Many professional lies are passed off as good information because they are just part of an industry vernacular or learning curve. For example, many people say make quality content, but never attempt to define what quality content is, or even how certain types of quality content are being marginalized by scrapers, social sites, user generated content, automated news sites, and search engines. Bad advice is frequently given out as though it is good advice because

• people talk in terms of ideals because...
  • they want to justify the time they spent learning what they know

  • they want to justify the career path they chose (which may become a large part of their identity)
  • they buy into white lies that put themselves or others at the top of social networks
  • they get paid more if only a few people can do what they teach (supply vs demand, etc.)
• professionals want to make their profession seem more complex than it is...
  • to lock new competitors out of their market

  • to feel proud of themselves for the hard work they do and all they know
  • to justify the fees they charge
  • they get paid more if only a few people can do what they teach (supply vs demand, etc.)
• many people with authority only consider their worldview...
  • because they are insecure or it is all they know

  • or they realize that if they (or the market) were less idealistic they might lose their authority / income / market position
  • they get paid more if only a few people can do what they teach (supply vs demand, etc.)

A few white lies I hate...

• Create quality content. Why do I hate it? If you don't have much brand recognition higher quallity content will lose out to average content. Most people never talk about the social aspects of the web when saying to create quality content.

• Don't buy or sell links. Why do I hate it? The major search engines are the largest link brokers. Their guidelines are based on them extracting as much value from the web as possible, and many of them buy and sell links with intent to manipulate their own indexes or pollute other search engines. Most quality links are in one way or another bought. If I package value and give it away and then people link at it then I bought those links. If I list my site in the Yahoo! Directory I bought a listing.
• Create your website for users, not for search engines. Why do I hate it? Search is marginalizing many publishing business models. To pay for the costs of creating linkworthy content it makes sense to add a significant amount of lower cost highly monetized filler to a website.
• Used variable width liquid design. Why do I hate it? Using a fixed width design allows you greater control of the readability and ad integration (and thus monetization) for most of your target market on most content sites.
• Validate your site. Why do I hate it? Most successful sites do not validate.

What web design / web development / SEO white lies do you see most often? Which ones frustrate you?

A while ago I made a bunch of posts about search (and the web as a whole) being about communication, but I think the posts were so verbose that nobody cared. :)

Since then I have been playing with social web stuff a good bit more and it is hard to grasp the full potential of it until after you see some of your marketing ideas spread like a weed. I have done well spreading ideas related to SEO, but I really was blown away by the potential when I had ideas not related to SEO that spread fast and far. In A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History Manuel De Landa highlighted that smaller businesses tend to act as research labs for larger ones. Nick Carr highlighted the erosion of blogs from the Technorati top 35 media sites over the past couple years, based on David Sifry's most recent state of the blogosphere post. The problem is not that blogs are less important than they were, it is just that big media is integrating blogging into what they are doing, and are leveraging their other assets to boost the blogs.

As more and more people write online the value of any singular algorithmic exploit is reduced, and the value of creating what people want or being able to influence decision makers and authorities directly goes up. If you are featured in TechCrunch the odds are good that thousands of people will see your product and hundreds of people will link at your site.

How much is a static link in a lower quality directory worth? It is hard to quantify, but as the static portions of the web represent a smaller and smaller portion of the whole, the value of being mentioned there goes down. If you create something that people are actively talking about which quickly spreads the marketing value of that exposure can be far greater than any marketing you could buy, especially if you value your time.

There are many ways to participate in the active web. If you build a finite amount of attention in the marketplace before you need to leverage it then you can use that asset over and over again.

Blogs & Forums: You can leave comments on blogs and forums, or if you are motivated you can create your own blog or community. If you have limited funds to invest you can invest by spending significant time learning your industry and freely linking out to other sites.

Feedback: Before launching an idea ask important members in your community what they think about your idea. Sometimes their feedback can make it far easier for your idea to spread. If they owe you a favor or feel emotionally attached to your idea they may even help you market it for free.

Social News & Social Bookmarking: You can learn a lot by seeing what stories are spreading on various social bookmarking and news sites. Pay attention to article titles, community bias, bias of the marketed content, format of the marketed content, how frequently certain topics appear, and how you can relate your site to topics these communities enjoy.

The Past: It used to be cheaper and easier to directly manipulate the engines by doing things like

• focus on a highly profitable commercial niche

• focus your anchor text
• buy high PageRank links and build many low quality links
• focus your link equity, pointing links at the page you want to market

But Google filters many obvious bought links, has added cost to low quality links (by making it harder to get in their index and not crawling some sites that have too many low quality links), has a -30 ranking penalty for sites with artificial profiles, and even MSN is getting more aggressive at filtering link spam.

The Present: In many markets it is getting cheaper and easier to manipulate the engines indirectly by participating in the active web, by dong things like

• creating ideas and content people like and want (even if those ideas do not have a direct monetization model)

• being willing to go exceptionally niche or exceptionally broad with some content to create an idea which people would be likely to vote for
• not caring about anchor text
• not caring about what page they link at (realizing that authoritative links to any page on your site will boost your site's authority and the rankings for all pages on your site, and thus will allow you to monetize your commercial pages from the authority of the linkworthy pages)

The Future: Imagine a day when

• hardware, software, and bandwidth are free

• Google and other engines have access to most web usage data
• most people who use the web run websites
• the web is a reflection of what most people think

If that happened would you still be able to compete in your vertical? No matter how good any of us are at manipulating engines, invariable for longterm brands and websites it is going to be cheaper to influence people.

In the past it made sense to cross reference categories and locations to make hundreds of thousands of pages, but with duplicate content filters improving that is a fast track to nowhere. In some cases though it still may make sense to make pages which will still rank for geolocal queries.

One way to do this is to create local pages as their own categories, but to make the page linking to the local pages a category page which shares navigation common to the rest of the section of your site. That will allow you to rank for many modifier rich keyword phrases without requiring you to generate 50 pages per topic.

I recently updated a number of my SEO tools, and a few other people recently launched some interesting new search engine marketing tools.

• Google changed their SERPs so I updated SEO for Firefox.

• My keyword research tool was endlessly looping when Overture failed. A friend helped me update it to stop doing that. :)
• All major search engines came together to support an open xml sitemaps standard.
• on SEM2.0 a PPC keyword research tool named Key Compete was mentioned. It shows you keywords competitors are bidding on by URL, and can be used for keyword ideas for arbitrage plays or authoritative content sites. You know if people are bidding on the keywords that there are going to be relevant ads. If you track your earnings and outbound ad clicks (if you do not want to buy a script for that use the free script here) then when you find an overpriced outbound click you can go buy the keyword list for that advertiser and start cranking out bids or content based on exploiting a great keyword basket or an idiot advertiser. As technology gets cheaper and people keep getting better at packaging highly relevant affordable market research the only thing that will prevent you from becoming commoditized is your brand.
• In case you missed it, a week or two ago I posted about a few new competitive research tools.

I recently read a blog post where I was referred to as a superstar, which to me an absurd classification given that I am me. But I do like to think of myself as being citation worthy in nature. Some people are citation worthy because they do great in depth research while others are citation worthy because they are creative or naturally quirky and then there are people who are citation worthy because they can relate complex ideas to easy to understand topics. Some people push buttons or are egotistical / insecure / shy / weird / uncultured / uncouth to the point of being citation worthy.

At times I am all or none of the above. Depending on mood, who I am with, where I am, how I feel, what song is playing, and what dance I am doing.

When I was in the military we had to wear these stupid straps on our glasses in bootcamp. The difference between me and most other people was that when I got to the boat I still wore those stupid straps, largely because glasses gave me a headache if they put pressure on my ears, and largely because I knew it annoyed certain people. At one point I also ate so much bacon that the boat got put on rations so that I personally forced the cooks to fix breakfast. Both of those things made me citation worthy.

I recently met a cool girl and we make up lots of fake words and tease each other for some of the silly things we say or do. In a couple of weeks of hanging out there are dozens of shared bizarre words and experiences. The connections associated with those tags we made up are easy to vividly share and remember because we made them up and only we know what they mean. I think great writing has the ability to make you think the writer was just writing for you.

I went to a Bob Dylan concert with a friend of mine last night, and on the ride home there was a dining place which had neon lights that said bakery and cocktails. And while that may have been dumb marketing for a restaurant to combine those two (who does that?), it also was citation worthy and memorable. And being memorable is about sharing connections. Our imperfections (also known as character) are what make life great.

I saw some people giving speeches at the conference which were well polished and were effective at making the audience yawn. I decided to not polish myself to the point of trying to make myself a perfect speaker. It is not who I am and is not who I want to be...at least not now. Instead I decided I would try to feel comfortable and just make people laugh. I am not sure how well my speech went (Powerpoint online here). If you saw it (or my Q&A Panel) feel free to let me know what you thought below.

If you give into who you are then you are less likely to get burned out and will be harder to replicate. If you have things you feel insecure about or areas where you feel insufficient or inexperienced one of the best things you can do is embrace your default character and let that carry you. If you are following someone else's path you are likely building their brand and reinforcing their market position while undermining or ignoring your core assets. What makes you a non-commodity is just as likely to be your flaws as your skills, so long as you are unafraid of appearing broken, which can go a long way on a network consisting mostly of various manipulative goals and chunks of scattered text.