Social Media and the increased levels of shameless self promotion

There is one aspect of social media that is the main reason that many of us in the SEM world are currently fuming at Shoemoney. It started by a simple post on his website on why he had a problem with SEO experts. This of course has lead to many responses and some have been very heated. There also been defenders of his cause. And to top it all off, Shoemoney is now holding his radio show and has called out the SEO experts to defend our honor and our trade.

I disagree with most of what he said and how he said it, the one point I can agree with there are many self proclaimed SEO experts out there who continue to give our industry a bad reputation. That is where my agreement ends. What would be even worse is if this was a calculated move to help out with some additional publicity for his upcoming season 3 of his radio show. Now lets just step back because this is why social media and I have a problem. What now makes the internet great, the giving anyone the opportunity to be part of a community. And being able to voice their opinion in the subject is a great thing. However purposefully putting together an article to cause a commotion and get people who are passionate and good at what they do to help further their cause is shameful.

Now this isn't going to stop anyone from doing this in the weeks ahead and this will happen again and again. It is one of the easiest ways to become known and a higher readership. One last item that makes my head spin is the fact that I would consider, as would many others, Jeremy Schoemaker aka Shoemoney to be an SEO expert. He knows how to manipulate a search engine to obtain a #1 placement. In fact he has won an SEO contest, you may recall the term "redscowl bluesingsky". And to give a really bad example Wikipedia even calls him an expert as well.

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Advice for the SEO/SEM Upstart

For those of you webmasters or individuals with HTML skills out there, I wanted to write this post for your. You may or may not have heard of Search Engine Marketing or Search Engine Optimization. But you may be trying to make a decision on whether of not to join in to a fast growing industry. Let me say this 5 years ago I was in the same situation. I was just out of college with an entry level potential in several areas of programming. I can remember the day vividly. Sitting down at my kitchen table and looking through the help wanted section of the newspaper, I came across a two line ad. HTML experience wanted Submit resume to .... A few days later I received a call for an interview, so in I went knowing nothing about what type of HTML experience they were needing.

After my interview was over I learned they were looking for someone to help out with the new SEO department. They explained to me what it was and at the end of the interview they asked me back for a second interview. On the drive home I was thinking to myself I don't know about this SEO stuff is it really something I can make a career of? By the time I got to my second interview I still hadn't decided if this was right for me. It was a on a Friday afternoon so they were nice enough to give me the weekend to think it over. It took me a talking to a few of my friends and family members and I decided to give it a go...Now 5 years later I look back at that few moments of indecision and laugh. I laugh because I almost missed a great opportunity. I have grown with a successful company through several promotions and I now oversee the SEO and PPC departments as the Director of Search Marketing. Not to shabby. Don't get me wrong there have been many long days of work, a few weekends here and there and a lot of hard work in there as well to get me where I am today.

It has been worth every second, I get to compete with some of the best minds in the country. I can see my efforts pay off for my customer through increased revenue and additional website traffic. If you are willing to never stop learning as the internet can change in the blink of an eye. And you can't let yourself get discouraged if your technique doesn't improve your clients rankings at first. Keep looking into the leading industry websites, forums and blogs to soak up as much information as you can to become better. And the when you find out what works you have to realize that it is what works for now and not what is going to work in a year from now. That is the nature of our business but that is why I love it.

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Why not to believe your SEO/SEM Company?

Now don't get me wrong, I want to give the benefit of the doubt to everyone I come in contact with. This includes people I meet professional and casually and either in the real world or through the internet. But this is business and business is business and if I or someone you know is paying for a SEO service, I need them to be completely honest with me and look out for my best interest.

With that said I need to inform you of a few things that if told to you by your SEO/SEM company why you should be afraid.

1) We guarantee you top placement in any search engine
2) Your site needs to be submitted to a search engine every time a change is made
3) The page title isn't important
4) They put a high importance on Google Page Rank and it is all they talk about
5) Inbound links are not important
6) We like to use hidden text to manipulate search engines
7) We use doorway pages
8) We put links on 1x1 gif's or jpg's
9) They overly repeat the same keyword phrase anywhere on the page
10) They don't use XML sitemaps and robots.txt files (ok this one is so bad but it is stupid not too)

You are probably asking yourself have I heard any of theses things. If you have answered yes to any of those please keep reading as I am going to explain why and what are the reasons behind these statements.

1) This is one of the most frequently abused statements when it comes to SEO. I read it many times a day out on the web; it is said by companies both large and small. The main reason it isn't a truthful statement is do to they can not control the search engine algorithm they are claiming they can guarantee ranking. I don't know a single person in my professional circle of friends that has been slipped any secret by an employee at Google, Yahoo or MSN. They don't have a Magic 8 Ball or Crystal Ball that lets them see the inner workings on the search engine. And by the way we can't control when they will release an algorithm change to help combat something they see as a spam tactic. Now knowing that hopefully you are asking yourself why I should believe someone who says that. Well only you can answer that. I am not saying that a professional Search Engine Marketer doesn't have a bag of tricks they use to help manipulate search engine rankings as we all do; I am just saying we are smart enough to realize that the internet is a volatile word that we can't control.

2) You may have read my previous post about 100,000 search engines spammers. The same holds true for someone who claims that it is necessary to submit to a search engine every time a change is made. This is a ridiculous statement as any website that offers a true value to the search engine will continue to come back to your site they may come back every month, week or day for that matter. If they come back that frequently why does it make sense to waste the time submitting a site that will cause the spider to come back who knows when? What determines the frequency they will return is based of many factors that I am not going to get into today.

3) Every web page on your site can have what is called a page title. It should be a unique combination of words and will reflect a very brief summary of some where between 6-9 words. I can't stress it enough that every page is a chance to market your business to a web surfer, so why would you market every page the same. Go through your site and take a look, if you find anything that is duplicated find out why and then get it changed.

4) If your conversations with your SEM provider are dominated by talk of Google Page Rank you should be concerned. This feature of the Google Toolbar is one of the most talked about items in our industry. There was a time that the information it showed was useful to our efforts. But it was quickly abused by me and my peers. We found that the higher the page rank for a page we could find that would link to our sites the better. Now Google even admits that they don't update this information frequently and that they have their own newer internal page ranking system that they use. One piece of information you probably didn't know about is that your site can be outperformed by another that has a lower page rank. It is true so once again I ask you why they would be stressing so much importance if a site with a lower page rank can out perform my site.

5) Any good SEM professional knows this is far from the truth. Think of Link Building in this way, a link to your site is like a vote. Now the more links you have to your site the more votes you get and without more votes a presidential candidate would when the election (sorry my attempt to bring in a current event). Search engines ranking algorithms take linking into account when determining the position of a page within its listings.

6) This should seem like a simple concept to avoid however it is very enticing for an entry level SEM. Having the ability to have text on a page that is used for search marketing and another set of text used for your potential customer makes so much sense. However this is a clear violation of every major search engine out there. And by the way they do provide guidelines for webmasters to follow in case you didn't know. Google Guidelines Yahoo Guidelines MSN (Live Search) Guidelines

7) Doorway pages can add many pages to the size of your website and trust me size does matter. What they can also do for you is add additional opportunities for web surfers to find your website. Now you probably said this sounds like a great idea more pages and more visitors. Well not exactly the problem with this scenario is how they are typically integrated into your site. They are usually buried somewhere where no human being could every find them and that is what the problem in lies. If there as one concept you need to understand is that if anyone ever mentions a technique and states that they are going to implement a technique that is strictly for a search engine you should doubt what they are saying and get a second opinion. Because any technique that is used for the sole purpose of hiding something so only a spider will find it is a violation of their guidelines.

8) I am not going to go in to great detail here as this one is simple anytime a link is placed on an image that is smaller than a few pixels it is a bad thing. These are hard to find if you are looking for them, they are usually hidden in a corner somewhere which decreases the chance you will mouse over them. To find them look at your HTML and search for either width=1 or height=1 if you do this and see the other one in an image tag you might have a problem. If you do find one look to see if it is surrounded by a hyperlink tag it will look like >a href=""<. If you find this get it removed as soon as humanly possible. Remember hiding is a bad thing.

9) All of the items I have gone over with you today this is the most noticeable. Look at your page is there any phrase that is repeated dozens of times; check the title, description, and keyword tags as well as the page content an image alt tags. If it looks like to many repetitions it is, now don't be alarmed if you see it repeated once or twice in all these areas you have nothing to worry about. This is a typical setup for a webpage. If you do see this and don't get it corrected your website has a good chance of getting banned. Get it corrected and everything will be ok.

10) For those of you who don't know what an XML sitemap or what a robots.txt file are you are ok. An XML sitemap is the simplest way that a webmaster can tell a search engine what every page of your website is and where to locate them. A robots.txt file is a page that no person usually sees and it is the first page of your site that a search engine spider asks for when it starts crawling your site. What it does is tells them how you want them to crawl and index your website. And better yet if you link to your XML sitemap from within the robots.txt you have told them not only where it is but how to easily find the pages of your site.

This was a lot of information for anyone to take in. It is extremely important for the well being of your online presence that you follow the above guidelines. Your website is your most important sales channel so why would you want to hurt it. The simple answer is you wouldn't, however if your website contains any of these bad things, then that is exactly what you are doing. It may not have an immediate effect on your site but when it does your website will no longer be included in their search engine and then what are you going to do. Don't say I didn't try and warn you.

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