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.

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.

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).

According to Google’s Annual Stock Holder Report, 99% of all its revenues come from their advertising programs (and not the 97% usually reported). For a company which almost did 35 billion dollars in revenue last year, that’s rather impressive.

As Google’s advertising flagship, Adwords is the bulk of that cash flow. The creative people at Wordstream did an infographic on the 20 most expensive keywords in Google AdWords. I was curious to see what it would cost if SEO was treated like Adwords. Meaning, what we would have to pay Google if they charged us per click for every #1 organic position we held in their search engine.

Doing this exercise puts in to perspective the importance of ranking organically over paid. There is no doubt that paid has a place in a search marketing strategy, but for many users the instant fix of paid search heavily over shadows the long run benefits of SEO.

As long as there have been search engines there have been people claiming to be SEO pros/gurus/wizards/ninjas. These so called “experts” make amazing claims and promise you the world of rankings. However, in the end these charlatans often do more damage than good.

So, in hopes in saving a few souls from the dark side I introduce 6 tips in unearthing a true SEO Jedi.

6. Realistic Results – It is not uncommon to desire to have thousands of people to come to your website overnight—it’s human nature. However, it is also unrealistic, particularly with SEO. Yet, the SnakE Oil salesperson will prey upon this desire in hopes to make a quick sale. A true Search Engine Optimization Jedi knows that SEO takes time and grows slowly. He or she will layout guidelines that must be met in order receive results that are realistic for your website.

Back in December, I wrote a post about how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (a.k.a. the Mormon Church or LDS Church) knows SEO. At the time, many influential SEO bloggers were showcasing the strength of the Church’s SEO efforts.

Yesterday, the LDS Church did a press release on their social media efforts. It seems that the Mormon Church is also quite proficient in social media. According to their press release, “…six of the Church’s official Facebook pages are ranked among the top 100 in the “Church/Religious Organization” category — including two in the top 25.”

These pages, according to AllFacebook.com, are:

So, I am not one for rap music or R&B, but when I came across the below video I couldn’t pass it up. This is definitely one effective way to teach SEO. Unfortunately, the old saying that white guys can’t rap still holds true for me! When you get a chance checkout the rest of the SEO rap songs. ~Paul

Related Posts:

• 32 Halloween Costumes for Internet Marketing Geeks
• 6 Tips in Finding A True SEO Jedi
• Notes from PubCon (Wednesday) 2008
• 6 Free SERP Tools that Actually Work!
• A SEO Valentine’s Day Card