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.

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.

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?

After a recent phone call with a potential client, I thought to contribute a short post regarding the role of expectations in the SEO agency/client relationship.

As a relatively new business, the SEO/SEM service set is not always clear in client’s minds, and this elevates the importance of getting clear about expectations. 

It’s important to communicate about what services are offered - and what services are not, and the results to expect. Without clear communication, problems resulting from mismatched expectations can easily arise. The client will often think that the scope of services is much broader than the people at the SEO agency.  We have all heard about projects that quickly move into client expectations of total web site redesign…at no extra charge.

As the relationship starts, and we deliver the obvious advice, such as dropping the all-Flash home page, clients can think that all the work will be this obvious or clear cut. Upfront, we tell them it is not, and why.

Another area where expectations can diverge is the need for regular maintenance and tweaking. Upfront, I make it clear that well-executed SEO is not a quick fix. 

Because each client is unique - different industries, different needs, different levels of technical sophistication – each time you set these expectations, it is a different challenge.