We’re pretty big fans of Dave Ramsey around here. Andrew and I just a few weeks back hit Austin for the EntreLeadership 1-Day event taught by Dave Ramsey and Chris Hogan. We even lucked out and got to sit at Dave’s table at lunch, which was a pretty rare chance to pick his brain (and barely let finish his food, sorry Dave!).

Fast forward to this past Friday, I’m sitting at a stop light at San Pedro and Basse, and Dave is on the radio doing a special EntreLeadership special to celebrate the final day of their EntreLeadership Master Series week long look behind the Ramsey curtain.

One of the questions Dave answered really hit close to home and I wanted to share it with you as I feel like it echoes a lot of the frustration we experience cleaning up the messes of inexperienced marketers. Like he says, anyone that can spell Twitter suddenly considers themselves an expert, and that can be really dangerous if you aren’t careful about who you partner with, be it internet marketing, advertising, or social media.

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April Fools Day is my favorite day of the year, and we’re already off to a great start with sites like Screenrant.com announcing the return of Full House and office favorites ThinkGeek debuting their Dark Knight Rises Bane Walkie-Talkies.

It’s all good fun right?  WRONG!  Not that creating hilarious content doesn’t fall into Wil Reynolds “Do Real Company Stuff” strategy, but yea, seriously, April Fools Day can be really really good for business, and for your SEO.

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Picked up the September issue of Harvard Business Review off a shelf in the office and sat back to read the cover story: The (surprisingly) Simple Rules of Strategy. I’ve always loved Harvard Business Journal for these types of pieces because it turns conventional wisdom on it’s head and I felt it really applied in the SEO space.

The article begins with a review of traditional strategy, collecting as much data as we can and often with no thought for how that data can be leveraged or acted on to create a result. I was amused by this as I see it every day in our industry, be it search or design, collecting ALL data for the sake of collecting it. There are entire jobs created at some agencies for “Analytics Ninjas” and the like.

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One of the tricks that SEOs play on the uninformed or the outdated is to ask them how they treat the classic Keywords Meta Tag. I cringe whenever an agency tells me “We’ll just cram all that into the meta tags!” They think themselves clever, having somehow stayed “one step ahead of Google”. All they did was waste their clients time.

It’s true, Google hasn’t relied on the Meta Keywords tag for a very long time, and spending any amount of time cramming keywords in there is a waste of time… or is it?

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Today is an important day as Apple becomes a part of every SEO’s life. If you connect your iDevice to iTunes you’ll be able to download Apple’s new iOS 6, which among other things introduces Apple Maps (Apple’s answer to the long standing Google Maps app they’d previously relied on). Many business owners have asked us how Apple Maps will operate compared to Google Maps and what they need to do to make sure their business is  friends with Siri.

Apple’s new “Maps” app is powered by Yelp.com, and while Google Maps (formerly Google Places, now labeled Google+ Local) is still a major component of your local SEO for Android devices and computers, Yelp is suddenly a much larger player in local search. It’s time to start creating your Yelp profile.

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