I’ve been thinking a lot about how SEO specialists market themselves and try to attract new business. Truth is that most decent SEOs don’t!. They never need to advertise their services, never mind solicit new clients, so it surprises me as much as it irks me whenever I hear of people I know being sold a bit of an SEO dummy.

I’m not interested in outing anybody so for the purposes of this article, let’s change the name to something suitably Glaswegian…BAWBAGSEO. This list just serves as an example of stuff I’ve discovered going on that I believe no decent web or SEO professional would ever involve themselves in. Furthermore, if you are a business and considering outlaying for some SEO on your site, steer clear of any of these scenarios…

1. BAWBAGSEO carries out SEO work for Client A and gets Client A good results. BAWBAGSEO then approaches client B, who is a competitor of client A and offers to optimise client B’s site for a long tail search term that Client A hasn’t optimised his for. You read that right…SEO’s offering out sloppy long tail seconds to client competitors. Very poor.How to avoid: Ask your SEO if they have any other clients in a similar sector to yours and what their policy is relating to this.
2. Aside from providing SEO services, BAWBAGSEO also runs 3 day “all you can eat” SEO courses at a £1000 a pop so participants can then carry out SEO successfully themselves (alongside running their day to day business)
3. Scaring client B into SEO expenditure (preferably supplied by BAWBAGSEO) by showing them their site’s W3C validation error report when BAWBAGSEO‘s validation report has twice as many errors as client B
4. Guaranteeing page one results for long-tail, traffic-light, highly specific search terms. A recent post on the consistently excellent Hoboweb blog titled How many clicks does a no 1 ranking in Google get compared to No 2, 3, 4 & 5 threw up some pretty interesing data that shows how much potential traffic can diminish past the first few results. Of course, using the Google Keyword tool, you can find out roughly how many searches across the Google network there have been for a specific search term. I reckon it’s even tougher now because the first page of search results is getting so clagged up with Google Places, Adwords and other Google bolt-ons.  Remember folks..technically, a page one result could be position 10 and you’ve got to ask yourself how much of a return on your SEO investment will this get you?
5. Beware the one month contract.  Any SEO relationship needs to be set up for the long haul.  If an SEO tells you they can achieve everything they need to achieve in one month they are lying.

I guess we all know companies similar to BAWBAGSEO. Has anyone uncovered any other unsavoury SEO practices they’d like to share?

Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do? and all-round Google sycophant/visionary (depending on your point of view) sat in on a pretty amazing Q&A session with some top Google execs at Davos a couple of days ago and has published the exchanges in full on his excellent Buzzmachine blog.

Here’s a summary of what I think are the six most salient points:

1. There will be more transparency with Adsense.
   Google is willing to  “consider” disclosing the revenue split numbers behind the AdSense program.
   This has been a contentious area for ages as nobody quite knows how profitable this element is for Google.
2. Not that hot and bothered over the Ipad’s arrival.
   “You might want to tell me what the difference is between a large phone and a tablet,” Schmidt said.
   Ooh. Schmidt the bitch!
3. The importance of applications.
   “The phone is defined by the apps.”
   Do you reckon they’ll get to work on the Google Toilet now then?
4. The economy is improving.
   “The recession is very much behind us.”
   So speaks one of the largest, most visible (and profitable) companies in the world.  As a company that specialises in speeding up during the slowdown, this will be an interesting period to see just how far of the competition Google can stay.
5. Increased focus on display ads.
   “Display (ads) is likely to be our next really big business globally.”
   So, the initial Chrome billboard advertising wasn’t a one-off.  This is a pretty big statement when you think about it.  Google, an online company, is going back to print to maximise it’s advertising revenue.  Watch this (billboard) space.
6. Better partnerships with printed media.
   Marissa Mayer promises better ads and support for pay systems.
   This has been a bit of an Achilles heal for Google in 2009.  It’s not a case of the newspaper industry needing Google more than Google need them or vice versa..they need each other….I still believe there will be a major battle soon involving Newscorp, Google and Microsoft but a general improvement in relationships with the printed media will stop Newscorp amassing too many troops in the early stages.  And remember – anyone can annoy Rupert Murdoch.

Well, they’ve not actually said it as such.  It’s just a conclusion that’s extremely easy to come to.

When I’m not forced to suffer the commute to work by the swine flu express I’m cycling to work.  There’s a couple of pretty major billboards by the Clydeside Expressway and I was fairly surprised to see a Google Chrome advert up there this morning in place of the usual Cheryl Cole “you’re worth it”/Davidoff Adventure nonsense that’s usually up there.

Excuse the quality of the image.  It doesn’t get properly light again in Glasgow until mid-March.  What the image does illustrate though is what passing motorists will see, which is not a lot.

Whilst I’m a big fan of the uncluttered element of the Google homepage, this level of minimalism on physical advertising seems a bit short-sighted.

The advert features a mostly blank page with a big Chrome logo and the words “Chrome by Google – A fast, new browser. Made for everyone.”

They wouldn’t be able to make this claim until they had a version of the Mac version of the Chrome Browser ready.  I wonder how long they’ve been sitting on the Mac version just so they could tie it in to their marketing campaign?

More importantly, what’s their thinking behind this ‘real world’ marketing campaign?  They’ve only really attempted it before once, when they promoted  its enterprise office and collaboration suite.  Now the big push is on,  with a pretty significant spend on UK billboard and newspaper marketing and  what they are hoping to achieve is significant market penetration (I hate those words) for Chrome as the operating system.

And they still need traditional forms of advertisting to achieve this.

As the way we search and the way we want need our computers to operate become increasingly linked, there is a pretty hefty battle looming.  With Microsoft already committed to spending over$100million dollars on marketing Bing alone and Windows 7 already past Apple’s OS market share, this latest move from Google is all the more intriguing…

Place your bets…

It’s Christmas!

Whilst I don’t officially play Santa until next week (my daughter’s playgroup) I’m up for spreading a bit of Christmas cheer now by giving away ten Google Wave invites.  Granted, it’s a bit of a cheap present to give away seeing as I got them for nothing but that’s not the point.

All you have to do is drop me a line at via the contact form.  First ten past the post are in there.  In the meantime, check out this Xmas card design that I did from 2005.  Summed up 2005 really…

When news is free

I HATE getting the bus to work.  By the time I’ve walked to the bus stop, waited on a bus, got on the bus, caught swine flu and been deposited outside the Ubisan Office, I could have cycled to the office almost four times.  Aside from the risk of communicable disease and being attacked by Rottweilers named after Celtic football players, the only plus is I get to sit down and read a leftover newspaper for half an hour.  Even if it is The Sun.

Don’t worry, I washed my hands afterwards.

Whilst I’ve contributed to the chatter myself about newspapers feeling the pinch and trying to charge for or limit content it opened my eyes even further to the way things are going on my last bus journey.

The Sun Sports section carried a story about Andy Murray’s final third round match with Verdasco and because of the paper going to print it didn’t know if the Murray victory would be enough to qualify him for the semi’s of the ATP Tour Finals as it depended on the result of the following match.

To find out, The Sun encouraged you to log on to their website to find out.  What did I immediately do?  I logged on to the BBC Sport website (stored as one of my favourites on my phone) and read the story there.

Rupert Murdoch would hate the fact that:

1. I didn’t buy the paper in the first place.
2. I went to the BBC for the news rather than the website he wants me to go to.
3. The information was free.

Everybody has their own source that they trust for news, views, restaurant reviews etc whether it’s a friend, somebody at work or God forbid, a search engine!   What’s your source?

For those that are interested, Murray didn’t get through and here’s the links to the two stories.  I guess Rupert got me to visit in the end.  Doh!

The BBC. (Headline: Andy Murray knocked out of World Tour Finals at O2)

The Sun (Headline: I MUZ BE OFF THEN )

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been tracking Rupert Murdoch’s various outbursts on Google (calling them “kleptomaniacs” and “parasites” for indexing their content in it’s Google News pages), attacks on the BBC (“thieves”) and general outbursts about the internet in general. Top of the heap, and possibly the most controversial is making loyal site visitors pay for content that was previously available free.  His methodology for doing this is a bit mixed up though as he knows he needs search engines.

How do I know he needs them? Because the process for blocking ANY website from being indexed by Google takes just one line of code but News Corp haven’t done it yet.  It is fairly imminent though.

Newscorp content to be exclusive to Bing?

To spice things up a bit, the rumour doing the rounds is that News Corp are about to make Bing the only search engine that indexes News Corp’s content.

That’s right…unless you use Microsoft’s Bing search engine, you won’t find any content in Google that’s come from USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and almost 2000 other titles across the USA alone.  That is a lot of content and presents Microsoft with a great marketing opportunity along with some extra oomph to their search engine market share.

It won’t change the game overnight, but if News Corp can convince other publishers to come with them, it could present a real problem for Google.

My personal opinion is that any alliance between News Corp and Microsoft is doomed to failure.  Whilst I’d love to see a Murdoch/Gates “riches to rags” descent on the scale of Randolph and Mortimer Duke in Trading Places, that will never happen.  What I do think  is that both of these companies, by trying to swim against the tide of everything that the internet now stands for, are about to get their noses bloodied.

Given the increasingly negative noise around Microsoft (overpriced, underperforming and downright shoddy operating systems…it’s taken them how many versions to get even close to OSX?) and let’s not rant on about the negative impact and damage that News Corp causes, is it just wishful thinking when I wonder if they are lining themselves up for a bit of a fall?

News Corp’s last major attempt at assessing where the internet is heading and spending money accordingly was their acquisition of Myspace in 2005 for $580 million.     How bad has that proven to be? His timing could not have been worse.   Check out this fairly indepth recent interview (Content on Youtube not blocked by SKY btw!)  Has he learned anything this time round?

I think not.  What do you think?