One of the absolute worst songs ever recorded, in my opinion, is Timbuk 3’s “The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades.” While I could make a lengthy post out of my utter hatred of this song, I will spare you for now BUT since I seem to have a pathological need to cross reference music in these observations about SEO that must, by this point, seriously annoy many readers, I thought this truly abysmal attempt at music would be a good one to use. I mean really, it’s not good for anything else…certainly not for listening, or anything remotely like that.

Well, I sure as hell don’t think that the future of paid ads is full of sunshine and light. I may indeed have to wear shades, but it’s to hide my cryin’ eyes. Honestly, the future of paid ads scares the bejaysus out of me and there are three handy reasons for it:

1. Money’s involved and people are really, really stupid when money is involved, especially when there is a LOT of money involved. Stupidity is bad enough on its own, but coupled with the attempt to make more money, it can make you feel like the one vaguely attractive girl at a meeting of the county chess club.
2. Many traditional marketing methods no longer work well, so advertisers are forced to look for alternatives. These alternatives tend to be freakishly invasive and creepy. Just check your Gmail ads sometime after you’ve been emailing your favorite transvestite friend. Ick.
3. Machines will be forced to make judgment calls about what they think you want to see (like with the Gmail ads), and that’s going to be enough to make a freight train take a dirt road. God forbid I ever refer to a cat by the p word.

The Money Plus Stupidity Equation
This usually equals disaster, if I may have a mathletic moment. A Paris Hilton/Jessica Simpson/Lindsey Lohan reference would be too easy here so I’ll spare you. The point here is that when lots of money is being sought or held by people who aren’t overly bright (see above), the world could easily end. I’m sure Timbuk 3 had money, and look at the stupid song that they unleashed upon the world. I wish I had more of a point to make here but I really don’t.

The Personal (AGHHHHH) Touch
Few companies are as high on the shudder factor as Microsoft. They are apparently really interested in audience intelligence, which is defined as “figuring out what kind of person the Web user is based on their surfing and searching habits — and display[ing] ads including video.” Based on my surfing and searching habits, I am one bad seed, let me tell you. I like Cabaret Voltaire videos, knee high leather boots, strawberries and cream, cursing, and the Fibonacci numbers. If I’m being shown ads based on that, god help me. I’ll be expecting some perverted math fetishist to be knocking on my door at any minute. Actually, that doesn’t sound so bad…

Process This!
Think about how you slow down when there’s an accident, and you try to get a good look. This certainly does not mean that you are sexually turned on by car crashes like someone in a J.G. Ballard novel does it? Well, if it does, keep it to yourself please, you pervert. Speaking of J.G. Ballard and his infamous novel, aptly titled Crash, if I’m searching for it and buy it, does anyone know who I’ve purchased it for, or does a machine simply “assume” that it’s for me? Will I then be shown ads that tell me where to buy footage of car crashes? Or how to connect with others who so obviously enjoy car crashes? There’s no way of telling the machine that hey, I’m not the perv, JON is the perv, is there?

It’s a grim future to consider, isn’t it? It’s the same feeling that you get when one of your favorite novels is being made into a movie starring Ben Affleck. First you’re incredulous. You quickly become agitated and try to convince yourself that actually, it’s not Ben, it’s most likely Tom Wilkinson and someone’s gotten really confused. Then, once you accept reality, you cry yourself to sleep after a few vodka tonics. It’s not pretty.

What worries me the most is the invasive bit of this…normally I prattle on (and on) about machines not being able to properly interpret meaning from simple words, and while that’s frightening enough, it’s the invasion that freaks me out the most. I’ve been listening to someone on the radio for 45 seconds and not realized that he’s plugging a product. It’s all become so NATURAL, like those pesky product placements in films that gently suggest to you that, since Bruce Willis likes 7-Up, you should go out and get some. I can look away from billboards, and I can completely ignore ads in magazines or on the sides of the SERPs, but it’s really becoming difficult to completely avoid all forms of advertising. And, as you may have been thinking, marketing is kind of the industry that I’m in right? Most likely that means that I’ll become a creepy (or creepier) and invasive presence in someone’s life at some point in the near future. Go ahead and get some restraining order templates ready because you’ll be needing them.

As universal search begins to dominate results and previous above-the-fold results get pushed below the fold, leveraging all channels possible is becoming essential.  Image search optimization offers several advantages not just limited to simple rankings or just image search.

One definite benefit for anyone involved in e-commerce is the possibility of free product promotion within organic results without looking spammy. Product images in search results can seriously boost click-throughs and conversions.

With image search, you’ve got more optimisation opportunities than organic search alone.  The name of the image, along with the tag and associated words will all factor in to ranking an image.  This gives you opportunities to optimise differently or capture searchers where organic is not doing as well.

At the moment, for those involved in e-commerce, not as many retailers are paying attention to the possibilities of image search and universal search when compared to PPC or SEO.  This means as Universal search becomes more prevalent, those in early will probably get better rankings.

So… what can you do?  Lots!  And most of it can also be done through many CMS systems so never say can’t, never say die, never say never… blah blah blah.

Why not try a bit of alt tag (attribute - I know!) text optimization? When I add an image to a page, I can ad descriptive words for the image.  Make these descriptions specific and include the keyword that you want the image found for.  Don’t be spammy – by being focused you’ll get more relevant traffic.

How about putting the images in separate HTML files named after the keyword (linking to the image with your keyword, using “keyword.html” as the file name)?  Try putting the keyword in the title as well as in your H1 tags on the keyword-named page where the image appears.  Again, keep it specific and focused and remember semantically related text and “buy me” button!

Give your image the name of the keyword you want it to be found for.  So if it is a picture of a box of Chocolate Society champagne truffles, call the image “champagne-chocolate-truffles” and not “1276394”.  Remember that alt tag text of “Chocolate Champagne Truffles”!

Never forget that semantic relativity!  Ensure you are keeping a careful eye on the on-page text.  An image of chocolate covered almonds on a page about white chocolate with strawberries won’t do as well as an image of coca dusted almonds (with the right name) on a page talking about chocolate and almonds.

Remember that to optimize your images for more than a single word, you should use dashes and not underscore.  Matt Cutts has an old but brilliant blog post about how Google sees a dash and why.

Finally, quality is king.  Have high quality images with sharp, clear contrast showing the product with little clutter.  As Google does shrink the image in the results, you will need to ensure you capture interest with not just words but pictures.

Search is changing and we all need to change with it.  It isn’t just text SEO that needs changing though – all elements of our pages can be optimised for search.  Always remember – just say no to spam.

Matt Davies, faithful reader of this blog (or stalker) and SEO/music guru brought up a really good point in a comment about one of my posts…where does the responsibility of an SEO begin and end?

I’ve had as many bad customer service experiences as anyone else, although to hear me talk about them, you’d think that I never received anything even remotely resembling good service. I do enjoy hyperbole. Anyway, a well known women’s unmentionables company whose name I shan’t mention (although the initials are the same as the 2 first initials of a famous writer born in Trinidad to parents of Northern Indian ancestry) almost seriously shafted me on some really nice knickers, and I am not one bit happy with the way this was handled. Thankfully, in the end (HA!!! I mean come on that was a good one…) I did indeed receive them, but it cost me quite a bit of aggravation.

Now, admittedly, I did not use any sort of search engine ANYTHING to find the aforementioned knickers, but here’s my rationale for discussing this…the site is quite visible in the SERPs, the usability seemed just lovely, and the ordering process was nice and painfree. It was only after these idiots somehow managed to lose my order and fail to provide me with my customer number (needed to login to check order status, which strangely enough did not allow me to actually see anything other than that, indeed, my order had shipped.) And, worst of all, there was no actual tracking on the shipment on their website. In this day and age, that’s simply quite unacceptable.

Obviously you don’t see this kind of issue until you’ve placed your order and attempted to track it. I’d had one horrendous experience ordering boots from a well-known site that also didn’t provide order tracking functionality, and I have never ordered from them again. I certainly will never order from the knickers site again, even if I CAN get 3 pairs for $25. SEO couldn’t have saved this, you see. And the responsibility of an SEO most likely would have ended well before these issues occurred.

With that in mind, really, what IS the responsibility of an SEO on a site that offers something tangible to a searcher? Years ago, as I’ve mentioned, I (perhaps erroneously) assumed that my job was to get the user to the site. I had nothing whatsoever to do with what happened after the click occurred in the SERPs. That was kind of nice, actually, since I could easily relieve myself of the responsibility of converting the user. Now, however, I think that it’s definitely a part of my job to lead the user to the most relevant landing page, make all the buttons and links visible and user-friendly, and work my arse off when paid ads don’t have a good ROI. Well, I should say that this is what I do when I’m well-paid…otherwise, I really do nothing but lead the horse to water but that’s a funding issue. You get what you pay for you know.

It’s now my job to pore over the web analytics, too, to figure out what information is useful to help me make the site owner more and more money. Usability is a major concern, and I’ll definitely keep the main principles in mind when doing my work. However, when your customer service sucks or you don’t provide a basic service AFTER the fact, how is that my problem? It should be my problem, since if this is happening with great frequency, it’s going to lead to fewer return sales unless your site sells something designed specifically for hardcore masochists. However, honestly, is something that occurs after a conversion an SEO’s responsibility? Is brand reputation now mine as well?

I think it is, sadly. While I’d love to say that no, it’s not, I think that I’d be remiss not to worry about things like this. I could be alone in my constant desire to find something to bitch about, but based simply on the people that I encounter daily, I don’t think that I am. When I told a few friends about my horrendous knicker debacle, after inquiring about exactly what type I bought, most said simply “blog about it” and here you go…that edict is springing from the lips (and fingers) of everyone these days.

Obviously I’m a seriously classy and high end type of woman, or else I’d be calling these people out on their shoddy system publicly without resorting to literary references. Oh, and remember that the products DID eventually show up, which softened the blow a bit. Still, it was a dreadful experience waiting, with baited breath, every day by the window, for the postal worker to show up empty-handed. The Country Curtains catalog just wasn’t enough for me.

With all this being said, and quite lengthily, for which I apologize, what do you think IS your realm of responsibility with regards to SEO? Where does it end, do you see its circle continue to widen, and what effect will this type of thing have as we move farther away from actual on-page factors?

The English Speaking Union was the location of the “B2B Marketing Debate” (watch the video!) between SEO and PPC. SEO experts Lisa Ditlefsen, head of search at Base One and Andrew Girdwood, head of search at Big Mouth Media debated with PPC defenders Stuart Small from Google and Simon Norris from Periscopix.

With over £700 million being spent annually on paid advertising within search engines, pay per click (PPC) advertising is often seen as the easy way in to the top spot on search result pages. Easy to change, start, stop and completely transparent, Stuart asserted that PPC was a better, more targeted way to gain leads.

Stuart Small from Google mooted that with 85% of all B2B purchases starting in a search engine, paid search ads were vital to any business. Google sees 80% of searchers clicking on organic results, with 20% of all searches clicking on a search ad.

With SEO perceived as a “black art” taking time, expert knowledge and effort, both Lisa Ditlefsen and Andrew Girdwood tackled the issue expertly, mooting that organic results were often perceived as more directly relevant, with a lower overall cost.

With three times the interest in SEO, paid search ads just don’t generate as much interest. PPC is a “money eating machine” according to Andrew. “People don’t want to put more money in. For B2B campaigns SEO has a definite advantage over PPC.”

Lisa Ditlefsen spoke about how SEO is like buying a house and PPC is like renting. While initial costs may seem larger, SEO is by far the cheaper investment. A well optimised site lasts in the SERPs, while a poor site with PPC lasts only as long as the money.

Simon Norris mooted that organic results were manipulated by devious SEO methods. To counter, Andrew Girdwood argued that Google was excellent at filtering spam out of the index “Google does an excellent job at this. ‘Gaming’ the search engine is just no longer possible the way it used to be.”

Simon also claimed that Google is trying to increase the number of ads clicked on by searchers and that personalisation changes the ads shown based on user intention. “That is not true” said Stuart Small from Google. “Google is very careful about privacy and we do not change ads based on people being logged on to Google. That is completely wrong.”

At the end of the debate, search engine optimisation won. No contest really, considering who was fighting the SEO side

Will our jobs, as SEOs, get harder as the average searcher gets smarter?

Typically speaking, people don’t really seem to get any smarter to me as time goes by. Sure, they may learn to do something more efficiently, but your average person is still a knucklehead who thinks that John Grisham is the new Shakespeare and there are gorillas running all over the place waging wars. And yes, I am using a bit of hyperbole here for the purpose of discussing what effect the “smartening up” of the searching public will truly have on how we do our jobs. I honestly don’t think that everyone is as moronic as I pretend to think, but I don’t feel like using a lot of qualifiers at the moment.

Speaking of qualifiers, that brings me to a few points about the future of search:

1. Searchers are beginning to FINALLY understand that qualifiers are useful in getting the most relevant results. This used to be something that SEOs did, mainly. It was an area of much exploitation as well, as I refuse to believe that I was the only SEO showing clients all the long-tailed phrases for which they ranked. Did these matter at all, in terms of anything OTHER than a ranking? Probably not, but there you go. At that point in my career, I had the belief that my job was to get the ranking, and the client was the one responsible for getting the conversion. I certainly do not think that way today, but this was years ago when I was young and needed the money.

Now, however, most searchers have used a search engine enough that they are a bit more comfortable with how to enter a query that gets them closer to what they’re after. Once you’ve entered enough generic queries and waded through hundreds of results to find your dancing cats sweatshirts, you’re going to realize that typing in “dancing cats sweatshirts” is much better than the simple “shirts” which, chances are, won’t have any relevant dancing cat sweatshirts too far up in the SERPs.

2. Long-tailed optimization isn’t as simple as we all think it is and it may not last as a decent SEO technique. As more cat lovers discover the joy of wearing dancing cats sweatshirts, they’re going to start wanting the matching sweatpants most likely, and a new market will open up that will initially have little competition. Our jobs will be easy at this point, as we succeed in bringing these truly insane cat people to our sites so that they can successfully tell the world how much they love a dancing cat. Then they’ll wear this hideously unstylish combination out in public, god help them, and someone’s going to want to imitate this look. Thus, more sites selling dancing cats sweatpants will go up, and competition will increase. See, this makes things a bit harder for us, all because of cat lovers with bad style.

Long-tailed optimization could easily be one of the easiest things to exploit in order to do well in the SERPs, so will we see Google, for example, making algorithmic changes in order to prevent yet another technique from working? I can’t imagine that they won’t try to stop this, honestly. No matter how relevant your qualifiers are, someone else is also going to be using them. How is Google going to feel about it when no one optimizes in order to do well with basic phrases? What will THOSE algorithmic changes do to the few remaining techniques that work? God only knows.

3. PPC prices aren’t going to come down anytime soon. PPC used to be fairly safe from major site-crushing changes, but now we have to think about more than whether or not we can afford to pay $.10 more per click for a keyword. We have to make sure our landing pages are relevant, which is definitely a good thing, and we have a lot more restrictions on what we can pay to advertise. It’s no longer a simple matter of buying your way to the top, and with Google’s insistence upon making sure that no one (other than themselves) controls any market, they’re going to be paying much closer attention to what goes on with how we all try and abuse paid ads.

We keep flipflopping between the view that most people won’t click on a paid listing and the view that people either don’t care if the listing is paid or they aren’t smart enough to notice. What if the general public DOES become more anti-paid listings? This could easily happen. People are sick of the corporate mentality…you don’t have to be a brainiac to get pissed off about someone using wealth to gain anything. If these people actually stop to think about a paid listing and what it means to get that spot, they could indeed decide not to click on it. As everyone becomes more educated about search, I don’t think that we can rely on cluelessness any longer.

So what does this mean? It means that there’s no danger of resting on your laurels any time soon, but that’s a good thing isn’t it? People may not get “smarter” so to speak, but they will become more educated on what we do in order to market to them. Just as we’ve seen the “Kill Your Television” bumper stickers and maybe even bought a copy of the magazine AdBusters, we will most likely start being witness to movements intended to break us of our internet habits. People do still watch television, but the popularity of systems that allow viewers to record and fast-forward through commercials has already cost television advertisers tons of money. If that kind of anti-marketing becomes ingrained in the minds of searchers, we could seriously be in trouble.

You have made a promise to yourself to be a better you, as you do every new years. There is a whole industry based around New Years Resolutions, but it has changed entirely. If five years ago you started a food journal on January 1st, by now you might have added the “My Diet” application on Facebook, which has about 520 daily active users.

With so many people searching the web right now, how are web based companies capitalizing on New Years? As people are Googling this week, whether it be for a new diet, exercise routine, budget planning, etc., will your website have something to offer?

I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed with the SERPS for New Years Resolutions. Actually, there was only a handful of “resolutioners” that bid on the keywords “New Years Resolution“. I guess (in a nutshell) I expected a lot more creativity. There were hardly even any PSA type sites to help quit smoking (for those who made that their resolution).

Of course, some websites are not totally flexible and they may not have anything to offer when it comes to resolutions or capitalizations…fine. But for the most part, the job of Internet Marketers is to use swift tactics to stimulate the user into believing they have a reason to be at your website; whether it be for a New Year’s sale or the debut a new product. This gives them a chance to participate and engage with your brand, your commodity and keeping them there. So, if you are smart (and have budgeted correctly) you can make new years work for you just by using Social Media.

Ultimately, capitalization is defined as using something to one’s advantage; how is it that you can market YOUR brand to your advantage?

The #1 Top New Years Resolution is: To Lose Weight (not a surprise). We were all caught up in that resolution one time or another, if not still.

(Image is outdated but Blogosphere has grown and people still want to be skinny).

According to this article, companies-capitalize-on-New-Years.

However, companies are still capitalizing on the scheme of “Losing Weight in ‘08.”

“Weight Watchers International is debuting a billboard in Times Square in a campaign for the first quarter of 2008 that will include television and print ads, an Internet video and MySpace page.” What about Facebook? I think, Weight Watchers International should really be more attentive to their market. Don’t they know that people prefer Facebook over Myspace?!

Facebook Application Developers didn’t waste any time this New Years. They were really thinking about “capitalizing” on their New Years Resolution. Remarkably, there were 29 Active Applications with the keywords “New Years”. The New Year Resolution 2008 Application has 2,836 daily active users, compared to other applications; that is a very large number.

Of course the Blogosphere naturally goes crazy with the concept of New Years. Millions of boring “end of the year lists” to read, but Aaron Wall took a different approach. He wrote a new years resolution; not for himself (not that I know of) but for SEO Book. What is YOUR blog(s) or website(s) resolution?

In the case of other Social Media sites, there were 157,000 New Years Youtube videos. Nevertheless, it was common to see many New Years Day photos spreading around Flickr. In particular, many pictures depicting what New Years day and celebrations looked like from different perspectives and areas of the world.

With New Years now directly under our nose, can I ask: How will you make your 2008 different by using Social Media?

Shopping at and after the holidays can be a frustrating ordeal as can finding a place to stay. The SERPs are full of useless results no matter how carefully you qualify your search for the perfect gift or place to stay. Add to the mix an inappropriate landing page for the PPC ads you select and tempers can boil.

As SEMs and SEOs, we strive to optimise our pages for the appropriate key phrases (*AHEM*) and land customers at pages which suit their needs and desires in accordance with their search. With paid adverts, landing a searcher at the right page can seem easier than pure optimised pages, especially when pesky internal navigation skews relevancy.

With 80% of searchers clicking on an organic result, relevant landing pages are the most important area to get correct. Focus too much on semantically related terminology and inbound links and too little on users and it may result in more page views but fewer conversions. Not focusing enough on what search engines want and only on pages for the end user may result in higher conversions for the few who find you, but so few find you that it becomes irrelevant.

Striking the balance is what a good search marketer and optimisation practitioner can do for you but how do you do it yourself? Thinking like both a user and search engine is one of the most difficult things to get right. Too much optimising and you’ll find yourself penalised, too little and you’ll not find yourself. Where are the rules written down – how do you find the magic formula?

90% of the secret to landing people on the relevant landing page for a search is freely available online. Rand Fishkin has posited that SEO/M is 90% published material and the other 10% is secret but where the difference is made.  Reading the SEO Chicks blog, SEO Book, SEOmoz, and other excellent sources will help give you an edge online.

Optimising for paid adverts may seem easy and yet it is also one of the places we mock for lack of focus and inappropriate adverts (zombie zombies?) landing us at non-existent pages (search for “stuffed animal”). At PubCon, one of the speakers pointed out that there were double the number of blog posts about SEO vs PPC.

Do a search on google.co.uk for chocolate and you’ll be faced with both the yummy treat adverts and a mobile phone advert. Here LG is ensuring a lost searcher can still find their phone without adjusting their search and Hotel Chocolat is ensuring a searcher finds them before The Chocolate Society (YUM).  Plenty of bad PPC advert matches can be found though showing how difficult it can be.

Paid search advertising may only command 20% of the clicks but it is not something to be ignored. By creating a compelling ad landing a user at a relevant page the conversion rate can climb through the roof.  Paid search marketing can help to raise brand awareness in some searches, and fix possible problems with targeted landing pages for others.

Paid search advertising can beautifully compliment organic search, increasing awareness in the searcher and helping ensure the right landing page is always available.

Make shoppers and travellers happy this holiday season. Land them at the relevant page through optimisation and paid search working hand-in-hand.

What is Blue and White and Read All Over?

What has more than 59 million users? Has 250,000 new members per day since January 2007? Has more than 14 million photos uploaded daily? Has More than 65 billion page views per month?

No…. Not Orkut.

The Answer is Facebook!

Whether you love it or hate it, if you are reading this blog, you are a Facebook member and you use it daily.

Every SEO Chick has a Facebook.

Here is how People were using Facebook in August 2007:

It was only a matter of time before every SEO, Link Bulider, and Internet Marketer in general saturated this amazing Social Networking site and took over. When the opportunity arrived over the summer to include applications and more recently Business/ Fan Pages there are more and more Facebook marketing campaigns popping up everyday.

Facebook made headlines many times this year. From when they sold a portion of advertising rights to Microsoft for a whopping $240 million, beating out Google’s bid. And then more recently Facebook has been battling their issues with the newer Beacon addition (Beacongate), which was heavily discussed in the blogosphere. Growing at such a rapid rate, I am sure that Facebook will definitely show up in the headlines for both negative and positive reasons more frequently.

Facebook has become an important tool for not only internet marketers, but all kinds of business. However, it is difficult for some (including me) to keep Facebook at work being ultimately work driven and not include social fun, but somewhere there is a thin line.

So if you are not using Facebook as part of your Social Media or Social Networking campaign, here is a list of blogs I find super helpful to keep yourself updated on whats new on Facebook:

1. Face Reviews - An awesome up to date Facebook news blog for marketers.
2. The Official Facebook Blog- Updated by Staff and Zuckerberg himself.
3. Inside Facebook- Tracking Facebook and it’s platform.
4. Facebooking101- Facebook Bloggers- Collects random posts about Facebook from all around the blogosphere.
5. All Facebook- The UNofficial Facebook Blog.

Facebook has definitely changed my work-flow (and my life) over the past 6 months and has improved Brand Management, Traffic spikes, link building, and it has opened up HUGE doors in my career through networking.

Questions:

1. Has Facebook changed your life more so than other Social sites, such as Myspace, Bebo, LinkedIn, etc?
2. How often do you use Facebook?
3. Do you include Facebook in your marketing campaigns?
4. Do you use Facebook Mobile or Faceberry ?
5. How has Facebook changed your work performance over the last year?

    One night, from the only punk rock bar in Las Vegas, I gave a horribly long rant to RateItAll’s Lawrence Coburn. It was my take on the industry. It is hard to find those words again as that was a conversation at 2AM and my brain was competing with the Bouncing Souls. The rant went on and on about popularity, branding, reputation management, and so on. Ever since this conversation, I have been thinking about this concept of SEO and Internet Marketing being something I think must be taught and discussed. Ultimately, the industry lies within conversation and apprenticeship.

For my first article on the SEO-Chicks blog, I wanted to write about the importance of understanding this industry, but that has been done so many times, and I just can’t take another “What my dog can teach you about Social Media” post….No offense.

I suppose there should be some sort of prerequisite, especially to understand where I’m coming from in this post.

I decided that I needed to be in this stimulating industry when I recognized how much observation my band was getting from just our website, social media, and forums; not to mention fans, PR, and label interests. We built links, contacts, tours, sold merchandise, licensing deals, but we really weren’t famous or critically acclaimed (but in our heads we were!). However, we looked great online.

*FYI: the site no longer exists, the band dismembered= long story.

My silly little band acquired huge label attention just based on our social media sites. I then asked myself, what kind of ROI would a legitimate business with awesome products see?

I contacted as many people I knew in the industry, took jobs with websites; primarily selling products online- slowly making the switch to purely working online and getting to know the ins and outs of this amazing industry. Over the next few months I decided that I would try to encompass everything I learned, did and sell to the internet. Slowly but surely this strategy worked, (Of course this is a really long; but short story) and I developed great skills to work in online marketing, something that teaches me new tricks every day.

Having been to Pubcon, other social events, reading millions of blogs, and e-books, I have learned that in the industry the only way to learn the trade is to be an apprentice. So I latched on and learned, like other thousands of young SEO’s. Even in job listings, companies are looking for SEO Apprentices, because as we know, every SEO has their own style, so you would want to train your staff according to your own practices. As Sugarrae said at Pubcon, when she spoke about hiring staff; “You must be able to train them.”

Apprenticing, the “Original 4 Year Degree” is extremely important in the SEO industry; and sure, most people in the industry have learned the skill as an extension of web development, but will the practice die out just as it did for the chair makers in the Middle Ages?

Apprenticeship= A master craftsman entitled to employ people as an inexpensive form of labor in exchange for providing formal training in the craft. - Wikipedia.

Well, we are already seeing huge numbers of companies outsourcing SEO work to places like India, reading articles saying a career in SEO is a bad choice, and there are many new SEO, SMM, SEM and even Facebook classes in tons of Universities.

So will the practice of Apprenticeship live on in the world of SEO, or will it be replaced like it was in the golden days? I think that to be an SEO you must always be an apprentice. Learning the skill is never-ending… thus we have millions of SEO blogs.

Questions:

• If the practice is replaced by manufactured SEO’s, what will be better for the industry?
• Aside from this ancient practice of training, are their better ways to become seriously skilled in SEO?

Whilst at SMX London last week I attended the session;“What’s new with the Algorithm?”,now, I had quite high expectations for this session as the panel included: Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Dave Naylor, Dixon Jones and my favourite Icelander Krisijan Mar Hauksson. Not so surprisingly this session was dominated by talking about the new Google PageRank and what is thought to be a change in the linking algorithms with regards to paid links. Not necessarily because the panel wanted to talk about it but the audience brought it up, again and again and again. Yawn…

Now I love these guys on a panel together, it’s so entertaining, a weird mix between Scandinavian irony and Northern English sarcasm = comedy. But, saying that, I was quite disappointed they didn’t go further into the different aspects of the algorithm. Maybe the session should have been called “What’s old and now more important in the alogorithms”??? Now, that might have been more relevant, basically what I’m saying is I’m bored of the Google PageRank discussion. A few of my clients websites got a decrease in PageRank BUT it hasn’t affected their rankings whatsoever. Has anyone else had any change in rankings and traffic since the PageRank update? If so please shout!

Let’s compare the search engine algorithms to the Matrix (why the fuck not?), do you remember this scene from the movie:

Neo sees a black cat walk by them, and then a similar black cat walk by them just like the first one

Neo: Whoa. Déjà vu.
[Everyone freezes right in their tracks]
Me,ehm I mean Trinity: What did you just say?
Neo: Nothing. Just had a little déjà vu.
Trinity: What did you see?
Cypher: What happened?
Neo: A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it.
Trinity: How much like it? Was it the same cat?
Neo: It might have been. I’m not sure.
Morpheus: Switch! Apoc!
Neo: What is it?
Trinity: A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.

When one part of the algorithm changes, is adjusted or added to, it’s likely that the “old stuff” will change as well, right? Now, I have no doubt that something changed in the algorithms with regards to the PageRank and quite possibly related to paid links. BUT my point is WHY is everyone looking at just the obvious that changed, the more interesting bit is what other things did they change to accommodate this? See where I’m going?

I have a few theories, ok maybe more lose random thoughts, about what has ACTUALLY changed in the Matrix, god damn it, I mean algorithms. And I would love to hear your thoughts on this, let’s get a real discussion about this.

1. IS CTR back in the Algorithms? Once upon a time you had people franticly clicking on their own website in the SERPs to get it higher in the results. As CTR was a quite natural way of measure relevance, ok slightly naive of the SE thinking no one would take advantage of this. We all know that CTR is a significant part of the Quality Score in Google’s paid listings, now isn’t there a chance that this vaild measurment of relevancy is back in the algos, obviously more sophisticated than before, including bounce back measurement etc etc?

2. Content for pity sake! I am such a big believer that it all starts and ends with your content. If you don’t have flipping keyword rich content it does not matter how many links you have. I really don’t think SEO is about sodding links, if you don’t have a keyword strategy and optimise your content properly (without keyword canablizing it to death) you are on your way. But what is the more important part of the content? Here’s my order, and please feel to disagree. I might punch you, but please go ahead

- Title tag (this tag has always been important but I think it’s become even more important in the last 12 months, so don’t fucking ignore it!)
- H1 tag
- Internal links & anchor text
- Main content (now I get a lot of stick for this but I still work on keyword density, not to get an ultimate keyword density or anything like that but to make sure one page will get ranked in-front of the other for targeting as quite often it’s difficult to not keyword canabalize a little, some relevant keywords you just have to use throughout the site.

3. Technical SEO aspects. Now I will gladly admit this is where I know the least. At one of the last sessions at SMX “Website Tuneup” Rob Kerry (evilgreendonkey) did a cracking job at evaluating some really shocking websites. But I must admit I found myself thinking “whatthefuckniwho?” most of the time. Some of these sites were not getting any results simply because of the ridiculous mess their code was in, loads of re-directs going to pages that didn’t exist and loops of endless error messages. This is where we need to start thinking clever, or maybe just basic. I think if a website is built with accessibility in mind it’s quite often SE code friendly as well. Rob can you share some knowledge with us here? What were the tools you used to find out how messy the code was?

So what’s it going to be? The blue or the red pill????

Ha! Google is the “system” and to be able to figure out the system you have to be “in it”. Taking the blue pill is what an SEO will do when all he cares about is earning shit loads of money and spamming the fuck out of Google. Now taking the red pill is always questioning and sharing your knowledge with other SEOs and together achieve greater understanding of the system!

Google, DODGE THIS!