We’ve got “chasing Matt’s finger” down, but she’s struggling with the advanced Link Building techniques, so I GUESS we’re still hiring for the HUMAN SEO Outreach Coordinator position. Keep them applications coming!

I was listening to the audiobook for UnMarketing by Scott Stratten on the drive back from my Honeymoon this past weekend (I highly recommend it, it’s even in paperback now). What I love about UnMarketing is that Scott didn’t write a book about Social Media, he wrote a book about integration, about customer service, about – as he declared it – “UnMarketing” vs. traditional “throw advertising at it” tactics to growing a business.

For as much love and respect as Scott gets, I’d wager too few people who rep his book have actually read the thing. Forgive me if this is you, but I’d wager more often than not books like Scott’s get skimmed for what few buzzwords they do contain and just enough wisdom is pulled out to be later quoted out of context or simply ignored.

Why buy UnMarketing if you’re just going to ignore it? Why buy Rework if you’re just going to make things more complicated than they have to be? Why quote Gary Vaynerchuck if you’re not going to hustle? Why attend a Dave Ramsey event only to go out that night and put your dinner on a credit card?

A couple years ago I’d felt snubbed by a client who’d started having success with their social media campaign but publicly gave credit to their internal team when it was our efforts that started driving actual traffic to their site vs. simply gaining likes or actionless retweets. They’d never seen a return on those efforts until they followed our plan and started creating content of SEO value, shared it via these social channels, and what a shock, their traffic increased to the praise of their advertisers.

I was told, “I don’t understand the problem, we’d been doing this social media stuff for years”. It is at a moment like that where you want to bash your head against a wall because you know that to many people, MOST people, Social Media IS the tactic, it is a check box on a product, “Did we spam people about it?” You betcha! Check!

Success with Social Media isn’t about spamming people with your blog feed, or asking silly questions so the responses you get will help boost your Klout score (don’t even get me started on Klout), Social Media is a CHANNEL not a tactic. Social Media is a channel just like how you answer the phone, how your website looks, how your employees treat your customers, these are all channels for creating great experiences.

It’s not about Twitter and Facebook!

Just yesterday we mentioned to a potential client that social shares would help their SEO and they responded with “oh we don’t think we need a social media campaign, we can’t imagine anybody tweeting or facebooking our stuff.”

THIS IS YOUR FAULT SOCIAL MEDIA PEOPLE! You created this! Shame on you!

People have been sold packages of “we will tweet for you for X dollars per month” and what they’ve come to see this as is “We will make up irrelevant crap and post it for you, using HootSuite”. It reminds me of the old directory spin SEO packages – which to be fair, we still get e-mails from India offering all the time – they didn’t work, and neither does posting mindless crap twice a day and calling it a marketing tactic!

Social Media is becoming the dirty word that SEO was that caused SEOs to migrate to Inbound Marketing as a heading instead of simply SEO. Because it’s hot, but vague, people are making money on the ignorance of others, and what we’re left with is businesses who think that curating irrelevant crap on a Facebook wall is social media.

Spoiler Alert: It’s not!

Social Media is to business, what the projector is to a film. If you don’t have a story worth telling, it certainly won’t be worth sharing, and no one is going to link to you.

Be interesting, add value, grow a pair, or just stop pretending.

Having come from a newswriting background, reading online content makes me cringe. Wait a minute, did you just use the wrong kind of “to” on your company homepage? Oh, boy. When I see this blatant disregard for the English language, not only does it make my inner nerd sad, but it makes me question the competency of said company.

Landing on your homepage is often my first interaction with your brand. If it’s riddled with juvenile writing errors, I’m going to doubt if you can be trusted with my money. Relaxed writing style may be acceptable in personal emails and text messages, but it has no place in customer-facing content.

Here are some of the most glaring (and most sadness-inducing) grammar errors I am constantly horrified to find on Web pages:

1. It’s vs Its

This one can be a little confusing when you’re writing in a hurry. We’re used to an apostrophe followed by an “s” indicating possession. In this case, however, the apostrophe is being used as a contraction to mean it is.

Example: When it’s (it is) gone, it’s (it is) gone.

2. Hyphens

Ah, hyphens. Contrary to popular Internet writing practice, there are actual guidelines on when to use them. The general rule is to go to the dictionary. Otherwise, follow this:

Compound adjectives + noun = hyphenate when the adjectives appear before the noun (but not if used after).

Example A: They were in a long-term relationship. (long-term is a compound adjective that modifies the noun, relationship.)

Example B: The relationship was long term. (long term comes after the noun.)

3. Commas

This one is surprisingly simple. Read your content out loud. Anytime you naturally pause, insert a comma. The most common uses of commas are:

1. To separate words in a list (pens, pencils, and paper clips). While the comma before the and is hugely debated in grammar circles, I’m a personal advocate of the Oxford comma.

1. Introductory phrases. Meanwhile, they went to the store.
2. To separate compound sentences. This means that each part of the sentence is a complete thought on its own, complete with a subject and predicate. (They went to the store, and he bought a bag of chips.)

4. The Dangling Participle

After rotting in the basement for weeks, my mother threw away the strawberries.

This is getting a bit advanced, yet makes your content a million times more user friendly. The participle phrase introduces a sentence. Writers go wrong when this phrase is not modifying the sentence that follows. Readers expect it to work this way, and when it doesn’t, your participle is left hanging.

After rotting for weeks is the participle phrase introducing the sentence. Both mother and strawberries are nouns in the sentence that follows. So what was rotting- your mother or the berries?

5. Subject-verb agreement

This is another rule that sounds entirely more complicated than it is in reality. A verb in a sentence needs to agree with its subject in number: meaning that the verb changes depending on whether the subject is singular or plural.

Example: He was one of the designers who were fired.

Who refers to the designers, meaning the verb fired must be plural.

In Closing

While it can be tedious and boring, combing through your online content for grammar errors ensures that your company puts its best foot forward to your clients. In a space as competitive as the Internet, every little bit helps.

When in doubt about grammar rules, you can always turn to Schoolhouse Rock. If nothing else, at least you’ll have a catchy tune stuck in your head for the rest of the day.

Everyone has been talking about Pinterest lately, if you don’t know, Pinterest is a new kind of social network where you can pin topics to your board and collect topics and content that interests you in a sort of advanced tumblr style. I think it’s neat but I’m one of those non-believers that doesn’t yet see power there for small businesses (big brands, maybe, but small and medium sized businesses, not so much).

Distilled, being the futurists that they are, knew that Pinterest was of much discussion and rather than waiting a whole year for the next conference, they decided to adjust their schedule last minute to add another session to the mix that addresses this new tool: Colby Almond from 97th Floor (who are responsible for that amazing Noob Guide to Internet Marketing over on Unbounce’s blog) has been added to speak about Pinterest and how search marketers can hop onto that opportunity. That’s huge!

It’s hard to know what is coming and create a conference where you’re locking down topics sometimes months and months in advance, but Distilled was able to add this session because they know the importance of this new technology as a topic for debate in our community.

As a holdout on Pinterest, I’m really excited to learn from a company like 97th Floor about how they’ve addressed the Pinterest opportunity, and maybe, just maybe, they’ll get me to come around on the topic. We’ll let you know.

This just goes to show the innovation and value that you can expect from the Distilled Conferences, and while LinkLove London is completely sold out, I’m told you can still get a ticket to LinkLove Boston, but I’d act now as they surely won’t last long.

Maybe we’ll see you there?

Don’t believe me? – Check out this blog by our friend and client David Cohen on how his company was able to bring in over a Million Dollars of revenue via an idea he got during LinkLove last year. Hell, we even met David for the first time at LinkLove in 2010, it’s an all around great time! Don’t miss out!

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.