Top 10 reasons why you shouldn't choose that SEO agency.

In order to achieve significant results, an effective SEO strategy must involve the website’s content, optimising the texts, HTML, information distribution and site architecture in order to make the website content more visible and relevant.

A simplistic approach usually means troubles, or rather, a waste of money. Here is my list of top ten of ways to detect that the people sitting in front of you might not be a serious partner to make your online business grow.

1. Here is your "Top 50" "Top 100" or "Guarantee positioning" package.
Yeah..really...

There is no way of predicting which position any given site can reach on any search engine for any keyword. The actual ranking of a site is a function of a number of ever-changing interactions which are not in the hands of the search engine agency. Besides the engines themselves periodically changing their ranking logics, in this very second there are hundreds of websites and search engine agencies working hard to improve their positioning for the keyword "London hotel". How can you honestly ensure you will rank at the top of them?

And moreover... who cares? The position of a given keyword is NOT the objective of a SEO activity. Nor it is a paramether to measure your online success. The number of top rankings for over-inflated keywords is not going to affect your EBITBA. Conversions and CPA are.

A serious search engine agency will rather get committed on the quantity and quality of traffic (conversions!), and to bring you tangible sales leads (and should be able to give you more clever advices then just try to get your traffic from the same old 50 obvious keywords).

2. We don't do doorway pages. These are “landing pages”.
BMW used to think it didn't make much difference. Then, its website completely disappeared from Google. Search engines can discriminate between proper landing pages and spamming, and can ban you in a second, making all your investments go up in smoke. Be sure landing pages are what they should be, an informative landing enviroment which is fully integrated in your navigation and content structure.

3. SEO is just about throwing in in some metatags.
Meaning:"We do have a feeling that there are other key factors...off-the page elements such as blogs, social bookmarking, press releases, viral content, advanced link popularity and linkbait are just as important as metatags for search engines, but actually, we haven't got a clue of how to do that stuff."

4. It's ok to spend 95% of your online budget on pay-per-click.
Meaning:"Getting you your fair share of traffic from SEO might take a bit more effort on our side and we do not really care about your distribution costs".

5. PPC is more controllable than SEO.
Meaning:"Achieving and tracking SEO results seems kind of hard, let's do some ppc advertising instead".

6. We guarantee you get ranked in 15 days.
Option 1:"No, not in Google really, just in 20.000 obscure search engines."

Option 2: "We will get you a top position in Google for 'design luxury yet budget accomodation providers in the tundra' (with exact phrase match)".

7. We only specialize in search engines.
Meaning: "What happens when a user arrives to your site is not our business and we don't understand much about usability or what it takes to generate a booking on a travel website".

8. Yeah, we are a web agency but will do the search engine for you.
Sounds like: "I've been plumber for the last 30 years, but I will fix with your electrical system for some extra cash".

9. You don't need to do any work on your website.
Meaning:"Deleting that annoying flash intro page would destroy the user experience. And adding some interesting content is not necessary. Not that many people really use search engines to book their travel anyway".

Hint no. 10 is open for discussion: post your comment and contribute to the black list!

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(Mash that site up!)³

We are all wondering how the future of of online distribution will look like. Well, I think that now we can get a much clearer picture by having a look at Yahoo! Pipes.

Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, users (with a little programming expertise) can easily create feeds that are powerful, useful and relevant by mashing up different sources, applying personal search filtering options and basically aggregating content in a very intuitive and customizable way. Not only pipes allows you to create your own mash up, but to access to others'users pipes, clone and modify them, in a open-source logic.

Quoting from O'Really Radar

"Yahoo!'s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It's a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output...While it's still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone"

Open-source platforms like Pipes will put more and more the technological keys of distribution into the hand of consumers, who will be able to determine themselves that a given source of - let's say - hotel inventory can be matched with some other personal sources of editorial, mapping or photographic content...all resulting in a customized ranking of search results. Just imagine the array of personal websites that could be powered by personal Pipes, each of them providing travel options and contents as real-time aggreation of endless sources.

Hoteliers and travel suppliers in general have already gone throught the shock of handing out the control over their inventory to players who are stronger in global online distribution... it will be interesting to see what happens if the aggregators (OTAs and metasearch engines) start to get aggregated.
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Sooo Folksonomic!

Marcos Weskamp, graphic designer and art director, has been very good at putting in practises all the teories on mashup, realising an applicative that got him a premium award in the category of Net Vision at the Ars Electronica.

Taking advantage from Google News aggregator, Weskamp created a visual map of news, bringing together graphic elements and some clever functionalities. Here is a powefull example of folksonomy at work: it is the popularity of the news to determine his visual ranking: Marumushi Newsmap organises the news into a sinoptic table, creating visual relactions between categories in a immediate and intuitive way.

"Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.

Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. It's objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news, on the contrary it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it."

Marumushi Newsmap gives emphasys to the tag cloud concept, by bringing it to a higher level and adding some extra functionalities. Every category (sport, finance, chronicle) is represented by a color: the brighter is the color, the more recent are the news and each box has got different dimension: the greater is the box, the more popular is the news. And you can filter the news by source or country.

A good idea for all travel vendor that want to leverage the popularity of a destination in a new, engaging way.
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