I keep hearing horror stories about SEO companies ripping off the very people they are meant to help. While there are some excellent search companies out there dedicated to helping customers and going above and beyond, there are others who, like cowboy builders, want to take the cash and run. This can often leave the client out of pocket but also unsure of who to turn to for help when something of this nature happens.

When I attended SES London some six or so years ago, I remember hearing the story of a charity who had paid an SEO firm five-figures and gotten nothing for it. Whether this was their perception or reality is always difficult to know but it left them thinking the whole industry was crooked. I continued to hear of agencies charging for Google Analytics (free), purporting to run PPC with no proof of any spend and continued hearing of SEO companies taking money and doing nothing at all.

If this wasn’t bad enough, the shoddy work produced by some led to sites being dropped down the rankings or worse – banned. Link buying is one example of a practice that can harm the client as well as the agency and as recently as March 2011 I have heard of companies continuing to buy links in competitive, but not extremely so, verticals. JC Penny and Overstock are just two examples of companies harmed by blatant link manipulation.

How do you know if you choosing a good agency? With no industry body and anyone able to set themselves up as an SEO, how do you know that they are acting in your best interest and in a professional way? I gave a talk on just that (and how to survive the zombie apocalypse) at the London Affiliate Conference.

Habitat UK, Skittles, Nestle, Asus, and more are all tales of woe and warning for anyone going in to social media. Getting it wrong seems easier than getting it right at times. This is often because of lack of planning as opposed to level of difficulty.

As important as it is for SEO, planning your social media strategy is important to ensure minimal brand damage from mistakes. Social media, with its low barriers to entry, may seem easy to do. Many think ‘how hard can it be to tweet and update Facebook’? Well, as Nestle learned when the tit-for-tat between an angry consumer and one of its marketing team on Nestle’s public wall got paraded out by some media and social media experts as a premium example of what not to do, a lot can go wrong.

While some may see Skittles allowing all Twitter search results to be published to its home page as innovative, it became a place where users tried to out-gross each other. My screen-shot from the time has to be blanked due to the nature of the tweets showing. Making a blog of Facebook the homepage of your company may seem cutting edge but a blog can also be seen as unprofessional and Facebook is nota space wholly owned by the brand.

Getting the strategy right to both move in to social media and use it for SEO is not just important – it is essential. There are several things to plan but first and foremost is an inderstanding of the why. Understand why it is your business feels it should be in social media. There are a number of successstories from companies like ABN Amro, IBM, Vodafone and others regarding their forays into social media however they were success stories because a picture of success was planned from the outset.

After understanding your reasons and goals from being in social media, select the best outlet for that strategy. Twitter is not a broadcast medium and no matter what anyone says, Facebook is invisible unless you promote it to existing contacts. Understand the different social media platforms and what type of engagement they are useful for. MySpace may not be mainstream anymore but it is still perfect for music and Orkut is the only way you’ll get a Facebook-like platform in Brazil.

Next plan out what you are going to say and do in this platform. Having a strategy includes not just why and where but also what, how, when and who. Important in here is who will be the voice of the company and if that ‘voice’ leaves will the social media contact go with them or will they be restricted to the brand. Also how do you identify who the person is behind the brand if it is the brand tweeting. Vodafone handles this by having all tweets identified by initials. You have to trust the voice of your company and empower them to tweet according to the schedule and when necessary off schedule.

Connections and outreach should be part of your social media strategy. Understand and research who the influencers are in your vertical and reach out to them. Do not try and make demands of them and do not try and buy space on their blog/facebook page/etc. If done to manipulate rankings, purchased blog posts or links can harm both the place the link/blog is posted and the company purchasing the link/post can be penalised.

When all this is in place and your ‘who’ is in place knowing ‘what’ they are saying ‘where’ and ‘when’ they are interacting, by what method (how), then you will be ready to launch your social media strategy and succeed where others have floundered or failed.

One of the things I think is most difficult to get right and yet is the most important factor for SEO is keyword research. The research that is done for SEO is quite different from the type done for PPC even though both are for search engines. This means while your PPC agency may have done some ‘keyword research’ it needs to be focused and refined for your SEO efforts.

Good keyword research is important because of the number of other critical SEO elements it affects (as well as PPC). The on-page targeting for non-cannibalised keywords is important. That is, don’t target the same keyword on lots of pages. The link building anchor text is important. Internal links and breadcrumb trails also use keywords. The titles, descriptions and URLs are also all affected by keyword research. Keyword research supporting a well optimised page can also reduce paid search costs. This one element of anything I believe has to be done right in order for everything else to flow properly from it.

In order to do good keyword research, the first step is to be open to new ideas. While seemingly fundamental, if a word or phrase sits at the core of branding and yet few use it, it would be more advisable to use the more popular word. If you provide “cookies” and yet insist on calling them “buttery flour chips” there will be issues with non-brand search exposures to your product. Google is good at understanding semantic relationships but even it needs some direction.

Write down groups of words relating to your product or service that you use internally. Next, expand that list to include what the industry you work in calls your product/service (a little spying on the competition). Expand that to how the media talks about your product or service. If you still have a small list, use this list set as a PPC keyword campaign and set the campaign to “broad match”. Keep it tight as a short term, low cost PPC campaign in Google. Crafting a compelling and relevant ad can be tricky but the insight gained from the keywords used to find your ad will expand your understanding of the keywords.

This should give you a core group of terms. Now, use the free online tools available to expand that list, refine it, measure the type of search traffic these terms generate and create a full comprehensive list of keywords that you think are relevant. The tools you can use for free are the Google AdWords Tool, SEOBook tool, and Wordtracker has some free data.

Next thing to do is map the strength of the competition and how much there is. If there are a lot of people competing for a term, or the top 10 are all very strong competitors, it may not be reasonable to target that word. Also be sure to check relevance. If a term has a high search volume but the search results are not relevant and the competition is strong then it may not be the right target.

By mapping the competitiveness of a word against the number of people looking for that term, you will get a very accurate measure of whether you should target that word. This is more complicated than slapping words into Google AdWords and dumping a spreadsheet of search terms and volumes which is what I’ve seen far too many agencies do. This adds real intelligence to your research and keyword selection. This will give you, and your business, a competitive edge.

One of the things I frequently get in trouble for is giving away too much information. I think that giving away too much insider information is what I am about to do below. My argument for sharing is that knowledge is power and by giving companies the skills and ability to understand what I do and how I do it, not only will they will better understand, appreciate and purchase services.

One of the things I get asked most often, next to “how do you choose an agency” is “how do you know if what they are measuring means anything”? Understanding what is being measured, how it is measured and how you can double check the measurements yourself if you choose to is an important part of understanding what your agency, or in-house SEO guru, is doing and how it is positively impacting your bottom line.

The below SEO ROI measurements can be used with different types of businesses. They are not restricted to one industry nor one type of measurement package. Where possible I’ve chosen measures which can be done easily and/or for free in order to keep costs low and understanding high.

In order for any measurement to have meaning, there needs to be a benchmark. Take the measurement you are going to track, record it and date it. If you then take the measure again, you have a point in time to compare it against. Always record your measurements at least monthly. For some sites weekly will be too frequently but less frequently than monthly may mean you miss something going wrong.

Visits from Organic Search Results – Measuring the number of visits in to your site purely from organic search results. To measure this, an on-site analytics package will give the most accurate representation of this number. Google Analytics is free and Omniture is my favourite but there are others available.

Number of Visitors from natural search Per Keyword – A breakdown of the number of visits from organic sources driven to the site via different keywords. The key here is that we’re breakingthis down by keyword and not just overall traffic. No other traffic such as direct or referred (from sites other than search engines or paid search) should be included. To measure, analytics must be installed and tracking incoming referrals. Most, if not all, analytics packages will break down incoming visits from search engines to give a per keyword value for visitors.

Conversions on Organic Traffic – This is a measure of the number of conversions made after a user clicked through from a natural search listing. More complex to measure as this does require the interaction between analytics and cookies. To measure, track user conversions where the last click is from natural search and leads to a sale or whatever you deem a conversion to be. To expand, measure where natural search is responsible for sending 2 or more visits by the same user to the site but where natural search is not necessarily the last click. Conversion rates = (conversions /visits)*100

Rankings for Keywords A ranking is where a particular site ranks for a particular keyword within a neutral set of search results. Neutral search results are where personalization and search history is not a factor in rankings – ie you must log out of Google and delete all cookies, close, reopen. Keywords are single or multiple words which are being targeted on page on the website being measured. To measure this, a neutral tool like Advanced Web Ranking which is able to gather non-personalised results. Failing the use of a tool, in Internet Explorer delete all cookies and history, close and reopen the browser and search for the term. This must be done prior to each search and if possible, a country-specific anonymiser should be used. Record that date this measurement was taken and link to the measured data.

These measurements, once you know what you are doing and have an action plan of execution, will help you see whether the changes are having an effect. Don’t worry if some changes take longer to show a difference – it can take up to 3 months for changes to be picked up by search engines.

For too many people for too long, SEO has seemed like occult sciences. Part research, part technical, part magic, search, and specifically SEO, has seemed something you had to trust someone else to do. Understanding more about how search works means not only being able to ensure it is executed in-house properly, it also means a better working relationship between you and your agency if you utilise one.

Setting up a search strategy may seem impossible if you come from a point of not understanding even the fundamentals of search, but information about the core of SEO – those elements which are most important to ranking – are published and freely available. What regrettably isn’t free is the expertise that comes from years of executing those theories.

To create and execute a search strategy, whether with an agency or in-house you’ll need an internal champion (not the search professional but a senior team member), a set of realistic goals, an understanding of keyword targets, the pages those keywords are associated with, a benchmark for everything – including search results and a gameplan for ownership of as much of the search results for your chosen keywords as possible.

The most important starting point is going to be identifying and establishing an internal search champion. Whether you get your search solution delivered in-house by a team or by an agency externally, there needs to be someone internal to your organisation who will bang the drum of optimisation, visibility and search awareness. Your champion can also manage the agency relationship or keep the internal team up to date with what is happening around the business to ensure everything stays co-ordinated. Lack of an internal champion (or champions) can doom even the best search strategy to failure as without that drive to keep everyone search-aware, it is easy to slip.

Once identified, everyone needs to understand what the goals are. These targets need to be realistic, relevant, achievable, and specific. There are a number of common criteria which can be measured provided the correct tools are in place. Measurements that go beyond followers, likes and fans are useful as they take the focus away from popularity measures and into measures of things which could increase ROI more directly.

The below SEO ROI measurements can be used with different types of businesses: Visits from Organic Search Results – Measuring the number of visits in to site purely from organic search result; Number of Visitors from natural search Per Keyword; Conversions on Organic Traffic; Rankings for Keywords.

Create a list of what you know needs to happen then establish an order in which they can be done as well as what has to happen first. They key elements of ensuring your site is on target are: Keyword research, technical audit & fixes, content audit and optimisation, link building, link bait & non-local content, social engagement.

One of the most difficult and time-consuming things to do, but the one thing which will last longest, is the keyword research. A well executed keyword research piece will last years. This can also be used to map the non-branded keywords chosen to appropriate landing pages. This mapping not only ensures the focus for the page is always clear, it is used in link building. Once benchmarking and the keywords and mapping has been done, other work such as technical audits, gap analysis and optimisation can happen. Keyword research is foundational.

As a search and social media “expert” (boy did I fool them!), I speak at a number of conferences through the year. I talk about the techniques behind ranking well but I rarely speak about the fundamentals and with the changes in Google’s algorithm this is more important than ever. Starting from a solid foundation will mean the difference between ranking well and failing. Starting with a solid foundation and following all the rules means you are also less likely to get hit by negative algorithm updates.

Businesses are experiencing increases in online transactions and more than ever, consumers are using search to drive both online and offline purchasing. Here are some tips about what you could do to help:

Have a strategy and a set of goals to ensure you understand what targets you are aiming for. It may seem overly basic but I have encountered countless businesses who have demanded a social media or search strategy without knowing themselves what success would look like. If your business has a target of being on Twitter, understand how it works and what the point of being there is for you. I can recount dozens of disaster stories for businesses on Twitter and speak about them as well.

Once you have a strategy and have mapped out the goals for a year (yes, 12 months. less is pointless unless we’re talking PPC) and understand what success looks like, map out the steps you are taking to get there and understand the time scales involved. Once you have optimised a website it can take up to three months to get those changes picked up in search. While we do have techniques in the industry to speed that up, misusing those techniques will get a site banned. Get a specialist in where necessary to map things out and deploy a task force of staff who will deliver the work needed to make sure your search or social media strategy can achieve success.

Do not treat social media sites as campaign platforms. Launching strongly in Facebook or on Twitter is fantastic but a long-term strategy is needed for these platforms unlike with a paid search campaign. Once a campaign has ended, if the Facebook page remains live it can become littered with spam and customer complaints. Failing to address these complaints can cause a long-lasting reputation issue that can cause customers to turn away.

Map out everything including keywords to pages, links that exist going to your site and your competitor’s site, your social media profile, the average competitors’ social media profile and your publishing table for the year ahead. Doing this will make search and social media campaigns much more successful. Failing to do this will mean you are not only left behind but a hap-hazard approach to publishing content may leave you with a gap at key holiday times. Failing to understand what most of your competitors are doing in the social media space can lead to unpleasant surprises and a perception of being ‘old fashioned’ or ‘behind the times’. Failing to map keywords to pages will leave both your SEO and PPC strategies lacking and your link building strategy will suffer for it as will rankings.

By starting with the basics now and mapping everything out for the next 12 months, not only will this help your site rank better but also help your link building go more smoothly, your content be seen by more people and your sales increase. Trying to make fast SEO changes risks disaster to make sure your plan covers a full 12 months.

With only 6% of companies ready to engage with customers on a regular basis and 82% of consumers actively wanting to engage with brands, the recent Alterian survey revealed a huge disconnect between businesses and consumers.

Social media reports may seem to be a dime a dozen at times and while there are lies, damn lies and statistics, this report casts a frightening light on marketing departments all over the UK and US.  No matter how nicely you try and spin the numbers, the Alterian report “Brands At Risk” is a damning indictment of the inability of brands to keep up with the rapid pace of change in the current marketplace.

The internet is essential to business.  Whether looking at the over 10 billion searches performed in March 2010 in the US alone, or the fact that 81% of the people surveyed for this study saw the internet as the ‘first port of call’ to compare products or services, the internet is an essential part of marketing.  Social media, with its requirement for engagement and response in an often public forum to sometimes embarrassing mistakes, can seem like an unnecessary time overhead and yet the Alterian study reveals it is as important a marketing channel as any other.

Only a tiny 5% of people surveyed trusted the advertising from an organisation, and yet 75% said it would have a positive impact on their experience as a customer if companies took the time to find out more about their needs.  While the time overhead involved in social media is greater than the time involved in traditional media, for the cost of an average TV campaign a much more effective and longer lasting social media campaign with a higher impact could be launched if this report is to be believed.

Social media is a relative newcomer on to a marketer’s radar but email marketing, a much more mature marketing channel should have a higher utilisation rate for customer management.  While 75.3% of companies taking part in a different survey said they received customer feedback by e-mail, only 23.1% said they tracked and measured the volume and nature of these messages.  These companies don’t know if they have a problem, let alone how bad the problem is.

New Media Age published survey results in January 2010 indicating that just 14% of marketers believe social media has a significant impact on their brand and 60% do not currently have a social media strategy for their business.  That is a serious disconnect between what marketers believe and that customers believe.  If the customer is always right then in this spells a disaster for many brands with a marketing department completely out of touch with the modern marketing age.

The Alterian and related reports makes for pretty depressing reading both as a marketer and as a consumer.  There is a serious disconnect between what marketing departments believe to be important and what consumers want.  This disconnect is serious enough that it is putting a number of large, well established brands at risk as smaller, more agile brands respond to this type of sentiment and move rapidly into social media for sales, marketing and customer service support.

Marketing departments need to take a look at this report and decide if they can afford to continue to ignore social media and the internet as a significant marketing channel.  While reach may be measured differently, the internet is vital for all brands, regardless of size or marketing spend.

Scared? Need to find help?  I have ONE FREE TICKET to the Monitoring Social Media conference to give away to the tenth person to tweet “I’m scared and *need* that free ticket to Monitoring Social Media from @JudithLewis STAT!” on Tuesday November 9th after 11:30am GMT (judge’s decision final. No cash alternative. It’s a free ticket, nothing more).  Missed getting a freebie? Get a 10% discount with code JL10

Social media is critical for companies to get right. With low barriers to entry and the perception of ease of use, it may seem enticing to jump straight in but disaster can lurk in the shallows as well as the depths.

The media is never shy about reporting on major blunders by large corporations and so with everything from “my Dell hell” in 2005 through to Dr Pepper ‘s Facebook blunder, the search results are littered with examples of social media disasters.  If it isn’t Habitat abusing hashtags in Twitter to promote their sweepstakes then it is Walmart creating a fake blog. Some of these activities are now literally criminal.

In the past the only thing wrong with doing something against the rules was getting the domain banned from Google.  While that ban could ruin a business, there was no criminality attached to it (except perhaps the increase in your PI rates).  In fact, some SEOs see getting a domain banned as a badge of honour and not the disaster it can be.

Suddenly the EU has changed all that and any SEO operating within its borders has had to also look at the legal ramification of everything they are doing.  Where once legions of pretend consumers lived and worked in the EU, they have all had to now relocate to another country.  These social media advocates trying to spread the message of love for the brand they ‘loved’ were in fact fake, and this only recently violated the law adopted in the UK under the Consumer Protection Act.

Where once love was espoused, silence.  Where once we were able to read about a boy wanting a PSP3 for Christmas or a couple driving their RV across America and loving Wallmart’s great staff while doing it, we have had to be content with the news or blogs written mostly about chocolate.  Where once a hashtag we followed about the protests in Iraq could lead us to a deal on garden furniture, now it simply brings us the news and drivel from spammers still seeking to invade the space.  This new law has made owning the social media space more difficult because we’ve been forced to tell the truth (or move our legions offshore).

Social media is vital for SEO though and a good social media strategy can result in increased visits and increased rankings in search.  It is important, if not essential, for brands to be active in the social media space, and do it correctly.  While the age of citizen journalism may not yet be in full flower, the power of word of mouth networks is now digital.  Mommy bloggers, passionate bloggers on food, alcohol, gadgets, and more all exist and have supporting communities, and tapping into these communities can yield rich results.  The deceptive ease of social networks and access to bloggers belies the danger in getting it wrong.

While social media blunders and gaffs abound, the question is how much brand damage is done by a bad social media execution.  Without the legions of ‘advocates’ able to be deployed at a moments notice, blunders in social media now have the potential to stick around for weeks if not years.  But is it really disastrous to have bad reviews about your business on Qype or someone have a moan about your brand on Twitter?  It depends.

The quickest way to screw up your social media strategy is to not have one.  Too many companies jump in with no idea of what they are hoping to accomplish by engaging over social media.  They have been sold a blog/twitter/facebook package by some social media guru and now they need to use it.  That lack of focus would never be allowed in a DM campaign and it shouldn’t be allowd in social media.

The website www.whatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy.com could be a good first place to check to see what you might want to get out of social media engagement if you don’t already have a plan.  But really, if you’re already Facepartying your Twitter check-ins on your BlogTube, it might be too late.
Stop.
Take a breath.
Plan.
Now get back in there.

SEO or search engine optimisation is the act of altering certain key aspects of a page to help the various search engines understand what the page is about and rank it accordingly.  Each page needs to have a specific focus and there are various elements on each page which need to be fine-tuned in order to ensure the web page is found, and ranks well, for specific search queries.

Some companies feel that this is a one-time job and once done, it should last forever.  There are several reasons why this is not true and why as a business, you need to ensure you are keeping up with the changes your site undergoes.

The algorithm Google uses changes daily in little ways but frequently in big ways.  All search engines running their own algorithm (Ask, Yahoo, Bing and Google) change the way they calculate rank associated with keywords to combat spammers.  This means that a sudden dip in orders or visits may not be due to seasonality, but in fact a shift in where your site ranks for its desired keywords.  There are programs to help monitor ranking on keywords both free and paid for.  When changes happen, being immediately aware will help you recover more quickly and save thousands in lost sales.

The delicate balance that is maintained by the search engines regarding ranking relies on several factors.  For a number of years, one of the factors with most importance has been incoming links and their anchor text.  The act of “Google bombing” was when numerous links with specific anchor text were pointed at a page, and that page ranked for the anchor text.  One famous example is the White House ranking for “miserable failure”. Since this exploit was discovered, the value of links has been steadily diminishing.  If your site suddenly stops ranking for a specific term, it could be due to changes to the way links are handled.

Search engines often reward freshness and so keeping your website content fresh and constantly changing could benefit your rankings.  These changes need to be carefully managed and should be overseen by an expert.  Simply adding content is not enough.  The content needs to be targeted, with proper optimisation.  Adding the wrong content in the wrong way could harm your rankings.

Mistakes are sometimes made when changes are rolled out and it can often take an expert significant time to fix the mistake of mere seconds. This can affect rankings and depending on the frequency of your site being spidered, the damage could last months.  Monitoring ranking is essential whether through searching manually, or using a software package.

There are several things you can do without incurring significant costs to your business to monitor your site and be alerted when more SEO is needed.  For a roadmap of necessary changes, it can be beneficial to invest in a technical site audit however these can cost thousands.  They will often supply a roadmap of required changes as well as a severity ranking and guidance on what and how to make changes in the future.  For the long term, these are a solid investment.

Register your site in Google’s Webmaster Tools.  If you receive a penalty or if Google has a problem with your site, this is where they will leave a message for you.  It is free to register and validate your site and the interface is relatively simple.  Once your site is validated, Google offers helpful pointers to dead/missing pages, problems it encountered or other issues.

Check your web analytics at least once a week.  Ideally you should be spending an hour a day with your web analytics to assist with the understanding of flow, conversions, bounce and related information.  Your web analytics may be where you first discover a problem.  Google offers an excellent free web analytics package.

Read, if possible, publications available free online which communicate important news and information about search engine changes.  As an example, a recent article alerted readers to a possible change to Google’s search results that may include “favicons”.  These images, seen when bookmarking or surfing to a site, can be made for free.  If search result pages include them, it could have significant impact on click through rates in organic results.

Awareness of changes to traffic and associated ranking changes for targeted keywords can alert you to changes as they happen.  These changes still need to be countered by professional search engine optimisation experts however by monitoring and having a roadmap of necessary changes in a site audit, you will be better placed to keep your SEO, and your site, always at the top.

The other night I was at a fantastic event at La Cave au Fromage which I highly recommend for corporate events. Introductions were made, wine consumed and conversation flowed. We got on to the topic of Google and someone made the assertion that Google “steals the last click”. So knowing the affiliate market as I do, I countered with “and the first click and the middle click and really anywhere that people use a paid ad in their journey.”

The gentleman who was arguing that Google was taking credit for that last click countered that Google was trading off others hard work.  For example, he said, Renault work hard making an advert about their new Clio car only for Google to force them to use paid advertising and stealing money as people go to Google to get more information about the new car.  Thus, since Google is stealing money from business, they are making money only because other people do the hard work for them.   Google thus was some sort of leech, draining money without making any effort. Well, even leeches make a bit of an effort and took thousands of evolutionary years to arrive at where they are.

Back when I started doing this SEO malarkey, the world was a different place. I’d been online for 10 years and in the previous 2 had heard more and more reference to something called “mosaic” and something about pages. You could see things on these pages! Unfortunately as someone who used raw telnet on a light computer this just was not possible but the online world was magnificent even without images.

Very quickly things changed and Windows 3.51 entered in to my life and the world got graphical. Google wasn’t around in 1996 but plenty of others were and many evolved in to the space with aggregators like Web Ferret and Dogpile bringing us a wider selection of search results. It was through Dogpile that I remember Google standing out. The results included actual on page text – a revolution!

What followed was a slow growth stage, then a heavy branding and marketing phase and now when certain parts of the world talk about wanting to find something online, they talk about “Googling” it. This came after only substantial marketing and technology efforts and the work that Google put in to their product should not be lightly dismissed.

Google did not simply form itself out of whole cloth and land a finished entity which cost nothing to develop and deploy – there’s millions behind this endeavour. It is able to make millions from its advertising platform because of the combined brand awareness and human nature.

I’m the first to admit to a love/hate relationship with Google. I miss the old keyword-stuffing days when it was easy to rank for anything. I’ll also be the first to admit Google is an effective monopoly in the UK and I think something has to be done. That does not make Google thieves, leeches, or sponges. They worked to become dominant and while I hope it goes the way of IM or Microsoft, we are where we are at the moment.

Google is not stealing money – they are not trading on the back of someone else’s hard work.  They are a dominant brand like Coca-Cola, Marlboro, and others.  Make the most of traffic they drive to your page by whatever route and get that conversion first time. Don’t blame Google for managing to win in a sector, learn to utilise them as a tool.

(rant over!)