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.

There are some really easy steps to improving search engine rankings that are often over looked. One of the big ones is actually putting keywords in your title. How often do you see a title that simply offers the brand name? Quite often! In fact, lets take the Pepsi challenge! Both Coke and Pepsi have their brand names as their homepage titles. However, Coke gets bonus points for using Cola because it can help them rank for more than their brand name. The simple truth is that Pepsi and Coke’s page titles could be anything they wanted to and they would still rank for their brand names. Why? Because the URL takes care of ranking for their brand name. As an added bonus, sites that link to Coke or Pepsi probably use the brand name as the anchor text. You will notice though, when you search for pop or soda neither Coke or Pepsi show up.

Search results for the keyword 'toilet paper'

What does this have to do with toilet paper? Nothing and everything. Searching for ‘toilet paper’ brings up another one of those missed oppurtunites. There is one brand that ranks for the keyword toilet paper, Charmin. What’s in Charmin’s page title? You guessed it, toilet paper! Guess what, Charmin still ranks for ‘Charmin’ too. It’s good to protect your brand name, but if you’re looking to gain more traffic from search engines, consider placing the actual product or service in the title.

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.

It’s about the conversation – not the number of friends or followers.

Social Media has become the buzz word of the day on the internet. Carrying websites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace and turning them to the glorious way for marketers to make money without spending money. It couldn�t be farther from the truth. For one, if you get everyone in your company to Twitter, you�re taking them away from their real jobs. To successfully work in Social Media you need to have a person who understands it and to continually monitoring and developing the plan.

Having a person dedicated to social media does not mean hiring a full time Twitter intern. Social Media is not simply creating Facebook profiles. Social Media is away for companies to open up dialog for consumers and to achieve granular details about the client like never before.

What really attracts people to Social Media is the fact that they can reach people they wouldn�t normally have access to. If you aren�t responding and actively engaging your customers through your social media initiatives then you�re paying someone a lot of money to screw around on the internet.

It�s laughable to see corporate Twitter accounts being followed by 50,000 people � but that corporate account is only following one person. What is that? There is no interaction, there is no socializing, and it�s not social media. It�s almost more laughable when a corporate account follows 50,000 people and still acts the same way the corporate account following one person does. If you don�t occasionally respond to the people that follow you and ask questions it isn�t social media.

Social Media also isn�t another place to jam your brand down consumer�s throats. I follow about 180 people and I probably actively pay attention to are the people who post funny things or post interesting topics. The people who just post a bunch of links to new products � well I don�t follow very many of those. I’ve also started to trim down the people who I don’t find interesting or hold conversations with.

I recently saw a ‘social media expert’ tweet about how they thought it was funny that people with less followers than them would make posts about how to gain twitter followers, and then followed the tweet with a profane hash tag. That person followed some 3,000+ people, what do you think the percentage of people she actually communicated with out of those 3,000 people was. I’m guessing less than .01%. It’s pretty easy to get 3,000 people following you if you follow 3,000 people. The real expert will be the person following 3 people but its followed by 3,000.

Another way people misuse Social Media is they don�t have a plan. �We�ll do it because the kids are into it� isn�t a plan � well it is a plan, but not a plan for success. If that�s your attitude, it�s time to wake up because the internet isn�t going anywhere. You as marketers have the ability connect and get more data about your consumer than you have ever had. Find out what consumers like and dislike about the product. Somebody somewhere hates your product � get over it.

Social Media isn�t Facebook, isn�t Twitter, isn�t MySpace. Don�t get the idea that being on the most platforms means you�re social media forward. You can get more results just using Twitter than all the others combined if you know how to leverage it. Social Media is conversation and dialog with the consumer. If you allow the consumer to leave feedback on your site and actively us the information it supplies that�s more social media forward, and useful than creating a thousand Twitter accounts to have some phantom Twit post to. Social Media is trendy – today it’s Facebook and Twitter, tomorrow who knows?

Do you think the only place people are going to talk negative about your product is on your Facebook page? Why not take the opportunity to defend your product head on, or realize you have serious problems and actually fix the damn thing. It isn�t the 1930�s anymore � word gets around fast when something�s wrong. Because you don�t let people see bad comments on you blog doesn�t mean nobody will see them.

As Dave Culbertson of Lightbulb Interactive points out even most large corporations don�t get Social Media. A big example of this is Ford, which shouts �We use social media, we�re hip and cool� but it fails to be nothing more than the same old tactics of marketing days of old. He calls companies that do this �social media chickenhawks.� See Ford has social media initiatives � but they don�t use them. Dave explains that Ford started off with a neat idea but dropped the ball by only offering up one vehicle model, one that isn�t even sold in the US yet to and then didn�t even bother to interact with the consumers they lent the car to. This point is clearly lost on Ford as their �Social Media Guru� � Scott Monty, who responded to Dave and just didn�t get the point Dave was trying to hit home. Ford should be letting people review their cars on their site � much like most electronics site allow users review products.

It�s about the conversation. Engage the consumer or take the �Guru� off the resume. Because if you�re just doing the same thing you�ve always done, you don�t need a new title, unless that title is Social Media Chickenhawk.

There have been a lot of social media efforts I’ve seen latley that just don’t cut it. It’s a really obvious problem that gets neglected when social media outlets become buzz words on the evening news. Usually it starts out something like this:

Boss: Hey! I heard about this Tweety or Twitter or something like that on the news last night, are we on that?
Marketing Head: Ummm no.
Boss: Well we should be, get us an account ASAP!

First of all, before I get negative, it’s great that companies are trying to stay current with marketing trends. Ugh, I hate that word, trends. That’s really the wrong word for this. Marketing Fashion is a more appropriate term, or maybe marketing fads. If there is one thing to remember about the internet, it’s that it is constantly changing. While Twitter is vogue right now, the shelf life in indeterminate. We can sit and debate how long Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, etc. have to last or we can approach everything with the same question: How can we use this to leverage our company?

Are you ready for some internet marketing blasphemy? Some companies don’t and/or shouldn’t have Twitter. The reality of Twitter, and social media outlets is that it’s addictive. We might go out there as internet marketers to post a new ad, or to tweet about a cool new company product… but then you get sucked into the vortex of poking that attractive person you met at the networking event last week or retweeting that hilarious YouTube video. Which is a really quick way to get fired because internet marketers have a lot of legitimate work. So you think, I know… hire some college kid to do some tweeting for the company. Ok, great, but now you have someone else doing the exact same thing and wasting a whole lot of time and money.

If you can’t answer the question, how can we use this to leverage our company? Don’t do it! Better yet, look at ways you can actually use things to leverage for the company! Traditional marketing, or what I like to call “dumb marketing” like a dumb bomb is a lot of “drop from a plane and hope it hits its target.” Dumb Marketing is the same approach, the flashy ads, the billboards, the TV commercials, etc. Create a big enough presence and eventually that translates to sales. And look, it’s proven, it has worked for eons and that’s great. There’s a big problem with that, it’s costly and it the actual sales generated isn’t all that great considering how many people see an ad.

So, again, how can we use social media to leverage our company. If you’re a traditional marketer your probably think of this word as “incentive” but internet marketers call it engagement. You need to create incentive, or engagement with your social media efforts. If you don’t give your followers something to tweet about then fire the college intern you hired to tweet because you’re wasting time and money. Besides, interns are supposed to learn something and teaching someone how to twitter takes 30 seconds. As marketing differs between industries I will leave you with the same question: How can we use social media to leverage our company? Stop thinking about following the fashion and try to think about why social media is such a buzzword. I’ll give you two big hints, it’s the data and the interaction.

Time Warner just doesn’t get it. Recently, the cable and internet provider announced it’s tiered data plans. The base price on which bandwidth you want. For $15 you get a 1GB bandwidth. If stream more than 3 hours of video a month, you will quickly reach that limit. Ultimately, you will be paying $150 a month to get “unlimited” use of the internet. Ridiculous, right? You’re not alone, even the government is scratching its head.

Time Warner Cable 2008 Broadband Stats, source Wired.com

Thankfully, the government is starting to take notice. New York Rep. Eric Massa is attacking Time Warner’s tiered data plan calling it ‘AIG-style Greed.’ Massa points out that they can’t justify this cascading plans on the grounds that it is needed to remain profitable, it shows in their SEC filings. To me there are only a few reasons in my mind to consider regulating an industry, and one of them is a monopoly. Time Warner’s business model is still profitable for them, and the decreasing cost in providing internet connections means that it is under no danger. As Wired points out, Time Warner’s costs are going down by 12% this year, and subscribers are up 10%. What this is, is pure unfettered greed on Time Warners part. These tactics are nothing short of stupid. It’s another example of how big media corporations fail on developing innovative solutions to a changing market.

If you’re thinking about switching internet service providers, more power to you. However, it might not be an option for a lot of consumers in out lying areas who only get high speed service through Time Warner. Even if you have the option think about what it means for business. If you stream video, you essentially pay for it with ad revenue. That is, ABC, NBC, CBS, etc are making money off of you by justifying higher price ads. This is not uncommon to how regular TV ads work. The more viewers of a show, the more money it is to buy an ad.

So what happens when people stop watching streaming video? They go back to cable, where Time Warner gets a better share of profits by being able to up-sell you on DVR’s and cable packages, not to mention make profit from the networks. So if you’re a network executive you should be really ticked off that Time Warner is going to start killing off your internet viewers. Whether or not you realize it, TV’s future is on the internet. Networks are able to control the entire channel, there’s no distribution costs to providers like Time Warner.

You can see where this is going. Time Warner can’t make a profit off streaming video as its business model is. So like print media it has decided to pass the cost to the consumer instead of trying to innovate to match the times. The difference is that given how needed the internet is, and the ubiquitous-ness of it, Time Warner knows it has the consumer by the short hairs.

This just echos everything we have seen from big business over at least the past decade. Companies need to understand that consumers control the market. It is no longer the case of “you buy what we make.” Give the consumer what they want! With social media, web analytics and the plethora of data available companies hsould have a much better idea of what will work than they ever have. Just in case they don’t get it, start with this simple rule: Pushing the cost to the consumer to make obscene profits doesn’t work! It might work in the short-term, but in the long-term you are doomed. If you don’t believe me ask: AIG, Chrysler, GM, OPEC, and about 75% of Wall Street. Truly innovative solutions are enormously successful. Capping bandwidth isn’t innovative, it’s an archaic reworking of the AOL-model of charging by the hour for internet use.

Read : Wired – Congressman Wants to Ban Download Caps

The Colonel has dropped the chicken and hit the pavement. KFC is paying for the repairs in exchange for a chalk stamping with the KFC logo and the phrase “re-freshed by KFC.” Now, I don’t put KFC and refreshing in the same sentence, but this ad campaign is pretty interesting.

The idea comes Cone, a Boston-based cause branding and corporate responsibility firm. The idea is to generate some goodwill among corporations in the current economic situation. Whatever it is, filling potholes is a good thing!

[Read] AdAge – Need a Pothole Filled in Your City? Call KFC.

There’s a few reasons why you want people to follow you on Twitter. The first and most vain reason is that it gives you the impression people care about you. That may or may not be true, but there are genuinely valid reasons. Among them is increasing brand awareness, either the company you work for or the “you” brand. Sometimes it can be tricky to get people to follow you but there are some things that you can do to increase the odds.

1. Follow those who follow you. Nobody likes to give and not receive. If someone takes the time to follow you, follow them back. For the simple reason that it increase the chance they will stick with you and not drop you a few days later.

2. Follow Others With a Larger Following. There’s a really quick way to gain at least 5 followers in one day. On Twitter, go to Find People, then Suggested Users and follow all of those people. You don’t have to keep following these people, but you will be surprised how many people you might gain.

3. Post often on a wide range of topics. I did a little experiment the other day and posted at least every 15-30 minutes for 6 hours. This combined with No. 2 netted me 20 extra followers in 1 day. Remember though, quality counts. Sharing links, quotes, and videos are all better than “just refreshing my Twitter feed because I’m bored.” Although shaking things up a bit good, nobody wants to know boring details.

4. Email/Facebook/LinkedIn/Blog etc. Adding your twitter feed to your email signature, integrating it with your Facebook status or profile and LinkedIn profile are all ways of exposing your feed to new viewers. Integrating your blog to update your Twitter status keeps new (and possibly original) content of your

5. Comment, ReTweet, Reply. Every time I get a reply from Guy Kawasaki I swear at least one other person follows me. The catch is, to get Guy to reply, I have to comment on something he does. It helps to actually mean what you say, if it’s obvious you’re just trolling the waters of someone else’s twit success then they probably won’t reply. Don’t forget, the reason these people are followed is because they have something of value to give and provide interesting content. You should provide value if you expect people you don’t know to follow you.

As I have pointed out before, one of the best things about marketing on the internet is the ability to watch the results of ads and to see what is working and what isn’t. However, as Andy Atherton at Advertising Age has pointed out, that’s really not the big selling point anymore. It’s not very surprising that the biggest selling point to market on the web is that it reaches the most customers. Yet companies still spend 95% of branding money in offline channels. It seems really odd that companies fail to act on web advertising with more capital. Now, there are those that notice it. Certainly, if you noticed CNN or the NY Times homepage this Monday were covered with a banner ad at the top half for Apple, and we have discussed how Porsche capitalized on mobile advertising.

As Atherton notes, the internet advertising industry has grown faster than any other medium before it. It still has ways to go. Is it the uncharted territory of high dollar web campaigns that have companies sticking to traditional but declining mediums like radio and print? Possibly, but I believe that is also that the people with the know how and chutzpah aren’t out there yet. In a medium that is just barley 15 years old it means that at most, online marketers have probably a decade of experience under their belts. Which might seem like a lot but, given how fast the industry and medium has developed it really isn’t.

Online marketers are continually struggling to find out what works because they have so many options. We now know pop-up ads are a quick way to irritate the customer, but how long did it take to find out something thats so obvious? It isn’t like TV had been, your option was a commercial or sponsor a show, the end. Banner ads, text ads, flash ads, viral video, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. The list can go on, and just because it works for company A, doesn’t mean it will work for Company B.

Online marketers are now faced with the largest demographic of any medium, and they don’t know how to handle it. You are now starting to see colleges offering degrees in eMarketing and eCommerce and even still these degrees can change frequently. You will start to see companies advertise online more but not because they are figureing it out, but because print and radio and to a lesser extent TV aren’t working as well as they should.

Advertising Age: Digital Marketing: Is it time to forget Measurement?