Long, cold winters often lead to baby booms 9 months later. During the winter, lovers have no other distractions to prevent them from showing off their bedroom prowess. Of course, each lover’s prowess is probably a measure of how many winters the lover has lived through, and how many times he’s been allowed to show off.

His mastery of the love-making process can generally be broken down into three primary stages:

1. Stage One: Awkward, clumsy, bumbling idiot
2. Stage Two: By the book, paint by numbers, gets it technically right
3. Stage Three: Smooth operator, graceful, accomplished, expert

The long, cold wintery days hold the same lures for SEOs. Trapped inside, bundled in warm, fuzzy pajamas or long-johns, the SEO prepares to strut his stuff. The goal: to seduce a bot into believing he holds the key to its spider-heart. Unfortunately, his mastery of the SEO process can be broken down into the same three primary stages as the lover.

1. Stage One: Awkward, clumsy, bumbling idiot. His mistakes are many, and he fails to satisfy the bot, time and time again. Rankings are non-existant, and traffic is just a trickle of accidental visitors.
2. Stage Two: By the book, paint by numbers, gets it technically right. While the SEO does an acceptable job of making the bot happy, he only does so by spending an inordinate amount of time as he checks and double-checks his mile-long lists of to-dos, and dont-dos. The process was lengthy and resulted in boring, but technically correct copy. Rankings are just ok. Traffic is mediocre, but promising.
3. Stage Three: Smooth operator, graceful, accomplished, expert. The SEO has enough notches in his belt to optimize mindlessly. He simply uses his vast experience to glide through the process like silk brushing softly over the little bot’s spidey legs. The natural ease creates great rankings, both short and long tail, and traffic is steady and heavy.

Morals of the story:

• Practice makes perfect.
• Prowess is as much about art as it is about skill.
• No one seduces anything in long-johns.

(Note: I used the male version of lovers and SEOs in this little tale because they are the most likely to try to show off non-existant prowess during Stage 1. The female version would differ somewhat, but I’ll leave that tale for another day.)

If there is one (more) thing that makes no sense to me whatsoever, it’s international power standards. Electricity. That which spews out of the wall when you plug shit in. Juice, and not that of the link variety. It’s the same everywhere. My stuff runs out of batteries at the same rate in every country, yet multiple countries have different power standards. Forgive me for not knowing their technical names, but the prong things that stick into the wall are not the same worldwide. There is also that voltage problem. I am going to England tomorrow and thus I have to deal with it. I have one hundred little gadgets to take with me, but one has caused slightly more trouble than the others.

Most U.S. mobile phones won’t work with international SIM cards unless they’ve been “unlocked.” I could pay exorbitant international roaming rates, but I’d rather not. However, thanks to Gillian at SEOmoz, I have got my paws on a couple of unlocked telephones which will gladly accept other countries’ SIM cards. I took them to Australia. They are not the most graceful telephones on the face of the earth and thus, despite their good service, I have dubbed them the Fail Phones.

Taken with my far-superior BlackBerry

Yes, this story has a point. I lost the phone charger for the Fail Phones and I am going to England tomorrow. I needed a new one immediately, otherwise I’d be phoneless, Fail or otherwise, for almost two weeks. You can get anything on the Internet. You can get freaking unicorns on the Internet. Live ones. You so can. Of course you can get a phone charger for an ancient Motorola V600. I went to Google.

However, I have now discovered the one drastic flaw of online shopping. It’s very hard to find anything that exists at a store within driving distance which you can acquire immediately. There is a disconnect between online research and offline acquisition. It’s 9am Saturday and my plane leaves for Heathrow in less than thirty-six hours, and I have no time for shipping. My searches were useless.

As an avid online researcher, purchaser and overall Internet shopping fan, I had never before considered that I would not be able to find something that I could buy “in real life.” Obviously, common items are pretty simple to come by offline when you’ve discovered them on the Internet. However, these telephones are old. They don’t take a USB charger; the part that connects to the phone is a prong. AT&T, who issued the phones, no longer carry the chargers. Every online electronics store on the Net had one, but would ship it to me by Tuesday, at which point I’d be at the Future of Social Media conference at the Hilton Tower Bridge. Admittedly, I could have had one sent there, but the phones are out of batteries and have been for six months, and I want one to function when the wheels go down at Heathrow.

In short, finding rare goods online which you can purchase and pick up offline is more difficult than you’d imagine. I tried a range of other searches to indicate that I wanted to walk into a shop and hand over cash for my item, but Google didn’t comply. I was also getting very tired of calling stores and being almost laughed at by sales assistants who were stunned that I owned such an antiquated phone.  I was about to resign myself to the fact that my methods of tidying were next to disastrous (I still haven’t found the pillow and don’t expect to), when searching for electronics stores and reluctantly partaking in some vertical searching paid off. I never thought I’d say this about anything, but Circuit City’s website (which I’ll never again call Circuit Shitty) agreed to cell me the phone charger online and let me pick it up at their store.

But I was lucky. Plenty of other stores didn’t hold the product or didn’t have it at a nearby location. However, I can’t account for shops that had the product and didn’t list it on their website as something they’d sell online. I’m completely sure this happens. I was also disappointed and yet not surprised that Google couldn’t identify offline retailers who listed what I wanted.

This fault is traceable to two sources: retailers think that if someone is searching online, they want to buy online. This isn’t necessarily the case. Plenty of people would rather use the Internet than the phone: everything from disabilities to a vague distaste for the telephone will send people to their computers before their phones or their cars. Additionally, there are plenty of reasons, including mine, why someone might not want to make the purchase online after finding the item.

The second problem is not Google’s fault, but it is Google. Google failed at multiple queries asking for products that could be purchased offline, but Google relies quite heavily on retailers to provide it the best information. Circuit City, and other stores that allow online ordering / offline pick-up, don’t make it clear enough to search engines. My natural inclination was to add keywords like “offline” and “in store” to my queries: as a retailer, I’d investigate who else did this and take advantage of it.

As it turned out, I canceled my order today. I had to do that over the phone. I found my original charger, safely filed in an abandoned shoulder bag at the bottom of my linen closet, where everyone would immediately think to leave it. What can I say: intuitive storage comes naturally to me. Thus, online shopping woes or not, I will have a telephone in London and it will have a charged battery. I’ll call you when I land

Recently, the SEO industry debated whether or not we need standards as part of our profession’s requirements. You may have heard about it. I made a bored face. It does not seem viable that any real restrictions could be put on an online industry like this, but I wonder about the pros and cons of introducing SEO as an academic field in which one can earn a college degree. Let’s look at these advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages

1. Official training. This is a given within accredited colleges and accounts for everything from my degree in English (I am officially licensed to write good and do other stuff good too) to the certifications given to surgeons.
2. Certified instructors. With university courses come teachers. These are people who (generally) know a lot about their subject and can impart it in an efficient fashion.
3. Trusted knowledge. I’d like to think that between two and four years of structured learning would take care of the basics of SEO and a lot more besides. Training new SEO employees would no longer be necessary.
4. The Idiot Recession. Total dimwits can’t call themselves doctors. Requiring some certification might elimiate some of them within SEO.

Disadvantages.

1. Money. Not everyone can afford to go to university and those who do often end up paying for it for a large portion of the rest of their lives. College educations can be hideously expensive and beyond the means of many people. At present, this expense doesn’t stop a person from becoming extremely successful in our industry. It seems criminal to threaten that.
2. Snobbery. I’m not sure this extends beyond the United States and Britain (it probably does, but it doesn’t seem to affect my native New Zealand), but have you heard what graduates of the University of Random State will say about the graduates of Random State University? Adding degree programmes in SEO is a definitive way to make our cliquey, infuriating industry even worse.
3. Standardisation can kill ingenuity. If too many institutions establish a “correct way” of doing something (and universities are excellent at this), innovation can be stifled as non-standard and thus incorrect.
4. A lack of qualified teachers. Danny Dover, a colleague of mine at SEOmoz, is currently enrolled at the University of Washington. He recently commented about how little true web development education was available at UW, a large, respected state college. He and I are both relatively sure that one of the reasons for this is that great web developers are still developing. Few have yet to progress to teaching, and becoming a web dev teacher is not yet understood as an accepted profession, whereas teaching geology or French is a normal aspiration.
5. Bastardisation. Following on from a lack of qualified teachers, universities will throw non-SEOs at SEO classes. A print-marketer or an IT specialist isn’t necessarily qualified to teach SEO, but do you remember the awful Teacher’s Assistant who taught your Biology session in your second year? The one who knew less than you did? Imagine that person in charge of teaching the difference between robots.txt exclusion and the meta noindex tag and in which situation you should use either.
6. Limitation. Even if SEO had been an option when I was choosing a college major, I doubt I would have picked it. Forcing or even encouraging people to obtain a degree in a subject before embarking in a corresponding profession limits the people the industry will eventually obtain. This isn’t a certainty: I’ve often heard that the subject of one’s degree rarely dictates their career path and that is definitely true for me. I spent four years being an obsessive wordsmith and analysing seventeenth century plays. Now I read .htaccess files and find well-executed CSS replacement delicious. Peter Chilson, you were the best teacher I ever had and I am truly sorry for what I’ve become

I’ve spoken to several people who graduated with marketing and advertising degrees (in New Zealand) who learned about SEO during college. On a superficial level, it seems like regulating SEO by introducing it into collegiate environments is a great idea, but are those benefits worth the significant and undesirable disadvantages? Is it better to put up with the idiots (your junk mail folder confirms that we have quite a few of them) and accept that Julie and I have degrees in English, Rand is one semester away from a degree in Finance and that I’d be even better at what I do if I’d spent the years between 2002 and 2006 ranking websites rather than doing my Modern British Lit homework?

I might be a late to the party on this one but it randomly entered into a conversation today, and since I’ve been truly rubbish at posting I thought I would do my 2 cents (or 2 pence, kroners, Euros…whichever rocks your boat) on Google personalised search.

To be honest I really don’t get what all the fuss is about. Why do SEOs still fear personlised search? Surely people don’t still think it will take away the need to optimise your website for the search engines? If anything it quantifies the need for optimisation.

Personalised search is PERSONAL, doesn’t mean you won’t appear in the SERPs for what you have optimised for. It just means you really need to make sure you pay CLOSE attention to relevancy and not freakin optimise for something that is not relevant to your business/service or product. Making sure you target the right keywords for the right pages, oh and don’t have a crappy designed website that has the usability of Russian built car.

Basically the Title and meta description (your Free ad in the organic SERPs) will become even MORE important as this is what gets the Click Through. As personalised search is mostly based on actual CLICK throughs. The relevancy and how you write these will very much determine that CLICK through. Then you also need to have a GOOD website that makes sure the user doesn’t bounce back in 0.002 seconds and makes the search “invalid”.

Personalised search is nothing to fear for white hat SEO’s that wants to rank for RELEVANT terms. Its Google’s way of bringing INTENT into the algorithm and (hoping) to get rid of all the stuff people don’t want, it’s all about relevancy. A site that is perfectly relevant to a search result will ALWAYS rank high. Yep, even with personalised search where the user has developed “preferences”. If your site is relevant for the search terms you will be the site preferred by the user anyway.

The same rules as always apply to optimising for personalised search: quality content, keyword targeting and mapping, optimisation of the increasingly important title and meta description. In addition you might do well out of prompting your users to bookmark your site, making your site more interactive (that doesn’t mean ALL in flash by the way) and obviously attract links to your site from other relevant sites that the user might visit, Brand awareness and all that jazz.

So to summaries; does personalised search make SEO redundant?

Does it bullocks!

Love it or hate it, we’ve all seen it. Flash sites built for beauty and not spiders have often been the source of grief and stress within the SEO community as we try and explain why it was a dumb idea to do it that way. Ya, that’s harsh but so it trying to force a use to guess where they need to mouse over to find a menu.

I have a site I love to use as the perfect example of how flash lets you down. This chocolate company has some of the most yummy looking chocolate treats. Problem is, Google doesn’t think it has much to do with chocolate. Take a look at the Sweet Thoughts chocolate site which looks like this to Google and results in the Cadbury UK site along with many others to outrank it for a search for chocolate. In fact, the spidered flash is there but just not ranking. So the new spidering of flash content by Google should be a RankSaver for sites like this but I would caution everyone for the moment against complacency and encourage adoption of existing best practices.

From July 1st, Google started spidering the content of flash files to help to unlock some of the last places on the web left unlookedat. However, rather than looking normal, these sites are clearly marked with �[FLASH]� next to the search result. Yahoo! have had the technology made available to them as well but have not yet committed to a timeline to implement this enhanced spidering. Who knows what Live will do - maybe Ms. Dewey will simply take her crop and beat the offending sites in to HTML submission. Or run over them on her motorcycle. Mocking them might work as well

Google’s help files specifically state that �In general, search engines are text based. This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format. This doesn’t mean that you can’t include images, Flash files, videos, and other rich media content on your site; it just means that any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won’t be accessible to search engines�. So while this is changing for flash, I would still continue to create a mirror site for those with things like old browsers and flash turned off.

While being able to spider Flash content may seem like a solution to the issue of invisible content like the chocolate site above, it can present additional problems. Any flash currently loading via JavaScript will still be inaccessible since Google’s spider will not be having the ability to execute javascript added anytime soon if they tell the truth over in Mountain View. Recent personal experience leads me to believe they are sometimes painfully honest about some things so I’ll trust the news on this.

A lot of the Flash content has no text basis to it since it has been created out of images and possibly links. This spidering change will have no impact on the ranking of these sites until it combines image recognition with flash spidering. Sometimes, flash files are better left hidden but it may help with the ability of Googlebot to access and possibly rank deeper pages previously inaccessible.

Some flash content has multiple text-based �pages� buried within the program. So lots of text, no context. If this causes one page to become authoritative for multiple keywords, it could cause issues with ranking. With the chocolate shop example, it could cause all items to be lumped on a single page, diluting a stronger authority if similar products were grouped logically together with unique textual content. So really, to catch chocolate lovers like myself that will want to include a different version of the content which breaks up text through a set of logical, focused pages to help Google rank each page for what it is authoritative for.

While duplicate content will be less of a problem with Flash since it’s all lumped together, the underlying code itself would need to be clearly understood by a robot. So you’ll suddenly need very clean, very well structured and very well written code. Since sometimes code which executes well is not necessarily written well, this may also pose potential spidering issues.

With the potential for so many problems, best practice remains the same. Include alternate, text based information for search engines in order to help them spider, understand and rank your site. Especially if you sell chocolate

Next time, I’ll look at the problems of javascript driven chocolate sites and how to overcome problems of the type the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory has.

It�s 6 o�clock in the morning, I got up especially early (whilst my daughter is still asleep) to write this post as I feel I can�t just let what I read yesterday rest and not comment.

As you may know SMX Advanced in Seattle was on last week, I didn�t go this year but attended last year. SMX Advanced is where funnily enough ADVANCED SEOs speak and attend to; learn more, broaden our horizon, share and network. Well at least that�s what I thought.

Yesterday I read this blogpost on Bruce Clay by Lisa Barone where she writes about “SMX Advanced going to the �dark� side.” The blogpost truly shocked me (and as Lisa Barone is prime blogger that might even been her intention) In fact it disturbed me to the point I even considered to put a no-follow on the link to the post, but decided to leave it, as rightly everyone should be able to voice their opinion, although I strongly disagree with Lisa�s comments and the way she went about this blogpost.

But even more so I am really disappointed and a little disturbed of Danny Sullivans comments in this blogpost. Yes of course he has his SMX brand to protect but don�t pooh on your own doorstep. At one point he literally singles out individuals:
�I’ll single out Jay Young. No, I don’t think it’s anything goes. I do think there are ethics in marketing and limits you don’t go past�.� I don�t think it was needed to single out anyone really. I know Jay very well, and he is a first class SEO and respected in this industry. Jay simply stated the obvious saying that buying links can still improve your rankings. Because it does! Most SEOs STILL do buy links, he was simply saying don�t by 100,000 of them, over night and from a link farm. Be clever about it. Yes it can be argued that this is black hat’ish, BUT why is it blackhat? Because the Googlesaurus say so, that�s why. If the Google Algorithm didn�t put such a big emphasis on incoming links and other areas such as age of domain you wouldn�t call link buying black hat technique. Who says a new site is less relevant than an old site? The algorithm says so, that doesn�t mean that its actually true!!! That�s for the user to decide!! Hang on, I�m actually going somewhere with this�.

I think the stamp “black hat seo” should be based on INTENT not necessarily technique. Still with me? Basically if you are doing SEO for a (new) site that is in a highly competitive market, it is NOT going to be possible to rank and gain traffic on a well constructed and content optimised site alone. That�s just a fact. Buying a few links and investing in a proper link building campaign is something you have to do to get into the really competitive market. Unless you are not planning on ranking before 2048!!! BUT that doesn�t mean the website in question isn�t relevant or useful to the user. And the end of the day, that�s what we are all working for right? Both SEOs (well most) and the engines, getting fantastic relevant and good quality websites ranked so that the user will be satisfied and find what they were looking for!!

Back to the point, so called �black hat seo� techniques are important for the development of your skills as an SEO. That doesn�t mean you have to use this knowledge and techniques, but KNOWING them WILL help you understand how the engines work, what you can and can�t do. We NEED these people to share, we should be grateful that they will share not condemn them and pick on them. I can with my hand on my heart say that I am a white hat SEO, BUT you know what, the ONE person I have learned the MOST from in this industry, is in fact a black hat, and a very skilled one as well. That doesn�t mean he is some dodgy marketer spamming the web with any random crappy website to rank his clients. A good black hat doesn�t do that

Anyway, I�ll leave the black hats that attended SMX advanced a suggestion for a T-shirt to wear to the next event (so that people don�t mistake advice for orders!!)

To be successful with your SEO campaign, you need to see beyond the simplistic ABC’s of search - looking past the typical optimization rules to get inspired. Find inspiration outside of the (chiclet) box, and you’ll likely find ways to improve both rankings and conversions!

Quick “Outside The Chiclet Box” Sources of Inspiration:

1. Help someone else. By giving ideas to another, you’ll be thinking outside of your own limited topic areas. That expansion of mind will not only help the other person, it will also help you apply similar ideas to your own campaign.
2. Future-think. What would a site in your niche look like 50 years from now? What kinds of content might it have within it? Try to bring some of that future into the present. Get creative with content, whether textual or visual.
3. Have a beer (or root beer). Find a group of creative folks in your area and meet up with them in your local tavern (or oxygen bar, or whatever watering hole works for you). Combine the party atmosphere with a group thinktank to help each other come up with off the wall ideas.

Those are just a few quickies that you can apply to your own inspirational wanderings. Nevertheless, even just one venture outside (the box) can produce an amazing array of ideas to stimulate your search rankings. Be bold; be adventurous; be boxless.

Inspiration = Creativity = Success

We’ve all seen the graphic shown below or one similar to it, haven’t we? Sure, it’s the typical image of the evolution of man. In fact, you may even have pictured this image in your head while you were reading one of Julie Joyce’s famous SEO Chick posts, Could A Chimp Do SEO? Heck YES! or SEO Easy, A Caveman Can Do IT!, back in October and July of last year. (I’m pretty sure Julie watches The Planet of the Apes series every few months, and that’s why she’s obsessed with that particular theme). I’ve decided to continue Julie’s recurring theme and present to you, The Evolution Of A Newbie SEO.

In the beginning, a newbie webmaster (who did not yet know SEO existed), created a web site. The newbie webmaster sat back, satisfied with his first attempt at HTML (which looked very similar to a 1997 geocities site I once owned), and waited for the instant wealth that would be bestowed upon him. Five minutes ticked by, and the newbie webmaster couldn’t understand why he’d not had the millions of visitors he’d expected by now. In fact, he’d had not even one! WTF? What happened to “build it and they will come?” At about the same time as the newbie webmaster was pondering this, he received a fortuitous email in his inbox. It read: 50,000 Visitors To Your Site For Only $19.95! And so the noob began his journey into the seedy realm of purchasing untargetted (and often imaginary) traffic from shady sites and exit popunders.

The newbie webmaster later begins a slight evolutionary process as his web travels introduce him to a new term: SEO. Filled with wonder and excitement, the newbie webmaster becomes immersed in this new world known as search engine optimization. He now understands that a site sits empty and alone if it cannot be found, and so begins his quest to rank well in search engines. His first exposure to SEO, again through his wondrous email inbox, details the riches to be gained by hiring a firm to optimize his site’s meta tags, and subsequently submitting that site to thousands of search engines each and every month. It costs $99/month, but surely that is nothing compared to the massive amounts of money that will be made once his site ranks in the top 10 for over a dozen phrases chosen by the SEO firm in at least 50% of the search engines they submit to. Wow! Thousands of search engines…50% of those get top 10 rankings…for more than a dozen phrases! The riches are right around the corner! Until they aren’t.

At this point, the newbie SEO has learned to be wary of the promises made in unsolicited emails that land in his email inbox. Another turn of the evolutionary wheel has been made, and the newbie SEO wanders out into the realm of the … SEO Forum. There lies all the answers…and all for free! The newbie SEO now makes the leap into optimizing his site himself, as he spends all of his waking time (which is close to 24/7) reading every post, in every thread of the SEO forum he has tumbled into. He soon learns that METAS aren’t the holy grail of SEO, and that submissions to search engines are silly and outdated. Instead, he skips off down the brown-brick road of recip links pages, sending form-letter emails requests demanding reciprocal link exchanges of thousands of site owners, optimizing his home page for 30 important keyword phrases, and including every keyword phrase he can think of in teeny-tiny light gray text at the very bottom of his home page. Then, he checks his rankings every day for every keyword, and gets really excited when he finds a few ranking in the top 100! Finally, the riches will come! Until they don’t.

As the months roll by, and the recip directory on his site reaches 30 pages of spam-filled links, but the rankings and traffic aren’t at the expected levels, the disgruntled noob seo begins to wonder where he went wrong. He now turns an important corner in his forum world, as he emerges from his “lurker” status to ask for feedback on his site. He is shocked when his amateurish attempts at optimizing his site are ridiculed and mocked. He is suddenly faced with new theories of content, long-tail, and one-way linkage that causes his brain to hurt as it is remolded and reshaped so intensely, that his skull actually begins to change shape (and will continue to do so over the next evolutionary stages), and he realizes that he needs to stand a little taller to be able to grasp this higher level of learning. Still, his past experiences have so shaped his thinking, that he still sees the need to take this new knowledge and twist it into a form that can be easily added to his site. So he listens again, despite his wariness, to the emails in his inbox that offer to help him generate lots of content on his site with the newest, whiz-bangiest RSS feed mixer available today! And as a bonus, he’ll also receive a blog comment auto-generator for no extra charge! Thus begins the budding SEO’s use of “automation tools”. He uses his wondrous new tools and the dollar signs flash green in his eyes, as he sees his 3 page site suddenly expanding to 3,000 pages - overnight! - while his blog commenting gizmo increases his one-way links by the thousands with just the click of a mouse button. And because he now has a slightly-straighter posture, he learns to dance a little at the thought of all those riches pouring in. Until the music stops.

One morning, the budding SEO wakes up to find that his site can no longer be found in Google - at all. It has been completely removed, and the tales he has heard of sites being banned suddenly become real for the emerging SEO. His beloved site, his baby, his creation, has been dealt a mighty blow, and he has been banned. The endless days and nights of research into the causes of such penalties creates new neuro-pathways in our SEO’s brain, and his evolution takes a mighty turn. It is at this point that our SEO does one of three things:

1. His evolution stops and his species dies as he abandons his web site dreams forever.
2. His brain calculates the risk vs. reward of automated site building and he buys/builds/outsources new, stealthier, less easily detectable tools that can crank out site after site after site, so that as some are banned, others are bringing in small amounts of money (which all add up)
3. His brain comprehends the many mistakes he’s made in the past, and he seeks out those who can mentor him in search-sanctified methods

At this point, our SEO is well-past the newbie stage and spends his next few years as an experienced (but ever-learning) SEO. His evolution is as complete as it will be for quite some time, and his occasional fashion changes (hat colors) only serve to increase his level of expertise. He has now completely started over, concentrating significant time and resources on either:

• Creating a well-designed site filled with quality content that naturally attracts links, and becomes more marketing-focused as he begins to understand that conversions matter, networking matters, and being unique matters. He spends considerable time doing keyword research and writing strong, compelling copy. He has mastered the the technical aspects necessary to ensure his site is crawlable and provides no roadblocks to search engine bots.
• Immersing himself in the clever intricacies of black-hat technologies, always attempting to stay one step ahead of algorithmic changes, but being able to quickly adapt and change tactics when the search engines occasionally catch up and catch on. His failures are many, but in this game of numbers, it only takes a certain percentage of wins to make it all profitable.

This stage of evolution will sometimes show our SEO occasionally crossing over from one side of the fashion world to the other, and back again, but ultimately, we will likely see him choosing one fashion over the other as he determines his true comfort level. Perhaps in a few years, we will be able to add a few more evolutionary cycles to this post. Until then, happy SEO’ing.

My name is Julie, and I have a bad client.

OK seriously, HE isn’t a bad client…he just has the misfortune of being bound by some amazing constraints that are coming from all over his company, factors that prevent me from doing, well, my usual SEO tomfoolery. Here’s the list of services that I’m allowed to perform:

1. Meta tag writing. This brings such joy to my life, you simply cannot imagine. I get to flesh out titles, meta keywords, and meta descriptions. I’m living the dream.

2. PPC ads. Small budget, mostly just brand keywords in quotes…see item 1’s “living the dream” which is also applicable here.

3. Witty repartee with client whenever he wants it, usually on IM and Facebook, occasionally on the phone or in person.

Why do I bother? And don’t be sitting there thinking, a la Basil Fawlty, “didn’t know you did…” please. Because working with this client, whom I’ll call Martin (after the two coolest Martins ever, Martin Fry and Martin Amis), I’ve had to let my ego evaporate. I am not at all in control. That’s actually an amazingly freeing sensation in my day to day working life. I’m there for Martin, providing recommendations on everything from how to handle upcoming site redesigns to whether or not a keyword is worth $5 a click, and sometimes he agrees with me, and sometimes he does but his boss doesn’t, but in the end, I am forced to work with what he gives me, with no gifts involved other than my Christmas tower of chocolate and my birthday cookies.

When I’ve discussed this client with other SEOs, some of them have questioned why I took him on and continue to work with him. It’s actually very simple: I learn an amazing amount about how to effectively do my job when I’m forced to rely on very, very simple things. I’m not able to throw a ton of money around and Martin isn’t funding any conference trips to Las Vegas and Seattle. He expects me to know my boundaries, and to keep him informed about anything that could potentially cause his site to fall in the rankings. That’s not really a lot of pressure is it?

Here’s the real point: if you can’t do SEO well enough to let things go and lose your desire to call all the shots, all the time, you must not be as good an SEO as you think you are. There’s a great deal of ego in this field, as you may have witnessed from time to time. Not every “deserving” SEO client will let you dictate his or her directory structure or agree to invest in your link building program, and if you can’t work with that, you should step back and take a look at why it is that you have to have everything your way. Is it ego? Or is it simple inability to perform without someone doing every little thing that you say?

When your main form of optimization is writing good meta tags, you have to be very, very good at writing meta tags. When your client wants to pay you to be there whenever he has questions, and he has some amazingly good SEO questions at some fairly inconvenient times, then you have to stay informed on everything that’s going on in the industry and be ready to provide your recommendations, knowing that they probably won’t be followed, for whatever reason. You have to stop dictating what pages are named, what long-tailed keywords are good for PPC, and a better way to word the main message on the index page. That’s actually not very easy when you’re used to being the golden child of marketing, having clients throwing money at you to do whatever it takes to get them to the top. It’s very humbling, though, and it’s potentially key to not becoming a pompous asshole as fast as you might otherwise.

When you know that your efforts are most likely fruitless, when you realize that you’re going to spend three hours gathering data on pay per click keywords only to have a marketing department decide not to even bother, you really learn patience. It’s kind of a Zen thing actually, just letting go and existing. And let’s not forget that you’re still in service to this client, as you’re still responsible for ensuring that things go as well as possible, with certain parameters in place. That’s actually quite a bit more difficult at times, because nothing’s easy. However, if you get too comfortable with being the one making the rules, you don’t quite learn how to follow them and let someone else lead. Most good leaders are also seriously good followers, if I may throw in a very trite turn of phrase. Try it, if you can find a Martin, only think of him as a challenging client, not a bad one. You may be quite surprised at how it changes your entire mindset for the better

Is SEO ever a waste of time and/or money? American Express certainly seems to think so, even going so far as to suggest that search engine specialists will naturally try to trick the filtering techniques of engines and are likely to get your site banned from the engines.

Seriously ineffective SEO firms and individual crackpots with just enough knowledge to fool people into giving them money abound at the moment, unfortunately. It’s quite easy to find examples of clients who have been shafted by someone who did something amazingly stupid and harmed his or her business. There are most likely just as many examples of cases in which, for whatever reason, clients simply did not do well in the online arena. SEO isn’t foolproof, certainly. Nothing is, really, not even marmite.

However, it’s fairly scary when such a large presence as American Express comes out and advises small business owners against employing a search engine specialist in their attempt to boost their online visibility. Not only is it an insult to those of us who know what we’re doing and do it well (usually), it also has the potential to cause even more damage to people who actually heed this advice and take matters into their own hands without the knowledge to successfully perform online. In the past, I’ve dealt with clients who would not do anything that didn’t involve frames, set up session variables that were then transferred all over the site via a querystring (no I am not joking) which caused pages to be indexed with these identifiers and ended up overwriting shopping carts, had nothing but an image on their home page, and spent $30,000 a month on PPC that they insisted on managing themselves only to finally TEST an ad and see that their landing page for these ads had no call to action as they thought it did. All of this nasty business was the result of someone in-house, with no SEO background, attempting to please the engines.

I currently have a client for whom my goal is to not do a single thing that could be construed as trying to please the engines. I am limited to PPC and meta tags, basically, but that’s fine because I’m honest about what I do and the client understands that I am bound by many constraints. This client’s view, which I agree with, is that the business’s offline reputation is so strong that it simply cannot be put at risk in any way. So there you have it…I don’t get to do too much SEO for him, but I am able to make sure that no one else takes advantage of him. That’s definitely not a waste of time OR money.

Honestly, any idiot can sell SEO services. (Notice how I am not taking this opportunity to provide you with any jokes about Jay.) I have dealt with enough small business owners who have absolutely no clue about how to effectively do business online to know that there is a massive amount of vulnerable people out there who can be easily snowed by someone looking to make a few bucks at their expense. I recently had an old coworker ask me to do some PPC work for someone he knew, simply because he had a great deal of respect for the company and knew that they lacked the knowledge to NOT get screwed over by unscrupulous types. As overworked as I am, I did agree to think about doing it, mainly because I’ve seen the money that gets basically stolen from these unsavvy clients who simply have no idea that they’re basically being raped by people who can end up doing major damage to their site and their online efforts.

Stating that SEO is a waste is completely irresponsible. Yes, there are examples of poor SEO but that’s absolutely no reason to advise all small business owners against employing the services of reputable people who happen to have the background and the knowledge to compete in the online arena. And, when you really think about it, that poor advice is really no different than bad SEO…