely and it leaves me plenty of time to read and study.

If I do sell V7N, it will be with stipulations that protect the interests of our customers. So, in other words, no worries.

And thanks to all the fine folks in the SEO industry who’ve made it such an intriguing and human industry.

V7 Inc is hiring for web hosting customer support (cPanel based web hosting), web design project manager, programmer (PHP / MySQL), server administrator and data entry positions.

Ideal candidates will have good communication skills and will be fluent in English.

Pay rate is 1,000 to 2,100 yen hourly, DOE.

Candidates must be located in Tokyo. These are not work-from-home positions.

Offices located in Setagaya Ward, Tokyo.

Please send resume to V7 Inc’s recruiter, Laura Kishimoto, at employment@v7inc.com

Just in case you’re wondering what’s up, I’m moving several opinions I wrote over the years from the main V7N website to the SEO Blog here. Some of these are old, ancient and may be less relevant today than when they were originally written. Come Monday morning, Peter D will be back with his insights so pay me no bother.

Comments have been turned off on this blog.

The decision to turn off comments was not reached lightly. We’ve had some quality commenting by some quality people on this this blog. But for the most part, the commenting has happened on the forums. And it becomes troublesome to have two discussions based on off one blog post running in two places.

So, after much discussion and due consideration, we have decided that the discussion of blog posts will be done on the forums.

If you’re not a member already, please do join. We don’t bite, unless you’re into that kind of thing.

Just dropping a quick note here to let you blog readers know about a new blog.

V7N Technology Blog

It’s a community blog. I won’t be blogging there, but several V7N Community members are blogging there and I’ve been impressed with the quality so far.

If you’re into technology, gadgets, gaming, etc - check it out.

Up until late last year I was entirely anti-blog. Blogging takes information that could very well be maintained on one site and spreads it around on different domains. Finding the good information can seem like an Easter egg hunt. My preferred method of information sharing was via SEO Forums.

But something happens with SEO Forums. The same questions get asked again and again, ad infinitum. Today, for instance, one member posted a How do I rank in Yahoo? thread. I did a forum search for previous threads on the same topic and came up with 500+ posts on the topic.

Blogs tend to have a higher signal to noise ratio. Instead of the discussion being driven by inexperienced members, the community leaders drive the discussion with relevant, insightful posts. Or, entertaining posts.

Anyhow, I figured it was about time for V7N to have a search marketing blog. Nobody does irreverence like V7. So here it is. Enjoy.

This article originally posted by JuggoPop on JuggoPop’s V7N Blog, which no longer exists.

Principles of Banner Design (and some other stuff)

Today I want to try and uncover what it takes to make a graphic banner ad worth its weight in clicks. Also, I want to explain my mindset used when designing banners.

What makes a banner worth clicking?

This is something that is different for every person and depends greatly on the reason they are online at that moment. To relate this to graphic design we must go a step further and decide the banner’s target market.

(more…)