1.) Overzealous link-building. Links are great to improve rankings, but just like anything too many of them could have a negative impact on rankings if they aren’t good links. One black hat strategy is to generate links through link farms. Black Hat SEO’s will use worthless sites to make search engines believe that pages are important. In the short term this works and rankings for those pages improve but Google is pretty good at filtering out. What happens when Google figures out what links are spammy? Google either devalues those links or blacklists that site.

2.) High Traffic-Low Relevancy Keywords. If Acme Co. sells custom pipe fittings, but the traffic around custom pipe fittings is low, then bad SEO’s might try to optimize pages for Brittany Spears to draw in traffic. Granted, the IQ of custom pipe fittings and Brittany Spears are pretty much identical, but the two things are very different. If Acme Co. manages to rank and draw traffic from Brittany Spears keywords, how many custom pipe fittings do you think they will sell? Chances are that people looking for Brittany Spears don’t care a whole lot about plumbing. While traffic volume is important it isn’t the be-all to end-all metric that people make it out to be. Just optimize for the relevant term that best fits the page!

3.) Cramming Only Keywords In The Title. We’ve all seen those search results! Custom Widgets, Blue Widgets, Red Widgets, Green Widgets. Uh, what? Remind your SEO that it’s still forward facing marketing – people see this. It looks like crap and doesn’t make people click on it. Write meaningful title tags for people, not robots.

Mmmmm, Donuts. While they happen to be Homer Simpson’s favorite “food” they also happen to be unhealthy. Naturally, that hasn’t run Dunkin’s out of business. Thankfully, we can still get our overly sugary breakfast treats. However, like most food places, Dunkin Donuts is diversified and its big push item is coffee?

How do I know this? Well, I happen to own a TV and whenever I see a Dunkin commercial it’s not for the donuts, it’s for the coffee. While I like donuts, there are mornings I can’t make it through without coffee. Dunkin knows this, and when they go marketing they want you to think of them as a coffee place that offers donuts and not the other way around.

Just look at their home page:

Coffee cup in the logo, coffee beans, coffee drink and a coffee bean cartoon. How many donuts are on that page? Uh… that twist thingy?

That should clue you into what your competitor is concentrating on – what is actually on the page. The name says Donuts, the content says coffee. Let’s look at what SEO experts change when they talk keyword strategy. There are 3 big things, the URL, Page Title and Meta Description. The URL is a hard one, they really can’t escape going with dunkindonuts.com. The page title and meta description offer some pretty concrete evidence that the double D want’s a sip from the coffee cup.

The page title is:

“Dunkin’ Donuts Coffee | Buy Coffee Beans Online.”

Buy coffee beans? What about donuts?

The meta description makes the coffee theme get really obvious:

“Buy Dunkin’ Donuts Coffee Beans Online – ground coffee or whole coffee beans shipped by the pound in Original Blend, Decaf or flavored coffee beans; sign up for regular coffee delivery service. Shop online for coffee gift baskets, coffee makers, Dunkin’ Donuts store gift certificates and coffee lovers gifts.”

They used the word “coffee” a total of 8 times! There are 49 words in that description, and over 15% of them are coffee. If you read that out loud to yourself it sounds like they wrote it on their 3rd pot of coffee.

Why did they try to target coffee? Well, the business reason is that coffee is the 3rd most consumed beverage on the face of the earth and therefor has a pretty big audience. The profit on coffee sales are also pretty good. The SEO reason for it though? According to Google, there are over 2.7 million searchs a month for just the word “coffee” – compared to about 135,000 for “donut.”

What audience do you want to go after? The one that is 2.7 milllion in size, or a paltry 135,000. That’s what I thought.

Is it effective though? Well, from a business perspective I can’t say. Who knows how much coffee Dunkin Donuts sells through its website. It does however, rank 10th for “coffee” in a Google search – your results may vary, and theres reasons for it, not the least of them personalized search.

Although 10th isn’t in the golden top 3 results its not too bad considering it gets beat out by Starbucks, Wikipedia, Folgers and the like. That’s tough competition.

If you’re in internet marketing, metrics and data are your part life (or at least they should be.) Permit me to be overly buzzwordy, but using data driven decisions to increase ROI should be a goal. However, understand and interpreting data is what separates the good from bad decisions. In the fast paced world of the internet, people are all to eager to jump on the latest fad in fear that we might miss some incredible opportunity.

Compete, Inc. has released information that shows that Facebook now directs more traffic Google. If you haven’t been paying attention for the past year, every month somebody declares that Facebook is the new Google, and as a person that has chronic ‘this-is-too-good-to-be-true’ syndrome, I don’t buy it.

Here’s why, and this is a shocker, because it’s not a data driven decision. It’s also nothing new, and it’s been said before. People using Facebook or social media aren’t looking to be sold to, they are looking to see what their friends are up to. Aaron Wall said it best, Social Media traffic does not buy.

When people search for something they are actively looking for a solution to a problem. So while Social Media gets more traffic, it doesn’t convert. Traffic by itself is worthless. I’d rather have 1000 unique visits per month with a 10% conversion rate than 10,000 visitors with 0% rate.

B-b-b-ut branding… conversations with the customer… my excuse to use twitter at work!? Sure, those are good points (ok, 2 outta 3 ain’t bad), and any company’s marketing mix should include Social Media efforts, but as lead generation activity, SoMe falls flat compared to search.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go get all these buzzwords off me.

If you run a pay-per-click campaign you are probably very concerned with how much money you spend per click. It should be a goal to target to your audience instead of just putting in a few keywords and setting a budget. To help PPC managers achieve targeting most PPC programs allow for ‘negative keywords.’ That is, words that will not bring up your ad when searched for. Here is an example of why this should be done.

If you use Google reader you have seen the following style ads:

Served up by Google these ads are displayed based on the content of the blog post. It’s clear what is happening here. The PPC manager for Del Opticians is advertising on Google’s Content Network and probably trying to target the keyword ‘glasses.’ There is a slight problem here. The article talks about 3D glasses, not glasses to correct vision. From the consumer perspective, someone who is interested or search for 3D glasses probably isn’t interested in vision correcting glasses or contacts. Adding ’3D’ as a negative keyword to their PPC campaign could help reduce costs without affecting conversion.

I thought I was doing a good thing. I appeased the mighty Google god; I listened to Matt Cutts; I made W3C-compliant pages. But Google hates me for listening just as much as they would hate me if I disobeyed all the rules. Either way, what it amounts to is that I can’t try to make a great page or a horrible page.

While I’ve been away a long time, I have not been out of the loop — quite the contrary. I started a search marketing internship and have been learning quite a lot of information from my new bosses. One thing I have found out about the mysterious world of SEO is that I knew a lot more than I thought I did – but oh, do I have a lot to learn.

After diving into this position, eager to learn as much as I could one thing has become abundantly clear: I don’t get Google, and I think that’s their intention. For one thing, let’s start with a concept known as LinkJuice. I’m not sure where the term originates but every time I hear it I flash back to high school and hear Nelly’s “Pimp Juice.” Yeah, I both hate the term and laugh every time I hear it. LinkJuice basically is this weird value that Google and other search engines associate with links to and from other sites. If you have an incoming link from, say, Microsoft.com, the value is quite high and your search engine ranking supposedly improves. However, if you have a link from, say, buycheappills.com, there is no value coming in and it does nothing for you.

Where this becomes controversial is in the concept of paid links. Way back when SEO got started, bad SEOs, or “black hats,” tried to game the system and would exchange links for cash. Google realized this and quickly started to crack down on it. One of the ways this is combated is using “nofollow” which basically removes any of the aforementioned LinkJuice. So, to be a good guy, if you were given money for a link you were supposed to use “nofollow” so that a domain wouldn’t get any juice it tried to pay for. The idea is that it’s supposed to keep the Web honest.

Well great, but now you’re getting into some gray areas. Lisa Barone from Outspoken Media points out that if Apple were to send you a new Mac Book to blog about, that constitutes as a paid link. However, if Mom and Pop bakery is handing out free cupcakes and you tweet or blog about it, it isn’t a paid link. Obviously Mom and Pop don’t intend to get links (or at least for this argument they don’t), but they are giving you product just the same as Apple. So really what Google wants to go after is intent – but how do you measure intent? Moreover, at the Google I/O conference, Google handed out free G1s to attendees who went out and blogged about it or sold it on eBay. Isn’t the LinkJuice and publicity Google got from that paid? As far as I’ve read, there was no “please make every link ‘nofollow’” from Google.

As if to add further confusion about the way Google works, rumors have it that they are considering changing how they value “nofollow.” Currently, if you have three outgoing links on your Web page then each link gets 1/3 of the available LinkJuice. If you use “nofollow” on one, then the remaining two get 1/2 each, and so on. The fear and rumor is that Google is changing it so that no matter what you use “nofollow” on, the LinkJuice doesn’t redistribute. In other words, if you have three sites and one uses “no-follow,” then the two remaining sites would still get 1/3 each instead of getting 1/2. What’s the big deal? Well, if you’re going off the earlier example of paid vs. non-paid links, somebody is getting hosed.

If you go to mom and pop bakery, review their cupcakes and blog about it, they’ll be getting less of the normal share of LinkJuice and a portion of your LinkJuice goes into thin air. It effectively demerits the authority of your site. It’s confusing because it’s my understanding of “nofollow” that it was supposed to allow Webmasters to give the most applicable share to content generated sans fees or gain by the author, basically “honest content.”

The past few weeks of research and work combined with the few events that have or might take place have left me wondering exactly what the heck is the whole idea behind this game. It’s been said by Seth Godin that your content is your SEO, and that is certainly true. An SEO shouldn’t be trying to game Google and scam the system but Google does ask you to do a few things to provide clean honest content – and then ignores it and treats all SEOs like they are evil. Leading me to ask: What the Google?

After having my trusty Blackberry 8830 for two years, the trusty-ness was starting to deteriorate and I started looking to upgrade. Let me just preface this by saying that I am well aware that comparing a two year old device to a brand new device isn’t entirely fair. On the other hand, Android is a new operating system so it isn’t as polished as the Blackberry OS, and for the most part the Blackberry operating system hasn’t changed much in two years to begin with.

T-Mobile G1 and Verizon Blackberry 8830

Hardware

Blackberry 8830 and T-Mobile G1

The Blackberry 8830 taken from the T-Mobile G1

T-Mobile G1 Keyboard

Screen
Obviously the G1 wins this hands down. A physically larger screen, more resolution and it’s a touch screen. To be fair, the 8830 Screen isn’t bad. It’s certainly up to the task for the device. The G1′s screen is 480×320, or iPhone size, but it is physically a bit smaller. The Blackberry sports 320×240 which is quickly becoming sub-par for Smartphones.

T-Mobile G1 Screen shopping the Android Market

Android fails miserably at copy-and-paste. It’s really a half baked joke. You can only copy and paste from certain fields, but if you want to copy and paste from an email forget it. It’s particularly aggravating if you’re trying to add a 64 character WPA key for a network in. Because there is no computer interface you have to manually enter it, and if you get it wrong you go back to start. It’s a painful process. However, that is really the only aggravating aspect I found. The interface is snappy and responsive the drop-down “notification” bar links you to incoming messages and alerts so you don’t have to hunt for the correct icon like you do on the Blackberry.

T-Mobile G1

Both the G1 and the 8830 have voice dialing. The G1′s voice dialing is just as bad as it’s copy-and-paste, while the 8830′s has been dead on. It is really odd because I recently got updated to the RC33 firmware which includes voice search for Google which works excellently.

Battery
The 8830 is the clear winner here. Lasting the better part of a 3 days even with the original battery it trumps the G1. When I first received the G1 I killed the battery in 6 hours, but the battery life has continued to grow. So the jury is still out on what lasts longer. The 8830 has a 700mAh, while the G1 is at 1150 mah. THe hope among the Android community is that further firmware updates (IE “Cupcake”) will increase battery life. Right now, average use gets me the course of the waking day, ~6am to midnight. While I have enough to get me through the morning, throwing it on the charger at night is easier than remembering the charger for work.

T-Mobile G1

So I’m kind of creeped out by this, but at the same time it is interesting. Google has a new service called Latitude that will let you share your location with your friends via Google Maps. The Google Maps software installs on your phone and puts an icon of your location on Google Maps that you can share with your friends. Thankfully, you have to add them first so if someone finds your email they can’t automatically see where you are. Also, if you’re deliberately trying to hide you can set your location. Parents with not so savvy teens (does such a thing exist) could use it to keep track of their kids. There is a catch though. It only works with some phones:

Click on to watch a video and find out more about Google Latitude:

Even if you don’t have a phone you can still log into Latitude to view friends location from the web.

To check out Google Latitude visit: http://www.google.com/latitude