Dear SEO Company Representatives

I know you feel very strongly about the issue of Search Engine Optimization.  Have no fear, kind sirs!  Your passion for this subject comes across quite clearly in your dedication to, and fascination with, my contact form.  I thank you for your selfless concern for my website’s wellbeing.  And I applaud your dedication to using only the finest white hat optimization techniques.  You rule.

(And, by the way, I’m so sorry to hear that you’ve had problems with your email solicitations getting intercepted because peoples’ spam filters are set too high.  That’s a shame.  In a just and fair world, spam filters would only intercept, you know, spam.  Like unsolicited emails containing vaguely targeted business proposals.  I now understand why you feel the need to randomly contact people who have commented on my blog.  Chin up and shoulder to the wheel, my friends!  Don’t let those bastards at SpamAssassin get you down!  Also, in completely unrelated news, my irony meter just exploded.)

I also thank you for your gentle yet frantic, persistent yet ominous reminders that I may be — at this very moment! — neglecting my “international clientele”.   Indeed, your warnings about my absence from the most popular Slovakian and Mongolian web search engines has caused much soul searching here in the international headquarters of my business empire (by which I mean my spare bedroom).  

I called a meeting of all company officers.  No mere video teleconference, this!  No, I wanted to look my deputies in the eye and know the shape of their souls as they weighed the SEO issue and, thus, the very future of our business endeavor.  And so I recalled senior management from all corners of the globe.  (By which I mean I lured that black cat from the neighborhood into the garden with some tuna, refilled the bird feeder with the seeds the grosbeaks appear to like so much, and flushed the lizard out of my recycling bin.)

Oh, my dear darling Search Engine Optimzation company representatives, I wish you could have witnessed this meeting.  What a beautiful thing it is when titans of business turn their collective willpower to a thorny problem.  Who couldn’t fail to be moved — nay, awed?

Even we masters of the business universe struggled to grapple with the issue at hand.  We’ve never held a more contentious meeting.  Strategies were analyzed, dissected, rebuilt.  Alliances were forged.  Partnerships shattered.  At least one financial officer was eaten.  (About that:  Mistakes were made.  I have formed a committee to investigate the incident.  That committee reports directly to me.  It has full discretionary power and will be reviewing all company policies regarding feline and avian members of our workforce.  It will issue a full report.  Also, just to demonstrate how seriously I take the eating of company officers, I have mandated that all members of the company, regardless of species, will be required to attend a two-hour training seminar.  This seminar will reemphasize our core values and make clear our zero-tolerance policy for inter-office predation.)

But, once the fur and feathers settled, we did identify a strategy for moving forward.  And my surviving company officers voted unanimously to put the new policy into effect.  (Well, the cat barfed up something that looked like a beak.  I took that as a “yea”.)

These, my esteemed Search Engine Optimzation friends, are our findings.

1.  Regarding search engine optimization:  It appears that Google does a fairly decent job of finding “Ian Tregillis”.  It appears there aren’t vast numbers of people who presently share that name. 

2.  Regarding our international clientele, and the issue of our standing in foreign web searching indices:  There are, at present, no Mongolian, Slovakian, or Korean editions of my books. 

We must therefore respectfully decline your extremely kind offer to help us apply only the finest white hat techniques for search engine optimization to this website.