Don’t fall for any „basic tips of how-to“

I usually try not to write negative about things, because unless it’s constructive criticism for the creator of the content, nobody gains much. But since there is no possibility to comment on things at marketingvox, I will do it here.

I am referring to the post with the title „How-to: 9 Basic SEO Tips„. It caught my attention, because just the other day, I had a discussion with colleagues at the agency about how creative agencies rarely know how to properly search engine optimize the websites they build.

However, with the 9 basic tips, we won’t get very far either. Let me quote some of them:

Find out how well you rank online. […] It may be helpful to download the Google Toolbar, which gives you the „PageRank“ score for websites. Pages are scored on a scale of 1 to 10. The goal will be to make this number higher on your website.

Ok – and how? (It doesn’t say). Another great tip:

Submit your site to search engines. Do it personally; avoid „submission services“ or software. You only need to do it once.

I won’t continue with other tips like „place relevant keywords in the title tag“ or „use alt tags on images“ that they also featured.

Was any of this new to anyone? Please ? If so, just leave this blog immediately. In fact – please leave the internet and switch off your computer completely.

Gheez – we’re in 2008 by now, it’s not 1998 any more!

Not sure about the target audience of marketingvox, but for this article, it sure isn’t your average webmarketer!

Google on the future of online advertising

In this article on Read/Write Web (while I am still at it), there are three points, where Google says, that advertising needs to go:

  1. Advertisers need to get better at creating a 1:1 experience for their users. As an example, she cited the work that Cadillac did with their MyCadillac campaign.
  2. Advertisements need to continue increasing personalization. This was surprising to me, given that I don’t believe Google has publicly announced any plans to incorporate behavioral targeting into their ad delivery system.
  3. Users are demanding the delivery of information to be an experience and advertising must respond to it, just like content needs to.

Not really new points, but it doesn’t hurt to reemphasize them. I also find it interesting that the one thing that made creative ad agencies puzzle (text based search advertising) – because it reduced the need for (admittingly more expensive) creatives – is something Google says, we must move away from. Instead, we should increasingly make it an experience. I have been saying this all along, but now even Google recommends experience-richer content.

One other thing I found in that article: I didn’t even know that Yahoo! actually owns the patent for search advertising! This is interesting.

When Google started doing this type of advertising, Overture (acquired by Yahoo) had been delivering similar ads for years. This is why Yahoo owns patent #6,269,361 – which Google licensed from Yahoo right before the Google IPO.

Another field which Google took from Yahoo! (or Overture, in this case) and made it successful.

Werben & Wuergen: a parody of Becker, Brown and Hardy?

Ok, this one will only be fun for those of you speaking German, but indeed it could actually be a clever viral stunt:

In total, it is a range of 10 videos (sofar) also found on the website Werben&Würgen, which seems to be made specifically for the videos making fun of the work environment of Becker, Brown & Hardy, an agency from New York, also located in Berlin. The website of Becker, Brown & Hardy already has a big notice up, denying any involvement in this, stating that they will take legal action against the creators of Werben&Würgen.

But who really is the creator? Is it Nolte & Lauth? They have PR statements on their website (opens PDF) claiming to support the website of Werben&Würgen. But it doesn’t really say how they support it…

The Website Werben&Würgen.de however is registered for Olaf Bauch, Ibob TGA, Usingen. That doesn’t help much, because whatever Ibob TGA is, their website does not yet show anything. And Olaf Bauch in Usingen seems to be an engineering bureau.

So, who is behind this? It does look like a cleverly made viral recruitment campaign for either (or both) of these agencies. Since the 10 clips have already taken us this far, I suppose (and hope) we’ll soon find out the rest about this…

In the meantime, enjoy the videos, they’re a lot of fun to watch!

And if anyone finds out what the real story of these videos is, let me know!

[Update: here and here are other sites actually stating that it is indeed a stunt by Becker, Brown and Hardy. I just wonder, how they got Nolte&Lauth in to participate? The two sources mentioned above wrote their posts well before N&L were brought into this. Or is N&L a fake agency? Or is it part of the BB&H Network? Anyway, the two sources say that even the main German Ad Newspapers fell for this, so I don’t feel so bad afterall…]