Last week, Fuel Interactive's CEO Will McIntosh and I spoke to a small group of association executives at the South Carolina Society of Association Executives' 3rd Annual Conference about how they can use social networking to bring their communications with their membership into the 2.0 era.

Listen to the Social Networking and Web 2.0 for Professional Associations presentation mp3 (which is funny and fun with lots of laughs and learning too- and way better than this description of it) and view the PowerPoint while you listen.

I wasn't too aware of the whole "professional associations" world (also called professional bodies) before we were asked to speak at this conference, but every profession from lawyers to doctors to asphalt industry professionals has an association, they all have memberships, and they're perfect to make use of web 2.0- they already have people, they just need to connect them.

Here are some of the things we discussed:

• Web 2.0, Blogging, bunches of web 2.0 tools
• Blogs vs. forums vs. listservs

Sites and Services:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Ning- Overview and Features
• Examples of Ning networks, some of which are associations
• Blogger, Wordpress

Social Networking and Web 2.0

• The best 2.0 sites for associations with limited resources
• Matching your social networking platform and your membership demographics
• Age and demographics issues with usage of 2.0 networks
• Quantcast demographic data on social networking sites

Making Your Association More 2.0

• Incentivizing members members to use 2.0 sites and services
• Using your existing email list to get people involved
• Leveraging membership to do the work for you!

Issues Associations May Have with Web 2.0

• Privacy Issues with blogs, Ning, and LinkedIn
• Comment moderation, spam filtering
• Professional discussions, discussion of legislation

Listen to the Social Networking and Web 2.0 for Professional Associations mp3 (which is funny and fun with lots of laughs and learning too- and way better than this description of it) and view the PowerPoint while you listen.

Why I Wear Graph Paper Shirts: Fashion & The Business of SEM

Previously a fashion choice made only by engineers and MIT students, graph paper shirts are now all the rage in the hot, young, explosive search marketing industry.  Coincidence?  I think not. 

Graph paper shirts symbolize everything that's right and good about the business of Search Marketing. 

I'm going to tell you why:

1. Aren't Graph Paper Shirts Nerdy?  Yes.  And that's a good thing!

Good SEM is analytics-based.  Analytical people like order.  Does anything say "I'm organized and logical" better than a shirt with lots of parallel and perpendicular lines?  Graph paper requires thinking inside, alongside, and through the box. 

Is there an "outside the box" in SEM?  Yes, but it's inside some other box. 

Sorry, you visionary freaks!  Think of something new.  We'll categorize it and assign metrics to it and define the process for doing it optimally.  Then you'll be in another box to think outside of.  We'll keep you visionaries on the run, and you'll love it, because you define yourself in opposition to us.

Alternative Lifestyle Indulgences: Wear mock turtlenecks or your old Metallica Ride The Lightning t-shirt and talk about "conversations" and "engagement".  Watch the facial lines of worry stay stubbornly etched into the faces of executive decision makers handcuffed by a recession economy.

Best Solution: Wear graph paper shirts, talk analytics, talk metrics, talk bottom line.  Use charts and graphs.  Project profit.  Get more clients.  Make lots of money.

Taking it Too Far: Drawing 45 degree upward ROI lines on your graph paper shirt with those big sharpie markers is kind of unnecessary ...Rob.  ...Duh!

2. Professional?  Yes.  Clients like it.

SEM, like most new computer things, is an unknown quantity (scary) for the traditional businesses we're trying to help. 

Your prospects and clients don't understand PageRank Sculpting, Quality Score, or Information Architecture, but they do understand charts, graphs, and metrics. 

Even if they haven't used KPI's adequately in their own businesses, your evangelizing of ROAS while wearing your graph paper shirt speaks reassuringly to their bottom line. 

And they do understand the bottom line.

Fun Alternative Business 2.0 Lifestyle Choices: "Hey, we're new and wacky, we're business 2.0, we wear hawaiian shirts and birkenstocks and tattoos- we are new and powerful and weird, respect us!"  Cool, may work for getting small SEO contracts for surfboard shops, but take that to a posh real estate development company in the South, and... um... nuh uh, see ya!

Best Solution:  Wear graph paper shirts, talk analytics, talk metrics, talk bottom line.  Use charts and graphs.  Project profit.  Get more clients.  Make lots of money.

Taking it Too Far: Creating your own graph paper pants. That's common sense, guys.  Just say no to graph paper pants.  Yes to graph paper shirts.

3. Changes Your Attitude?  Yep!  Use it!

Don't get me wrong, it took me 34 years to darken the doorstep of a Brooks Brothers store.  I'm the ultimate cool casual clothing sorta guy.  I used to work at an outdoor gear retail company where business casual was a The North Face fleece, convertible khakis, and Merrell hiking shoes. 

But dang it I'm in the South, and I'm in management.  Have you read the research that shows that one of the biggest determinants of who gets to be the leader is the one who most looks like the leader?  Studies also show that the taller you are the more money you make.  I'm not a tall guy so I have to impress people with my stunning good looks, my mind-blowing intellect, my cantankerous obsession with results, and my ridiculously hilarious sense of humor. 

But all of that would fall apart without my graph paper shirts and Italian dress shoes.  Why?  Because I think and act differently in different clothes.  Are you so different?  Try it and see what happens.  I act more professionally, more conservatively in dress clothes. 

Conversely, I'm more lax and self-centered in casual clothes.  I call it being "creative", being "me", etc. but the measure of my value at work is the potentiation of my internal resources (knowledge, decision making ability, analytical ability, creativity, everything) in a team framework- and I'm simply a better team member in dress clothes.  Weird, but true. 

Self perception affects behavior, behavior affects self-perception.  Classy clothes stimulate classy behavior, classy behavior creates a classy person.

This from a guy who used to say "it shouldn't matter how I dress- you should accept me for who I am".  But if it doesn't matter how you dress, then dress respectfully- and if you won't do that, that says something about who you are, doesn't it?  Noncomformity is disrespectful, because other people have limits in their perception of value- we use external cues to guess at truth- and if how I dress changes my own behavior, then I'm optimizing my work value by wearing different clothes... as an SEO I understand that clearly.

Alternative: Wear whatever you want, and witness yourself starting emails to clients with phrases like "hey dude..." and "hey man!"  Sure there's a place for that, but it shouldn't be the default.  Try an experiment- measure your productivity from client perspective, what you got done for them, and alternate your dress on different days for 6 days- analyze the results of your productivity in your different get-ups, and let me know what you find.

4. Morality?  Yes, Clothing Affects and Creates Business Morality

Everybody in SEM knows morality is an issue.  At the recent SMX Advanced conference, Danny Sullivan asked Matt Cutts how it felt to be the moral compass of SEM.  SEO professionals must decide whether to and when to use gray and black-hat techniques. 

Fundamental to this decision are questions like:

• Is this truly not a white hat technique?  (Discernment)
• Will this technique put my client at risk? (Altruism)
• Will this technique put my reputation at risk? (Vision)
• Is there truly no better white-hat alternative to this (Creativity)

It may be argued that gray and black hat techniques don't jeopardize an SEO's career, especially if they only do it on their own sites- some may even posit that usage of these techniques increases SEO savvy.  However, if your use of these activities could injure your client and could directly or indirectly injure your career, I'd argue that your attitude is immoral, instant-gratification-oriented, unwise, and more importantly: un-American, and you probably support the euthanizing of homeless people.

Is there less chance you'd engage in gray or black hat activities if you were wearing a graph paper shirt?  Of course!  Read on...

Alternative Amoral Clothing Choices: Everyone knows that the Enron executives got tattoos and road Harley motorcycles to work and wore leather boots just before defrauding their investors of millions of dollars, right?  Just kidding.   But Enron executives did not wear graph paper shirts, and they should have.  They wore black suits and ties, and that may have been a problem, but more research is needed.

Best Solution: Wear graph paper shirts, go to church, feed the homeless, write down your SEM ethics, and follow them.

Taking it too Far: Using a red marker to check a box on your graph paper shirts every time you beat the temptation to take gray or black hat action.  We don't need to know, buddy.  Keep it to yourself.

Bottom line?  The clothes make the man or woman.  And if you disagree, you're wrong.  I know, because I wear graph paper shirts, so I'm right.

More reading on Clothing, Self-Perception, and Business:

• BusinessWeek: Leaders Must Look the Part
• The Influence of Appropriateness of Dress and Gender on The Self-Perception of Occupational Attributes
• Clothing interest, clothing satisfaction and self perceptions of sociability, emotional stability, and dominance
• Search Google Scholar for more!

 I thought it was interesting at SMX Advanced how much more attention was given to SEO than PPC, and how some of my social media/SEO friends knew little or nothing about PPC, so here's a start at some info for them:

Do you ever inherit clients' AdWords accounts?  They can be a mess, right?  Where do you start?

Wouldn't you like an organized way to sort through everything?

I'm building a quickly growing SEM department, so I spend a lot of my time mapping efficient SEM business processes.  One of these is how to take an AdWords account that's new to us and transform it into a shining example of the kinds of best practices that get stellar business results. 

Sometimes clients have been running an account for years in what we'll diplomatically call a very simplified form: one campaign, one adgroup, no match types, no conversion tracking.  They want to lower their cost per click because that's the only metric they can measure. 

So we start educating about better metrics, and we transform that account into an AdWords machine that can get optimal results.

BTW you may apply these steps to whatever degree to other PPC engines- Yahoo, MSN, etc. - but I'm AdWords-centric... Do I have to explain why? ;-)

The 4 Step Emergency Fix for Dying AdWords Accounts:

1.    Check Conversion Tracking

Is there any conversion tracking?  Is it adequate? 

This is the most important thing to do first, because you can't optimize without using a metric to optimize with... and CTR and CPC are not the right ones to use.  What should be your key performance indicator (KPI)?

Naturally, our star this time is not Ramses, but Moses... (Charlton Heston style)

If you read about my SEM 2.0 Pyramid, you may have noticed the references to and picture of Yul Brenner from the classic movie, The Ten Commandments.

It hit me a few days after publishing that, that there's a perfect way to extend the theme of the post and go into more detail.

That's right, it's...

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF SEM 2.0

1. Thou shalt test everything everywhere; test thy messages, offers, and appeals in social media, on thy site, in thy ads, and in thy search listings.
2. Thou shalt win friends and influence people via Social Media; thou shalt turn competitors into allies via networking and SM.
3. Thou shalt not beg, cajole, or threaten people to give you links for thy networking and value surely shalt bring thee more links (blessed are the poor in links who deserve more links)
4. Thou shalt create valuable content and useful tools that people will want to use, link to, and share.
5. Thou shalt use analytics to discover which keywords, placements, ads, offers, and audiences get thee the results thou needest most.
6. Thou shalt use lessons from each of these three channels: social media, SEO, and PPC to doest better in the other two.
7. Thou shalt use thy seo wisdom on landing pages to increase thy PPC quality score.
8. Thou shalt re-optimize and re-strategize based on clues provided to thee by thy analytics.
9. Thou shalt monitor what people are saying about thee, stay up to date on thy competition, and watch for new competitors.
10. Thou shalt attain wisdom from pre-internet marketing and PR books and teachers and test them in thy SEM efforts.

And finally, thou shalt not argue about whether there is any sense to the order of these 10 commandments.  Because there ain't.

This is a huge topic, since Google's universal search results include images, locations, business listings, videos, news, and now/coming-soon merchant services... so I can't cover everything, but I want to give our SEO clients a short primer on what universal search is, how important it is, and what we can do to optimize it, especially for local businesses.

The basics are this: without you asking, Google gives you more than just websites in web search results.  It's been like that for more than a year, so I'm sure you've noticed... but you may not know how this impacts SEO.  Here's an intro to Google's blended search and what's included in the results.

 There's a New Definition for "Number One Search Results"

A bunch of our clients are local businesses.  For example, we have some clients who are either golf courses or advertising cooperatives for golf courses in Myrtle Beach, SC. 

Look what happens these days when you Google "myrtle beach golf":

The Division of Search Results Real Estate

This is on a 1024 pixel wide browser-

• There are 345,000 square pixels of area in these search results above the fold
• 51% of the space is local search results
• 49% is AdWords ads
• Natural search results (individual webpages apart from local results) take up 0%

Yes, zero.  Ye ol' natural website listings are not visible above the fold for this local search.  And we didn't ask for that- that's just what Google naturally gives us for this search- it decides this is an important search to show local business results for.

So if your critical target keywords show local business results in Google's search, YOU MUST BE IN THE TOP LOCAL BUSINESS LISTINGS.  If you have any doubt about that, check out independent research that shows that blended search changes searcher behavior.

Getting in Google's Top Local Business Listings Search Results

How do you do that?  Luck? Voodoo? 

• Some have alluded to the importance of reviews on the third party sites Google aggregates- sheer number of reviews, and keywords in the reviews.  Note, you cannot optimize that in a white-hat manner. 
• Many of these third party sites also discourage businesses (hotels, for example) from telling their customers to post reviews. 
• I'm certain Google would frown on you telling them to post a positive review with specific keywords in them. 
• What about keywords in the local business profile?  I regret to say I don't have enough data on that to comment yet.  My SEM stock answer?  Test, test, test.  But don't spam.
• Check out Matt McGee's 10 likely elements of the local search algorithm

Some businesses are lucky (or smart) to have keywords in their URLs and brand names.  Look what happens for "Myrtle Beach Resort" when you type in the popular keyword "myrtle beach resort"...

...instead of a variety of local listings, the one business is featured.  And they have the number one website ranking, so they get all 51% of the non-ad space above the fold.

The hotel group "Myrtle Beach Resorts" does not get the same privilege for the search "myrtle beach resorts":

Evidently, Google lets the plural form trigger a listing of multiple results, and MyrtleBeach-Resorts.com does not appear to be optimized to win in the top local business listings for this keyword.  Looks like they need more backlinks and more reviews with that keyword in it!

An interesting question that comes up is: what keywords bring up local business listings in the Google search results?  We tested a bunch of keywords in multiple cities, and it turns out that it depends on the city and what the businesses there are. 

For example, "myrtle beach mosque" does not produce local listings...

...but "new york mosque" does:

Why?  There aren't any mosques in Myrtle Beach, but there are a bunch in New York City. 

How Do You Know Which Keywords Will Have Local Business Results?

The easy answer is search all your target keywords to see if local business listings come up and see how your client does for them.  Every business should be managing a Google local business profile anyway- and that's part of the solution.

NEW! Google Merchant Search

Google Merchant Search was just outed by Search Engine Land -  it's still in beta in the UK. 

This is like the local biz results but not local and only service providers- so if you want to compare secured loans, you can compare rates and even fill out a lead form to get rate quotes. 

Will it replace websites that get business leads?  Probably not, but will it be another important channel?  Yes.  And will someone have to manage that information for these service businesses?  Yes.  Who?  SEO's, of course! 

Doncha think?

Videos in Local Search Results

Just a few tests demonstrate that you can get locally relevant video results not just from keywords that contain video like "myrtle beach funny video"...

(note "myrtle beach video" brought up listings of video stores like Blockbuster)

You can also get video results from keywords closely enough related to the title of the video, e.g. "myrtle beach funny commercial"...

My Tips on Video SEO Optimization are:

• Know which keywords will NOT bring up local business results, avoid the ones that do bring up local biz results, because I suspect the local results will trump video results, and your video won't show up in those search results. Let me know if you ever see blended search results with both local biz listings and videos on the first page- I haven't seen it.
• Upload videos to multiple sites via tubemogul, especially youtube, as youtube videos generally rank highest
• Put your target keywords in the video title, the video description
• Put your website link in the video description
• Put a title on the video itself with your website url so viewers know where to go for more info
• Link to your video from your websites and blogs

Herewith endeth ye ol' lesson.

SMM, SMO, and ORM hath heaved up my SEM department. 

As I wrote elsewhere, web 2.0 messed up my job title.  The crazy thing is how much SEO (search engine optimization) and SMO (social media optimization) and ORM (online reputation management) overlap.  Throw into the mix the PR department at our sister traditional agency, and you've got a logistical juggernaut.

So I went to the cocktail napkin, actually the back of a printout of my previous best visual representation of our services, and started sketching out something new.

The more I thought about it, the more I saw that SEO, SMO, and PPC form an interdependent triangle, or pyramid, since pyramids are generally cooler (see Matt McGee's SEO pyramid). I thought, hey, that was a really successful concept, so I created...

The SEM 2.0 Pyramid:

(I threw in an Egyptian, which Matt somehow forgot, because I thought it was funny- well, at least Yul Brenner as an Egyptian is funny.)

I left out ORM, because I don't see ORM as marketing exactly, and it's a more occasional service- or you could look at SMM as the proactive part of ORM, so that takes care of it- and while you're doing SMM, you may notice ORM issues. 

Besides, the SEM 2.0 Square wouldn't be as cool as the SEM 2.0 Pyramid.

The serious explanation of the SEM 2.0 Pyramid:

It's all about relationships, and what each strategy/channel contributes to the others:

Search engine optimization is foundational, because the keyword approach you learn there penetrates everything;

• PPC uses keywords, and usage of keywords in SMO leads to SEO benefits. 
• Understanding of inbound links, keywords, and anchor text also helps SMO create more SEO value.
• SEO also can help determine which audiences, keywords, and messages lead to business results
• Analytics associating keywords with conversions gives you converting keywords to retarget, and
• Copywriting tests of meta descriptions also provide intel about which messages resonate with warm prospects. 
• These converting keywords and messages can then be tested in SMO and PPC.

Social media optimization is an educational process; conversing with your prospects and interested parties in various audiences leads to

• Discovery of placements you can target in PPC, and
• Alerts you to ORM issues. 
• SMO may also tip you off about why various keywords and messages do and do not work in PPC and SEO. 
• Good SMO inevitably leads to more backlinks for the sites you SEO.

Pay per click advertising:

• Placement targeting research may alert you of important domains to do SMO on- that is, blogs to have conversations on.
• And PPC provides a powerful test laboratory in which to try out messages, keywords, and audiences, which can then be tested in SMO and SEO.

Together these three strategies almost form Voltron, but not really.  They do create an incredible synergy in this new SEM 2.0 paradigm. 

Haha, I had to say synergy, didn't I?  Couldn't help it :-)

This post was written in part for our sister traditional ad agency, Brandon Advertising's PR department. 

Blog programmer Jeff and I were talking about how to help them blog excellently and help their clients blog excellently, and thinking about the differences between traditional PR and web 2.0.   That's where this blog post started.

Then we just had a meeting with Brandon PR team there and the possibilities for Social Media Management and Online Reputation Management are pretty exciting (our combination of interactive savvy and their decades of PR expertise mean we can create a powerful new offering AND probably form Voltron), but PR people need succinct guidance as well as info for their clients.  That's what this post is for.

How does this fit with traditional PR?

It doesn't.  Press releases are boring and written to get the attention of old media.  The way to get the attention bloggers is to follow the 10 steps below.

Is there a press release for bloggers?

Blog posts themselves work like press releases for bloggers.  Bloggers typically don't read press releases.  They read popular news blogs like TechCrunch, which pick up things from a variety of news sources.  Most of this happens via RSS feeds. 

1. A blogger reads news from another blog's RSS feed, then
2. He/she blogs about it, and then
3. Their RSS feed communicates info about that new blog post to other bloggers.
   Click here or on the image for an illustration of the RSS feed process.

As more traditional journalists get into blogs and social media, they'll be reading the blog posts that get attention and make it into popular RSS feeds, so this is how you'll reach journalists online.

A 2.0 press release, or "social media release" follows the guidelines below.  There's no reason not to do both traditional and 2.0 press releases.  But know that a traditional press release alone isn't going to engage web visitors like a sexy blog post will.  ...cuz who doesn't like sexy?  Ok, maybe the pope.

10 Tips for Making Your Press Release 2.0 and Getting More Attention Online:

1. Use Multimedia. Text is boring.  A combo of images, video, audio, pdfs, etc. is much more titillating.  And PDFs are better than Word DOCs.
    
2. Link it!  Create internal links by linking from one blog post to another (that's what I just did with that PDF vs Doc link above).  Put keywords in the blog post title to get more relevant links from other blogs.  Put in social bookmarking tokens to facilitate viral message spread.
    
3. Make Lists.  Lists are easier to read, are more organized, and more useful to the reader.  This fabulous blog post includes a top 10 list.
    
4. Ask for and Respond to Comments.  If people don't comment, they don't care, and you didn't make an impact.  Try some controversy.  Or use the word sexy 20 times in your post.
    
5. Write Sexy Titles.  They get attention and increase curiosity- that's why I said "sexier" in this post's title.  Titles are arguably more important than your post... because without good, stimulating titles, no one will read your post.
    
6. Engage Multiple Contributors (real people).  This post would be even better if it was the opinion of 10 different bloggers.  This blog is written by multiple people.  Synergy, baby, synergy.
    
7. Personality.  Web 1.0 was boring and corporate.  Web 2.0 is real people with real, sometimes controversial opinions.  Without an opinion you can't make an impact, without emotions you're not human.  Talk to humans like a human if you want to make a connection.  That means not legislating the soul out of your releases with overly restrictive guidelines.  NOTE: you must possess, develop, or purchase a personality before you can successfully complete this step.
    
8. Be Useful.  What's the reader's take away?  Just ideas?  Not good enough.  Why should someone tell someone else about your release?  They're asking "WIIFM" (What's in it for me?) and they know if they forward it on to you, you better not be likely to go "What the heck is this?  Who cares?"  The value must be obvious.
    
9. Use Real Stories.  Ideas and principles alone are boring and don't engage most people .  Stories that illustrate principles, however, are powerful.  That's why preachers use them.  That why politicians use them.  That's why YOU should use them.
   
   
10. Write Good.  Yes, that was tongue in cheek.  Good writing does the work of communicating for the reader.  Bad writing makes the reader do the work of understanding.  That's lazy.  And that could be impossible if your writing really sucks.

All of the above needs to be interesting, shocking, surprising, fun, thoughtful, and personal.  That's why I use a sense of humor and choose surprising/shocking words.  Ok, go forth, release in a 2.0 manner, and form Voltron!
 

I think two things are shameful right now in social media:

1. Everyone is trying to define or limit Twitter- Twitter is for this or that or should be used in this way and not that.  You should have this kind of following:follower ratio.  Blah blah blah. 

Here's a prime example of a statement that's clearly false: "Twitter is not a sales channel"

• Dell has sold $500,000 of hardware using Twitter (from discounts/specials), and
• Other people are doing more modest things like selling t-shirts.

2. People are settling for and even justifying the use of engagement metrics instead of ROI metrics.

If your goal is branding exclusively, fine- maybe I can accept that.  But why not still try to find a way to track your results?

If you're responsible for the bottom line, don't give social media a pass on ROI metrics.

If you come from a PR background and haven't dealt with ROI metrics much, don't use that as an excuse not to learn to use them.

What Twitter is For?  Ridiculous.

I was wondering why I spent 30 minutes looking for proof that Twitter can be used as a sales channel. I think it's because I intuit that Twitter can be powerful for a lot of applications... as a communications tool, an engagement tool, a sales tool, a networking tool, to push news feeds... who knows what else.

To me, saying "Twitter is for this or that" would be like in, the early days of the telephone, saying "the telephone isn't for sales" or "the telephone is just for meaningless chatter"- you can't measure it on ROI".  Even to say "Twitter favors women" is near-sighted.

Come on!

And by the way, anyone can answer questions like "Can you sell stuff on Twitter?" for themselves with Summize: for example: http://summize.com/search?q=twitter+sales+-tax+-garage+-rummage+-soupy

The reason Twitter works for sales is, not only is it a communications tool just like a phone or email, but also you can use it to find customers at point of need. 

Here are is some amplification of that:

• http://www.smstextnews.com/2008/04/using_twitter_as_a_real_time_business_sales_marketing_service.html
• http://www.mediaphilosopher.com/2008/05/06/online-expressions-of-the-point-of-need

Online reputation management is becoming more and more important to everyone online, not just companies.

Monitoring Your Reputation

As G.I. Joe used to say, "knowing is half the battle," and in ORM that means monitoring all relevant online channels for people talking about you, your company, your products, and even your whole niche.

How Do You Monitor Your Reputation on Twitter?

There's a lot of conversation on Twitter about all kinds of topics, but how do you monitor Twitter effectively and efficiently?

My favorite tool is Summize.  In this video I show how you can use summize and iGoogle to do ORM monitoring in the Twitterverse.  This will also work with any RSS feed reader.

Here's a summary of the steps:

1. Do some summize searches, preferably using boolean options (see the advanced search page for more) until you get the concentrated results you want.

2. Copy the links for the RSS feeds for those searches

3. Add those links to your iGoogle or feed reader.

4. Check the feed every day to see what's going on!

Matt Cutts is a Google engineer who focuses on web spam, and he's their main spokesperson when it comes to SEO and spam. According to Matt, web spam happens when website break the rules "so that their website shows up higher than it deserves to show up."

 You may not want to consciously spam Google, but do you want to show up #1 for rankings you don't deserve?


What? Um, Brian, What Search Rankings Do I Deserve?

Let me give you an example.  If you're Ford Motor Company, do you deserve to rank for the search "cars"? 

If you answered yes, think again.  There are dozens of auto manufacturers that also deserve to rank for "cars". So who gets to be number one?  The website most optimized for "cars"?

No, most likely, the site that wins is the one that deals with the entire topic of "cars".

If you only represent one manufacturer, you don't deserve to rank for the entire topic.  If you want to rank for that, you need to create an info portal that deals with ALL cars.  For example, the #1 result right now is cars.com, a portal that helps you research, buy, and sell cars. 

(In fact, two of the top four results are for the movie "Cars"- so the search results have to deal with diversity of manufacturer and meaning.)

Is SEO Spam?

Matt Cutts is quick to clarify that "SEO is not spam."  There are ways to optimize sites to make sure they get the rankings they do deserve.  But SEO is not voodoo, and if it's done ethically (white hat, not black hat), it can't get you rankings you don't deserve.

Isn't Good Web Design Enough?

No. 

Web designers usually are not SEO experts.  Their job is to design a site that looks good and is functional- hopefully they know enough SEO to not block you from good search rankings, which they can actually do. 

For example, entirely Flash-based sites seem cool, but they're more complicated to optimize.  Search engines don't read Flash nearly as well as HTML.  There is a work-around, but it requires not just the normal SEO but the Flash FLA file also needs to be enhanced.

SEO can help you in a number of ways, including:

1. Fix web design issues that block good search rankings
2. Enhance web design to make sure you rank for the keywords you deserve to rank for
3. Show you what content areas you need if you want to rank for keywords you don't deserve

How to Deserve Mo' Betta' Search Rankings

If you want to rank for keywords you don't currently deserve to rank for, check out the third item above.  It implies changing your website strategy, possibly even part of your business strategy. 

If you want to be an authority on a more general topic so you can get more search traffic, you need a content development plan. 

You might need to identify someone in your organization who can and will blog. 

Or you might have lots of internal documents, sales documents, or white papers you haven't put online yet.  You can leverage those information assets into better search rankings.

Your Next Steps

Contact a good search engine optimizer.  They can assess your website's current content and service offerings, help you understand what keyword targets are reasonable, and give you an idea what you'll need to do to rank for more general or lateral keywords.  Executing both optimizations and optimized new content takes time and labor, and should be done with white hat techniques only.