So when DC Comics, publisher of Batman, Superman and my favorite the Green Lantern, decided to relaunch their entire line of funny pages, it got people talking.

It started in August of 2011 with the relaunch of DC’s flagship title: Justice League #1. We have a first printing copy of Justice League #1 here in the office, which has jumped from it’s $3.99 cover price in four short months to selling for $12 or more today on eBay. According to the Hollywood Reporter (never thought I’d say that on this blog) this new incarnation of the Justice League #1 sold 361,138 copies since it’s August launch and that doesn’t take into account new digital distribution mediums.

Why am I blogging about this? This is an SEO blog, and while I am certainly a known Comic Book geek, this is a bit of a departure from our usual. I’m blogging about this because DC Comics, for the first time in years, beat Marvel Comics in sales. Simpler characters like Spider-man and the X-Men are huge sellers and DC Comics has long lived a close 2nd to Marvel in sales figures.

According to 2011 Year End numbers, DC Comics took 32 of the top 50 spots for comics sold in 2011. This boost, this advancement, this buzz and revitalization of a struggling comic book market came from the inspirational leadership of co-publisher’s Jim Lee and Geoff Johns. These two asked the difficult questions and weren’t afraid of the answer.

Last year at SXSW Interactive, I spoke alongside No Bullshit Social Media author Jason Falls at an event where Jason posed to the audience that we as a people have stopped asking the right questions. We’ve stopped challenging the status quo.

Jason was absolutely right!

We are far too accepting of things as they are. Imagine where DC Comics’ sales would be right now if they hadn’t started asking the hard questions? If they didn’t challenge the status quo and take a risk relaunching every single one of their comics. Where would they be if they’d decided not to make a change because of fear?

DC Comics took a risk, made a leap, grew some balls, and dove in, face first. What can you learn from this? They certainly could have failed horribly, and hey, maybe 2012′s sales numbers will show DC back in the number 2 spot (which I doubt), but this is what it takes to succeed. This is what it takes to win.

It takes kryptonite evading, bat signal responding, blackest night surviving, amazonian trained, faster than a speeding bullet, big brass testies! It takes balls! It takes fearless, limitless, and inspired determination.

In a digital age, growing a pair helped DC Comics sell print funny pages.

What is fear stopping you from doing?

Retargeting is where your behavior is tracked by browser cookies, little snippets of code that record where you stop online, and then use that data to target the most relevant ads to you wherever you browse.  Google has done this for years, using even the body of your e-mails in Gmail to serve you text ads and so forth.  More advanced examples of retargeting are like the ads I get for SEOmoz because I attend their workshops and am a subscriber.  I see their ads everywhere, well, theirs and OkCupid’s.  Don’t ask.

I’m an identified target for their retargeting ads as I’ve been to the site a few times, though the ads don’t know that I’m already a customer.  Joanna Lord from SEOmoz wrote a great piece this week about the best retargeting companies, worth a read if that is something that might help your business.

The future however, is looking to be more and more guided by your user behavior, and Google’s recent privacy policy change has me believing that this isn’t about Google+ beating Facebook as a social network, but instead about collecting your data so Google can sell retargeting advertisements and continue to grow its advertising revenues.  (Especially in light of Apple making more net profit in Q4 of 2011 than Google brought in in total revenue for that period.)

While you’re logged into Facebook or Twitter, Google cannot track your behavior.  Google doesn’t know what you say to your friends, and cannot then take those conversations to better target advertisements to you.  While you’re using Gmail, or Google chat, or now as they want you to be doing, using Google+, they can (according to this new privacy policy) record all of your personal information in a format that they can share across all Google networked sites, thus “one privacy policy for all of Google”.

The internet, and by which I mean people like me who always think this stuff is more serious than it ever is, has been going crazy about the shift in Google’s policy.  There is even a new search modifier called “Don’t Be Evil” that adds Twitter and Facebook results to Google’s new Search Plus Your World results that right now only favors Google+ results.  (Even when that profile has never been posted to.)

Google makes their profits from advertising and it may be that Google has predicted a major drop or has seen a decline in these advertising channels and they’re scared.  Fear is a great motivator, motivator enough to have Google CEO Larry Page threatening his own employees to hop onto the new more aggressive Google bandwagon or start looking for a new job.

I for one will not be creating a profile for Image Freedom on Google+.  I don’t believe in it as a platform, I see it not as an innovation, but instead as a data mining resource for Google.  I also don’t know enough business owners who use Google+ to warrant my jumping onto that bandwagon.  There’s a joke about Google+, “Occupy Google+, It’s Lonely Here” because people on the most part weren’t looking for a new social network, they tweet or they Facebook and Google+ hasn’t revolutionized anything worth motivating a migration in their online behavior.

It is a time for caution.  In light of SOPA and PIPA being shot down by overwhelming online protest, I feel like Google is sliding into those cross hairs as their Privacy Policy now favors Google more so than it favors the user.  It’ll be interesting to watch as the internet as a whole has a chance to react to this shift to a darker, greedier Google.

Regardless of what the next few weeks look like, this is going to be a hot topic inside the search community for a long time to come.

Ryan wrote, “Every now and then we have customers who want to cancel their service because the SEO effort has not generated an ROI in terms of sales through the website.  While this is certainly reasonable to assume, it’s almost an unfair proposition given the amount of external factors unrelated to SEO that can drive a “sale” on a website.”

I went on to write a blog comment on Ryan’s blog, but apparently six paragraphs is more than the Livefyre comment engine he’s using could handle, so I was left with few options outside of writing this here blog to tackle some of what Ryan addressed.

In a nutshell:  NO ONE EVER SAID SEO WAS EASY.

It’s a sexy idea.  This awesome tactic called SEO that can make new people come to your website, even sexier when you automate that process so you don’t have to pay much time or energy helping it to succeed.  It’s one of those things that Dave Ramsey would say sounds a little too good to be true.  Curious why?  That’s because it is!

There are companies out there with entire teams dedicated to SEO, men and women who every day are out there generating content, creating linkbait, drafting infographics, leveraging social networks to build relationships and gain links, etc.  There are in-house SEOs, there are outsourced SEOs, there are fat ones, skinny ones, SEOs who climb on rocks!  You get the idea.  It takes PEOPLE to make SEO work correctly.

What Ryan is saying here, is basically shifting the blame off of his SEO offering and onto the client for not knowing as much as he does (should) about creating that inbound marketing funnel.  That is the SEO’s responsibility, not the client’s.  The SEO should provide the client with a complete snapshot of their internet marketing, not just a view so drilled down and focused on what can be automated or what comes out of some algorithmically created keyword report.  Our job doesn’t stop there.

It is straight irresponsible to assist someone in optimizing their website for the wrong keywords.  Taking the skilled SEO consultant out of the equation, you wind up with websites that only offer a local product, being targeted nationally for keywords that couldn’t possibly provide a buying audience.  Sure that national keyword is going to get more searches in a month, but someone in Phoenix, AZ is not even able to buy from someone whose services are only offered here in San Antonio.

Google isn’t stupid, and if your website is highly ranked for keywords that it does not properly deserve to be ranking for, the “bounce rate” (people who leave without visiting additional pages of a website) will be obvious to Google.  If I search again seconds after clicking on that site, that activity, we call it Click Through Rate, that “bounce” off of your website will hurt your SEO, not help it.  That shows Google that your website wasn’t worth staying on for people doing that search, and Google never forgets.

You cannot automate this stuff.  It takes real people.  It takes real people, real consultants, who understand the ins and outs of earning links to a website, optimizing a website, giving advice on how to improve a landing page, or how to improve that inbound funnel.  The SEO’s job isn’t to take a spreadsheet and do some SEO busy work it is to ADD VALUE to their clients sites.

We’re a little weird in our industry as Image Freedom has a very small team.  The standard is to get investors and then hire a bunch of low paid workers who will do as much SEO busy work as as they can, so you can then overcharge your clients, and wonder why they want to cancel a few months later for not seeing a return.

We’re “weird” in our industry for doing the exact opposite.  We didn’t just hire a bunch of anybodies and I’ve fired plenty of folks because they didn’t help me help our clients.

I don’t want a dozen kids right out of college who have never written a blog let alone built a backlink going anywhere NEAR our clients websites.  I hired slow, painfully slow, the best talent that I could find, and I only hire when I find someone that will help us help our clients.  Our team rivals any in the nation because they’re each accountable to themselves, and to each other.  They’re actual SEO Consultants.

You just can’t automate this stuff.  SEO is hard.  It takes energy, it takes creativity and it takes finding opportunities and good old fashioned Gary Vaynerchuck hustle.  An algorithm’s never going to have hustle.

Clients cancel their SEO services because they were probably only getting “SEO Busy Work” instead of getting true SEO Value.  That is why they don’t see an ROI.  There is a huge difference, and if I’ve ever made SEO look easy I apologize because we’re here every day hustling our butts off.  We are challenged each and every day to beat the other guy.

That’s what it takes to be a good SEO.  It isn’t something you can teach a Roomba to do, it’s something you have to get up every day and do yourself.

Can you believe it? Me?! A mentor?! (I know right?)

I’ve certainly bent the ear of enough folks over the years to have gathered plenty of useful tidbits of wisdom but what a daunting task it is to see a room full of ridiculously smart people, most of whom are easily smarter than me, and have to find something useful to share, something of value to impart so that their time with me was worthwhile.

No pressure right?

What I got to thinking about was how these folks must be inundated with suggestions and advice, often from two people who couldn’t disagree with each other more. How do you know who to listen to? How do you know what pieces of advice to ignore?

You have to trust your heart. There’s a stellar line from Ronin that I use quite often: “Whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt.” I couldn’t agree with this more, if nothing else this is my new moto. Sometimes when we’re feeling ineffective it’s because there is a doubt in our heart and that doubt is holding us back. If you get advice, even great advice, even well educated advice from people making more money than you could possibly imagine, if it feels wrong, don’t do it.

I had the fortune of sitting down with one of the startups, this one in particular working on a pretty cool Cloud Computing Analytics tool. Their CEO and I talked about blogging and inbound marketing, keywords and on-site optimization. He and his team took some notes on improving their SEO and outreach programs with my feedback. Pretty cool right?

Maybe I’m not such a bad mentor afterall! They took notes!

You could see their eyes light up when they got a piece of feedback that they loved, an idea they hadn’t though of, or my favorite, the advice that gives you affirmation that another idea you knew in your gut was right, was in fact bad ass. You could see it in their expressions, in their tone, it was a very high energy chat!

That said, you could tell they also knew which advice to ignore.

It’s very easy to get a million different suggestions from a million different angles. I’m a big fan of Hugh McLeod’s Ignore Everybody for just that reason. While I can’t say you should ignore all advice, you have to believe in yourself and have the faith that not everything you learn will be worth implementing. You have to write your own story, often that means writing it by yourself. Sorry.

Despite the success that Image Freedom has experienced, and my personal growth since our founding, it’s been a very insecure process much of the time. It’s freaking scary to own a business! Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It’s easy to see what “everybody” is doing and think you should be doing that instead, acting like that instead. It’s easy to think you have to go with the flow. Trust me, you don’t.

If I’ve learned anything in these three years of chaos, tears, and miraculous success, it’s that you have to follow your heart. Your heart will give you the best advice that you could ever ask for. You already have all you will need.

Image Freedom has moved down the street, from our original location in the Broadway Bank Building, to our new location in the Taylor Telecom Center at 100 Taylor Street. Inspired by the recent blog from our friends at Outspoken Media on their new office, we thought we’d share some photos from our own new space.

We decided to proudly wave our Geek Flag with a entry display of some old and new comic books. Tried to be as cliche about it as possible, from classic moments in Comic Book history like the death of Supergirl in Crisis on Infinite Earth’s #7 to more recent book’s like DC’s New 52 Justice League #1. See if you can spot your favorites.

Today is Bob’s birthday! It’s a bit of a tradition that whoever’s birthday it is gets their area completely decked out. We jokingly call Bob “Bob The Builder” so his birthday cake was decorated with tools. Do you have an office tradition to celebrate birthdays?

One thing we’ve always been lacking is office storage, so we went out and bought shelves and book cases to house some of our favorite books. Dave Ramsey’s EntreLeadership being prominently featured. We were fortunate enough to get a large stack of signed copies to give to our clients. Maybe we should do a contest with the blog to give away one of our remaining signed copies.

Not at all shy about waving the Geek Flag on my desk. That life sized Iron Man has to be the highlight of my collection. The thing is huge, it makes the 27″ Apple Cinema display look small! What nerdy trinkets do you have protecting your desk?

Here’s our new conference room. We realized that we spend a lot of our time, or my time specifically, traveling to and from meetings, so we wanted to deck out the conference room with enough gadgets that it would be silly not to invite clients in to meet with us.

Big fans of Ikea, we decked out our “pixel” themed Conference Room with a LED light kit that caused the red “pixels” to glow. Reminds me of Simon from when we were kids.

We’re all really excited about the new space. What features have you invested in to make the most of your office experience? Share your story in the comments!

It’s ok Scarlet, come out from under the coffee table, nothing to fear here.

Every few weeks someone comes out with an article proposing some new technology that will result in the death of SEO as we know it. Jeff even takes the tried and tacky route of copping back that it’s not the death of SEO but just the death of “traditional” SEO.

Jeff writes, “Siri is a voice recognition app, but voice recognition is just the underlying tool that drives the app. Even though it does appear to work better than other voice recognition software, the key to Siri is what it does with the voice it recognizes: It can update your calendar, check the weather, set reminders, play music, and write and send emails and texts, etc.”  Ok? So where’s the SEOpocalypse?

Is Google going to suddenly see less search traffic because people are starting to talk to their phones? No! Siri is a neat function, a gimmick, but it’s been out for a month or so now and commerce as we know it hasn’t been replaced by voice activated receivers.

The tin foil hat isn’t necessary, to quote RENT’s Joanne “We’re Ok!”

Jeff continues, “Does that mean the search engines are in trouble? Not really. Over time much of the data users access will still come from search engines. Siri doesn’t use Google results, but similar Android-based tools obviously will. And Google will certainly adapt to changing user behaviors.”

Jeff then argues against his overly sensationalized headline by saying that the search engines have nothing to fear from Siri, and if the search engines are still going to be used more than they ever have, then how does this result in the “The Death of SEO as we know it?”  It’s like he’s speaking a language that Siri can’t follow.

Siri, and other technology like it, identifies a need that Jeff even addresses late in his post, that your business needs to be ready for local search users, optimized for Google Places, optimized for Yelp and TripAdvisor, etc. If you ask Siri for the nearest Italian restaurant, it’s only going to be able to pull from restaurants who actually have a Yelp or any of the other profiles Siri can pull from.

If you don’t have profiles in good standing with these places, you won’t show up in the search, whether that’s through Google or via Siri.  Jeff is talking about modern SEO as if claiming your Google Places page is somehow news.

I typically really like Inc. Magazine, but I’m very disappointed by the quality of this post in particular. You absolutely want to consider your Local Listings beyond just being on Google’s organic search, but that’s been a part of SEO for years.

Jeff’s final point couldn’t be more wrong, “If you run a small business, keep working to improve SEO results on major search engines but spend the majority of your time focused on optimizing listings on Google Places, Yelp, Foursquare, Epinions… because more and more, your customers won’t be hanging out on search engines.”

Consumers aren’t spending less time on search engines, consumers are spending more time using search engines on a variety of devices. Where Jeff could have provided some value would have been pointing out the importance of being ready for a mobile equipped consumer.

Ignoring SEO is more hazardous than ever because users who used to sit in their home on their desktop are now accessing Google from more places than ever. They’re better equipped to act on what they search for faster than ever and you have to be ready.

Google’s search volume is not going down, it’s going up every single day. Google stated last year that they see over a billion searches each year that they’ve never seen before.

Check your mobile traffic! – Login to your Google Analytics and check out how many of your users are accessing your site through their mobile device. Is your site mobile friendly? Imagine how badly your site might be performing for these users if your site is not providing a great mobile experience. This stuff matters.

Jeff means well, I’m sure, but he’s wrong. Siri is not going to replace the search engine as the source of information for iPhone users. Will there be Siri Optimization? Probably. But that’s a fraction of a fraction of an already overwhelmed marketplace. Jeff’s advice is as valuable as being told to ignore Google all together and focus only on Bing or Yelp.

The Death of Useful Advice As We Know It! What a shame.

That’s no secret to anyone who has been reading this blog for more than a few weeks.  We conduct our business 100% debt free.  We never spend other people’s money, take outside investors or generally spend money before we’ve earned it. So when Dave released a new book, titled EntreLeadership, I got pretty excited.

Last night I was reading a ZenHabits blog titled Start Slow and guest blogger Dave Ursillo posed that to appreciate a slower life, a more dedicated life, we should start our day not by rushing off to the office to tackle that ToDo list but instead to read a chapter or two of a good book – a book that inspires us.

What better book to be inspired by than Dave Ramsey’s EntreLeadership?

Dave’s story is not too far removed from my own: a young, married father who hit rock bottom, saw great success and then watched that success slip through his fingers. What Dave did after his crash has been one of many inspirational fables that I’ve adhered to in rebuilding my own life and redefining myself as the SEO you know today.

I read the first chapter of EntreLeadership, and be it less than macho or not, it brought tears to my eyes. One specific story (and this is in the Amazon preview of the book as well so hopefully they won’t sue me for retelling it) but the story involves a man who had also run into some hard times. He’d had to do the unthinkable and layoff about 250 workers from his factory.

That in itself makes my heart feel tight. Hiring is hard enough, but firing is the absolute worst part of being a business owner. I feel very responsible for every member of our team and to think of the pain this man must have endured to have to layoff, even temporarily, 250 families, 250 potential mothers and fathers, is heartbreaking.

Dave went on to share how this man, passionate about his business and a servant leader to these workers who had placed their faith in him, started parking at the very back of his factory’s parking lot. This way, each day he walked past 250 empty parking spots, 250 reasons for why he had to turn things around, get those sales back up, put the factory back to work, and put those families back in those parking spots.

That’s a sad story, but it’s a hopeful one. I sat there this morning, with my five-month-old Labrador pup Casey resting his head on my lap, reading what Dave and his team of EntreLeaders have learned over the past 20 years. That was the slow and dedicated start to my morning that I wanted, that I needed.

If you’ve been following last week’s blog, White Hat SEO Might Get You Beat Up, you’ll know that we’ve been battling with a very competitive keyword against several companies who have been doing SEO for a lot longer than our client. A company fueled by paid links and other Black Hat tactics has been winning in this space and we’d been fighting to get our client onto the first page.

As soon as I closed EntreLeadership, using the front cover to mark my place at the start of Chapter 2, I flicked open my iPhone for the first time that morning and saw a familiar sight for a Tuesday morning. See, on Tuesdays SEOmoz’s Rank Tracker tool checks the rankings of all our targeted keywords for nearly two dozen websites and spits back the results as to how many had risen and fallen that week.

There it was, as if fated somehow to follow my purposeful “slow morning,” the news that this client had moved up seven spaces breaking onto the first page and into the top five. SEO doesn’t typically work this way. SEO doesn’t typically respond to you shouting out to the universe “wouldn’t it be nice if we got this client onto page one?!” and God himself then has a sit-down with Matt Cutts to make it happen.

Nope. That isn’t the world we live in.

SEO takes time, dedication, research and passion to build the right links, organic White Hat links, that nurture the reputation of a website in a way that earn you the rankings you desire. I didn’t expect to have validation so soon after my run in with the dark side, I didn’t expect to see such a leap four days after being threatened by one of these competitors over a silly Google ranking, but I did.

Sometimes that is the world we live in, and that inspired me even more.  Charles R. Swindoll said, “Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.”

In the last 30 days we had two executed contracts for over $30,000 in consulting that disappeared overnight due to corporate restructuring. We also had new business come out of nowhere and want to sign with us all in the same day. We said good-bye to some team members who moved on to new challenges and we welcomed two new members to the Image Freedom SEO consulting team.

I could have seen failure, I could have focused on the loss, I could choose to see these things through failure-tinted lenses (Lord knows I’ve experienced my fair share of failures to know what failure looks like) but that’s not what Dave would do. I’m grateful for EntreLeadership and everything that Dave Ramsey teaches, because were it not for the passion that we live by every day, we wouldn’t have the opportunities that we have and I wouldn’t be leading the best team of SEOs I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.

“There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.” – Nelson Mandela

Pick up your copy of EntreLeadership today – Click here to view on Amazon.com. Also, tune in to the EntreLeadership Simulcast broadcast from Dallas on September 30th. Michelle and I will be there and we’d love to see you if you’ll be there too!

Google doesn’t like this, as you can imagine. Google wants their search results to be based on the algorithm and tries very hard to prevent that algorithm from getting gamed. Links, according to the “White Hat SEO” theorem that we subscribe to, should be earned.

It’s a dramatic contrast between the two points of view, where one side wants to game the system for easy rankings, the other side strives to earn the rankings so as not to run the risk of being penalized by Google (see above, poor kittens).

So you can imagine my surprise when I find these links, all of which were clearly not placed because they were earned, or because this website was choosing to link to them out of any sort of relationship, but instead these links were paid for, and that goes against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines on manipulating PageRank.

Google says pretty clearly, “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.” I don’t know about you but I’m not willing to risk the success of my website, of our clients websites, by “cheating” at SEO for temporary gain.

As I typically do I reached out to my Facebook friends, I connected with a hidden Facebook group Image Freedom runs for people we connect with at conventions called SEO Secret Sauce, and I reached out to some experts. I didn’t exactly get the answer I wanted.

One of my friends, and I won’t out him here (though knowing him he’ll out himself via the comments) told me that when it comes to buying links your job is to not make Google look stupid. That if your website has a few Paid Links, but also has other organic SEO that you’ll be fine. The trick is, according to my friend, to not be obvious about it and to use it as a leg up to boost your otherwise White Hat SEO tactics.

What pissed me off is that what he said made a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense but it goes against everything that Rand Fishkin and the SEOmoz folks teach. It goes against the label of “White Hat SEO” and it was very much NOT what I wanted to hear.

I kept asking around.

An SEO who I very much look up to Lindsay Wassel from Keyphraseology told me that the thing to remember is that in all things SEO, it’s a marathon and not a sprint. That even though I’m looking at this example of Black Hat SEO succeeding right now, that doesn’t mean that the more they push that envelope the more they’re also inviting Google’s wrath.

Again, this was good advice, but it was NOT what I wanted to hear. I wanted to know that there was a magical Matt Cutts button somewhere (Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Web Spam Team) that shined a light in the sky and magically all the bad SEO tactics would be kicked in the groin.

That wasn’t what I was told however, so I kept asking around.

I reached out to some professionals that I look up to very much, and again not going to out them here, but I was told by one popular SEO blogger that in his 15 years experience he’s seen Google’s Paid Link reporting tool only work about ten to fifteen percent of the time.

Yet again, this was NOT what I wanted to hear.

I was down. I’ll be honest. The team here can tell you that my White Hat SEO bubble was on the verge of breaking. So much emphasis on content, so much emphasis on Social Media and earning positive reviews, building relevant links, all of it, hung in the balance.

Finally I reached out to Tom Critchlow, one of the few SEO’s who I will pay a thousand dollars to attend an event, hell five thousand if I take our whole team, just for the chance to see Tom speak. His talks at LinkLove in New Orleans this year were fantastic and I look very much forward to seeing what he and the Distilled team have in store for us at SearchLove in New York.

I reached out to Tom and I told him that I was down and starting to wonder if Rand Fishkin’s content powered socially driven White Hat SEO dream wasn’t in reality a Peter Pan fantasy.

Thankfully, Tom set me straight.

Tom asked me point blank if the website I was optimizing for deserved to beat this company that was using Black Hat SEO. I paused for a moment, “Deserved?!”, I thought. They’re doing Black Hat SEO, of course they don’t deserve to… oooooh.

This is when Tom told me what I’d been waiting to hear.

I took a step back and I looked at the two sites side by side, I looked at the other competitors against our client’s site and to be honest, there are still some things that we have in the works but that haven’t yet been fully implemented to help our client DESERVE to rank higher on Google than these other sites.

I was looking back, I was turned around, and when you’re turned around, you can’t take a step forward. Tom told me about Good To Great, a book by Jim Collins, and talked about the Flywheel concept. The Flywheel concept is that if you ever stop pushing the wheel, if you’re ever not making forward progress, you’re killing your momentum.

By worrying about these Black Hat tactics, I was not pushing the Flywheel for our client. I wasn’t helping them develop their blog, or their mobile site, I wasn’t helping them earn positive reviews from their clients.

I wasn’t doing my job.

Tom held a mirror up and asked me if I deserved that which I was going after, and the answer, I’m sorry to tell you, was no. I had, and have, a lot of work to do for this particular client, who lives in a very competitive local space against large sites who have been doing SEO for years.

If I’ve exhausted every tactic, built every organic link that we can build, received citations and reviews and written blogs and… you get the idea. If I’d done all that, and was still beaten by these Black Hat tactics, then maybe I can doubt what Rand Fishkin represents, what Distilled teaches at their events, but I clearly wasn’t there yet.

SEO can be a frustrating industry because you take action today and you may not see results until 30 or even 60 days later. Google, as amazing as their tool is, is still fairly slow.

So I brushed myself off, I went back to the lab as Eminem would say, and I faced forward, choosing not to worry about what the competitors were doing, how they might be cheating to win, until I’d exhausted every tactic that White Hat SEO’s execute on every single day.

With that in mind, I thought I’d reach out to those local TV stations that were selling Paid Links on their homepage. TV stations in the past had been great clients and they probably had no idea that what they were doing could potentially hurt their own rankings on Google.

We’d spent nine months last year consulting with another local station here in San Antonio and I reached out with the open heart that if I shared Google’s Webmaster Guidelines with their web team that maybe they’d join me in the White Hat SEO race.

This is where it gets interesting. One of the two TV stations, their webmaster to be specific, forwarded my contact information over to our client’s competition. My phone rang and on the other end of the phone was a very upset businessman wondering why I was trying to out his Black Hat paid links to these local TV stations.

I’ll admit, I’m not proud of it, but I was amused as hell.

He went on a small rampage yelling into the phone, asking me if I wanted to go to war with him and tried to intimidate me with stories of his service with the Air Force as a Combat Controller (I was in the Air Force myself). Here I was, worrying about him doing these Black Hat tactics when clearly he was more afraid of me doing the opposite, so afraid that he’d call up a total stranger and threaten acts of violence over his ranking on Google.

It’s that old saying that the Bear is more afraid of you than you are of it. I had really gotten under his skin. White Hat SEO was as scary to him as his Black Hat SEO had been to me.

He knew he’d gotten caught. He knew people were starting to ask questions and were drawing attention to his link buying activities. The proof was right there in his Open Site Explorer link profile. He’d failed to stop Google from looking stupid and he knew it.

My epiphany came at the cost of a little drama, a few physical threats and a few lost hours, but my faith in White Hat SEO was completely restored. My belief in everything that I’ve stood for over the last two years was reinforced and I saw, staring the bear in the face, that he truly was more afraid of me than I had been of him.

I’m on the right side of the fence, our results speak for that, and I won’t be making a change to the dark side any time soon.

Want to hear Tom speak? – Tom Critchlow and other SEO greats like Rand Fishkin, Wil Reynolds, Michael King, Laura Lippay and more will be presenting at the New York SearchLove Conference. The entire Image Freedom team will be there and we’d love to see you there too. Click here for info on tickets and accomodations.

UPDATED – We have received confirmation that one of the two TV stations carrying “paid links” on their homepage has made the offending link “no follow” after talking with us, so score one more for the White Hat effort!

Chick’s love a good sword fight

Cary Elwes and Inigo Montoya himself, Mandy Patinkin, spent most of their downtime during the films production learning swordfighting skills for the films many fencing scenes.  This dedication to a specific talent, a specific skill is a great example of a little energy investment that goes a long way.

We can take this and easily apply it to the SEO world.  What are your talents?  What are your skills that help you stand apart?  Inigo Montoya and the faux Dread Pirate Roberts were both extremely skilled swordfighters, but were it not for their skill, perhaps the film would not have been as memorable.

What makes you memorable?

As I’ve always said, “if you’re worth talking about, you’re worth linking to.”

Every business, every person, every team is unique when set beside another, and these differences are where we can find opportunities to build links to our site.  You don’t have to be a master swordfighter like Inigo Montoya to have won an award for racing model cars or have biked across the country for charity.

Who are you?  What makes you stand apart?

Focus on that, wave your Purple Cow freak flag, and use that to build relationships, earn links from bloggers, and prove that you are someone of consequence.

Play To Their Ego

Ego can be one of the most valuable tools in an SEO’s arsenal, and Princess Buttercup’s one true love knew to play to the kidnapper Vizzini’s ego in order to outwit him.  You don’t need a battle of wits (to the death) to play to someone’s ego.

Networking, blogger outreach, relationship building, and all of these avenues to building valuable links are helped along with a little ego bait.

Going back two years now to when Image Freedom first got started, I wrote a glowing review for 37Signal’s BaseCamp software.  37Signal’s posted my kind words on their blog, and just like that, one of the best links I’ve ever built was created.

Consider creating content, a review, a love letter, anything that might gain the affection of your intended audience.  I’ve fed carefully worded tweets to Dave Ramsey fans knowing they’d retweet the fiscally savvy URL I was optimizing.  I’ve dropped peoples names in blogs, knowing that they’d want to share with their Facebook friends that I’d mentioned them here, etc.  It’s all about the Ego Bait.

Inigo Montoya baited Miracle Max’s ego to get him to revive Wesley hoping that Wesley might embarrass Prince Humperdinck, who had embarrassed him.  Ego is a great way to get someone to drink from your poisoned goblet, and in a much less deadly way, can create for you extremely valuable backlinks.

Don’t worry, I won’t let it go to my head

Whether your father was slaughtered by a six fingered man, or you’re eternally joined by the bonds of love, you can easily learn from The Princess Bride and other cult classics how to earn more backlinks and in turn improve your rankings on Google.

Have fun storming the castle.

Do me a favor real quick, search for your website in Google.

Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Ok, if you happen to see your title is being cut off or your description is trailing off into the darkness, then they’re too long and need to be shortened. In the image above you’ll see that the tag & description for our home page is correct. However, as you can see the ADD CEO that he is, Matthew has neglected our blog’s homepage in the meta description department.

I won’t tell him if you won’t.

Anyway, while you may have learned from some random article on the web that it’s ok to leave it longer so that you “entice” the reader into wanting more and inevitably clicking…it doesn’t really work that way.

When a consumer does a search, they’re looking for instant gratification. They need to know what they’re looking at and which site will give them the information they need.

Extending your title and description so they trail off just makes consumers angry, not willing.

So what exactly should be in the title tag and description in order to show off exactly who you are and what you do while still targeting for your main keywords?

First, you’ll choose your primary keyword and place it in front of your name.

Example, for us, our title tag is: “San Antonio SEO Company | Image Freedom | Results-driven Web Marketing”.

That sentence alone tells a consumer what they would be expecting once they enter the page. Plus, Google picks up your main keywords at the front of the title tag.

The description should be a continuation of your title. It should be written with the users in mind; straight and to the point. No keyword stuffing! Cramming lots of keywords in your meta description does not help your ranking. It’s as useless as the meta keyword tag, Google doesn’t use it at all anymore.

We believe that simply changing a pages title is the absolute an easy place to start in your SEO venture. Just changing the title tag alone can increase your ranking by several pages.

So, go check out the free SEO Title & Description Meta Tool and let us know how your site measured up!