The world’s most lovable half-giant delivered a very important life message to Harry Potter in the statement above. Fortunately for Harry, he learned this lesson from a friend, rather than learning things the hard way. If only everyone could be so lucky…

To work their magic, SEO strategists make use of a variety of complex and ever-evolving tactics that can be difficult to explain, and even harder for those who are less than web-savvy to understand. To further complicate matters, not all SEO methods and professionals are created equal, and this uneven relationship can make it all too easy for web novices to end up getting scammed.

So put on your Sorting Hats. Here are a few simple rules to help you ensure that you are not one of the unfortunate many to get scammed by dark wizards.

Run away (Disapparate if you can) from:

• Companies that claim that they will optimize your site through “meta tag optimization and submission to the search engines.” It is well known that this tactic will no longer accomplish anything in terms of increasing search engine rankings
• Anyone who guarantees you a certain position in the search engines. Since the search engines run on their own proprietary algorithms, no one can guarantee a particular ranking
• Read fine print. Many companies use questionable tactics to meet their “guarantees”
• Be wary of anyone who won’t tell you what they are doing to your site, or says that they can do all of their work behind the scenes without changing the appearance of your site. The odds are that person is either doing nothing at all or engaging in some risky SEO strategies that can ultimately lead to a penalty for your website

Keep in mind:

• A high ranking is not everything when it comes to measuring SEO success. If you get a top ranking for a keyword phrase that doesn’t deliver relevant traffic to your website, then it has no value to your business. Having a lower ranking for a high converting keyword is far more valuable than being number one for some obscure phrase that no one searches. You and your SEO consultant should work together to find the appropriate keyword phrases for your business
• The SEO consultant you are working with should be concerned about your overall marketing objectives. SEO is just one component of an integrated marketing strategy, so understanding a client’s business is a vital part of any successful SEO strategy
• Be an active participant in the planning phases for your SEO project. Be sure to give frequent feedback on keyword suggestions, copywriting and site architecture recommendations
• Before any work begins, outline a detailed plan for measuring success with your SEO consultant. Specify what metrics will be tracked, what kind of reports will be generated and how often you will hold a review to discuss key accomplishments and next steps

Next up in the contenders’ corner – Microsoft’s Bing. Check out a few reviews of Bing and a short video that illustrates how it feels it may knock off the Champ.

http://www.reuters.com/article/bigMoney/idUS183638463920090529

http://www.decisionengine.com/Default.html

For privacy, Google claims that your answers to these questions are not tied to your Google account, even if you are logged in. However their servers will automatically record information including a cookie, ip address, browser type and language, and the date and time of your answer.

So it makes me wonder, why experiment only with health-related searches? In the future will they consider adding additional questions for other types of searches too, if they feel this will help improve their search results (and ad serving technology)?

1. People who are extremely lazy. And by extremely lazy, I’m talking too lazy to move one hand from the keyboard to the mouse. Or maybe you have a bad case of laptop touchpad hatred like me. For these folks, Keyboardr lets you search the web in a “mouseless” fashion, allowing you to use the arrow keys and enter button to scroll through search results and select the page you wish to explore. 
2. Competitive research. I love how the results update instantly, as you are typing in a keyword phrase. This allows you to quickly get a glimpse of all of the sites that rank for any given phrase in Google, Wikipedia and Youtube.

Most of us have Googled ourselves at one point or another. Why not? It’s out there for everyone else to see and we should know what they’re looking at! Well, Google has a (not so) recent release that gives you the power over what they see.

Google Profiles lets you define yourself in the way YOU want to be defined. It may not get rid of the spring break pictures from freshman year of college but at least it’s a start.

As we can see below, this feature is also integrated with Google Maps:

It’s important to note that you have to login to http://draft.blogger.com to use this feature. You can read more on this feature here at the Blogger in Draft blog.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4259135.html

And apparently Microsoft is working on just this thing, with collaborative searching:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4292830.html?page=2 (see #7, collaborative search)

My mind’s too simple to make sense of it all, but it looks like there are some big things coming.

So I want to whine and kick and scream because this hasn’t rolled out to my Google account yet, but Google launched SearchWiki today. Instead of testing it, I have to sit back and envy others who are using it and tweeting about it.

Here’s an article on Mashable about how it works: http://mashable.com/2008/11/20/google-searchwiki/

According to Mashable (and jerks who already have the feature), SearchWiki allows you to re-order search results, remove or add links to the search results page, and leave notes with any listing which others will be able to view.

Wow, major changes.

I was just reading a SearchEngineLand article stating that Google has rolled out audio indexing (GAudio) for YouTube videos on the YouTube political channel and will soon roll it out to all YouTube. That’s very exciting stuff, as it presents a great opportunity for companies who publish great content videos to start seeing their videos rank for important keyword phrases, and increases the relevancy of video rankings. It’s a necessary advancement beyond using meta data to rank vidoes.

Granted, it also presents the opportunity for keyword spam in video content, ie “Governor Palin, we need you to mention ‘Maverick’ 3 times in this speech, and put strong emphasis on it once at the beginning.”