For all their impressive capabilities, search engines today are still only dumb robots that basically work by trying to match a search query with the same textual phrases on the internet. They can’t (yet) very well understand the meaning of words and phrases, pictures, music or video. As such, there are a group of question types that they can’t handle. Here’s my guide to those question types with an example of each. Use them to create your own quizzes and have a go at answering my questions. Stick your answers in the comments section. Some are easy, some are hard. You can try Googling, of course but it won’t help you.

1. What Links?

Contestants have to identify a common link between a series of names, places, words, numbers, whatever… Search engines can’t compute the myriad possible ways these things might be linked.

Q1. What links: Daft Punk, Buster Rhymes, Kanye West and Alice in Chains?

2. The Odd One Out

A cousin of What Links? and favourite round in Have I Got News For You, contestants have to identify a common theme in a series of names, places etc and find the one that doesn’t fit the pattern.

Q2. Name the odd one out: Vinnie Jones, Julio Iglesias, Gordon Ramsey and Jason Statham.

3. The Next in a Sequence

Another list that requires the contestant to first understand the relationship of the items before working out what the next in the sequence should be. Warning: this becomes Googleable once  the relationship has been worked out.

Q3. What comes next? Russia, Germany, Turkey, France, ?

4. What is More Likely?

Questions on statistical probabilities are very hard for most search engines to understand, although Wolfram Alpha is gradually getting there. Other search engines will struggle to even realise they are being asked a mathematical question unless it is presented as an equation. It is technically possible to use search engines to find information to help you get to the answer but it wouldn’t be practical in most pub quiz situations.

Q4. What is more likely if you live in the UK: being hit by lightning or dying in a plane crash?

5. Logic Puzzles

There is no current way for a search engine to understand logic so these are very safe questions for quizzes.

Q5. On a game show there are 3 doors with a prize behind 1 of them. The contestant must pick only 1 door which he does. The door remains closed but the show host opens 1 of the other doors to reveal it empty. He now offers the contestant the chance of staying with his original choice or switching to the other door. What should the contestant do to provide the best chance of winning the prize?

6. Media Identification

Be careful here. Google Goggles and Shazam are 2 mobile apps that use image and audio recognition software to identify media. To combat this, distort your media in some way by adding noise or reproducing it in a different way from the original form.

Q6. Name these movie posters:

7. Word Puzzles

A merging of the logic puzzles and perhaps images, these can include the Dingbat-style word puzzles but also the likes of word searches, crossword clues and riddles.

Q7. Name the phrase: HAVEHAVE + HOLDHOLD

As I mentioned, if you think you know the answers, stick them in the comments below and I’ll provide answers next week. The rate of advancement in search engine technology and artificial intelligence means that these questions will probably be answerable by robots within the next few decades. I promise to write another blog post about beating the search engines then.

How to Create an UnGoogleable Quiz is a post from: Response Marketing Blog - Search Engine Marketing by Mediarun

I think search is an area where it’s all too easy to forget this. Search is a discipline that’s so measurable and data-led that there’s a danger of forgetting there are more reasons behind why someone chooses to click on a search result than just the position on the page and the ad copy or description.

In a recent presentation, I wanted to illustrate these other reasons so I went looking for data to support my point. We have been working for the Dukan Diet for over a year now, mainly managing their PPC account. They are the leading diet in France but when they launched in the UK in 2010, they were largely unknown. 2011 has seen their profile rise considerably, partially thanks to a lot of media coverage sparked by high profile figures such as J-Lo and Kate and Carole Middleton “doing” the diet, but also thanks to a lot of good work from UK marketing partners.

I suspected that the rising brand profile had helped search performance so I went into Google Analytics, segmented non-brand search traffic and looked at PPC click through rates. I took care to compare click costs too, as you’d expect to see CTR improve if you simply paid for higher ad positions. Here’s what I saw:

Dukan's increasing CTR and decreasing costs.

Since February 2011, CTR (dark blue line) has doubled while CPC (light blue) has nearly halved. You can even see the effect of the Royal Wedding in April where press discussion about the Middletons reached a peak. As the Dukan brand became more well-known, more people clicked on generic keyword ads because they were familiar with the company.

As a PPC management company it is our job to reduce click costs and improve CTR so I can’t present the above graph as “proof” of brand recognition affecting search, but that isn’t my aim. Brand recognition, PR and advertising have other effects on search behaviour which I’m sure we’ll cover in future blog posts. I present this as simply a reminder to us all about how search works and how all marketing channels combine. Therefore never send to know for whom the sale is attributed; it is attributed to thee.

How Brand Recognition Impacts SEO and PPC is a post from: Response Marketing Blog - Search Engine Marketing by Mediarun

The Goal of Google+

The primary purpose of Google+, on the surface, is to be a major social networking platform and possibly to knock Facebook into the pages of history. This is too simplistic a view, however and if it were their only goal, then people would be right to see their chances of success as slim.  Instead, if you think about the name and what it means, you begin to see what Google are doing. Google have simply added a “+” to their name. They’ve designed a social layer that sits across the whole of the Google family of sites and applications. So whatever you are doing, on whatever device, you can be connected to the same platform as your friends, colleagues and other social acquaintances.

I don’t think this realisation has dawned on most people yet and Google haven’t done the job of communicating it well, either. Just like Twitter was misunderstood (and still is) by many as being just a series of status updates, Google+ is being seen as an unnecessary alternative to Facebook. As Martin Soule, Account Manager puts it, “Google+ feels like it is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist to me”.

Then there is the impact on search. Google has been turning to social media for a couple of years now and users are already seeing search results altered to promote and highlight content that has been +1’ed by their friends. On top of this, Google+ gathers a huge amount of signals about content that is being shared by people. I’ve written before about how this enables Google+ to be a “Social Signal Aggregator” and therefore potentially a new layer of search – a social search engine that displays what people have ranked, not what the algorithm has.

How Will It Get There?

Google+ needs users. At the time of writing it has reached 40 million sign-ups and has only been open to everyone for little over a month. It doesn’t need Facebook-levels (800 million) of users to succeed in its goals, however. For it to deliver a good user experience, and deliver enough user data to be of use to Google, it only needs to grow to the point where the user base represents a statistically significant group of internet users and for them to log in regularly.

Clearly, Google+ needs to be a popular social networking platform first. It needs to give people what they want in a way they want to use it. As to whether they need to persuade people to leave Facebook, that may not be the case. The ball is arguably in Facebook’s court with this and Google simply need to lie in wait and capitalise on Facebook’s mistakes. The recent changes to Facebook’s interface caused many complaints and played into Google’s hands, for example. There are constant privacy issues that never seem to go away and Google have clearly taken a share of the market on the back of this. Facebook, have reacted by implementing Twitter and Google+-inspired features such as the Subscribe option and the real time news sidebar – the sincerest form of flattery. There is a question over whether people who quit Facebook are ready to go straight into another social networking experience or whether they are put of the whole thing altogether. Joanna Jeske, Account Executive says, “Too much personal investment has gone into Facebook already.  With the new changes, they’re aiming for emotional investment and attachment. On top of allowing users to access the myriad social apps, Facebook has now announced the integration of music, TV and movies into their platform. Google+ would have to come up with either a vastly improved rewiring of the system or some outstanding and hugely differentiated apps to beat that.”

So is Google+ happy to lie in wait? Does it know what to do to persuade people to switch? Or is it banking on its user interface to be a better estimate of the way it predicts most people would rather use social networking in the future and therefore the natural place they’ll migrate to? Matt Bednall, Offpage Strategist says, “There’s been a natural evolution of sorts so far. I moved from Bebo, to MySpace, to Facebook. Each did something better than the other and persuaded me and my fiends to move. The problem for Google + is that Facebook has stayed on the ball and become some something more than all the other sites; a sort of internet within the internet.”

As Matt points out, in little over a decade we’ve seen empires rise and fall in social networking. This simple tides of change could mean that Google+ will be Facebook’s natural and inevitable successor. As a new generation goes online, they will behave differently to the previous ones and want something different. A survey of teenagers by New York agency Mr Youth saw that after Facebook’s latest changes, most anticipated spending less time on the platform.

Matt Bednall states, “As with all things that go mainstream, a few people will start to defect to new, uncharted, cooler waters. If Google can craft something that will appeal to the early adopters then it stands a chance of being a serious competitor.” Sean Parker (see Napster and Facebook) seems to agree. In his recent interview at the huge Web 2.0 summit, he claims that Facebook are already seeing their “Power Users” going to Google+. Supporting this, albeit unscientifically is the comments sections of tech and social media sites like Mashable where visitors show a regular preference for Google+ over Facebook. It seems the way Google+ allows users to organise their contacts and information is already winning favour with savvier users.

What Are Its Chances?

Not everyone is reacting well to the changes Google+ has brought, however. When I first saw my search results personalised with the promoted pages that my social circles had shared, I welcomed it and what I perceived as a useful layer of recommendation on top of the algorithm. (That sentence could not have existed before 2011!) However, as William Renedo, Business Development Manager puts it, “It’s a deal breaker for me. I’d love to say that I respect the opinions of my 400+ social media connections, but I know we also disagree on some things and I simply don’t want their likes and dislikes to interfere with my search results.” This raises a very interesting point. Writ large, there is the danger that the signals from Google+, averaged and applied to search results, will just make them into a populist, middle-of-the-road collection of sites. I’m a fan of graphic novels, for example yet the most popular form of the medium is super hero comics, for which I have little interest. I don’t want my search results for “best graphic novels 2011” skewed by all the social signals that are sent the way of Tony Stark and Steve Rogers.

Aside from user preference, there’s also user access to contend with. For all its strengths, Google+ also has a challenge persuading people to change their existing habits. Alex Wares, Managing Director adds, “For those of us who rarely log in to Google, Google+ is irrelevant. Unless Google can find a way of making the platform useful to people like me, they have their work cut out.” I think this is the key challenge for Google+ and I return to my earlier point about what the name means. Google recognises this challenge and this is why it has been created as a “+” to all its services. Google+ adds a layer to ubiquitous web tools like search, Android, Chrome, YouTube and all its properties. It has numerous chances and ways to demonstrate its appeal to users and for me, this provides its best chances of success.

It is not the walled garden that Facebook represents. It is always on and with you whatever you are doing online, making commenting and sharing content fast and easy. It allows you to organise information and use one profile for multiple audiences and social groups. For me, it understands the way the web works far better than any comparable site. It’s easy to forget that behind the scenes Google is constantly watching internet behaviour and taking notes. Google+ is the subsequent outcome.

What’s The Future of Google Plus? is a post from: Response Marketing Blog - Search Engine Marketing by Mediarun

For that reason, when I noticed the following data this week, I thought I’d seize the opportunity to blog about it and use in future as evidence of one benefit of combining paid and organic search. I always struggle to recall good blog posts and studies on this anyway.

Now, it’s important that I stipulate the following conditions of this keyword and website example because the data is easy to misunderstand. Without giving away my client’s keyword strategy, I can tell you this is a non-brand keyword, 2 words long and commonly used. The client has ranked 2^nd in Google for over a year. The market is not one with well-known brands and so searchers are not influenced by familiar names in the SERPs.

The following graphs show daily click data for the same keyword from Jan 1^st to August 10^th 2011. At the beginning of April, we reduced the bids for the Adwords keyword because the costs per conversion were simply too high to justify spend any longer. What is interesting to see is what that action did for clicks on the organic ranking. Since April, there are clearly fewer clicks on the same keyword in organic search.

Paid (Jan 1st-Aug 10th 2011)

Organic (Jan 1st-Aug 10th 2011)

It’s a decent example of one of the benefits Google posits for Adwords: using paid search can help create more clicks for your site for your organic rankings as well as the ad itself. The reason is that searchers see 2 results for your site; double the amount of information and that creates a greater reassurance that your site is relevant for their query. As a result, they become more likely to click through. It’s particularly effective when they have never heard of anyone else in the results because they have only the information in front of them to go on.

From a marketing agency point of view, this raises some interesting issues. For example, if you have a different agency for PPC and SEO, the former is clearly able to help out the other but may not get credit for doing so. There are many examples of the reverse as well, so if you do have 2 agencies, try to encourage collaboration between.

Also, from an analytics point of view, there is probably a case for crediting paid search with a share of the conversions that come through the organic clicks. The details of fine-tuning click attribution to this degree makes my head hurt; however if you feel last click attribution is not working for you then consider hiring an analyst or getting more advanced technology to enable multi-click attribution modelling.

How Using Paid Search Increases Your Organic Search Traffic is a post from: Response Marketing Blog - Search Engine Marketing by Mediarun

2 months ago I started to learn the harmonica. I bought a Hohner Big River harp in the key of C and then I went looking for tips, music and lessons online. I walked out from behind the scenes, joined the audience and became “a searcher”. Now obviously, I use search as a consumer as much as the next person, but this was different. I was thoroughly researching something and going into far more depth than the day to day searches for news, bars, information, clips etc. I used Google (because I’m a pro) and it served me very nicely, helping me fill my bookmarks with numerous guides, videos, tab sheets and forum discussions to get me started learning. That was all very well, but after a week I felt like I needed more in-depth tutelage and that I would be willing to pay for some of the many pieces of premium content. And that’s where I got stuck.

Image by penarmusaraj

Searching helped me find all these handy sites and content but I had no real way of telling which were best for me. Some sites did better than others at using quotes from happy customers and displaying various accolades but I can’t help being a little sceptical about those tactics, working in marketing as I do. I wanted corroboration from social networks; to see that real people were paying for and getting value from the services I was considering buying. I realised then that I’m already taking social signals on websites for granted. It’s only been a couple of years since they’ve been in widespread use but it’s already clear that sites not using them are missing opportunities.

The experience helped to crystallise a collection of thoughts I’d had about search, social and conversion rates recently. In SEO, the most common discussion around social signals are about how they affect rankings. My harmonica experiences show that if that’s the only way you view social signals, you miss a more important point. SEO and social work together to create conversions. Embracing social buttons and letting users provide feedback on a site provides an additional layer to the search process that can increase conversion rates and probably click through too. Users are now expecting to find out what other people think of websites, products and content. Ignoring this could result in a lack of initial trust in a site, particularly for less well-known brands.

All of which brings me to my second point. It’s admittedly a partially-baked theory about where Google are going with Google+, but it’s an intriguing concept to me. With all their +1 data and the way users are organised socially, in Circles, Google should be able to create a complete alternative to traditional search. To explain: I would go onto Google+ (some future, imagined version), find the harmonica users or ‘Sparks’ and see the websites that they have +1ed the most, historically. Google will have to build up enough user data and change the way it is displayed for this to work as the current interface is just a chronological roll of shared content at the moment. However, if I could see the most +1ed harmonica sites I would therefore get indirect recommendations from real people about which sites and content to go to. The process would completely bypass web search.  Now I just need to come up with a name for it…

Thanks to Matt Kynaston for research and input.

Search + Social Signals = Success (And The Potential of Google+) is a post from: Response Marketing Blog - Search Engine Marketing by Mediarun

Smart-arse advertising by Google. If you got this without looking it up, you deserve to work there.

There are good reasons for this which I’ll quickly state:

• Search adds measurability to the campaign. The search data can be monitored and therefore the impact of the ad can be gauged.
• Response time of different ads can be recorded. TV ads can generate searches within seconds of airing while billboards might take days to impact on the consumer consciousness.
• Geographical differences can be analysed using the data from the search visits. Perhaps the ads in London reached a greater percentage of the local population than those in Liverpool.
• It encourages that second conversation with the consumer. The more a person sees an ad, the more likely they are to recall it and connect it with their lifestyle.
• A website visit provides a brand with much more time with the consumer and the ability to impart more information than a single ad, in an interactive way. It can act in a similar way to Twitter’s hashtag, uniting similarly-minded organisations to optimise their content around the same term, creating a results page full of complementary webpages. This is still underused and arguably best employed by non-profits but The St John’s Ambulance “first aid” radio ad effort is a good shot.

It’s a pretty useful and innovative technique and it’s easy to see why it’s so commonly employed. It’s a recognition of the fact that people use search for navigational reasons, to enter a site or particular page in the site via a search engine and not the browser’s address bar. There are some drawbacks to the technique and they are potentially overlooked by the marketers, not being immersed in the world of search as we are. I therefore offer 4 caveats; 4 things for marketers to consider before using search in their offline campaigns:

1. You don’t control the SERPs. By asking people to search you are sending them to a page that provides them lots of other places to go that aren’t your website. It takes minutes for competitors to buy your search phrase in PPC and appear at the top of the page. Pet Plan ask people to search for “Petplan” in their TV ads (skip to the last second). But by doing so, any potential customer will be exposed to multiple competitor PPC adverts!

2. Anyone can end up occupying the SERPs for your chosen search terms, including negative reviewers and pranksters deliberately optimising to appear in the results.

3. Why not consider buying terms in PPC that describe your ad? Do this regardless of whether you’re asking people to search or not. Your ads will still provoke search traffic and from people who might not necessarily remember your brand name but want to find out more. Clicks will be cheap due to the lack of competition.

4. Choose your search term carefully. A unique term will be easy to control the SERPs for; create a blog, a website, a Facebook page, buy PPC keywords etc and you’ll fill the results and capture the traffic. A more generic term where the top results are already long established will provide you with a much harder job getting seen. An ambiguous term such as Orange’s old “I AM” campaign can serve to cause confusion for the search engine and deliver a wealth of different results for which your keyword may not be deemed the most relevant.

I’m always pleased to see search being applied to different aspects of business and society and applaud the lateral thinking of the people using it. Working outside of search (or any discipline) can mean that it’s very hard to see every angle and every consequence of a decision. At worst, you can be causing problems you’re not even aware of.

4 Things To Consider Before Using Search in Offline Advertising is a post from: Response Marketing Blog - Search Engine Marketing by Mediarun

Mobile users by the tens of thousands. Photo by Carlhiett.co.uk

Mobile traffic behaves differently to desktop traffic. The details of that are perhaps left to another post but take a look at your own web traffic and you’ll probably see shorter visits, fewer pageviews and if your site is well designed for mobile, possibly higher conversion rates. But I only bring that up to emphasise the fact that we all need to adapt our sites and marketing quickly to the mobile visitor.

The point of this post is to highlight the environmental factors that seem to be influencing the volume of mobile traffic. It became very clear on Saturday when we had the start of the school Easter holidays, sunny weather and a weekend all combining to cause a drop in desktop visits and a sharp rise in mobile internet usage.

I offer the below factors as things we’ve noticed that influence mobile traffic volumes either within our own clients’ analytics data or from anecdotal evidence. Use this data to help interpret changes in your own traffic stats, plan PPC campaigns, optimise your site and structure your marketing this year. Mobiles traffic is already approaching 10% of all visits and is set to exceed 20% by the end of this year. Tip: get something mobile-related ready for the royal wedding day.

Evenings and Weekends – So much internet usage is conducted from work computers or during work hours. By the evening and weekend the number of people near a desktop drops off and people turn to their mobiles for their internet needs.

Warm Weather – It gets people outside. Obviously, this means that they then need to use a mobile if they want to Google something, visit a site, check their Facebook profile etc.

Longer Days – Similar to the above, but worth mentioning because since the clocks have gone forward, there seems to have been an increase in mobile traffic.

Big Events – For example, music festivals, public exhibitions, sports events, royal weddings. These are potentially more of a local effect but the principle here is the same as the weather. They get people outside and away from their desktops.

Traffic Congestion – The other type of traffic, that is: cars and trains and that. The bigger the delays, the more mobile traffic you’ll see. These usually combine with evening and weekends and big events, compounding all the factors into one big mobile assault on the internet.

A New iPhone Release – Sure, it’s not the only smartphone but it’s the one that’s driven the mobile wagon train. IPhone 4 caused an acceleration in usage and iPhone 5 will do it again at the end of 2011.

Google tells us that mobile traffic in the UK will exceed desktop traffic by the end of 2012. Those who adapt fastest to this will prosper the most.

Top Factors That Are Influencing Mobile Internet Traffic Increases is a post from: Response Marketing Blog - Search Engine Marketing by Mediarun

Image by Asha ten Broeke

Why Do It?

There are 2 types of searcher typing your organisation’s name into a search engine: those who don’t feel like typing the full URL into their address bar and those who don’t know your website’s address, possibly because they haven’t visited your site before. When they do this, they will then see up to 10 websites that relate to your company’s name.

In some cases, your company name may be the same as other companies or other sites on the web. Even if this isn’t the case, those 10 results are still likely to show sites that you don’t control or have anything to do with. All of them represent a distraction to the searcher and a reason they might not visit your site straight away, or in a worst case scenario, not visit at all.

There are a few good reasons to appear for several, if not all of the top results.

-          Branding. It’s simply good branding to be seen in multiple positions on page one of the SERPs. It creates the impression that you are a well-established organisation with multiple presences on the web.

-          Brand protection. For consumer-targeted companies, customer reviews on the web are especially important, but this applies to business to business companies too. Review sites such as Ciao, ReviewCentre and DooYoo now feature prominently in SERPs for brand name searches. Obviously, you have little control over the reviews and the aggregate score reviewers have given you. If it’s less than stellar, you do not want that review site ranking high for searches on your name.

-          Affiliate sites, especially the voucher code sites, Amazon and eBay often have pages dedicated to their brands. If you use them and the page ranks highly, you are inviting people to visit your site via a discount code or via a site that you have to pay commission to, thereby directly reducing your margin.

-          Reputation Management. Anyone with a vested interest in reducing your market share such as competitors, unhappy customers or disgruntled employees can create a site about you designed to dissuade people from visiting your site. This can be really quite hard for them to do effectively unless they have a lot of help from similar-minded collaborators or you have made it easy for them by only having a single site ranking for your name. The more support they get, the more successful they’ll be, as Nestle knows all too well.

So what are you to do? It’s simply a question of ensuring you set up enough sites that are about your organisation or an aspect of it. It’s not as much work as it seems but like with most aspects of SEO, you get back what you put in. Below, I’ve made recommendations for sites and techniques that the average organisation should be able to set up, maintain and develop with a reasonable amount of effort and justifiable with the inherent benefits of the exercise. Different options will work for different organisations, so decide on what would work best for you.

Use Paid Search

You could use paid search ads to bid for your name and then activate the site links, and other ad extensions to make the ad bigger. This doesn’t count as one of the 10 organic listings but there’s a good chance it will push them down the page and below the fold.

Use Site Links

Like with paid ads, Google will display site links under the listing for your homepage. They are chosen algorithmically but you can remove the ones you don’t want in Webmaster Tools. Again, this pushes the other results further down below the fold.

Create a Wikipedia Page

You’ve no doubt noticed the regularity with which Wikipedia appears in search results. Create a page about your organisation.

Create Social Media Profiles

A Facebook page is a must and you could probably include Twitter and LinkedIn and possibly YouTube on that list too. There is a wealth of social media sites and not all will be suitable for your organisation or target audience but it takes no time to at least claim your presence on them. There’s even a site called Knowem that aggregates them all for you!

Sub Domains

Creating sub domains does imply a bit of work and the decision to do so is probably best driven by organisational changes. However, sub domains will often rank under your main site when your name is searched for. Subjects for sub domains can range from other business units within your brand to blogs or sites that perform different functions to your main site, such as transactions or discussion boards. See Virgin Media’s presence.

Google Places

This applies more if you have more than one location or where your location is important to searchers, but a Google Maps or Places listing will take up a large part of the SERPs.

Creating Other Websites

Similar to subdomains, but potentially less work. Some organisations buy domain names that contain their company name plus a phrase that describes what they do, what industry they’re in or a specific service they offer. For example, Sky and the BBC have several sites devoted to each of their channels and business units.

Industry Directories

You will probably already know which directories are the biggest in your industry. If they allow you to create a profile page about your organisation, do so. Our Econsultancy page ranks along with one or two others at any given time. 

I’m going to stop there as I think I’m getting the point across. Creating sites and profiles on sites that you can control is the name of the game. There are numerous opportunities for this on the internet. Getting them to rank for your name is arguably another blog post in itself. For now I’ll simply say, keep them updated and make them interesting for visitors. Over time, they’ll pick up links and start to expand their presence, making them significant enough to rank for your name.

Pick your profiles based on how many you can realistically manage over time. By aligning them with your existing business goals, you should find that setting them up and maintaining them fits in naturally with your processes and goals.

How and Why To Dominate The First Page Of Google For Your Organisation’s Name is a post from: Response Marketing Blog - Search Engine Marketing by Mediarun

The elusive keyword had been subject to rumours in SEO circles for months but the announcement still sent shockwaves around the industry.

Google are refusing to divulge the actual term but it is said to be made up of 2 distinct words that are “impossible to write accidentally”. Placing the phrase in your homepage’s copy will guarantee your site the top spot in Google and 1042011 visitors each day (or 4012011 in the US).

Google originally created the term back in 1998 when the internet was only used as a hangout for science fiction fans. Now the internet has several other uses, the presence of the secret lexicon poses real issues for the search engine.

Unscrupulous SEO consultants have been quick to capitalise on the announcement. Numerous services are now available from shady SEO companies who claim to know the enigmatic edict and are prepared to place it onto websites for exorbitant fees.

Guesses as to what the term might be were being made on social media sites and webforums across the internet last night. At Mediarun, we do not claim to know what the word is but we suspect it might be “lorem ipsum”. We’d welcome any other guesses in the comments, of course.

Google Reveals Secret Keyword That Guarantees Top Ranking is a post from: Response Marketing Blog - Search Engine Marketing by Mediarun

Needless to say, as complex as SEO is there are plenty of grey areas that we suspect the ASA will struggle to do anything about – there are so many more webpages than there are adverts. That said, we’ve made a wish list of the things we’d like to see them tackle, but know that they almost certainly can’t. Still, we can but hope…

Visual pun #1872

There are plenty of examples of the below online but you’ll forgive me if I don’t help them out with a link.

1. We’ll take the “guaranteed results” bunch as read. For the googolth time (real number – look it up): no one can guarantee any search results unless they are the search engine. Also, it’s a meaningless promise. Tell you what, I’ll guarantee to get your site on page 1 for the keyphrase “large badger hats”. Think of the prestige!

2. SEM companies using Adwords positions screenshots as evidence of some kind of expertise. They are effectively saying “I have no respect for you, potential customer, you gullible fool.”

3. Companies using volumes in their claims i.e. 1000s of search engines! 1000s of directories! With no quality stipulation, these big numbers are meaningless.

4. Spam commenters. Anyone who leaves a blog comment that adds nothing to the discussion but links to their site. The ASA should employ specialized agents who hunt these individuals down and then interrupt their private conversations with loud non-sequiturs while passing them a pamphlet for a one-step teeth-whitening service.

5. SEO Ninjas, Gurus and Rock Stars. You don’t make yourself sound cool by appending one of these titles after your name. I’d like the ASA to hand out fines to anyone who uses these titles in their social media profiles and can’t back them up with a definition of what they actually mean and a demonstration of their related abilities. I imagine an SEO ninja is something you use to assassinate other SEO consultants but I’m not sure so please clarify this.

6. SEO agencies saying their SEO techniques are ethical. Admittedly we are among the agencies guilty of this but I’d like to see the practice consigned to the past. By simply bringing up ethics, we imply there are unethical sharks in the SEO waters and this smears our industry as a whole. Surely it’s better to focus on the positives and achievements and move to a time where good ethics taken for granted? You don’t see a restaurant promoting itself by proudly boasting of its hygiene record. Or an airline boasting of its low crash rate.

7. Non-SEO companies (developers, designers, marketing agencies) that say they “do” SEO. This almost always means they cover 1 part of SEO. Usually, this means they will make your site visible to search engines but they can lead unwitting clients into thinking they’re paying for an SEO solution when they’re not. Cue future disillusionment with SEO as a practice because of weak results.

That said, I think SEO is already a great industry to work in and I’m proud to be a part of it. The talent and achievements far outweigh the ne’er-do-wells. But sometimes it just feels good to have a grumble. And the best of luck to the ASA.

The 7 SEO Practices We’d Like The New ASA Remit to End (But It Probably Won’t) is a post from: Response Marketing Blog - Search Engine Marketing by Mediarun