Social media marketing has been talked about over the last couple of years as the hot new trend in search marketing. Many SEO people utilize social media web sites to push their client site’s content, sometimes called “link bait”, to many thousands of people on the web, which can

• Drive hundreds, if not thousands of people to your site
• Create many hundreds or thousands of back links
• Drive buzz about your topic
• Increase your Organic Search Rankings

We recently had a client article hit the front page of digg that brought in quite a bit of traffic. Before the event,  the site was averaging around 150-200 hits a day (paid and organic). Once the article received roughly 150 diggs, we had pulled in over 5,000 hits that day from digg alone! Below is an analytics photo of the traffic spike:

One important point to note here: traffic from stumble upon over the time period was still significant with around 800 visits, showed a longer time on the site and a lower bounce rate.

A client of mine recently sent me the following snippet of text from his company’s SEO person named “Ron”:

I double check with Ron about what constitutes changes to our site that may cause issues with our SEO and this was his reply:

You can change whatever you want after we have established positions……EACH time major changes… i.e.new pages, new sections, structural changes, etc are made there is the possibility Google will throw you in the sandbox…we never know until you look at them if they are a risk…..minor content changes are USUALLY okay..as long as they are reSEO’d…all I can tell you is go ahead and do what you want…if you lose positions afterward…it is what it is….we will do our best to avoid that from happening….but no one in their right mind makes changes to a site that is just newly changed and being indexed…it becomes a spiral of failure….

When I read this I cringed and couldn’t believe this person is still in business:

• If I were the owner of the company, I’d ask “Ron” why cnn.com and msnbc.com rank very well for “news” on Google, they always seem to be “changing” their content!
• Google’s Sandbox is a set of filters that can apply to new sites in order to reduce web spam results. Old sites have a bit more trust and the filter doesn’t apply.  The site in question is over 3 years old.
• Making changes to a site is not bad, in fact, if you have poor rankings already then you have nothing to lose.
• Adding content or sections to a site can help a domain pull in more customers because more pages (tickets) are being placed into the search results (lottery).
• As long as your pages don’t look like spam, you will generally be ok. Don’t link out to other spammy web sites and don’t organize your pages to be unreadable by a human (don’t stuff keywords)

I was also told by my client that “Ron” advised his client company that changes to the site would be best made every “6 months”.

Do you see where this is going? Yes, we have what you might call an unethical SEO on our hands.

If I could, I would nail this dumbass right to the wall. I hate unethical practice and seemingly ignorant people. I myself have even been accused of being an unethical SEO (before I did any work) by a gullible, desperate person looking to find cheaper SEO labor.

Unfortunatley, and to the best of my knowledge, they continue to use “Ron’s” services while paying “Ron” a lot of money each month to “optimize” their company web site. I’d get a second opinion!

Looking to find keywords that will drive traffic to your site? How about keywords that convert? Here are several tools that I use when looking to find keywords that matter in terms of traffic and conversions:

• Quintura is a nice visual keyword tool that shows keywords and their related terms in a 2D visual graph. Punch in a term or phrase and get back semantically related words that can be mixed and matched, a pretty good way to help brain storm and find words that you might not otherwise think of.

• Try using WordTracker’s Free Tool and compare to Keyword Discovery’s free tool. This comparison can be a great way to find keywords that matter in terms of search traffic, if one term finds it’s way near the top of both search tools then you probably have a winner.

• Google’s Adwords Keyword External tool will show relative search volumes and advertiser competition between keyword phrases. This can be a good way to gauge weather or not one term is popular when compared to other keywords that you already know are popular by using other search tools.

• Microsoft offers a search funnel tool that shows incoming and outgoing keyword funnels. Incoming funnels are keywords people searched BEFORE they searched your keywords, while outgoing funnels are keywords people search AFTER they search your keywords. Another way to see how people think when searching broad keyword topics.

• Use Google’s allintitle command to find web pages that contains words from your search in the title tags. This is good for a few reasons: you can find pages that are actively optimizing for your keywords and see what other keywords they are using in their title tags, meta tags and page copy.

• Run a back link analysis to see what keywords a site uses in it’s link anchor text, this can be another good way to see what people actually target on the SEO campaigns.

You may also want to check out this article on how to find keywords from wordtracker’s website, written by Aaron Wall.