Sometimes we in the search community get drawn into playful SEO contests where we compete with each other to rank for some nonsense phrase like "nigritude ultramarine." That's all fine and good, but it's merely ego stroking. It doesn't make the world a better place. What could we SEOs do for the greater good? One idea is we could help the Tibetans by raising awareness of their plight. And now would be an opportune time to do it, considering that the Olympics are right around the corner. As outlined in the SEOs for Tibet post on Changes For Good, the idea in a nutshell is to get SEOs to join forces and send a bunch of "link love" to a Tibet-related site like FreeTibet.org, in order to boost its rank in Google for "olympics" -- thus raising awareness and perhaps spurring on demonstrations at the Olympics by attendees. For optimal results, the Tibet-related site would need to concurrently implement some on-page SEO as well and adopt "olympics" as a keyword theme on their home page.

An interesting idea? Does it have legs?

If you have been around social media marketing for any amount of time, you have heard the term "link bait." It's a great way to gain traffic, readership, and rankings -- but what actually is it?

Link bait refers to something that grabs the attention of the blogosphere and makes people want to link to it from their blogs or tell their friends about it. It really can be just about anything, however, some link bait does better than others.

Two approaches that always seem to do well are controversy and humor.

The more simple piece to write, of course, is controversy link bait. Write something that a lot of people disagree with and you're going to be talked about. Jason Calacanis is a master of this kind of link baiting. In my opinion you have to be careful how you use this tactic, as you can burn bridges much faster than you can build them.

Humor is a different animal. When you are trying to write a funny piece of linkbait, using humor you actually have to be funny -- or at least more than just mildly amusing. I saw a great piece of humor link bait recently from Jane Copland and Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz: Google Search Results Missing from OneBox. I loved the search for "things rick astley would never do." It was rather clever and funny. Now if only Google would actually return those mock results!

Other ways to bait for links include -- tools (like blog plugins and browser addons), late-breaking news and scoops, original research, and photos that you've Creative Commons licensed.

When you sign up for just about any social network, you have the option to upload an image that will represent you. No matter what the social site, you'll want to associate an image with your online identify. This image is your "avatar." It's your online persona. It's the way the online community will see you. With it, your profile appears more real, more tangible, more human. A good avatar will help people relate to you as a fellow human being, to take notice of you, to remember you, and to listen to what you have to say.

Sure, you could choose not to upload an image, but why would you? Then you'd be a faceless user that no one remembers or identifies with - making gaining traction in the network much more difficult.

You don't want to blend into the woodwork and be ignored, right?

Choosing your avatar doesn’t need to be difficult. Your image can be a simple picture of your face or just of something you like or identify with. Using the same avatar on many social networks helps brand you and helps people remember who you are. When people recognize your avatar across many platforms, they are more likely to want to be your friend and vote for your story submissions.

What avatar do I use? It depends. If it's a persona that I don't want necessarily tied to me / my company, then I go for an illustration - something distinctive. (No I'm not going to show any of them to you here.) If the profile is one I've associated with my own name, then I use this headshot photo of me:

I don't have much faith in Google's (or any other engine's, for that matter) estimated number of results, and I've held this view for a long time. I believe it to be a wildly inaccurate number. If you think about it, why would a search engine put a lot of effort or processing power into really nailing that number, since searchers (with the notable exception of SEOs) could care less if there are 100 thousand results or 100 million results returned; they only really care what's in the top 10. So it's fraught with problems to use the estimated number of results as a basis for any SEO metrics. Yet SEOs use the number all the time, for things such as: indexation (a site: query), link popularity (a link: query), and keyword competition (e.g. KEI score, or Keyword Effectiveness Indicator).

If we can't trust the estimated numbers for such metrics, then we should probably move on to find other SEO metrics that we can trust. Yet indexation remains a metric we should care about.

So how does one go about checking a site's Google indexation levels without relying on the demonstrable inaccuracy of Google's estimated results? Don't expect it from Google Webmaster Central, although that would be nice. For Webmaster Central's "Index stats" under the "Statistics" tab, you'll only find links to Google SERPs for site:, link:, cache:, info:, and related: queries. I'd love it if the Webmaster Central team added reliable stats here that weren't simply based on estimated results in the SERPs. If they did, it still wouldn't provide me with trustworthy indexation numbers for sites of which I'm not a verified owner/webmaster. I'd need another solution.

At this point the only solution I can think of for getting an exact count of your indexation in Google is to query for each individual URL, then sum all results together. You'd have to write a script to hammer away at Google -- via the SOAP API if you're lucky enough to have some old keys (Google discontinued offering websearch API keys), or by scraping the Google SERPs.

Remember: to check if a page is indexed in Google, don't use the bare URL as the query, prepend it with cache: or info:. So, to see if http://www.ifloor.com/gs/cat-8-hardwood-floors-1.html is indexed, you'd query for "cache:http://www.ifloor.com/gs/cat-8-hardwood-floors-1.html".

With the amount of time needed to stay at the top of the game in social media, it is inevitable that you will eventually burn yourself out. No matter how much you enjoy being on these sites, and no matter how good of friendships you have made, after a while it becomes tedious. This happens most often to the users who have been trying to become power users, and it continues to happen to the super stars.

So what is the secret to no letting yourself burn out? Taking breaks. This might sound obvious but, if you are like me, social media can become an addiction if you let it. You enjoy the social aspect and you love the traffic benefits... and you constantly want more. You get so caught up in it; everything you do online revolves around getting to the front page of your favorite site.

There is an entire world outside of social media (believe it or not ) and you need the real one as much as you need the virtual one. It might sound crazy, but this weekend I'm going to be out in the sun WITHOUT my computer. I suggest you try it sometime. I might send a Twitter update or two from my cell phone, but don't count on it.

I was speaking with a friend recently who was sharing with me a web site idea. Quite honestly the idea wasn’t the greatest or maybe I just wasn’t that interested. Regardless, I have the same problem nearly every time someone tries to get me excited about their whizzbang new idea – they don’t know how to pitch it to me and so they don't reel me in.

What typically happens is that the person gets lost in the weeds - caught up in the small details such as what the site will look like or what they are going to call it. That isn’t what I want to hear. You need to be able to tell me three things:

1. What the site does (Technical)
2. Who it is for (Target Market)
3. Why it’s better than what’s out there (Competition)

You can have the best idea in the world, but if you can’t answer these questions you have a problem. All the other details can be filled in after this. Sure it’s nice to have a conception of what you want your site to look like, but if you’re not a designer you shouldn't get too caught up with this because what you envision probably isn't web friendly or practical.

If you have an idea that has you excited enough to go out and try and find funding or someone to join your endeavor, that's fantastic. I don't want to be a killjoy here, but do it right or don't do it at all.

It's not unusual for prospects to be under the mistaken impression that natural search (SEO) is free. It takes ongoing investment, that investment comes at a cost, and that cost has to be budgeted for.

But while these prospects are trying to hire our firm they are also sending us a very mixed message: "We don't have any budget for SEO". These words make any SEO want to scream. It's like trying to hire a construction company to build your company a new headquarters and informing them in your first meeting "Just so you know, we aren't likely to have the money to pay you." This tells me that my and my colleagues' time - and expertise - are not being truly valued.

Maybe it stems from the misguided notion that they are entitled to the traffic - it's their right and anything blocking them from their rightful share of free traffic can and should be swept aside. Simply throw a few dollars at the problem (i.e. buy the minimum number of SEO consulting hours required) and make it go away. Then the tide of "free" traffic will wash over them for years to come.

It's my job, and the job of my sales team, to convince them that SEO is an ongoing investment, that it must be resourced properly, and - this is the most important part of all - that they should pay us for value received rather than hours clocked. You can't blame them for being stuck in the dollars-for-hours paradigm when that paradigm is pervasive: it's the modus operandi for accountants, lawyers, and consultants of all sorts. Tell me the minimum number of hours I need to buy from you in order for you to complete my tax return, to draw up a new legal contract, to retool my business process. The euphemism for this is: "Can't you just get us some quick wins on the board??"

It's time to think differently, folks! If you put a dollar in, and you can get 8 dollars back, you should beg, borrow and steal as much as you can to keep putting dollars in. Keep plowing money in - as long as you feel confident that you will get a good return on your investment.

There are hard costs and soft costs to which you must allocate budget. The hard costs include hiring staff, allocating internal resources, engaging an SEO firm, and outfitting your in-house team with on the tools of the trade (SEOmoz Pro, Internet Marketing Ninjas, SMX and SES conference registrations, SEOClass, SEOTraining SEMPO, etc.).

There are soft costs associated with SEO too, which are fuzzier and harder to define than the hard costs. These include the missed opportunity cost, time-to-market cost, and the cost of competing opportunities. For more on these, read my Search Engine Land article.

Getting to the top of the rankings isn't free. And guess what? Neither is staying there. Keep that budget up year after year. Making a "one time investment" in SEO is a recipe for failure.

I've always taught in SEO training sessions that Google queries are case-insensitive. Indeed, Google states this in their online documentation in no uncertain terms:

Google searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case. For example, searches for george washington, George Washington, and gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN will all return the same results.

Yet, as my Netconcepts colleague Chris Smith recently noted, this is not currently the case. We get different results in the 8th position for “george washington” vs. “George Washington” vs. “gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN”, when expanding out the number of listings per page in the Google preferences.

In another example that Chris found, "fossil watches" and "Fossil Watches" returned different results. You can see this in this screenshot:

I found that the new "whois" shortcut query, which returns a domain lookup from domaintools.com as a shortcut at the top of the results, only works if the domain name is entered in lower case. You can see this to be the case in the following screenshot:

Could this be the start of a new era for the SEO industry - an era of case-sensitive rank reporting, case-sensitive keyword research and case-sensitive optimization? God, I hope not!

From a social media marketing standpoint, YouTube isn't an ideal social site because of the way it hoards PageRank (video pages can't have external links on them, and external links are nofollowed everywhere anyways, including on your user page), so it can't be leveraged to increase your site's rankings in the same way that a site like Digg can. That's why a lot of SEOs and SMOs prefer submitting link bait articles to social news sites versus making videos for YouTube. When a video goes viral, it's YouTube that tends to benefit in terms of inbound links rather than the original site. So, if the link juice and thus the search engine visibility benefits don't transfer to your site, what's the point you may ask?

True, YouTube limits your opportunities to add external links and then nofollows them. But you can be at peace with that fact. Instead, get the YouTube video itself to rank in the SERPs. Long live Google's "universal search"!

With universal search, YouTube now wields a lot of power to rank in Google's web search results -- which means that getting into video is a good idea. Video blogging or trying to create something that has the potential to go viral can be a great thing for your business.

I especially love the "plus box" in universal search -- the clickable plus sign in a YouTube video containing Google SERP that allows searchers to watch the video right there, without leaving the page. It's a great opportunity to make a brand impression over a course of minutes, while the viewer watches your video.

So how do you optimize video content?

Obviously the spiders can't see what you say in the video so how are these things going to rank? When you upload a video to YouTube, there are a few important areas to optimize are:

• the title
• the description
• tags (keywords)
• and your YouTube username

What you call your video, the words you use in the description, and what tags you assign it, will make a difference when it comes to its ranking in the SERPs and for which keywords.

Step 1: When coming up with a good title and description for your video, remember to use the words you are trying to rank for. This might sound obvious, but it's just like if you were writing good titles and descriptions for a regular page on a site you were trying to optimize. Do not be too exact, but don't be too broad either. YouTube has the ability to rank for some fairly competitive words especially if there are not many videos about it. At the same time, however, if you title your video "Sports video" you're just wasting your time.

Make copious use of tags on your videos (assuming the tags are all relevant to the content), spread your tags out among your clips, use adjectives to make your videos more visible to folks searching based on their mood, have some category descriptor tags (bearing in mind that YouTube's default search settings are Videos, Relevance and All Categories), match your title and description with your most important tags, and don't use throwaway words like "and" or "to."

Your YouTube username is an often neglected but important piece, because it can drive traffic to your site and help burn your brand in the viewer's brain. Consider the famous "Will It Blend?" videos from Blendtec, where they blend iPods, rake handles, light bulbs and the like. Blendtec cleverly set their username to "willitblend.com" to promote their microsite. Granted, it's not actually an external link (it still points to a YouTube user page), but it provides bloggers and journalists with a URL to use in their blog post or article besides (or in addition to) the YouTube video URL.

Read more on YouTube marketing in this article I wrote for MarketingProfs last year.

If you're a search marketer and you dabble at all in social media, there is one program you're probably already taking advantage of: StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon gives some great returns with a relatively small time investment. I've discussed StumbleUpon before, in the context of an interview with social media guru Neil Patel, but let's take a closer look at how it works...

With the StumbleUpon browser extension installed, with the click of a button you get sent to a random page. Once there, you can give the page a thumbs up or thumbs down and then move on to "stumble upon" the next random page. Think of it as channel surfing, but on the Web. You can select your categories of interest so that the random pages are more targeted to your tastes. You can leave a comment about what you like/dislike about any page.

It doesn't take very many thumbs-up votes to send hundreds if not thousands of visitors to your site - even if your site is brand new. It sounds easy, just start voting for your content.

But there's more to it than that... there are some important social media "tricks of the trade" that will help maximize the opportunity.

The most important thing is to have mutual friends. As you follow people on StumbleUpon, you will see more pages that they like. The idea is to follow people with similar interests.

The trick comes in when you begin to use the "Send To" option within the browser extension / toolbar. This option sends a site, along with a personalized message to your friend. The friend is forced to view this site before they can continue with their random stumbling. Do you see where I'm going with this? In the message you can ask them to thumbs up your page -- the more thumbs up a page has, the more traffic it will get from StumbleUpon. Your friends will probably ask for you to do the same for their sites in return. One hand washes the other...

What are your favorite tactics for maximizing your StumbleUpon traffic?