The Problem with S.E.O. Shortcuts

Don’t get me wrong. I understand how important S.E.O. (Search Engine Optimization) is: In the age of Google, no company with a digital presence can be effective there without a fluent understanding of S.E.O., and an equal dose of diligence when it comes to using every tool at its disposal to make its content easily indexable and a breeze to find in searches. You don’t want to show up on page five of a search. You don’t even want to merely show up on page 1; you want to be in the top 3 of the search results.

How you do this, however, matters. Creating good content, properly tagging your pages, using bookmarking and sharing tools throughout your sites to help people find and link to specific pages are among the things you should be doing. Surrendering chunk of cash to one of thousands of shady S.E.O. outfits, however, is not a good idea.

I routinely receive correspondence like this from SEO companies trying to attract my business, and it makes me laugh. First, it’s SPAM, which is ironic in and of itself. (An S.E.O. company should know how to get to the top of searches about S.E.O. and shouldn’t have to SPAM anyone, right?) But what’s fascinating to me is that outfits like this show you exactly how they work. Check out the main body of a comment my trusty SPAM filter caught this morning on this very blog:

Penetrate awareness of your target audienceby using an integrated marketing strategy, which in many cases would include a well-planned website marketing strategy. If you can get yourself to become just a little “obsessed” with business marketing, then you’ll tend to read more marketing books, attend more business marketing seminars, and discover more marketing websites, newsletters, and blogs that will provide you with valuable small business marketing ideas and inspiration. If your website isn’t converting the way it ought to be, try to pinpoint its weaknesses and correct them. If the solution doesn’t jump right out at you, ask your associates, acquaintances, neighbors, or spouse what their initial gut reaction is to your latest print ad, website landing page, a business marketing postcard, or a radio ad. Get your products, services & business featured in blogs, websites, magazines, newspapers, and on TV. Make sure, of course, that you are allowed to include one or two links back to your website. This will accomplish two objectives: 1) You’ll probably draw in anywhere from a “trickle” to a “flood” of additional traffic to your website, and 2) Inbound links to your site from other relevant, high quality sites can help improve your search engine positioning (ranking) in Google, resulted in more targeted traffic and potential customers.

Nowadays internet marketers must use the right internet marketing tools to succeed. We use (company name removed) for all our marketing tools. Having good tools is essentail to success in the marketing world.

Thanks for the post great information.

Joe

No offense, “Joe,” but no thank you.

I won’t comment on the lack of punctuation or the typos. What I want to draw your attention to is the keyword soup Joe has cooked up for us. It’s amazing, really, how many keywords this guy has managed to squeeze into just a dozen sentences.

This basically amounts to what many S.E.O. “services” do. Unfortunately, cooking up keyword soup and ladling it all over the gears of a company’s digital properties is not intelligent, ethical or effective S.E.O. methodology.

Before you write me angry posts, note that I didn’t say all. I said many. I don’t necessarily mean your S.E.O. company.

Also note that this post is not an invitation to turn comments into sales pitches for your S.E.O. services. I will not remove sales pitches from this post’s comment section, but be warned that if any are posted, they will serve as examples of the very type of slimy and ineffective “tactics” (for lack of a better word) this post aims to illustrate.

Good content, frequently updated pages, making content sharable, building a community that will want to interact with your content and help others do the same, patience, diligence and attention to detail, these are the ways to think about S.E.O.. Hiring a company to spill instant keyword soup all over your websites isn’t. Be very careful who you hire for this type of endeavor. (Note: If the S.E.O. company you are talking to now assures you that they are not “one of these types of companies,” ask them to explain to you in detail how they are different. Don’t let them off the hook until you understand their explanation.)

Cheers.

(Now let’s just hope Google doesn’t tag me as a spammer for having listed all these random keywords in one post.)

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Engagement Paradigm: Focus on Lateral Action

So we’ve been chatting about engagement these last few days, and particularly vertical action (essentially brands addressing their communities from the top-down, and creating mechanisms through which their communities can communicate vertically with them using the same channels). When you look at corporate blogs, Twitter accounts and most branded community sites, this is mostly what you see: Vertical engagement between companies and their customers/fans/friends/users.

Likewise, the breadth and depth conversation we had last week also relates to vertical action: Brand managers, Community managers and/or Social Media managers finding ways to engage customers from a brand-to-community perspective. Even when dialog exists, even when the communication channels are truly 2-way, most of what happens is vertical: Brand-to-customer and customer-to-brand. And that’s nice, but it is only half the story: In order to understand the power of the social web, the power of communities and the power of truly engaged fans, you also have to tip your hat to lateral action.

What is lateral action? Simple: Lateral action is simply peer-to-peer engagement that happens within or across communities. A brand or community manager may have planted a seed along the way (a tweet, a blog post, a comment, a promotion, etc.), but once it has hit the community, the message/info/conversation is spread from customer to customer without having to be prompted by any official brand representative.

Another example of lateral action is WOM (word-of-mouth): Peer-to-peer recommendations are classic examples of lateral action. Rumors are examples of lateral action. Community tweetup invitations are examples of lateral action. RT’s on Twitter tend to be examples of lateral action.

Lateral action is what happens when the brand, the company, the official presence of a business gives its community the opportunity to BE a community by taking a step back and letting people share what is important to them with peers.

And lateral action is often the answer to the question raised last week about breadth and depth of engagement: Once a brand has managed to scale its community to several thousand or tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands, even), how can a team of community managers possibly engage so many people properly? It’s impossible, right? (This being the logic behind some Social Media directors’ decision to focus on depth at the cost of breadth.) Truth: Vertical action alone cannot serve the purposes of engagement (breadth mostly, but depth also) in the Social Media space… or even when it comes to fostering vibrant brand-centric communities in the “real” world. Lateral Action is the yin to Vertical Action’s yang. Lateral Action is how community engagement actually scales and transcends any breadth-related engagement limitations.

And though Lateral Action is nothing new, it is not a typical strategic mode of thinking for most Marketing professionals who have spent most of their careers working in traditional media (yes, even in the world of the web). This is why MANY Marketing folks still talk about the challenge of creating “content” even in the Social Media space. This is why advertising, messaging and marketing products are still among the first things marketers try to “plug in” when it comes to leveraging Social Media “channels.” This is all top-down thinking. Vertical Action thinking. And though it has its place here, it cannot succeed in the Social Media space without an equal (and in many cases greater) measure of Lateral Action.

Brand managers, Social Media managers, Community managers – whatever their designation may be – need to understand that their job isn’t just to produce content and constantly stimulate vertical engagement. There is only so much they can accomplish this way. What they must also do is empower their communities to manage themselves to a great extent and generate conversations and motion from within. Community members have to reach out to each other. They have to reach over to other communities. They have to share and discuss and debate and organize themselves. Brand Managers in the Social Media space have to learn how to be good hosts and patrons and supporters without being mother hens 24/7. This lateral action has to be fostered, nurtured, and built into their online and offline communities.

This is a crucial point for all brand managers to understand if they want to be successful in the age of Social Significance and Community Marketing. I hope the video and this post help you understand the difference between vertical and lateral action… and their importance our ongoing discussion of community “engagement.”

Tomorrow, we will bring our engagement discussion to a close with some far less strategic yet much more valuable advice than what we’ve touched on so far. 😉

Have a great day!

Bonus Footage: Oui, en Francais! (For my Francophone readers, a question: Since I can, should I also start shooting videos in French?) And since a few of you have asked me if I would say my name in its original French so you can hear what it sounds like – Two birds, one stone. You ask, I deliver. (And yes, I take requests.) Check it out:

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Perhaps the worst example of product endorsement in the history of web advertising

I was subjected to this horror earlier tonight while signing out out of my yahoo email and couldn’t resist posting about it. Here’smy 90-second rant:

Hey, FRS: This only works if the superstar athlete is a) still competing, b) 100% not tainted by doping allegations, and c) still a role model to anyone with half a soul.

Poor choice on all counts.

Looking forward to the Barry Bonds version of the ad.

Oh, and Lance… stick to selling Nike,Oakley and Trek. Everything else is off limits to you from now on.

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