I’m always glad to see the gleam of positive news in the reams of economic doom, gloom and despair–and especially when it’s good news about our sector. This just in from the new Technical SEO Consultants blog:

While the world is experiencing an economic financial crisis, the SEO industry is experiencing a surprising increase in demand. From intensive training and SEO consultation to actual website changes and link building, the demand for expert SEO help is growing at an astonishing rate….But currently most established SEO professionals seem to have just the opposite need, they have too much business. Many established SEO professionals are declining to take on new clients because they just cannot accept any additional work load right now.

Google is releasing SEO guides, Microsoft and Yahoo! both have in-house SEO departments and the “SEO is BSâ€Â� crowd have lost a little of their swagger and a lot of their arguments. No surprise – solid evidence trumps wishful thinking, especially when times are tough….

“Prospects are demanding more specific information related to their sites issues and detailed, actionable solutions are expected. Generic audits that look automated in any way are no longer welcome. Ex: Don’t just tell me I got a problem with my titles, but tell me exactly how are we going to fix them! That is the attitude of an average educated site owner looking for help. This will ultimately separate the amateurs from the experts.�
-Jose Nunez

We’ve seen a year-end push from new clients, and of course the normal inquiries related to setting 2009 budgets. December looks to be very busy, for which we are thankful. The good news is that clients are getting a lot smarter about both the value of SEO and how it works. In tough times, the SEO charlatans who promise a lot for a little are going to be hard-pressed to show results, and the clients who continue to improve their sites are going to gain market share. Those SEO agencies which do good work are going to ride out the storm as valuable team members of those successful companies.

It’s my “turn” to write a blog post. After listening to my whining for all of half a minute, our Blog Overlord said, “We have this great blogroll right there on our blog. Go read it. Find something interesting and link to it.” Very sympathetic. As it turns out, it was excellent advice.

The very first blog post I read was titled, “Blogging Lessons.” Its very first point? “1) It’s hard.“  (yes, it was written in bold.)  Now, that’s serendipity.

I just knew I’d found the I-Told-You-So blog posting to shoot back at our Overlord and get me out of having to ever blog again.  Nope. I realized she was right – again – to withhold sympathy.  Blogging IS important.  And it’s a commitment.  And it is hard.  Even for folks (like Spike) at Brains on Fire who blog all the time.  So, I feel better.  No more whining. For now.

Seriously, do read their work.  Very enlightening stuff.

It’s spring, and my brain is in overdrive. I don’t know if it’s the usual seasonal restlessness or if it’s a combination of a lot of ideas and influences percolating at once, but man oh man, I cannot stop thinking. For once, my thinking is turned to work. I usually think of travel, of art, of letting my body and life fly as fast and free as my mind. A creative, relaxing trip to Spain with one of my best friends is in the works for June, so that beast is quiet.

Instead, I’m tenaciously drawn to excellence, to actually identifying and solving the problem, to being utterly devoted. It does me no good to be devoted to serving the next big thing, to being an early adopter for the pleasure of “been there, done that” once everyone else picks it up. I’ll do that for my own enjoyment. For clients and friends and readers, though, I want to bring them what they need and want. My question to them shouldn’t be, “Have you seen this cool new thing?” It should be, “How can I help you? What can I do to make your job and life easier?”

To that end, I’m putting together questions and a survey to actually sit down and ask how we’re doing, what we could do better, and what you need to know about in the sphere of web marketing. The companies and people that you see and want to emulate are awesome because they know their audience and serve them well. They encourage and enable their people to go out and do their thing and do it well.

I love this video. That’s what we want to do for web marketing. Ask us your questions, tell us what you want to know, what you need, and we’ll answer. We’re marketers first and foremost, and we want to be your partner in web marketing, plain and simple. Not to sign you. Not to market to you. We care about making your job easier. About helping you make sense of the million things you could do and the few you should do. We want you to be able to answer the questions you get asked. We want to make you look good in front of your boss. Seriously.

Every nerd’s dream is to win the epic battle using his brains and maybe some secret ninja skills, thereby winning the admiration of Pamela Anderson.

Unfortunately, most muscleheads would crush the typical nerd in any battle, particularly an epic one, because of one factor: muscle. The nerd’s problem is he’s dreaming of victory without putting the daily sweat into his game plan. He’s trying to short circuit the system. No sweat, no victory.

We see this attitude with black hat SEO. While slugging through competitor sites for a client, Susan the Meticulous discovered a site that put a pile of hidden text on the home page, and then duplicated it throughout the site. They even included links to a completely unrelated website, most likely another SEO client of theirs.

Ethical search engine optimization means that you have to do the work. You cannot short circuit the system. This is one of my biggest soapbox issues. Technology only creates obstacles. It does not provide solutions for SEO.

Black hatters think they can avoid hard work by creating hidden text. It’s hidden because it’s stuffed with keywords and is bad for marketing. Technology is only giving that site an invitation to the blacklist.

If the nerd sweated it out at the gym 2 or 3 times a week, he would have the strength and agility to defeat the musclehead. Similarly, if you add good content to your site 2 or 3 times a week, you will be in a much stronger position as time progresses.

The irony of this is that Sara Rasco, our Blog Overlord, has been cracking the whip because I have been lax in my blog postings. My job is not about writing blog posts, and I’m guessing that yours isn’t either. This is why it’s so tempting to look for the easy way out. The site with the hidden text should have spent the time to write great marketing copy.

Note: if you’re a nerd and a woman, please substitute the words “his brains” with “her brains” and “Pamela Anderson” with “David Hasselhoff”.

Immediate engagement starts before your prospects visit your site. Maybe they’ve listened to those enlightened podcasts you’ve been cranking out for the last few months, or seen the wacky videos you’ve posted on YouTube.

The more you focus on drawing prospects from social media, the more likely they will get to know you on a personal level before they know you professionally. Once they’re engaged, don’t loose them with corporate speak.

BAD, BAD HOME PAGE
Consider the following example from the home page of the fictional Happy Baby Megacorp website.

At Happy Baby Megacorp, makers of Happy Baby Cloth Diapers, the rashless diaper solution, and H.B. Powder Ups, the only baby powder with added vitamins, our goal is to be the global leader in portable infant waste entrapment and removal solutions for working mothers, in-home infant health care workers, and government-supported and private health care facilities.

Seriously, nobody cares what your goals are. They just want their babies’ butts to be clean. Building loyalty comes from helping people meet their needs. As marketing professionals, you already know that.

The danger for us as marketers is the potential disconnect between the personal voice we use with social media and the professional voice we use on our website, particularly the home page. So how do we maintain our professional dignity without losing their interest?

First, be consistent with your message. You can’t just go off on some obscure diaper example without having an underlying message that matches the message on your site. Have fun with the social media, but stay on message.

Second, always talk to your prospects on their level. That gives a consistent feel to the conversation as they move from connecting with you “out there� in the social media universe to their interaction with your website and eventually with you.

Third, engage them at every step. Your vision statement sounds like the Happy Baby Megacorp example above. Keep it to yourself. Consider how your home page sounds to the person who only knows you from your quirky blog posts.

Finally, use excellent organic seo practices. People may be entertained by your social media content, but they will likely use search to find the right solution.

SEO’s flexibility gives you the advantage of being able to quickly change as the market changes. Suppose a competitor posts an obnoxiously cute video on YouTube for their “Super Baby rash-free diapers.â€Â� Before you know it, their video is flying around the internet and people start to search on “rash-free diapersâ€Â�… but you’ve built your empire on “rashless diapers.â€Â�

Incorporating new terms in a way that sounds natural is the cornerstone of ethical search engine optimization. When your message is consistent, talks to your target audience on their level, addresses their needs, and when your site uses good seo copy writing so people can find you, then you can connect with them effectively with social media and search.

At long last, I have some shiny blogging presentations for you! The Understanding Search Marketing one is the presentation that Susan the Meticulous and I did for a luncheon a few weeks back, and has an overview of some of the more important areas of search marketing, plus an edited version of the blogging presentation.

If you have any questions or want clarification on anything, please don’t hesitate to email me (sarasco (at) refreshweb (dot) com) or ask in the comments. These are both something used when I’m there, live and in the flesh, running my mouth and answering questions.

P.S. I shouldn’t have to tell you, but these are the copyrighted property of RefreshWeb, and if you take them and call them your own, very bad things will happen to you. Things involving ninjas and paper cuts from manila folders.

There is a reason they call me Susan the Meticulous. I’m going with the notion it’s a compliment. I say yes, that’s me, and I have the shoes to match.

It is a safe (workplace!*) characterization. I do tend toward research and cross-checks. I perk up when I get an afternoon of View–>Source for a zillion websites to get a sense of how our client’s competitors are coding in support of their organic SEO. I jump with delight when I can get a whole year of client HitsLink data, and it if it includes conversion tracking, well, start thinking tranquilizer dart. And, yes, I always set the keyword research setting to return 1000 results.

I have, however, stumbled around the block enough times to respect some limits, one of those being we can optimize a website, at least on the first round, for a very finite set of terms. We’re talking somewhere between the legal driving age and the age you get dropped from your parent’s health insurance. Inevitably we’ve carefully pruned a list of a few thousand terms to a list of a couple hundred, and now the task is to choose which are the top 10% to optimize.

Usually there’s not a year’s worth of data (sigh) about terms that have worked for the client. OK, usually there is not a day’s worth of data about what terms have worked for the client. We’ve got data about search volumes and numbers of competing pages, but we all have to admit that data has imperfections.

So here’s my question. Other than using some variation of the ratio of search volume to competing pages, what comes to your mind reading this – how would you go about ranking a list of 200 great terms so you can take the top 20 for optimization? No matter your perspective – marketer, SEO expert, any other interested party…I am curious what first comes to your mind.

Because no one knows better than someone who adores manually comparing lists for overlap and gaps that sometimes the best choices have little to do with anything listed in columns and rows. Rather, they come from listening to what strategies seem interesting to folks like you, folks who might make it this far in to an entry in an SEO blog.

So let me know. And until then, I’ll be sorting and pivoting among columns and rows, earbuds tuned to the ambient wood flute and yoga bells channel, looking for clues.

*Please do not go looking for those shoes in my closet. My image would be so blown. I can only imagine the new nickname.