A media consultant friend used to have this sign taped to his office wall: “Never Do This.”

Below it were newspaper clippings of unfortunate things public people had said. An oil company PR person saying: “Only four hundred thousand gallons of oil was spilled and it wasn’t all ours.” An elected official defending allegations of violating a particular law, saying: “Uh, that’s not a LAW. It’s just a STATUTE.” At our SEO agency, we call it “Worst Practices.”

Last week, doing some competitive snooping for a client, I was at cache:www.competitorwebsite.com for the search engine view. It was the same as the competitor’s homepage - as it should be - with the Google cache box across the top. I scrolled all the way to the bottom, in my meticulous way, no surprises.

Then I clicked for the text-only version. Just what you’d expect - no images, same words. I scrolled to the bottom - oh my.

There, below the footer text, were several hundred words of hidden copy. About eight more seconds of detective work revealed the copy’s formatting code, the css class “se,” designated the right size, color, and presentation to be invisible to a human yet still be indexed by the search engines.

This is bad. If this were ok, web searching would be like ordering the fish at a restaurant that says you can order anything, but really everyone in the kitchen is having a fist fight to see who gets to come out to your table to take your order. The strongest and possibly meanest – or most desperate or corrupt - wins the fight and comes to your table. You’d say: “Could I have the daily fish special?” And she’d say sure, which one do you want: we have fish Brittany Spears, fish steroids, fish nudity, and low cost prescription medications with fish.

If you were patient, or terribly hungry, rather than running out the front door you might say “I asked for the fish special: I’ll have the salmon.” And she’d nod, and say sure, which one do you want: we have salmon low interest credit cards, salmon diet cure, salmon vitamins, salmon product coupons, and online matchmaking with salmon.

Vitriol aside, I was having a great time doing the email equivalent of popping in to everyone’s office and saying “Look at me at this, isn’t it amazing?” Our CEO then asks if that hidden text is on any of the other pages. I rush to view: source. Yes, it is. There is duplicate hidden duplicate copy on multiple pages.

Some of you already are sharing the satisfied elegance of justice, and for those not there yet, the punch line is: search engines despise duplicate text. When it’s found – and it’s easy for an automated process to find – your website gets penalized – those pages aren’t shown. SEO cheaters can be removed from the ranking results, aka de-listed.

So this website, while decently sized and showing signs of some ethical optimization, is nearly invisible to people searching. Whether a Google or Yahoo human picked up on the hidden text, or the automated process detected the collateral damage of the duplicate text, this site is suffering the consequences of its unethical SEO. We regrettably, and with a grimace of disgust, award this site top tier recognition in our gallery of Worst Practices.

Cory Doctorow’s article in the Guardian, “‘Intellectual Property’ is a silly euphemism” is a good talking point on the noodley world we content crafters inhabit. There’s a friend I go around and around with on IP law and acceptable usage of things like, say, a photo of a famous work of art. If I’m writing about color theory and illustrate my post by putting in Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” and something from Picasso’s blue period–even though we’ve all seen the images before–she says I have stolen art. Not Picasso’s art, mind you. The photograph is someone’s art that I have stolen and should be paying for. The art may be public domain, but images of it aren’t somehow? That’s just silly. It’s an impossibly fine distinction.

Maybe it’s generational. There’s never been a time in my life where anyone couldn’t record something and share it–mix tapes, movies on TV. I remember sitting up late with my boom box in middle school to record the hip hop music on the radio my parents wouldn’t let me buy. It’s not malicious. If I post a 30-second video clip of my dog on my blog and put it to (credited) music that I didn’t write, record, and edit myself, have I committed a crime? Have I harmed album sales? Most people under a certain age would instantly say, “No, of course not! It’s like free promotion!” Have you ever bought music someone else used in this villainous manner? I have, and a lot of it. Music I wouldn’t have known about otherwise.

Yes people flat-out pirate, and we all know it’s wrong. That’s not what we’re talking about here. Media is the most accessible way to talk about this because it’s a lot easier than trying to explain someone owning a theory or concept. But as internet marketers, content creators, and people that are in the forefront of emergent forms of media and content, we run into this constantly. We’re out there making mashups and homages to products we love, but a lot of the people whose titles start with a C aren’t happy about it at all. Some companies embrace it, like Apple, who went ahead and used a customer-created iPod ad. That’s the good. Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba talk about fan-created content a lot in their book Citizen Marketers, and they make some excellent points for marketers and corporations to consider when they’re deciding what to do about this loss of control over the message.

The bad is more like blogs populated by bots that post scraped content. Or outright plagiarism. Some people think that just because it’s on the internet, you can take it and use it however you like, without attribution. For me there are two main questions to be answered in determining if it’s right or wrong: is there profit involved? are you attributing the source of what you’re using? Where do you think the line is between what constitutes fair use and thievery?

Each man is the architect of his own fortune.

There was a link to this great little interview with Ward Schumaker on Illustration Fridays in my inbox this morning. It needs to be shared. Not just because IF is one of my favorite sites. Not just because you need to see art–though you really do: it’s like vegetables for the soul, or maybe chocolate… mmm chocolate-covered metaphysical broccoli. You need to read this because it’s inspiring in an achievable way.

What do I mean by that?

You read stories of people who are heap big at whatever they do. They have inevitably made it there through perseverance, determination, hard work. Half the time they have a debilitating setback that would have caused lesser mortals (read: you and I) to crumble. One-legged marathon runners are inspiring. But I’m just a normal person. Ward is a normal person, too.

His story is a good example of finding fulfilling work through the normal channels and opportunities. Over time. Without being grabbed by the collar and thrust into the limelight where we could all recognize his awesomeness. Fulfilling work is different for everyone. For some it’s a very specific job, for others it’s criteria like being your own boss and knowing you’re doing some good in the world. Both kinds are good dreams to have, and sometimes it’s nice to be reminded that the way to them is slow and meandering.

Today is Valentine’s Day, and I’m here to celebrate long-term relationships. Several of our clients have been with us for three or four years, and the joy of committed relationship is seeing the little love nests of their web sites become fruitful. Here’s a virtual chocolate truffle to my sweeties: Overland Storage in San Diego, SS White Dental Burs in New Jersey, Clifford Law in Chicago, and Prescott Legal Recruiters in Houston.

SEO is a long-term strategy. It takes months to do the work, and months to see results. Like going to the gym. Hiring an SEO firm is like hiring someone to go to the gym for you…except you’re the one that gets to show off the bod.

If you’re thinking about reworking your web site, plan on a month or two to develop the strategy and plan out the work. Optimizing your web site will take a couple of months, then it takes 30-45 days for your first gains in ranking. Next, link development to support your new content and the SEO strategy, including PR and other social media. More links, better rankings, more traffic. Now, you work on improving your conversions. Are you tracking phone calls and emails that come from your web visitors? What can you give away to get some token of commitment? All these go with the territory, so when you’re thinking about reworking your web site, you have to understand that it won’t really be OPTIMIZED for maybe a year. But an optimized web site has leverage–probably the most effective marketing you can do, because of the long-term payoff.

A web site that’s purring along, bringing in traffic and converting them into customers, is worth the effort. Like a new car (and at about the same cost), it’s exciting to feel the power, take a curve, and cruise down the road. Unfortunately, it’s not something you can drive off the lot…it’s a custom rod you spend a lot of time under before you can take it for a spin.

Search Engine Land’s post on the proposed Yahoo! buyout has email from Y! CEO Jerry Yang to the employees. From the way it sounds, one thing that won’t be going directly to Google is the search marketing portion of Yahoo! In the “actions that need to happen” section of the email, Yang writes:

must buy: at the same time, we will increasingly make online advertising easier and more effective for marketers, opening up new ways for them to address consumers. our right media exchange, acquired last year, is more open and easy to use, simplifying transactions for buyers and sellers of online ad inventory. another 2007 acquisition, blue lithium, brings us best in class performance marketing. while we’ve historically tracked the success of our ad business by focusing on metrics related to our owned and operated sites, our goal is to increase the percentage of the total online advertising demand we touch—to 20% of our addressable market over the next several years, from an estimated 15% in 2007.

I had wondered about that, since Panama’s only been running for about a year. Even before they announced their rejection this morning, there have been rumors of Yahoo! renewing talks with AOL. I haven’t a clue what that would gain Yahoo! in the long term since AOL is a slowly-failing dinosaur who uses Google’s search results. Who still uses AOL?

RefreshWeb just posted a comprehensive list of SEO tips for integrating search marketing into your site. Covers strategy and tactics, with links to all the resources mentioned. Links to free SEO tools.

read more | digg story

This is the first time I’ve used Digg to post, direct to the blog. Like other eager social marketers, we are interested in seeing what happens as we branch out into more engaged, less direct marketing. Well, I have to confess to a little self promotion in doing this post: there wasn’t a Digg that mentions RefreshWeb, so I needed to fix that.

As this blog is written for other people doing web marketing, we will keep you posted on results from our activities. In this case, we are also promoting the free seo tools, tips and tactics via PRWeb in a press release next week, and have mentioned the page in a couple of articles we submitted last month. In January, the seo-tools.php page was the entry page for 30 people…it’s safe to assume these were all new visitors from the articles. The blog was the entry page for 38 people, so that’s encouraging…our audience is more interested in learning from our experience than they are in experimenting on their own…or maybe people are bookmarking or using the RSS feed to keep up with what we’re saying. I’ll report back in a few weeks on the experiment in progress.

I’m going to the Interactive portion of SXSW in a few weeks. Got any recommendations for panels and parties that aren’t to be missed? Or ones to miss? Our own Tom Parish is leading the Social Marketing Strategies Metrics, Where Are They? panel on Saturday, which will be excellent. I’m hoping it doesn’t overlap with Social Network Coups: The Users are Revolting! (Annalee Newitz), The Suxorz: The Worst Ten Social Media Ad Campaigns of 2007 (Henry Copeland) or Creating Findable Rich Media Content (Jennifer Taylor) that are all on the same day.

If you’re going, shoot me an email or comment and maybe we can meet up. I’ll be the one in jeans and a Threadless shirt with an iBook liveblogging… no, wait! That’s everyone. My bad.

If you’re going and you’re not from here, I’m happy to make recommendations before people send you to eat really awful Mexican food and make you wonder what the fuss about Austin restaurants is if this is the best we can do. (Hint: if the margaritas are supposed to be great, they’re either really cheap or only good if you substitute the primo tequila so they make it with limes instead of mix. This will serve you well at Matt’s El Rancho/Trudy’s/El Arroyo).

I have known many copywriters over my career. I hired many, having managed both a technical writing business, and a technical PR/marcom business. Last week I ran into a past employee who has been a copywriter for many years. She told me how writing for the Web has been a struggle for her, but an interesting experience. I could relate. She likes writing for the Web, but had a difficult time with the transition, having to let go of the quest for just the right word in every case. While “traditional” marketing copywriting and SEO copywriting require different styles, I would choose a copywriter who can do both well. A combination of the styles is the best bet, because while good SEO copywriting plays a role in getting them to the site, it’s not helpful if it does not eloquently get across your message. Well, I think I will visit a few poetry sites now…

Susan the Meticulous has had a relationship with social media like those little birds with twiggy legs at the beach have with the water. They run toward the incoming wave, get a little bit of a leg or beak wet, and then turn around and run away fast. While I believe in the power of telling, and believing a priori is not a strong suit of mine, I go through periods of resistance to blogging, filling out the “about me” part of the social network profile, saying any more than absolutely is necessary. I struggle between desire to share and fear of exposure. Personally, it’s the fear of saying that one very wrong thing. Professionally, well, it’s exactly the same.

What do you think - do younger people, people who have been blogging or reading blogs since their teens and are now in the workforce - have that same fear? Privateness - it just seems to be so, like, out. Controlling who one is to others by self-editing, holding back, playing cards close to the chest…who needs that layer of faking it? Hey, duh, we change, we evolve, we adopt new perspectives. Yesterday we were blue and today we’re red. If we’re smart, we are where our customers are and trying to figure out if orange is next and if so exactly what shade.

Here’s another wonder: for seo agency client companies marketing to people young enough and social-media-centric enough to assume that a transparent evolving personal or corporate identity is the norm, what are the limits of the fabled transparency?

Corporate competition always has been secretive. Will businesses seeking to prosper in a social-media public relations framework adopt a norm of carefully spawning yet another public corporate image - people creating characters whose purpose it is to be real people on social media? Perhaps a persona of a CEO telling all or an entry-level worker climbing the ladder, personas we’re drawn to… personas manufactured as distraction and to give the appearance of transparency.

Or will social media be able to do what it seems like it could do – through sheer volume of uncontrolled communication, be able to establish a fairly enforceable terrain of true and customer-mandated transparency?

Driving to errands after work, a story came onto NPR’s Marketplace that was so riveting I sat in my parked car, little heart all aflutter with hope at what I was hearing. See, Microsoft is attempting a hostile takeover of Yahoo! That’s not the fun part, though. Yahoo! is trying to rally by paring down to doing what they do well and outsourcing what they don’t do so well. Namely, search.

That’s right–the execs got together over the weekend to discuss Yahoo! outsourcing their search and paid search to Google. It’s like a Valentine’s Day gift from the universe to search marketers.

Okay, that’s probably not nice of me, but I have a major problem with Yahoo! putting paid results in with the natural ones and not differentiating them. Not PPC ads, but an additional service called Yahoo! Search Submit. The clicks are cheap, but you don’t have a say in what search terms they use to display these listings you’re being charged for. We’ve found that our clients are usually paying for clicks on their own name–positioning that they should have for free. There’s an argument for it providing a lower-quality user experience as well, since the results aren’t going to be as truly relevant as Google’s.

Why pay at all if the practice is a little bit sketchy? Because otherwise, it’s crazy hard to get listed in Yahoo! at all. Since they index your site and drive traffic there by giving preferred positioning, it’s not such a bad deal, even if it is a bit devious. To just have the second-largest market share of search become one with the largest would have us SEO nerds blissed out like you wouldn’t believe. Fingers crossed!