Keeping on SEO.

After reading my last posts about SEO, you would be asking yourselves, Where do we put all those backlinks?

Well, there are a lot of options to choose from: link directories, press releases, forums, blogs, comment boxes, link exchanges, that means, any place that allows you to write a link with or without an anchor text.

But that's not just it, links have another classification, there are poor links, and quality links. The difference stands on the quality of the content in the website where you put that link. The hard part is to tell the difference between the regular and the quality ones. Following this logic, there are quality link directories, press releases, etc.

Why is this important? Because SE spiders not just look for backlinks, but also the context quality, page ranking, changing content, etc. of the website they're located at.

It's not the same to put "buy salvia" or "Kratom" at A-Z directories than to put them at DMOZ (wich belongs to Google).

It requires some practice and patience to discern between good and bad quality websites, few of them are very easy to tell, some are easier, but they would cost you as if it was advertisement.

So, you have to make a balance between quality and cost, if you have some money to spend on it, or quality and time, if you don't want to spend money on it.

I'm not an expert on this, all this articles are my point of view after all my experiences doing this job as one of my duties at BHB.

As you can see, there are a lot of variables on this, and it's not easy to be successful on SEO, because even if you did it great with one website, doesn't mean you'll gonna make it with another one, specially if it's a different niche.

As always, I receive any comments, good or bads. Have a nice Sunday.

Reply about gangs kidnapping people.

The question is:

"I have heard more news about gangs that are kidnapping people to hold them ransom. Has this been a problem in Culiacan or Mazatlan? Have tourists been targeted outside of the traditional tourist areas, for example?"

That's another problem, related a little bit more with the police than with drug dealers. The events I told you on one of my posts had forced to some police men to resign their jobs fearing that they are a clearer target by keeping them.

But they're too used to have good amounts of money from drug dealers to suddenly change to nothing, so one of the ways they take is kidnapping.

They use their former uniforms, batches, and knowledge acquired in their former job as police men, and command kidnappers gangs to keep their economic lifestyle as same as before.

They usually target successful business owners, politicians, doctors or their close relatives to extort them.

Remember that these are ex-police so they have a similar method to investigate, follow, and kidnap people, which wouldn't be easily applicable to tourists.

If you think a little, you'll know that is not viable to kidnap a tourist, for several reasons:

- They wouldn't be able to get their activities as they'd do with a regular citizen (work or school schedules, daily activities, etc.)
- They don't know how much money they could take from each of them (their economical status).
- They wouldn't know who to contact to extort.
- They don't want to mess with foreign law enforcement (they're not like ours).

There are some more, but I trust in your intelligence to imagine them.

I'm not saying that if they see the opportunity they wouldn't do it, but it's not in their minds as something worth doing or profitable.

There's this variation of kidnapping called "Express kidnapping" (Yes, we even have classifications)

This one is more feasible to happen. They take a person into a car, and give him a "ride" over the city, visiting some ATM's to make him take the money from his credit cards.

With some prevention methods this can be minimized.

And last but not the least. Talking locally. I'm not bragging about this, a decade ago we had problems with kidnapping in Sinaloa, but one of our former Governors (Juan S. Millan) created an elite force specialized on dealing with kidnappers. Since then, Sinaloa has one of the lowest rates on kidnapping in the nation.

I haven't heard about the kidnapping of a tourist anywhere in Sinaloa ever, I'm not saying it never happened, this is just my personal knowledge. There has been some deaths of tourist in Mazatlan, but not related to drug dealing or kidnapping, not even to violence, one committed suicide, and some die drowned trying to swim where is not allowed. I would tell you if I know something, as I'm telling you this:

They killed a French Science Teacher about 3 weeks ago in Mexico City. A gang of robbers followed him after he exchanged 5,000 Euros (not the exact amount) and some dollars at the Mexico City International Airport. It seemed that their method was to stay near the exchange place checking who exchanged a good amount of money, then followed him in several cars, hijack them, and go away with the money. In this case the French didn't want to let go the bag with the money and they killed him.

I'm saying what I know, and I'm not one of those people who tries to hide the truth, violence it's happening in Mexico, and unfortunately it was a foreigner at that time.

I don't know much about the rest of the touristic places in Mexico.

I hope this cleared some doubts on you.

Wish you an excellent life, don't waste it!!

Labor story.

I had a strange episode with one of our customers at the chat.

He was very interested on Kratom extracts, specially about their relaxing properties. He asked about Rivea seeds also.

But the main point is that he wanted to low his stress at work. I personally think that's the right use for Kratom. This customer confessed he was just gathering info, even from other online stores. He asked for some smoke shop selling our product nearby his area, I think he's not used to buy things online, I adventure to say that he was new with the internet also, as he liked to chat. I had to stretch my work time to answer all of his questions. That's my own decision, I care about customers, my boss has nothing to do with that, even if he's a little bossy.

I encourage people to shop around before taking the decision of buying something, the quality of our products allows me to do that.

I'll be waiting for your comments. Have a nice weekend.

Yes, SEO again.

Let's continue with SEO vocabulary before I start explaining the methods.

On-site SEO is to build or change a website with the intention of being more attractive to SE spiders.

There are some areas of a website that the usual visitor won't see, but the SE spiders will look for, called meta-tags.

Meta-tags are like the ID of the website presented to the SE spiders, built with keywords oriented to tell the spiders what the website is all about. This keywords may help or affect the overall ranking of a website, so programmers must be aware of the keywords they put or erase in it. I.e. Salvia extracts, salvia divinorum.

Ok, so what's a spider? It's the regular name for the program of each SE in charge of checking every website to set the ranking each SE gives. Some times is called robot, or bot. But spider sounds better, because if you represent those programs graphically, you'll have a dot as a source and a lot of straight lines pointing anywhere outwards, just like the spider shape.

There's this internal linking, that is just the same as the backlinking, but inside the same webpage. So, if you have several pages in one site, you link them together, or you can direct all the links, or most of them to the page you want to be more popular for the SE spiders. There are a lot of mathematical and graphical equations to get the best result using internal linking, but some people think it's just a waste of time.

And last but not least, the content of your page. Most of people agree that spiders look for a daily or weekly variable content to give a page a high rank. Remember meta-tags? Well, it's said that if spiders find that the keywords used there don't relate to the content of the page, they would low this page's rank. This is just an hypothesis, but better to do it and not needing it than don't and to need it.

There are some other stuff out there, but they're usually experiments, nothing proven. On-site SEO is as complex as the spider's algoritm.

Like someone said in a movie: "Life is a box of chocolates, you never know what you get"

Have a great night, I'll be waiting for your comments.

My travel to Los Mochis

There are more pix of my travel to Los Mochis.

They asked me how I felt to travel in an area with so many security problems. Well, I'll tell you that after I show you some pics taken when going out from Culiacan.

This one it's a Jeep-Chrysler dealer, brand news, or course.

Culiacan has several new car-dealer brands that you'd hardly find anywhere else in Latin America. With the risk of forgetting some of them, these are: Ford, Chevy, Fiat, Volvo, VW, Seat, Mitsubishi, Mercedes Benz, BMW, Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Cadillac-Hummer. I'll show you some pix of those when I have time to take them.

Our USE (Unidad de Servicios Estatales), State Services Unit in spanish. Similar to DMV but with several diferent ID's (Passport, Birth certificates, etc.)

Oxxo, similar to American am-pm or 7-eleven

Pemex, gas station. We only have this brand because it's nationalized.

I'll start with my reply to that comment I received.

I think that the international view of Mexico is a little different than it's own population. I guess every country in the world has the same problem. But Mexico has been labeled as a country with too much violence compared to Pakistan by the US.

I'd be lying if I tell you that all things happening right now aren't true, but in our case there are some specific areas, to some specific individuals which violence is usually directed.

In Culiacan, we've living this way for at least 2 decades, to the point that we're almost used to, not intolerant, or insensible, but just with a sense of where the danger is and how to avoid it most of the time.

Since the beginning, Calderon, our current President, took an offensive against all drug cartels in Mexico. Most known to be in Sinaloa and Tijuana at that time, with some other areas less violent (Cd. Juarez and Michoacan).

Of course the drug dealers wouldn't be standing by as the feds and the army were chasing after them, they moved to other areas and started to plan strategies.

One thing you really have to have in mind when thinking about drug dealers and police and how regular people sees all this, is that we all know what they do, how they do it, when and where, if people knows this, of course police and government too.

So this is not a matter of "finding" them. It's a matter of taking the decision to go and to get them. Our President took the decision, he pressed from the highest rank of the Feds and down to the local police.

Of course, most of police and feds, if not everyone, were involved in some level with drug cartels. Before this, they were doing well serving the cartels, and appearing to serve the citizens. But now, they were pushed to do what they supposed to, to go after any drug dealer they know and put it in jail.

What do you think cartels think about this? Of course! They felt betrayed by their former servants. So they took it against the police, feds or anyone involved with them. How hard was for them to do that? Nothing, they have the guns, the money, and the info.

That's how all those killings started and keep going. Killings from police to drug dealers, and vice-versa, from drug dealers to some businessmen that gave some info to the feds to save their own interests, and vice-versa.

I won't lie telling you that there weren't some innocent people killed in the middle of these settle downs, it hurts that any person is killed anywhere, anytime, doesn't matter if it was a drug-dealer or a passing-by pedestrian, here or in Irak. Most of people killed were involved in some level with those cartels or some other delictive area, whether be a cop, a regular citizen, a congressman, a taco place owner, etc. And as cartels not knowing exactly who betrayed them, are shooting some of their former allies just in case.

What does it have to do with my personal feeling of safety? Everything, just like any person in Culiacan living with this environment all these decades. I'm not involved with any drug dealer, haven't heard of it, and I'm not asking questions to know about them. I'm not a drug buyer, and I'm not laundering money. So, the only way I could be killed by a drug dealer, fed, or the army, is by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that can happen to anyone, anywhere in the world. We can't be living in fear of dying, that won't be "living" in the first place.

So for anyone from anywhere in the world who hesitates on coming to spend some vacations in Mexico, you're safe! Unless you have something to do with drug dealers.

PD: The ones innocent killed directly by drug dealers are press journalists that wonder around and find something they wouldn't supposed to. That gives you a hint about how we use our right of free speech: til death. I honor them for their courage.

Still on SEO...

Now you know what a "keyword" is on SEO.

Let's continue with another important part of this complicated topic.

We have the "backlinks" they are exactly what their name shows. On the web, you have links inside your web site. But there are some links from outside your site, that leads to yours, those are the famous "backlinks".

Backlinks can be simple: (http://www.blackhatbotanicals.com) or with "anchor text": (i. e. salvia) this means that you put one or several words as the title of a simple link.

Why not just write the simple form of a backlink? Because for advertising purposes, it doesn't look good to have just an url address, plus, the anchor text provides a better definition for the website backlinked to it.

Backlinks are one of the main things that SE (search engines) look for, not just the number of them pointing to its source, but the quality of the text where it's embedded, the anchor text used on them, the congruence within the article, review or paragraph where the backlink is located, etc.

You can write backlinks in web directories, forums (where allowed), comment boxes, press releases, blogs, etc. not exactly in that order, even on images, videos, and banners.

I hope this is being good enough info for your researching. Please leave a comment, any type is welcomed.

SEO tips.

There are some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies I've learned from my research and its application for our website.

We put a lot of effort to get BHB on the track of success on Google Search, me, on daily, boring tasks, some times going blind because of my lack of experience on the subject, and to my boss, whose trust on my instincts and capabilities allowed me to get enough experience to get the page the rank it currently has.

Everything starts with the so-called keywords, which are not other thing than the words the SE (Search Engine) user writes on its text box to look for the web page that could fit his expectations.

In our case we use "salvia extracts" "salvia" "salvia divinorum" and others. In example, when somebody writes "salvia extracts" on a SE, we want our page to be on the top of the list the SE gives. All our efforts are focused on making the website to appear on the first page of it, which should be good because it would be at the sight of a potential customer.

On the next days, I'll be getting deep on what have been my technique on getting the web page where it is right now.

I'll be waiting for your comments, my readers.

If you like it don't change it.

Hey, I wish you all the best of life.

Tomorrow is gonna be the 6th anniversary of me and my girlfriend being together.

You may be wondering what stops us to get married, well, we're very happy together right now, and we bond very well so far. Besides I have some plans I want to do before I settle, because I think it's important to fulfill our personal goals before we head for a greater commitment.

We'll start tonight, don't ask about our schedule, that's top secret, I'll leave that to your imagination.

For now, have a nice weekend.

Be happy.

Just a thought.

After all the work done on SEO for BHB and reached the 1st page on Google, I realized that having that good rank doesn't mean we'll get customers to buy salvia, kratom or rivea seeds.

But I think it's gonna take more than just getting on the first place on Google search. I guess that we also need to attend all of our customers as our only one, keep in touch with our current ones and try to recover some of our former customers.

On that sense, I'm doing my part when treating customers on our chat, considering that because of you, I have this job.

Thanks for your purchase, thanks for your choice.

More about the buses.

You might be wondering, what all this started for in the first place?

Well, I had my vacations last week, and I went to a little town at the North of Sinaloa near Los Mochis.

This are some pics of the buses we use to travel between cities.

Yes, the bus has a DVD player.Those are some other pics from the bus station in Culiacan I took right before we left to Los Mochis.

No, that's not me, that's just a guy that turned out to be on the shot when I took the pic.

I'll be showing you some pictures later on future blogs.

PD: Great news! We are ranked on the first page on Google SE with the keywords salvia extracts! All this thanks to you, our dear customers. We're heading for the first place!!

One of the biggest bus station in Latin America

Yes, I'm back. I know, you all missed me, I'm used to it.

Those pictures you're seeing above are from the bus station of Culiacan. It's called one of the biggest of Latin America.

I'm not sure if those buses are used somewhere else in America but I think those are top of the line on quality buses, the cost of the ticket is quite cheap. Most of those bus brands are European, so I think they use them also.

I hope that you enjoy them, and you can get excited enough to come and enjoy our touristic places.

I'll show you more of the bus station pics and some inside the bus tomorrow.

For now, have a good night, I'll be waiting for your comments.

Exciting news!

Yes, but don't get so excited, this is a good new for me.

I'm finally gonna rest a while from all this heavy job I'm into.

Specially from my boss, he has been too nice lately, so this is going to be like the calm before the storm for me.

I'm gonna watch the Grammy's Awards tonight, because I'm fan of one of the nominees, I won't tell you who, that's my little secret. Ok, I'll tell you what: if she wins, I'll let you know who she is. At least you know it's a she, and she has already won some Grammys, but this happened a long time ago.

I'll be off working one week, but before you start crying, I swear I'll try to keep up with my daily posting as long as I have an internet connection nearby.

I'll get you some photos from my vacations and some stories about how I'm doing.

For now, I'll disappear. Have a nice week, I'll try to do the same.

More about the shamanic use of salvia

Hello, this is a great Saturday!

I'm gonna continue with more info about the use Mazatec shamans give to salvia.

One of the several names for salvia is Maria Pastora (Mary the shepherdess) related to Virgin Mary. The reason why salvia is called this way stands on the belief that the Virgin Mary talks to you while under its effects.

These are the main recommendations made by Mazatec shamans for those wanting to reach the divinatory level:

Not to drink alcohol a couple of weeks before the experience.

Drink a mix of juice of 50 smashed leaves in a glass of water, although I think that this relies on the concentration of salvinorin A, so I think it's possible to alternatively use salvia extracts just in the right quantity .

Make a prayer.

Stay on a quiet and dark place (any sound or light will disturb the effects of salvia).

Have someone watching over you (a sitter).

Describe what you're seeing, this is intended to help recall the experience later.

With several times of practice, you should be able to discern the truth from the illusions while having visions.

As you can tell, some of the advices above seem ridiculous, but shamans say they're critical to achieve the higher state for salvia, that will let you tell the future, tell if someone is trying to hurt you or envies you, cure some illnesses, and acquire more knowledge from your own soul and the beings around you.

You might think that you need a lot of potency for this, but indeed, if you follow those simple rules you can reach it with a 5x or 10x extract.

Have a nice weekend and a happy tripping!

Experiences on salvia.

Good night dear mass of followers and stumble upon web surfers!

Don't go before reading this.

I thing is time for you to tell me something about your Salvia Divinorum experiences. I think this would enrich a little more my knowledge from your experiences.

I've read that the shamanic way of using salvia is by smashing fresh leaves, more than 50 per dose, and the resultant juice is mixed in a glass of water. Then you have to drink all the liquid from the glass, stay in a dark room with the least sound possible.

This is the basic stuff of what I've been reading. If you want to know a full explanation about the shamanic use of Salvia, let me know. I even might convince my boss of paying me a trip to Oaxaca and give you a first-hand info about all this heavenly plant.

Something more about me.

I'm going to stop talking about Salvia Divinorum for a while and show you some pictures I took with my laptop. I hope you enjoy them. This is Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico, the place where I was born, and I'm currently living.

I'm gonna start from the outside to the inside. This is a park in front of my house, some of you might be thinking: "Wow! they have parks in Mexico!" And yes!, we have some. But the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

Now, this is the house I'm currently living, but I move very often so, if I move again, I'll let you know, hopefully with pictures. Yes, those jail bars you see on the window are not optic illusions, they're real, and that's to prevent any person to enter the house "by mistake". You may think: "What about the door?" The door has iron bars also, but in this picture the iron door is open, duh.

Ok this is my room. Yeah, I know it's just a mattress, you eagle eye! But I'm very comfortable there, the weather is not as cold as it could be, and I also have a TV, for a person like me, that's all you need.

So, this is something a little more personal than what I was writing before, I hope you enjoy it. I'm planning to show you more pictures of my city, and maybe with this change the negative image it has internationally.

If any questions just let me know on the "comments" area. I'll answer almost anything except the alternative use I give to the mattress, and the address of this house, I don't want you to stop by to ask me for free salvia.

Peace, brothers.