Don't be "That Guy," Keep Your Eye on the Prize

Though it may feel like it some times, SEO is not about waging geek wars on unexpecting designers, programmers or Web strategists. We are not here to berate our clients, belittle their efforts, scoff at their priorities or in some way portray a world where natural search results are king and those that get in the way should cower on their knees.

A mature, discplined SEO is cogniscent of the wide range of priorities that come pass the desks of a corporate IT/Web dev team. As important as you think you are and even if your blog, Facebook page, Linkedin profile, newest SEO for dummies book and Classmates.com profile all dominate the top of the SERPs, your projects will rarely dominate the top of your client's priority list.

Work to escalate your SEO projects on the priority list, but be realistic. Our jobs are to help our clients grow their business through a stronger Web presence, not to preach a "me first" priority plan.

Keep it humble, progressive and realistic.

Temporary Content Poses an Interesting Challenge for SEOs

Well, a post about the Google "Let's Get Social" event never materialized.  Being relatively new to the blogging world, I'm still amazed at the amount of time required to properly maintain a blog.

As the holiday grows ever-closer, and with the month of November just around the corner, my client is in the midst of developing a whole host of new holiday content.  With wireframes stacked high on my desk, I've had a little thought stuck in the back of my head.

What is an SEO to do with temporary, promotional content?  Some of these wireframes are only going to be live for 6 weeks.  After their 6 week run, they will be buried until next year and likely replaced with newer, fresher content.

We can certainly wrangle internal link popularity, add this new content to XML sitemaps to ensure indexing and work to make them as viral as possible, but at the end of the day, is 6 weeks enough time to build the link popularity needed to compete on high-volume holiday keywords?

Here are a few ideas for putting immediate momentum behind brand new content that is only going to be live during the holiday:

1. Find relevant pages on your site and create a solid internal linking architecture to pass popularity to the new page.
2. Add the new content to your XML sitemap and ensure the page isn't being blocked by your robots.txt file.
3. Be realistic in your keyword research.  Target attainable keywords that are further down the tail.
4. Dig up last year's pages and permanently redirect them to this year's holiday pages.  You may be able to take advantage of external links that were built last year.  Not to mention, you'll create a continuous user experience and prevent potential customers from finding last year's content.
5. Rally with vendors, partners and other Web properties you control to get some quick and temporary link popularity.
6. Make it viral - encourage holiday visitors to link and share.
7. If your content is newsworthy, use online press release submission to build buzz and the link popularity that comes with it.

Any other ideas?  What's the best way to optimize content with an uncertain future?

Even Though I Missed the Afterparty, I Still "Got Social"

On Tuesday, Google hosted a social media event for agencies, publishers and partners at their Kinzie St. office in Chicago.  Speakers included Jeremiah Owyang from Web-Strategist.com, members from the MySpace and Facebook sales teams and Paula Drum, Marketing VP from H&R Block.

Stand by for a download of the day's highlights and tidbits.  More to come...