Okay, so it has been a little more than a week since Part I, but SES NY takes a long time to recover from.

There are a ton of keyword research tools and tool lists out there, but it is still incredibly important to have all of your tools in one place. There are a lot of familiar tools in here, but there should also be a some lesser known ones here as well.

Let’s start this off with an SEO snack provided to you by one of my newest friends, Gareth

Free Tools

SEObook’s ultimate keyword research tool is a great place to start. Another tool on the site, is the Google Scraper tool

We can’t forget everyone’s old favorites, the Adwords Keyword Tool or Overtures Keyword Selector (although it doesn’t always work)

Quintura shows keyword maps to help you to generate more keywords!

Track keyword trends with Blogpulse.

If anything, Kartoo is a lot of fun. It provides keyword maps of who is ranking for what terms. Results could be a little bette

Find your competitors Keyword!

Start off with figuring out how competitive a keyword is

Long tail keyword discovery shows you the 3, 4 and 5 term keywords for your (or a competitors) site.

SEO Digger is pretty awesome tool. Find out what keywords your site ranks in Google’s top 20 for, or use this to spy on the competition

Shoemoney review

Keyword Spy is great at finding what your competitors are bidding on and ranking for and you test it out for free right on their homepage. The free version only lets you see 10 results, but the paid version for $90/month lets you see a lot more.

Digitalpoints Keyword suggestion tool is another good free option. It also lets you specify what country you are looking for data for. They also have a free keyword position tracking tool.

Paid

Wordtracker has a 7 day free trial for their tool, otherwise, it is paid for at $329 a year. They also have very good free version of their keyword research tool.

Trellian’s keyword discovery is another fantastic tool. It draws info from over 180 search engines around the world and has keyword brainstorming tools as well as the ability to import import keyword lists and add descriptors. This is paid for with prices varying, but a 1 year standard subscription will run you about $600.

Keyword Discovery also won Best Keyword Research Tool in 2007 on www.toprankblog.com

Wordze has gotten a bit of a following with tools that let you perform keyword research, get historical keyword data, perform competitive research, and download top searches. They cost $45/month

Wordze also had a great deal of praise TopRank Blog

Wordze review on copyblogger.

AdGooroo, which also deserves a mention in Yoda’s Ultimate Competitive Research Tools Post is also a great keyword research tool. It allows you see what terms your competition is bidding on so you can make sure you don’t miss any opportunities. Prices range from $89/month to $399/month depending on what you need.

Spyfu also let’s you see what your competitors rank for as well as help you find new keywords to use fro your own site. They let you perform some research for free, but if you want to dig deep, it will cost you $308/year or $6.75 for 3 days

Miscellaneous

Shimon Sandler listed some keyword stemming tools on his site a while back that are very useful. Basically, they help you to take the stem of a word and build out additional keywords by adding in the variations of that term. Here are a few good ones:

http://www.usingenglish.com/resources/wordcheck/index.php?word=work

http://www.related-pages.com/adWordsKeywords.aspx

Other Great Keyword Research Lists

The other Loren (Baker that is) recently wrote a post at Search Engine Journal asking what keyword tools his readers liked – WordTracker, SEOBook, and Keyword Discovery seemed to make it out on top.

Mona Elesseily also put together a great list about spying on your competitors including Compete and Spyfu (mentioned above).

SEOBooks keyword research tool list is another great one.

Anne Smarty’s list on SEOMOZ is also very comprehensive

Coming soon . . . Must have Firefox Plugins

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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

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Recently, the Catholic church decided to update the 7 deadly sins with a new set to reflect it’s new socially conscious agenda.  Sweeping away the obvious historical issues we could raise here, I thought it would be fun to look at what these might be in SEO/M

These are meant in fun only.  LAUGH AT THEM - do not take them seriously

Gluttony
Based firmly in the realm of food, gluttony can be seen in the SEO community among those who consume too much chocolate – errrr… food.  Gluttony, unlike greed, specifically relates to the consumption of food.  In SEO Terms, it can be seen in the constant desire and obsession over keywords.  Wanting more constantly, this SEO scrapes content, reworks it and tries to have a page dedicated to every term imaginable, no matter how odd or obscure.  Wondering what that page ranking for asdfg is?  A desire to rank for anything and everything – a glutton for keywords.  Since gluttony is really about obsession over food, I thought I’d pop in here a fun site about SEO Foods 

Lust
Dante’s asserted that this was defined as the “excessive love of others”.  I think this could be typified as the type of SEO that chases after other rankings constantly trying to beat them.  Lusting after keywords that have nothing to do with their website, this SEO chases every keyword that catches their eye.  This SEO also chases after people at conferences and online, constantly trying to chat with them.  This ‘lustful’ individual then tries to friend and follow them on every system they can, comments excessively on their blog and if spurned, starts their own blog about how awful the previous object of their lust was.  This may also manifest as extreme excessive assertion of love/lust/desire for the target in public and online, resulting in making them look phenomenally pathetic.

Avarice
One of the worst of the SEO sins, this type of behaviour will get you thrown out of the community.  Relating to behaviours like disloyalty, deliberate betrayal, or theft, especially by means of trickery, or manipulation, I’m sure many SEOs can think of numerous examples of this type of sin.  The SEO who scrapes/steals content to run their affiliate sites, deliberately betraying confidences and secret techniques to try and achieve material/personal gain.  This SEO is driven by nothing other than personal profit and is willing to hack a site and change affiliate links and add hidden links.  This SEO is the worst of the bunch, betraying the code of SEO Fight Club.

Sloth
I’m sure by now you can picture this SEO – sitting at a computer, head in hand, clicking away on things sooooo sloooooowly.  More traditionally, sloth actually represented the failure to utilize one’s talents so it would be having the talent and ability to do really stunning SEO but failing to work beyond what is required.  Sloth is a sin of laziness or indifference; chasing the SEO easy wins and none of the more finesse SEO.  It manifests as an unwillingness to act in the face of falling rankings.  Perhaps it could be an unwillingness to care as hackers infiltrate your client site.  This SEO is going to only ever pick the low hanging fruit.  They may make SEO sound much harder and less possible for the client to achieve.  They extend the length of time to achieve changes and then results, charging excessively high fees for little, if any, work.

Wrath
Interestingly, wrath just happens to be the only sin not really associated wholly with the self.  Wrath could lead out of envy, lust, avarice or even pride.  It is the desire to do evil on others for a perceived transgression against the self or others – including society.  In the SEO, this could easily be a malicious link-buying campaign or Google bombing.  It is hacking a site to place a competitors hidden links on page to try and get them removed from the SERPs.  The SEO actively ignores the truth and aggressively targets the site they have chosen.  This may also result with fist fights at conferences or assertions of a negative sort made over multiple blog posts and other public forums in order to harm the target/victim.

Envy
I think most SEOs who do not have top rankings for their chosen keywords have occasionally fallen victim to this.  In fact, I’m sure the day someone else ranks for “SEO chocolate” I will be filled with envy (though not to the extent it is a sin).  I think I may be envious of those chosen as sexy female SEOs considering my new pole dancing abilities :)  However, as opposed to simply being a desire for what you do not have, envy is the desire to deprive others of their good fortune/pleasure/etc or to delight in the misfortune of others.  In the SEO world, this could be the perverse pleasure at seeing a competitors’ rankings fall for a highly desirable keyword.  It could also be withholding information about bad SEO practice from them which causes their sites harm.  Mind, it depends if the person deserves it whether it qualifies as envy or a service to the community.

Pride
Given the immediate drop in rankings experienced by more than one prideful boasting SEO, this is one of the most deadly of the sins.  It is also possibly the one sin SEOs strive to avoid as much as possible in order to avoid invoking ‘envy’ and the possible ‘wrath’ – especially by Google.  Pride is taking excessive pleasure in your top 10 ranking for a certain call to purchase a certain pharmaceutical and boasting about it or mocking Google for being unable to detect your undetectable linking network.  This most deadly of SEO sins can result in lost rankings and possible partial or total loss of income.  Of all the SEO sins, this one has the potential to cause the most damage.

Of course, this has been a humorous look at the seven deadly SEO sins and should be taken as such.  It was written with a light heart, free of envy, pride, lust, wrath or avarice.  There was no gluttonous chocolate-munching and no sloth (giant ground or other kinds).  I hope you have enjoyed it in the spirit of a good giggle as it was intended. 

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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…

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In case you are living under a rock….

Twitter is just another one of those social platforms that you didn’t want to grow attached to but knew you would. It has become unavoidable at this point. If you don’t tweet, I bet at least five of your Facebook friends have synched up their Tweets to their status update. It’s gotten to the point where even my friends who aren’t within the internet marketing industry (all 5 of them) have a Twitter account, whether they know how to use it or not doesn’t really matter. I doubt they will sign up for Pownce and the whole point of any of these wastes of time are for them to exist for the masses.

I have noticed that it all breaks down to 3 different types of Twitter users:

1.There is the Twitter user that tweets all of the time. This is the person who just tweets nonsense once an hour. You read their tweets but might form an opinion on them just based off of the value of their update. Maybe they are humorous and you appreciate the smile it gives you or maybe its just random crap that doesn’t even flow and becomes annoying. Sometimes these people also converse with each other too much, they should be instant messaging each other. If you know these people you might want or not want to follow them.

2.Then there is the marketer twitter user. This twitter account might be owned by a blog, a news source, or a blogger. The updates might be fed by a bot and are on a schedule. The only purpose of these tweets are to inform you when they add new content to their site. This has become really useful because I don’t always have a chance to read my reader and I am updated about blogs I read through a second source.

3.Finally there is the tweeter that I favor the most which is a great combination of the two. This person tweets things that come to mind, links to things that they like, links to things they are marketing (whether it be a personal brand or a client) tastefully. I’d like to think I am this kind of tweeter. Donna, also does a great job of this.

There are still many people who are well recognized in the industry who don’t like Twitter and choose not to use it ….like Lisa. In my opinion it is not as necessary to use Twitter as it is to use Facebook. You can simply use Twitter scanners like Terraminds (which has been on the fritz lately) or Tweetscan for market research. I have had huge success from using these tools.

Just like any other social media trend, micro-blogging has to be used on a schedule. Some tweeters update once and hour or more and this can be really annoying if you are running a Twitter api like I do. It can be super distracting if your api uses sounds and your computer just tweets all day, but of course you can control this. However I like it because it makes me feel like I am working in a park somewhere with birds……

Keeping tweets to a regular 5 to 10 time basis keeps your followers familiar with you and the types of updates you are doing. Likewise you don’t want to be updating with links at heavy work flow hours because chances are nobody will click them.

Another thing to keep in mind is tweeting during or at conferences. This is how Twitter became popular. During conferences Twitter goes crazy with updates and can be really distracting if you are not attending but helpful if you are looking for links with info about the conference. Because of SWSW and SES NY. I have turned my Twitter sounds off because it is just too annoying.

Nevertheless you can chose to be the Twitter user you want to be for whatever purpose you are doing it. But as with any social content platform; know your audience, be present, and be consistent.

If you are new to Twitter, there is a special language spoke, please refer to the Twitter Glossary beforehand.

PS: Color wars are happening now at Twitter. Here is a great video that explains what this is…

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Here I am again with the London events

Only this time, it’s on MY BIRTHDAY!

There will be three speakers.  I’m leading off speaking on SEO basics so all you Chicks out there wanting to pick up pointers, come on over and grab yourself a ticket!  There will be food and a bit of wine, water and juice courtesy of the sponsors along with FREE WI FI!!

Head over to http://londongirlgeekdinner20.eventbrite.com and enter the password “searchme” and you’ll be able to grab yourself some tickets!  You can donate any amount and all the cash goes to help Girl Geek Dinners.  Everyone is a volunteer and freely gives of their time.

March London Girl Geek Dinner

Date: 25th March 2008 7:30pm - 10:30pm

Sponsors: Latitude

Venue: The Knights Templar 95 Chancery Lane, WC2A 1DT

Organizers: Sarah Blow, Imp & Judith ‘deCabbit’ Lewis

The talks start at 8:15pm on the following topics:

* SEO the core elements – Recently named one of the UK’s most respected SEO bloggers, Judith ‘deCabbit’ Lewis will be speaking about the basics with handouts. Amanda will get the q & a off to a searchy start as she’s just done a site and used automated seo tools… will make for a good conversation…

* Semantic Markup and Organic SEO - Sheila Farrell will be tackling this fascinating topic on combining SEO with semantic web elements - Danielle from Israel to instigate the Q & A based on her experiences in Israel

* Search Vs Find, the mobile search perspective - Sarah McVitte who is deeply involved with finding answers in a mobile environment will tackle this fascinating topic - Vero to instigate the Q & A as she’s great with the mobile search stuff

It’s a fantastic opportunity to get information usually presented at conferences costing £500 or more to attend.

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Every so often I get irritated and start looking for a job.  It’s only usually when I’m irritated or it would occur to me to use my network and check with them for a job.  However, not everyone has a network – and not everyone knows where to look or what is reasonable.

I went looking recently and was surprised at the amount of variation in salaries offered.  Since I knew of a few SEOs looking for something new, I thought it would be a fun blog post.  There are lots of decent jobs out there but I’ve tried to select a good cross-section of mock-worthy and praise-worthy.  The commentary is my own and does not reflect the opinions or views of my employer or the SEO-Chicks.

Hopefully this will become a regular feature and please do let me know if anyone reading this gets a job as a result of seeing it here.  It would be good to know I helped.

I’d like to draw your attention to the salary survey put out by SEMPO. While it relates to in-house SEOs only, it does give a good indication of what someone with a certain number of years, handling a certain budget could expect to earn.  They are currently conducting an Agency Search Salary Survey

Also – women tend to fail to apply for a job unless they have at least 80% of what is being asked for whereas men will go when they have as little as 30%.  BE STRONG CHICKS and go for these jobs whether you think you have enough or not.  This industry needs more women willing to take a chance!

I did the following searches (links should give search results):

SEO Jobs London – mad.co.uk (aggregator)
SEO England London – SEOVacancies (main site link)
SEO SEM United Kingdom London – JobsInSearch (main site link)
SEO W1 10 miles – Totaljobs 

Search Engine Optimisation Assistant/SEO Assistant/Search Executive - £18-20K + benefits
This is the type of role you want to look at taking to get introduced to search optimising or marketing jobs.  It may not be the kind of impressive salary more senior SEOs get but we all have to start somewhere.  This is a great opportunity to start from nothing – GO FOR IT!

Junior SEO Consultant - to £27,000+benefits
This is a good opportunity to get a foot in the door and get a great salary to boot.  This job doesn’t require anything but a passion for SEO “You may be experienced with SEO or you could be a recent graduate who is passionate about SEO with desire to get into the industry”  WOW!  Jump on this all you budding SEOs in and around London.

SEO Executive - £28k
While these folks are asking for “proven experience” don’t be put off by those strong-sounding words.  All it means is that you’ve done something and can show your work for example changing title tags after keyword research or working on a PPC campaign and the steps you went through.  They will be looking for some hands-on something so even if you just helped with keyword research give it a shot!

SEO/Search Engine Optimisation Specialist - £30000 - £35000 per annum + healthcare, gym membership, bonus
OK… the perks are nice but really – if you have 3 years agency side and 2 years managing large accounts, you’re going to be looking for a head role – and more money with a manager role.  This is most certainly not a “top salary package” as they claim in the ad.  Look elsewhere!

SEO Specialist – Leading Online Fashion Brand - Up to £35k
I’m always wary about people who think they know what thy are doing – asking for a “white hat” to fix a site with “1,200 back links” and a “PR of 4/10” plus want someone “who has the skills and commercial experience to turn their vast links into profitable link juice”.  The pay is not fantastic but if you’re only caring for one site – fashion though it may be – how much work is there going to be after 6 months?

SEO Manager – £35 - 50,000 basic + bonus + excellent package
Oooohhhh… I’m liking the sound of this one – especially if you can negotiate up to the £50k salary.  The request for skills is reasonable, and really the requirements are realistic.  They aren’t asking for the moon and have a good idea of what they want.  I’m not an agency kinda gal and sales isn’t something that ever floats my boat but this looks like an excellent opportunity!

SEO Manager- Online Marketing Agency - 40-45k + Bonus
I’m always wary of jobs like this as it doesn’t really seem like they know what they want.  However, this is for a new team and so you’ll be coming in to an environment where you can mould and shape and grow the team.  This is the perfect kind of job for someone who wants to get in to it up to their elbows and really make a difference.

International Search Director - £40,000 to £50,000 per annum
I’m sorry… is this a joke?  Man management, Google qualified, experience… Ladies, go elsewhere.  What kind of a moron thinks this is enough to pay for someone with skills, qualifications, a degree and a European language?!?!  Seriously!  Don’t apply for this job – laugh at it!

Head of Search - £65 - 80k
This should actually be billed as head of PPC rather than head of search.  A throw-away statement at the end of the job advert makes this clear.  This looks to be a fun position with US and European travel and liaising with non-technical departments.  If you’re looking for that next move to head, I’d go for it.  In fact, I might go for it myself!

Hope you had fun and maybe applied for a few jobs.  The two with search results (madjobs.co.uk and Totaljobs) are a quick way to find what’s gone up recently.  The other two (JobsInSearch and SEOVacancies) you will need to put search parameters in yourself.

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If there was one thing most semi-literate, half-awake people always liked about Facebook, it was the clean air and the tidy sidewalks. You knew that you could let your kids out after six and their bikes wouldn’t get stolen. The city council was pretty strict about how you couldn’t park your nasty, rotting car in the drive, and any graffiti was always dealt with in a timely manner. There were no closed buildings with boarded up windows and most people respected each other’s property, aside from the odd character-art wall post. Lately, Facebook has changed and I’m not willing the blame the Developers’ Platform and Applications entirely. Just this week, I went to write on a friend’s wall, and I saw this:

What. The Hell. Is that. Ringtones? In a Facebook wall post? If you’ve ever laid eyes on a profile that includes the Super Wall, Fun Wall, Advanced Wall or any other sort of non-conformist, MySpacey bulletin board, you’ll have seen this crap:

However, the entry on my friend’s wall was not posted via an externally-developed application, most of which specialise in the distribution of idiotic pictures. The ghastly ringtone advertisement - which signifies so much more than just an annoying piece of spam - was left on a Facebook mainstay that has been fiercely protected from abuse. A few days later, I came across another spammy entry on a regular Facebook wall.

These posts have all the hallmarks of automated spam and none of the traits of copied-and-pasted messages. The terrible grammar. The inconsistent punctuation and bad spelling. The use of the number zero in place of “o.” A redirected URL that ends up at the vomit-inducing Sleektones.net. No link for you, not even with a nofollow. These messages were also “posted by” twenty-one year old college students, and although there are problems with the U.S. education system, I find it hard to believe that anyone who’d made it past the third grade would believe “free” was actually two words.

If I’d seen this on a SuperAdvancedFun Wall, I would not have looked twice. Those applications seem to have been developed and spread for and by people who miss the gaudiness of MySpace. However, Facebook has held on to early adopters and utter snobs like me by maintaining its initial structure and dignity in the face of mass development. Despite the main structural changes in layout, I can hold on to the clean, tidy profile I liked so much three years ago. They’ve done especially well in this regard.

That’s what keeps people like me around, and whilst it would take many more fails on Facebook’s behalf until I left it, I fear the day my wall falls victim to ringtone ads. I’m not bothered by the copied and pasted wall art: Although I delete any images like the one below, they are a far cry from automated annoyances.

On Facebook’s potential-laden yet neglected blog, Paul Jeffries recently wrote about application spam and what Facebook is doing to combat the problem. However, letting in the masses and having them create applications has allowed a slew of undesirable things to infiltrate a once-pristine community. Jeffries’ blog post addresses applications that require a user to invite friends to also use it before they’re granted access.

I’d go as far as regulating how pushy applications can be in requiring (tricking?) people into adding them to their accounts. Clicking on any one of the applications’ links in the image below brings up the application’s Add page. Whilst I agree that “Forward” and “Write on [blank’s] Wall” should require a user to add the application, the “click here to read full post” link is just trickery. I’m also fairly sure that there is no full post.

How should Facebook go about achieving the balance between pleasing its users who like its tight regulations, and catering to the people who want to forward yellow smiley-faces and messages about how the name of one’s crush will appear on the screen if they re-post this message twenty times in the next eight minutes?

I don’t know what exactly is going on with the ringtone spam and various other questionable messages I’ve seen posted on Facebook walls but neglected to capture. I did, however, feel a touch of sadness when I saw those messages, as if I’d learned that yet another nice area of town had gone to ruin. Have spammers and phishers finally begun the slow take-over of Facebook, as they did MySpace?

No, I don’t have to add the applications I find annoying, but after seeing spam creep onto Facebook’s regular wall and after being nearly tricked by other sneaky applications, I believe Facebook should consider tightening up their community before housing prices drop even further and people consider finding out what AOL plans to do with Bebo.

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Hey there. I’m not sure if you know who I am, but my name is Rebecca Kelley, and I was an SEO Chick (here’s where you all drone back, “Hi, Rebecca,” as if I’m in rehab). When Lisa asked me if I wanted to become one way back in June of last year, and I thought, “Yeah, that’d be cool. Girl power, and all that good stuff!” I promised to fulfill my SEO Chick duties to the best of my abilities. Those duties pretty much only consisted of blogging, but hey, I can do that, right? No problem.

I wrote a post, and time passed. And passed. And passed. Lisa would casually email me every so often and politely ask if I was going to post again soon. “Sure!” I said, “No problem!” Eventually, I wrote another post, a whopping two contributions in the past several months. Needless to say, I sucked. I was not worthy of my SEO Chicks crown, and so I stepped down as “official SEO Chick” to that of a guest blogger. Aw.

The point is that, basically, I overpromised and underdelivered. I told Lisa that sure, I’d guest blog until the cows came home. I’d be on that blog morning, noon, and night, and I’d contribute the awesomest posts known to man. Well, I didn’t. I sucked it up and disappointed my fellow chicks as a result.

This translates across multiple mediums. It’s tempting to promise your client everything under the sun in order to impress him or her, but you have to be reasonable, too. There are only so many hours in a day and you have X other tasks to do, not to mention a social life. If you overpromise to your client and underdeliver, well, you’re not going to have a happy client. Maybe your contact won’t provide you with a testimonial, or maybe he’ll withhold payment, or maybe you’ll just have that feeling in your gut knowing that you disappointed someone. It’s not a nice feeling.

Conversely, if you set up conservative, reasonable deliverables and deliver on time, or, better yet, deliver the task and then some, your client will think you’re the best thing since sliced bread. Underpromising (or maybe simply “promising”) and overdelivering will delight your client to no end. And it makes sense, right? Don’t make promises you can’t keep.

Well, here’s my attempt to promise and deliver. I promise to keep guest blogging for SEO Chicks on a regular basis—maybe not every week, but at least once or twice a month. The site has accumulated a score of talented writers, so I can patiently wait my turn until it’s time for me to take a crack at the blog. That’s a promise I expect to keep, and hopefully Lisa won’t break my legs.

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I’m banging my head against the wall; I keep on saying “NO, that’s not it, it’s not just about keywords. Hang on, I’ll explain”. We’ve all been there, trying to explain SEO. Whether it is to a prospect client, a boss, a friend or your mother (mine still thinks I work for Google, and frankly I’ve given up!). But WHY OH WHY, do people have selective hearing. It makes me want to bang my head THROUGH the wall, not just at the wall. I’m in the middle of the presentation, been through the basics of how the search engines work, the potential traffic and ROI, then you move on to the basics of SEO. The second I say keyword, it’s all doomed. For some reason people think they know and understand everything about SEO from this point on.

Prospect Client: “Ahhhh!! It’s all about keywords, yeah I see, of course, that makes sense. Yes you can’t be found for a keyword unless you have it on your website, we’ll just bash it in”

Me: “Erm you need to do some research first, don’t just bash in any old keyword”

Prospect Client: “Nah we got it covered, we know what people search for. We just bang in, I mean spam in, erm I mean input all the keywords from our brochures and stuff”

Me: “have you got a rope?”

In my opinion, and I’m sure most of you will agree, Search Engine Optimisation isn’t something you can have a bash at doing. You can’t try SEO, either you do it (and properly) or you don’t.

But sometimes it’s so difficult to explain it all, you know how important it can be for a website, you got all these facts and figures and even case studies to prove what it has achieved. But when you only have a few hours to pitch, to explain, that you, the SEO Jedi can bring their site to another level. You realise they just aren’t speaking the same language.

If after an hour they are still asking whether they can put keywords in hidden text, target 30 keywords on one page (29 of them being general keywords such as high competitive brand names) and they insist in putting in 200 keywords in the meta keyword tag (just in case). RUN, RUN FOR THE HILLS!

Basically the “moral” of the story is simple; sometimes you have to chose your battles. It’s not likely that someone that think they can do SEO as well as you, after only 1 hour is going to be a client you want!

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