The other day my friend Leland asked if I knew any great SEO SERP tools that were free (serp is an acronymn for search engine ranking position). Personally, I am hooked on the paid tools SEOmoz offers, but I understand that when you start out in SEO you often don’t have the luxury of paying for the all the new shiny tools out there.

Leland’s biggest frustration was that when he did a search in Google all the tools he tried didn’t work. A lot of these websites can’t sustain their tools since they are free. It actually takes real resources to crawl the engines and return results. If a SERP tool pings the engines too often their IP is banned for a day. Get banned too many times and you can count on being permanently locked out.

I came across a website that actually has SEO valentine’s cards. The site is lacking in design, and it looks like they haven’t done anything on it since 2007, but the cards are very humorous!

The service allows you to forge the sender, so I spoofed an email to a SEO buddy. I setup the ecard to be from his wife and he did receive it. However, if you do this make sure you spell your friend’s wife’s name correctly or he will throw it into his spam folder Ü.

It’s too bad they don’t have more cards, it truly is a great idea. I talked to my friend after he received the email and he recommended I make the Matt Cutts eCard my avatar and go leave a comment on his blog. There’s no doubt it would be hilarious, but I told him he could be the creeper that Matt files a restraining order against.

We have seen in the past few years Bing growing leaps and bounds in the search market. However, the growth really isn’t coming from Google’s market share, though it has nibbled some away. Instead Bing is growing because it is cannibalizing its partner Yahoo!

Growth is growth though, and Bing is becoming a significant player in the search industry. As a search marketer this is obviously very important to me. I personally don’t care how my users find my website (Google, Bing, or their mother), just that they do find it.

Yet, there is a significant problem with Bing that continues to hurt them—quality. Hate or love Google, it is hard to deny that their quality isn’t light years ahead of Bing. Due to this fact, Google recently has become extremely sensitive about Bing stealing utilizing Google results.

With the birth of 2012 comes the renewed determination to push out content that sits in my drafts folder being perpetually worked on. This post has been one of my perpetual projects since I wrote part one waaaaaay back in September on common SEO mistakes.

Originally with this post there were 16 total mistakes, but the last five were the main road blocks in the post being published. However, with just the below 11 tips this article is already almost 2000 words long. So I don’t think the omitted five mistakes (which will be added to part three) will be missed too much.

Count on one—possibly two—more post that will wrap up this subject. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take me to 2013 to do it. ~Paul W.

Yesterday, I was a guest speaker for a university Social Media class. The teacher wanted me to cover SEO and left the specific subject wide open. I chose to present part of the “Importance of SEO” slide deck which I often give to business owners. I also covered the basics of SEO and finished with the main strategy I use to compete on difficult keywords.

The students are in the MBA program and I wished I had shared with them the below infographic by Onward Search. Not all, but most of my MBA friends are hyper focused on the corporate world, and seeing the pay spectrum of corporate SEO jobs might have been helpful.

As it was, I think my presentation fell kind of flat with them. I didn’t manage my time wisely and had to rush through some technical areas, which was a mistake. Several students eyes slowly glossed over from disconnect, and I swear I could almost see the reflection in their bored glossy eyes of the solitary game they were playing on their laptop!

“Like at Halloween: I knew I’d arrived when I saw people dressing up on Halloween as my character.” ~Jane Badler

Saturday my family and I went to a Halloween party/dinner. However, at 1pm we were still having troubles trying to decide what to go as. A few web searches showed that there are some ambitious and creative people out there when it comes to Halloween costumes.

This got me thinking, and I started typing in Internet marketing costumes ideas. I was surprised (and probably shouldn’t have been) to see that marketing geeks truly show their love for their industry come Halloween. Below are the top family friendly costumes I found that will bring out the web geeky kid in all of us.

Recently, I wrote about seeding your blog footer. This is a little experiment of mine, which adds content to the footer to help further focus the keywords found on MyMarketer.

This case study is still going, but one of the footer seeds I have is the top search marketing mistakes. I display both Pay Per Click and Search Engine Optimization mistakes, but only have 10 mistakes for each focus.

When I compiled the list of mistakes I had a much longer list than 20, but footer seeds are suppose to be condensed posts and thus many search mistakes on my long  list had to fall to the wayside.

Will Google penalize you for pumping out spammy comment backlinks on the blogosphere? The quick and dirty answer is no—with the disclaimer that you didn’t do thousands of these links overnight (spammy backlinks or not, you will trip a Google algo that way).

The next question that follows this answer generally is “Does it help my Google rankings by being a blog comment spammer?” Apparently, thousands upon thousands of spammers seem to think so, and if Google is completely honest they would agree as well (though they really can’t be so forthright).

Google can do their best to create algorithms which diminish the value of comment spam, but, like many mathematical solutions to human issues, it cannot be 100% perfect. Therefore, the spammers know that even if they only get  power from one spammy backlink out of a hundred it is still worth their efforts.

Recently, a friend shared their hypothesis on how Google Sets can be used to see what keywords Google thinks a site should rank on. Basically, he advised building a short list showing the keywords with the most density on your site and throw them into Sets. The final outcome would show the keywords Google feels you would best rank on.

I tried this out on MyMarketer, and a list of very broad keywords came about. Obviously, since I pulled the density from MyMarketer’s home page, which dynamically changes with the publishing of a new post, the accuracy of this method seems questionable.

Furthermore, there is a warning label on Google Sets stating that the service will expire September 5th of this year. So, even if my friend is correct about his assumption (which I am doubting) it wouldn’t matter much in exactly one week.

If you look at the footer of MyMarketer you will notice something you might not have seen before—three miniature articles. The articles you will find focus on three areas: blog content, general web marketing, and search marketing. The titles of the articles are: Tips on Creating Great Content, How To Do Web Marketing Better, and Top Search Marketing Mistakes.

These are not your typical blog articles, but rather seriously condensed posts that are roughly 130 to 150 words and use about 20 lines of space. I call these mini articles Footer Seeds, and as far as I am aware this technique isn’t really being used in the blogosphere.

I decided to create these Footer Seeds for several reasons. First, I needed something to place in my footer. In the previous design I placed my social media efforts down at the bottom, and after I redesigned MyMarketer I moved my social media spots up to the sidebar. The new design focuses much more on the importance of social media and I felt it was pertinent for visitors to easily know where else to find me on the Internet (which wouldn’t have been achieved in the footer).