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So you know, we do file away a lot of articles and tools in our various bookmark collections. If you would like to check them out, please do.

And if you’re a memeber of either of these services, don’t be shy about friending us either. Thanks!

This week, Jim Lanzone announced he would no longer be the CEO of Ask.com. Why? Because he found another job. This seems to fly in the face, of course, of Mr. Lanzone’s statements about his commitment to a site like Ask.com, and how they would be working to finally make the search engine competitive with the big three.

Apparently those are sights set too high. Whether he chose to get out while the getting was good, or was “asked to leave” as part of the company’s recent restructure, it does remain clear that toppling Google will take more than a page redesign, or TV commercials, or, in his words, “not worrying about the millions of people using Google, but helping the tens of thousands who already use Ask.” (Or words to that effect. This is not a direct quote.) I heard Mr. Lanzone say this during last year’s Search Engine Strategies conference, and thought to myself, “Wow - that’s pretty short sighted! I bet he doesn’t keep his job too long!” (Conversely, this is a direct quote.)

That’s been the question bandied about a lot lately. It even had a panel discussion at last week’s SES show in San Jose. The main points people bring up (when they do think it’s evil) is that if everyone left their search rankings alone, the search engines would find the best content on their own, and if you had the best content, you would do well in search rankings. So if you just concentrate on making quality content, you don’t need to worry about SEO.

To a certain degree, this is true. Search engines only care about finding the most relevant match in a search query,  and if your article on Houston trade shows is really what they think hits the mark, then by gum you’ll do well in searches.

Thing is, that system requires everyone to not try and do well in search, and it makes me marvel that no one sees this. Lets up the ante on this argument, and say your business has some relevant content, and you want your business to do well in search. How willing will you be to adhere to these wonderfully utopia ideals of the Internet? What about your competitors? Do you think they’ll be willing to lose  all those potential sales because your un-optimized content does better than their un-optimized content? Not on your life - they’ll run out and start optimizing their content in a heartbeat.

Not that the actual practice of optimization is that evil anyway. The main thrust of what we do is not to “game” the Google system, but in essence to do what they say they like to see: Create content related to what people are looking for, create links to the content that show its relevancy, and get the word out about products and companies the way any good public relations campaign would.

Calling SEO evil is rather similar to calling capitalism evil, which is a whole different argument and certainly much more easily made. If you’re going to take that route, it will certainly be a more honest argument. Laying the blame on SEO alone, however, is unfair.

Any system, no matter what safeguards are put in place, can be gamed to promote a specific result. If the reward for pulling this off are great enough, then enough people will try to do so. SEO, then, becomes a responsible business decision, since NOT optimizing and trusting the efficiency of search algorithms may or may not get you customers. This may or may not leave you bankrupt.

So hate the other players - not the game.

This morning’s special was learning more about how to get traffic to your site using RSS feeds and blogs. It is always refreshing to have speakers back me up on my own opinions, and this one they banged like a gong: If your company doesn’t have the blog you’ve already missed the boat, you need to set one up now and start playing catch up, and everyone in the world has a blog by now, so unless you get hopping on promoting yours, no one will ever care.

The nice thing is there are so many avenues for promoting your blog. Feeds, namely, but not just one – a site should have several feeds, for several different points of interest, in order to have the widest appear.

One of the speakers was Rick Klau, formerly of FeedBurner and now with Google. The change-up is the result of Google’s buy-out of Feedburner. The happy result of that merger is that many of the analytics tools Feedburner used to charge for are now free with Google. As such, if you are publishing a feed, (and as I say, when you syndicate feeds, think plural,) Google/Feedburner can give you great analytics on who is grabbing your site, what reader they’re using, how long they’ve been with you, etc.

And did I mention, “free?” Free’s always good. You just would not believe the handbag of chatchkis I have from the exhibitor booths. I may not have any shame, but at least I have a Yahoo! breath mint case. But more of that anon.

There were several other strategies I must admit I had no idea existed – but then again, that’s what you pay your money for when you come to SES. Since Mighty Interactive and Off Madison Ave both administer Wordpress blogs, there are a mass of tools available to us that I will roll out in the coming weeks. When I do I’ll let you know about them, and how they’re doing. I’m particularly looking forward to instituting, “Ultimate Tag Warrior” – this Wordpress-specific tool creates a tag cloud of topics within your blog. It gives a simple, easily viewable lists of topics that a blog has covered in the past, giving visitors a direct and simple to follow line to your subject matter.

Well, next up is Link Baiting and Viral Search, a favorite topic of mine. After all, going out and building links is hard – I’d much rather build content that impels others to link to me on their own, wouldn’t you?

Here is the full breakdown of the panel on SearchEngineRoundtable.

This pannel is focused on mistakes that can be made in site architecture, URLs, and all of that fun stuff. Rather than try to absolutely explain all of this now, I’ll just serve up the tidbits and answer questions as you have them. So be sure and ask!

• Javascript in toolbars, links, etc. does not work; this is because the search engine’s spider is running through links, but does not have the time to execute Javascript while doing so. This would just slow down results. This is why we always tell people to avoid their use, unless there’s a sound alternative on the page.
• Similarly, to do well with images in a search, don’t be shy about putting keywords in the alt tags, the name of the image, URL, etc. (This is covered in the Off Madison Ave post on Universal Search.)
• Inconsistent linking problems can cause duplicate content. For example, if you have a content management system building dynamic URLs, but pages also put together breadcrumb trails that could put three different kinds on one product page, then duplicate pages will be spidered. (Example: Business>Real Estate>Contractors is a bread crumb trail that tells users how they got where they are.
• BTW, URLs that are generated by content management systems and are longer than freight trains is far less helpful to SEO because of the lack of easily found keywords in them. (www.mightyinteractive.com/arizona-marketing” will always do better than www.mightyinteractive.com/?source=ig&hl=en&q=arizona+marketing&btnGblahblahblah…)
• Things like a mouse action to move forward from the home page, or enabling a cookie, or selecting a region, etc. can stop a search spider dead in its tracks. Spiders run on links - if you do not allow the spider at least an alternative to find the rest of the pages on your site…. it won’t.
• Tables aren’t nice to search engines. When spiders look at them, they get a mish-mash of information that they cannot make sense of. So don’t use them. Thank you. (Brought to you by Citizens Against Tables.)
• On the other hand, CSS style sheets are cleaner, and therefore easier for spiders to take in. In lieu of a mass of code, use these in page building whenever possible.
• Go to Google’s Webmaster Central to get a crawl report. These can tell you how Google is viewing your page, problems that exist, the amount of time it took to cruise the page, etc. It is a good analytics package for finding out if you have site architecture problems to deal with.
• And finally, www.sitemaps.org. This is something I’ve been using for several months to put a searchlight on websites for engines to find.

That having been said, again, if a site has sound architecture this shouldn’t be a problem.