I’ve had Vibrams for about 4 months now and love them.  I was a little skeptical at first.  Thought they might be a fad or something, look cool at first and not work.

Fortunately, it was not hype.  They ARE truly functional and awesome.

Now, I get lots of questions about the shoes, running, running barefoot (which I don’t do YET!) and more.

Before, I bought mine, I read a whole bunch, and now I’m finding some useful videos that might help you understand the process and more.

This one has rather quiet audio, but very illustrative.

On that last video, I’ve definitely moved away from heel running and rolling my foot on the side of my foot (in a bad way).

I find myself naturally almost reaching out with my toes in a fraction of a second, and then coming down more on the front balls of my feet using my toes, foot and calve as a shock absorber (as opposed to a thick soled running shoe or nike shock system).

That uses my muscles in a more natural way, reduces the stress on my feet and legs, and gets my foot on the ground and off again faster and with more traction.

Gathering information through your feet

This video also talks a little bit about the feedback that you get through your feet.  It helps you sense what you are running on, how fast you are going, how much traction you have or do not have and more. 

For me, it really makes running fun again, I feel like it makes the world a playground for my feet, like a blind person taking off mittens and reading brail.

Walking Barefoot

One of the things that helped me realize these were not a fad, but a very super functional product, was walking.

I went to a couple conventions in Orlando and Las Vegas, where I walked miles through theme parks, convention halls, and casinos, none of which are known for being ‘feet friendly’.  I’ve been to all of these places before, but when I wore my Vibrams, my feet did not get as tired, they were not ‘sore’ from standing on concrete slabs all day.  I was still new to Vibrams, so my muscles were sore from the work out a bit, but much less than wearing shoes.

Hiking

I have worn these hiking and again love em.  I’m wearing the KSO’s myself, and they don’t have much tread on them.  You will find that you use your toes quite a bit to grip things, like a squirrel climbing a tree.  That said, I would like a little more tread lines on the bottom, especially if you hike up wet rocks, say like jogging up the  granite face of Stone Mountain in Georgia, or for that matter jogging down a slick paved street or sidewalk in a light rain.

Mud and Slush

I haven’t tried Slush nor ice yet, but have done a little mudding.  VERY FUN.

I don’t have any of these Injinji socks yet, but they are on my christmas list, which should help keep you dry a bit more and warmer.

Maven Mapper’s Information is undergoing a review of many different Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing Services, service providers and consultants. 

Today we are reviewing DiscountClick Online Marketing Services.  DiscountClick provides a suite of SEO and SEM services from link building services to SEO consulting to Natural Search Engine Optimization and PayPerClick Management.  Their SEO promotion includes an optimization consultation to analyze a clients company, their website and competitor websites.  From this point they will build a strategy with a targeted cost point to generate results and return on investment.

They also offer a Search Engine Optimization Tutorial guide that can help companies and potential clients gain a better appreciation for the importance of Search Engine Optimization and the work and art combined to create successful Search Engine Marketing results.

Maven Mapper’s would like to introduce our new sponsor, Serr.biz.  Serr offers ethical Search Engine Optimization and Marketing Services.  They have been in business  since 1999 and can provide services ranging from Search Engine Optimization to Web Design, SEO Training and more.

Serr.biz was founded by Michael Zittel in 1999 as a sole proprietorship and later reformed as a Limited Liability Corporation in 2004.  Michael and his company have several years of experience in Search Engine Marketing Services and SEO Training for which the company has many excellent reviews.

The company espouses the concepts that  Content is King, but “Link Popularity is Queen!  To this end they provide many services e-commerce sites, blogs, websites and podcasts looking to promote their sites more fully.  Many of their services require a monthly commitment and marketing spend minimum of $1500 monthly, which is not an atypical price range for entry level SEO work that will still deliver results.

Page Rank

Page Rank used to play a large role in Google’s analysis of link popularity for returning successful search results.  But Google doesn’t hire some of the best mathematicians from around the world to build complex formulas for nothing.  Nope, they keep those guys working around the clock in some bunker of a laboratory under Shiloh Mountain working to determine if a websites words contain the right keywords to refer their customer searcher. 

They are trying to stay ahead of the many Search Engine Optimization SEO specialists that learned how to manipulate Googles Search Results by inflating their Page Rank.

LSI

Google now uses new metrics including a system referred to as Latent Symantec Indexing (LSI) which is a process that looks at the incoming links to your website and reviews the content on the page they came from and the header or title of the page at that location.  A referring page with the link to your site will score higher for your site if their content is similar in nature to your page where they are linking to yours.

Link Baiting

The key is that you want to build unique content that everyone on this Google’s Green Earth will want to link in their own webpage or blog.  If you can come up with that content and copyright it until the cows come home, then you can maitain your sites popularity.

Blogs are a great source for contextual referral services.   Sponsors can connect with Blogitive, who will pay bloggers to review and  write about your site with the keywords contextually written up in a way that maximizes the LSI potential and which can spawn more link baiting.  So if you have a website and want to get or keep your natural search engine traffic, you might want to consider baiting that hook and if visitors are important for your business then chumming the water might even land you a bigger Google fish.