Sorry YellowPages, he signed a contract with us after talking to us for less than 10 minutes!

The worrying thing is they only called us after receiving our marketing postcard in the mail that day, had they not seen it they might have signed a very expensive deal with YellowPages

After finally drilling it into them if they change the content it will undo the work we have done to optimize it, everything was going well.  All signed off, we’re done.  Now we want paying.  It just so happens Yahoo recrawled the site when the hosting was down so it indexed it on MySQL errors and they refused to pay us!  How is this our fault?

On reindexing by Yahoo, they did pay us and were actually very happy with the results – Google page 10 to page 1!

Do not send out emails to your customers asking them to join you and then do nothing but ignore them and send out marketing email after marketing email trying to get more sales.  The delete button will be hit in no time at all.

If this is you – you are missing the point.  Social Media is a two way process.  Connect, communicate, get feedback, improve customer satisfaction, send out loyalty offers and the odd sales email.  Traditional marketing methods simply do not work with social media, this is not a mass marketing tool.

Wrong.  Just think how this works in reverse.  Do you want to join the list and be on the receiving end of thousands of commercial emails?  You should not use Twitter to bombard people with blatant buy our products and services messages.  Connect, learn from your customers.  What are they saying about your products and services?  See a complain, do not ignore it.  Follow up, what is wrong and how can you correct it?

Support and build customer loyalty and then you will start to reap the rewards of social media.

We have happy clients that are page 1 on all three engines and have seen significant increases in orangic traffic, but we do tend to web optimize for Google as a number 1 target.

NO – do not do it.

An analogy I like to use in response to this is it is a bit like having an inground pool installed in your home.  When the time comes to sell there will be a huge portion of potential buyers that will rule your home out as they do not want a pool due to the maintenance and safety concerns.  The same is true of companies just relying on social media.  What about the  billions of people that aren’t Facebook members?  You are closing the door to all of the people that choose not to use social media.  Yes, 500m+ Facebook members is very impressive but your website has billions of potential users.

Do not be sucked in and fooled by someone trying to convince you social media is all you need to be concerned about now.

I was chatting to someone about this recently and they have seen the same.  Their thinking is Google is pushing some new domains to page 1 to see if they quickly gain a lot of in-links and become an authority site.  If not, they slide back to where they should have really been indexed in the first place.

So if you think you’re doing great on a new site that is indexed page 1 on Google within a week or so, wait and see before you crack open the bubbly, this might be the reason.

It can be hugely beneficial to include incorrect spellings of your keywords to gain traffic.  In very competitive keywords it can take a long time to achieve page 1 rankings, however a few targeted mis-spelled words can have you racing up the page rankings relatively quickly.  This can be a great source of additional traffic and result in page 1 Google rankings