I thought I’d do a bit on how an SEO should be these days:

1. Coding smarty - while being an SEO doesn’t usually need you to be an AJAX guru, you need to have at least basic knowledge about HTML, CSS, XML, DHTML, as well as stuff like PHP, SQL and configuring Apache servers
2. Copyrighter by blood - no one can do SEO unless they know how to write content, because SEO is as much about search engine optimization as it is about human optimization, meaning that people need to love those titles so that they choose them from a million optimized titles
3. Marketer - an SEO needs to understand product placement, and target users, and how to include the offline marketing plan as well as branding into the website
4. Restless - sometimes SEO campaigns mean working three days straight with one hour sleep because you need to meet a deadline, or because you need to catch an indexing date (however sometimes you need to wait for a customer to give you content which means dolce vita)
5. A pretty good salesperson - I don’t know how it is where you come from but here people fail to see how SEO is better than online advertising, so you need to teach them like you would a six-year-old and you need to keep pestering them until they say yes. And then you need to justify the cost, etc.
6. An Internet fanatic - an SEO needs to keep up with a lot of data to keep up to date and beat other SEOs. also, he needs to know what tools to use when, and how to find different ways and techniques through which to promote the websites he works on
7. Ex-podcaster, ex-blogger, ex-youtube poster, because he needs to have a background in social media, and an understanding of the problems and opportunities it brings as well as a thorough understanding of how to adapt to fast moving tech discoveries
8. Not on myspace - while I understand that it could be a marketing tool (in the US), it’s a place for immature teenagers and embedded crap. What happened to the personal website? Connect how you want, but try to make it look good (like LinkedIn, or Twitter, or even maybe if there is no other choice Facebook)
9. Launcher of at least one viral campaign which went - experience is key and social media is really starting to offer its perks to those interested in investing in it; just don’t get too attached to one site, they’re not usually meant to last
10. 100% white hat - if there’s one mortal danger in SEO it’s black hat techniques which if not completely brand new and unexplored as well as permanently maintained and refreshed can totally ruin months of hard work making a site usable (i’ll post in a few days about position 60 penalty for buying links)

That’s just a quick list I made to give you some ideas, naturally there’s a lot more and maybe there’s room for a sequel to this list, anyway, leave a comment, let me know Don’t forget to subscribe to the feed or who knows what you’ll miss out on. You can also subscribe by email.

This is another of my posts targeted at small businesses and basically dispenses marketing rather than SEO tips, but I figure it’s a nice read for all you SEOs reading this as well.

I personally felt, when the MacBook Air appeared, that it was the most awesome thing ever. It was slim (I love slim), it was powerful, it had the newest high-tech, and it fit in a Manilla envelope (which is really an awesome way to present its thickness). Also, Steve Jobs has that charisma that allows him to present even the most banal of items in an incredible way. Which is why Apple will lose immensely when he steps away from the scene. But enough about that, point is when I bought my laptop earlier this year the Air had just been showcased and I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I loved the little Caps Lock LED on the key and I loved many things about it.

Slowly though, I got more and more disappointed with it. Firstly, it came to my country at a price of 2000 euros (over 3000$) and only the model without the SSD drive. Secondly, I found out about its many limitations and I chose to get an HP laptop, with a decent configuration and a decent cost-to-features ratio. Also, it’s cool too, and to my amazement had a Caps Lock LED.

However, time passed and CERF 2008 happened (which is a computer fair here) where Orange brought a bunch of MacBook Air models for you to play with, testing out the new 3G. And I was wholesomely unimpressed. Firstly, it didn’t really look like much, just a smaller laptop, the size wasn’t that shocking. Sure, it was slim, but… not impressively slim. Secondly, the oh so awesome Caps Lock LED was a small thingy which wasn’t even visible in daylight. Mine is a bigger one and highly visible in direct sunlight but as I have noticed myself, the whole idea of the LED there is insanely stupid (although it’s still cool). That is because when you’re typing your hands tend to move over the caps key blocking your line of sight to the key thus the LED itself. HP chose to put it to the side of the key where it is visible while keeping your hands on the keys, but still becomes invisible when you start moving the hands on the keys. Which is why a simple indicator above the keyword is way better.

Also, the whole gestures thing… Not the most useful thing… I mean it’s cool to be able to rotate an image quickly, but you can do that with one click. And when you try for example to pinch the image and you fingers slide and you end up rotating the image instead, that’s annoying. But otherwise it’s all so pointless. The scroll gesture is substituted on most new laptops with the scrollpad next to the touchpad, and that only needs one finger, and the pinch thing is pretty hard to do, my friend had to try a few times before getting it right and I only could do it with the thumb and a finger.

It’s so like Apple to promise a lot and then, when you get to look at the actual product, you start to see the flaws, and you start to notice that most features are in other products out there and they’re actually better thought out and with more value than the Mac. It’s so like Apple to overcharge by hyping their products and then acting like it’s the coolest thing out there.

As Seth Godin said, you must promise a lot, and then overdeliver. This wasn’t it with the Air and it’s not with most Apple products.

Try not to disappoint your customers and think of how hyping will affect you: it’ll bring you instant sales but will hurt you in the long run. There’s bound to be an application here for SEO but unfortunately I have no time to go into more detail.

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This is an interesting one for pay-per-click users: which is the most clicked position and why. Now, while the answer may be obvious to some of you, bear with me because it’s not always so. Read on to find out why.

All right so the main thought that springs to mind when I tell you which position is most-clicked for AdWords is that it’s the one above the actual results, and partially you’re right. But that position is not without its problems. First of all, people tend to skip right past that highlighted area, and that’s for two reasons: the first is that that result does not look like a result (it only has a short title and first below it is not the description but the link, which tends to throw people off); the second is similar to the first, in that when scanning through the page that green area with little information does not register so quickly.

So what does this mean to an advertiser? Well, for one we have a problem, because you pay a lot and you get less optimal results (which I think is pretty unfair of Google). But let’s look past the issue here, how can you actually use that spot to get a high conversion rate? Two things: target commercial searches (”technics RF290 buy online”) rather than generic or research searches (”headphones” or even “technics headphones” in some cases), and second is match the searcher’s query. This is crucial if you want to actually make use of that top position ad. Again, there are two reasons for this as well and they are as follows. First is that as I said before people tend to scan the page when they make a search, which is why you need to anticipate and fulfill his expectations, meaning that you need to think like a searcher and give him the lines he’s looking for. Do keyword research, optimize campaigns so that ad text matches searches, use strict match for keywords (which is generally a good idea) and most of all do user testing. Start with web histories to which you have access (if you have a Google account you’re bound to have your own searches saved) and look through them at what you searched for and what you clicked. As for the second reason for doing this, it’s because you are not alone up there, there are up to three competitors with you which all target the same things.

But enough about that top space, what about the rest? Well, I for one tend to click on ads when my intentions are commercial, unless I either have an established merchant from which I frequently purchase, or I find one that seems promising within the first page of that Google search. But if an ad up there matches my expectations I will click on it. What that means is if I’m looking for a merchant who ships for example laptop skins (i’m looking and i’m looking but in my country such a thing is rare) I’m going to click on that ad saying “laptop skins - design your own and get free shipping” or something along those lines. And a strange thing I am beginning to see more and more recently is that normal results are written better than ads, which is problematic to say the least… Why would you spend money on an ad without making it better than a normal result. It’s like buying a billboard in the center of the city and writing a lot of small text on it with illegible colours just because you didn’t want to spend money on a designer.

Moving on, I like to do case studies and usually competitor analysis because it teaches you a lot (and opens your mind to different approaches). So I took this query and looked at the ads. All things equal if it were me doing that search I would click the result on the right titled “accommodation in london”. Why? Because it matches my search and my expectation. Anyway, here’s a screenshot before we go any further:

And I took this image and put it through an interesting web service called feng-gui which analyzes layout and it came up with:

And as you can see this is a heatmap which shows us that the first place someone looks at is in fact the top ad from the right and then the first search result itself, after which returning to the ads on the right. This is of course not a bulletproof way of testing such things but it should show us an approximate tendency and my thought is it’s right.

So basically you do want the top position in ads but you will want the top right, and the one on top of the results is only shown in one in three searches anyway (Google tells us there’s a 33% chance) so in a sense it’s wasted money.

One last thing I wanted to ad is never underestimate the value of a good ad, so hire a professional to write it. It will return the investment back to you in the necessary time.

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Late last April I read an article on Cnet about “Google’s pointers on countering web spam” and I felt there were some issues that were correct and some that were… off. I mean I’m down with Matt Cutts and how he’s like a rockstar nowadays but I feel that all this “the Google way is the best way” is to much fanboyism. I mean, that’s how Google got big, by questioning stuff and doing one better.

So, on to the article, the first part was about spammers. Matt Cutts said: “Spammers are human. You have the power to raise their blood pressure. Make them spend more time and effort…If spammer gets frustrated, he’s more likely to look for someone easier.”. And he’s almost right, I mean, hackers are people too and if you piss them off… no, wait, you don’t want to piss hackers off. I mean, a decent enough hacker will be able to break anything if motivated enough, and in a way, it’s like burglars do: if you have a shiny metal door with “burglarproof” written on it, it’s a downright invitation, whereas if you keep cool, you’ll get some spam, but nothing big. It depends on whether you want to annoy the little guys or attract the attention of the big guys. Think this through before you complicate things.

“Use captcha systems to make sure real people, not bots, are commenting on your site. He uses a simple math puzzle–what’s 2 + 2?–but he also likes KittenAuth, which makes people identify kitten photos.”

This is perhaps one of the things that annoys me most about the internet: captchas. Small, awkward texts, illegible to machines (i doubt anyone actually uses machines to read captchas) and pretty much illegible to people. They’re annoying and the really are pointless. They put captchas once on stumbleupon, I almost stopped submitting stuff, that’s how much they annoyed me. As for their reputation of being unbreakable… Slim chance. There was an actual case where a porn site asked people to enter captchas to view some pics and the robot could thus bypass any captcha out there. So captchas are very easily breakable. Not to speak of math captchas (i think i can rustle up a script to detect the + sign or the key words and then do the math), or that kittenauth, which although fun (and highly unaesthetical) can be broken with a script that matches the photos to google searches. All in all captchas are nothing more than an imperfect way to stop spambots. A much better way would be to actually challenge people in something fun, like a flash game or puzzle. Or heck, just trust people and moderate yourself later, you need people to join and comment. And akismet and bad behaviour do a neat job of keeping spam comments out… Why complicate things?

“Reconfigure software settings after you’ve installed it. A little modification of various settings will throw bots off the scent. “If you can off the beaten path, away from default software installations, you’ll save yourself a ton of grief,” he said.”

This is a blur of advice but what this means is the simple stuff, like changing the default username for wordpress (admin) to some strange intergalactic hail, like @>FE{@342dasA. Guess that, spammer. Also, some changes as to permitted post behaviours give you a buffer against spam. That means make all commenters need to be trusted (have at least one approved comment) and you’ll escape a lot of spam…

“Employ systems that rank people by trust and reputation. For example, eBay shows how long a person has been a member and how satisfied others are with transactions with that person.”

This is a way of tracking how much a person has contributed and thus how likely he is of compromising your blog. For example, someone who comments a lot is less likely to spam and lose his status than someone who’s new. Reward people for being there. Wordpress usually does this via number of comments, but feel free to expand on that.

“Don’t be afraid of legitimate purveyors of search-engine optimization services. “SEO is not spam. Google does not hate SEO,” Cutts said. “There are plenty of white-hat SEO (companies) who can help you out.”

I’m not really sure what this has to do with spam, but it seems in some places people view SEO as a bad thing, like they’re cheating Google, which is really not true. I know hackers who do white-hat SEO (the good kind) because they feel spamming and all that should not be used.

Anyway, enjoy this lightweight article, I found it refreshing.

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