• Was it worth it?
• Am I where I expected to be in one years time a year ago?
• Did I reach my goals?
• Does blogging make sense for SEO, business and on a personal level?
• Does SEO 2.0 exist or was it only a fad?

Certainly SEO 2.0 was the right blog at the right time. SEO 2.0 was in the air, it was overdue. You could smell it. Someone needed to make it public, make it known. Obviously it was me. So here I am.

This week I reached 900+ subscribers (920 to be exact) after a huge jump of almost 100 in one day after this post was published. As unreliable as the Feedburner subscriber stats might be it seems not bad for a part time blogger in a rather small niche like SEO/social media/meta-blogging. OK, you see yourself it’s not small, a SEO-only blog has a small audience but not my blog which covers SEO 2.0, a far broader topic.

I still remember the joy of having

• my first 100 subscribers
• my first 25 friends on StumbleUpon (now I have 100+ friends and 600+ fans)
• my first posts submitted to SU.
• my first front page appearance on Sphinn (that one was really hard!)
• my first buried story on Digg ;-)

Isn’t it melancholic?

To be honest the blog still has the same level of traffic a a year ago, I had thousands back then and I have thousands now. Or rather I have them from time to time and most of the time I have hundreds. As I have turned my back on Google, I was so tired (and still am) of SEO 1.0 that I did not optimize SEO 2.0 much at all. So my traffic last month was still only 8% from Google. The biggest difference is my posting frequency. In the first 6 weeks I posted 3 times as often as now. On the other hand my posts were far less valuable then.

The reason to blog is probably to feel at home on the web. So ironically not the homepage is your home online but your blog. I really feel at home on the web now. I mean I don’t feel like this is only a screen I stare at the whole day and a random array of billions of web pages. The contrary is the case, it’s like having a house in the hills at the coast and people can see you from afar. Am I getting poetic again? ;-)

So a blog can make your working environment more friendly. This is of course a two edged sword. The more time you spend online the less time you have to meet real people etc. You know the deal. So let’s lay aside the emotional chatter.

OK, you want the hard facts instead? You want the ROI? You want to see the money? Tad Chef is not John Chow, I won’t show you cheques or earnings. I do have blog related earnings though. Direct and indirect.

Direct blog earnings include:

• Ad revenue
• Guest blogging
• Regular paid blogger jobs

Indirect blog earnings are

• SEO clients I got via the blog
• SEO clients I got due to my blog readers and social media friends

Here you already notice the ROI of blogging which is not measurable in $ or other numbers. I have been invited to the SES due to my blogging and social media activity. I could convince a prospective SEO client of mine to set up a blog and I am still writing daily for it. One big client was referred to me another blogger “I met” virtually during my blogging and social media endeavours.

In fact I found out that the SEO/social media/meta-blogging community is the single friendliest, most helpful, tolerant and cosmopolitan crowd whatsoever.

What did not work?

• Being friends with everybody, some people you have to refuse to have ties with
• Earning money with affiliate banners and text ads, almost no affiliate sales this way
• Getting thousands of visitors regularly, only hundreds
• Becoming independent from Google completely
• Ranking at #1 for SEO worldwide, at least i rank in the top 50 for seo blog by now ;-)

What would I do differently if I would start a new blog today?

1. I would choose a different topic. SEO is a too small niche and even if you call it 2.0 many people will still assume that you do evil SEO spam.
2. I’d aim at having 70/30 traffic or even 50/50 social media and other sources vs Google traffic.
3. I’d sell something related to the blog topic.

In fact I plan to do just that. Selling advertising or affiliate products on a non-A-list blog which nonetheless is a high quality blog is difficult: It’s too good for Adsense (Adsense gets only clicked if your content is crap) and not important enough to get the big advertisers.

So other bloggers sell WordPress themes, ebooks, consulting services (OK, I do too in a way) or they offer paid reviews. So yes, now that I have your attention I want to sell you something! Indeed I blogging and social media proved to as much fun as expected, thus I want to do even more blogging and social media. I can’t do more than what I do now without getting paid more directly for it though.

So I want to offer to my readers what they really need:

• Links and traffic
• Know How
• Guidance
  
• Training

There are a few proven online business models to offer just that:

1. Web directories
2. Ebooks
3. Premium content
4. Webinars

What do you need and which medium would you prefer to get it?

• Switch on your browser, no, not Internet Exploder, a browser and type in “stumbleupon.com” in the address bar, then hit “enter”. Congratulations! Done, you already hit the homepage!
• Review StumbleUpon as “ingenious” for the NYT. Your review will be added below the BBC and The Wall Street Journal.
• The last page to hit the Frontpage of StumbleUpon did it in May 2007. Travel back in time one day before it was submitted and submit it instead of the original submitter.

OK. So you don’t actually want to hit the frontpage of StumbleUpon? You rather want to get hugely popular there?

• Check out a highly popular submission of an artist, steal the images and resubmit them on you own site 20 per scrollable page. StumbleUpon users love to stumble the same stuff over and over even if it’s content theft. I told them again and again to vote for the originals instead but they prefer the ad packed “fun” blogs with easily understandable headlines like “Funny Images” or “Creative Art”.
• Create an extremely sophisticated animation to waste time with. More ideas here.
• Pimp your cat but don’t electrocute it!
• Fight racism by making two different races meet and get friendly with each other.
• Meet your meat.
• Submit something about weather or money, two of the most popular topics on SU!
• Torture and document it you evil bastard!

So these 7 or 10 ways of getting popular or to hit the frontpage of StumbleUpon (depending on the perspective) should suffice by now. I understand that now most stumblers will hate me for giving away the trade secrets but hey what do you expect from a dirty low down SEO spammer? Everybody knows that SEO is much worse than terrorism!

SEO bloggers are barred from both major social news sites as users of Digg and Reddit correctly assume that all submissions regarding SEO are spam and nobody can prove otherwise.

• So what’s left for us poor souls?
• No social news site for stories about SEO?
• Sphinn? Mixx?

No, both offer only a traffic trickle instead of the flood! There is only one viable alternative: StumbleUpon!

Tragically I don’t

• do Flash programming
• have a pet
• steal

so I have no way to get popular on StumbleUpon.

I’m glad more than 90%+ of StumbleUpon users leave a landing page in an instant so they don’t read this revelation about me being an evil SEO!

What do sex, permission marketing & social media have in common? It sounds like the start of a bad joke… but believe me… there is some logic behind the analogy. Let’s start with everyone’s favourite topic – sex. If sex isn’t the original form of permission marketing, I don’t know what is. In the eternal chase for a piece of the action, most of us mould our ‘personal brand’ to enhance our chances of attracting some attention from the opposite sex. We change hair styles, clothing and even behaviour in the quest for a little bedroom ‘permission’. You might even say the dating game is permission marketing in its purest form (or at least its most primeval).

It took us a while to pick it up, but most men are now acutely aware that there is a due process to follow if you want to win a girl’s heart. Propositioning her five minutes after you meet isn’t likely to earn you ‘permission’ of any kind… unless you meet in a sleazy nightclub/strip joint. For most of us, there are a set of golden rules we need to follow in order to join the mating game:

1. Building trust & respect – Don’t try and jump in the sack on the first date! The only type of action that’s likely to land you is a class action. Most women need time to build a level of trust in a partner before considering anything further.
2. Listening – Everybody likes to talk about themselves, but seriously… if that’s all you ever do most people will tire of you pretty quickly. Meaningful two-way conversation is simply a must to be considered for ‘additional’ benefits.
3. Regularity – Sure… some people are lucky enough to land a booty call, but for the rest of us our likelihood of getting some action is directly related to our propensity to commit to some quality time together.
4. Giving – Ok… this one is a gimme. Everyone knows that women love flowers, chocolates, jewellery etc. Giving generously without asking for anything in return means you’re chalking up a few extra brownie points.
5. Avoid self promotion – Does anyone remember the Italian supermodel Fabio? He was apparently ‘the world’s most beautiful man’. As far as I can tell that title was self proclaimed, because few women I know found him attractive. In the end, he ended up with a bird splattered on his face. Karma, some would say for the ultimate self promoter!

Funnily enough, the principles that lead to success in the bedroom are strikingly similar to those that permeate successful permission marketing. Weird… I know. And if you thought men were slow to embrace these principles in personal relationships, marketers have been truly caveman-esque in applying them to customer relationships (probably because we’re too busy figuring out how to get laid). Let’s re-visit the same concepts again, except this time we’ll consider them from a permission marketing context (email marketing in particular):

1. Building trust & respect – Customers are people. So the principles of real life relationships apply. Credibility needs to be established before attempting to ‘make the sale’. You may have been smooth enough to get a girl’s phone number, but that doesn’t mean you can call her every day. The same rule applies to customers. You may have collected their email, but that doesn’t mean you can spam them constantly. You wouldn’t scare a hot chick off within the first week, so why do it to a customer?
2. Listening – Do you remember the episode of the Simpsons when Homer bought Marge a bowling ball for her birthday? Hilarious! And a perfect example of what most organisations do. Rather than listening to what their customers (or wives) want, they try to sell them something different. It didn’t help Homer get any action; in fact Marge almost had an affair because of it. Successful permission marketers take the time to listen to their customers and deliver relevant offers tailored to their personal needs. Perfectly simple.
3. Regularity – The concept of quality time applies just as much to permission marketing as it does to romantic endeavours. Communication and interaction needs to be maintained to continue any relationship. The art of permission marketing is striking the balance between spam (over communication) and remaining front of mind. But here’s a novel concept – customers don’t mind regular communications when they’re relevant. It’s irrelevant crap that annoys them. Try listening to what they want.
4. Giving – Few marketers actually think of what they can give their customers. Instead they think of what they can sell them. That’s a little like taking a girl out on a date, and asking her to pay for the bill. Sure, it may help you financially for the night, but you can bet your bottom dollar she won’t be back. Great permission marketers find a range of ways to give back to customers via exclusive content, relevant offers, priority service & loyalty programs.
5. Avoid self promotion – Let’s get one thing clear. Customers don’t care about your company. They care about themselves. They don’t want to read your latest press release. Sending customers self congratulatory messages is like getting your friends to tell a girl how great you are. It’s lame. If the customer (or girl) cares enough, they’ll take the time to learn about you. Good permission marketers don’t talk to customers about issues that don’t interest them.

Does the analogy between permission marketing and sex still seem so crazy now…? Probably. But I’ll continue anyway… because just like sex, this analogy becomes a whole lot more fun when we get three parties involved. The final link in this juicy ménage à trois is social media. And just like permission marketing, we marketers could learn a whole lot from our mating rituals. Let’s explore how our five golden principles apply not only to permission marketing, but to social media success as well.

1. Building trust & respect – Here’s a recent email I received from a brand new ‘friend’ in StumbleUpon – ‘Link exchange? Contact blah@gmail.com’. Yeah… nice to meet you too. While you’re at it, would you like to sleep with me? An immediate link exchange request in social media is just like asking a girl to get down and dirty on the first date. It’s just plain bad manners. Take the time to interact with a person in social media before asking for any favours. It’s called social media, not spam media.
2. Listening – Striking up a conversation on a first date can be a challenge, even for the best of us. So instead of trying to dictate the conversation we listen and ask questions. And eventually we find common interests. The same principle applies to social media. Savvy individuals watch a social media community before entering. They listen to the conversations and build and understanding of the dynamics. Then, when they really understand the community, they begin to participate. Smart!
3. Regularity – Rome wasn’t built in a day. Nor was a social media profile. In fact, most social media power users have spent years establishing their profile. So stop thinking you can crack it in a few weeks. Remember that whole trust and credibility thing? Well… that takes time to earn. The only way to build trust is through a regular dose of meaningful participation in your social media community.
4. Giving – Here’s a short tale of successful permission marketing within social media. A few weeks ago my new friend Ahmed befriended me in StumbleUpon. After I accepted, he contacted me to tell me he liked my work. He subscribed to my blog, visited regularly, Stumbled my posts and submitted a review for my StumbleUpon blog. What a nice fella! Only after he had done all this did he send me a StumbleUpon request. And I had no hesitation in sending a thumb Ahmed’s way because I appreciated his support. In fact, I also Sphunn his article and subscribed to his blog. And all because he was polite enough to give before asking for anything in return. I’ll bet Ahmed gets a lot of sex. If I was a girl I’d sleep with him…
5. Avoid self promotion – This one can be tough, especially for newbies trying to establish a social media presence, but self promotion (aka self submission) should be limited wherever possible. Self promotion isn’t perceived favourably within social media circles. It’s sort of like turning up to a party invited, and then telling all the girls they should sleep with you because you’re a great lay. Success factor = low.

So by now you’re probably wondering what the moral of this crazy analogy is. It may be that permission marketers get more sex than the rest of us… But a more believable one is that marketers who treat their audience as they would a partner are far more likely to succeed. Just because you’re hiding behind a computer screen, doesn’t mean you can abandon the principles of human relations and interaction. If you’re struggling to gain traction within social media or any other communication channel, perhaps you need to ask yourself… where’s the love?

Author Bio

James Duthie is an Australian online marketing expert. He writes on all things social media, blogging, SEO & digital marketing at his blog - Online Marketing Banter. Subscribe to hear more of his ramblings here.

Advanced SEO is not yet clearly defined but many people already seem to agree what it is. My personal impression as to this inherent definition is: Advanced SEO appears to consist of complex web development and analytics tasks.

Now I wonder:

1. Is this kind of complex web development and analytics really advanced?
2. In what other directions SEO could advance to?
3. Does advancing mean evolving or just getting more complicated?
4. Why strive for complexity when simplicity is often the best advancement?
5. Is advanced SEO just another synonym for SEO 2.0?

While I agree that you need to differentiate between basic SEO or SEO basics and advanced SEO I am not sure the current way the SEO industry is advancing along is the ideal course. When we compare the SEO industry to other industries we’ll notice that there efficiency is key not complexity for it’s own sake.

Also in SEO you can’t automate anymore like you could a few years ago, so advancing more and more into the web development and programming direction is a step back.

While there are new tools which of course have to be programmed relying on automation and programming for SEO reasons can backfire due to the fact that more and more human input is introduced into search results ranking.

So at the end of the day SEO is not only about SEO anymore but about

• content creation
• social networking
• and ultimately public relations

SEO becomes increasingly part of a larger marketing strategy.
Currently SEO is advancing in different directions:

• Complexity (web development, analytics)
• Social Media (networking, public relations where the public actually is)
• Content creation (blogging, writing, “multimedia” like Video)

These directions are very different, but the movements towards them takes place at the same time. While some people concentrate only on one of those, others attempt to cover all of them.

That’s my point: You can’t limit yourself to advanced SEO in the sense complex web development and analytics.

Tracking conversions, ROI is fine but you can’t succeed in the long run if you analyzed your perfect customer without ever talking to him. Using meticulously coded websites that make search engines happy will never be a success strategy if you can’t offer killer content.

In SEO 2.0 often the most simple solutions are the best: Why not socialize with the potential consumer or to find out what he wants instead directly of sifting through website usage data?

Yes, sometimes it’s so easy. Don’t scan me, just ask me want I want. It’s done off line “can I help you?” and you can do it online too. So advanced SEO is about making the target audience visit your site and then making the visitor find what s/he wants. This is advanced SEO or SEO 2.0.

In basic SEO you just want

• to rank
• get found
• or garner huge traffic.

In advanced SEO you make sure the traffic is viewed as people, customers, multipliers.

In SEO 2.0 people out there do not hate SEO, they don’t even notice it because it just perfectly fulfills their wishes. Advanced SEO is not about cool programming skills only, it’s about social skills.

Crime scene by Cati Kaoe.

Web designers & developers often focus on web standards, table-less layouts or CSS effects like styled lists or sidebars e.g. All these things are perfectly OK unless they are executed at the expense of findability.

Yes, findability is the orphan of the web design industry and thus often forgotten, overlooked or plainly ignored.

Those who do not heed findability in many cases without even pondering it manage to make a website useless for a client as it won’t have many users or if some appear, they won’t find what they seek.

Here I collected the 10 worst findability crimes committed By web designers & developers you should avoid:

1. Cool HTML titles
For years web designers used “cool” HTML titles for their websites, the more special characters, the less decriptive keywords the better: —===###///Name///###===— Also imagine a book cover with only the author’s name but with no title, many web designers won’t disclose what they do or offer. Some obviously only offer portfolios. Many sell “work” or “projects”.

2. Mysterious links
Why tell anybody what you do when you can make them guess? “Profile”, “projects” is much more mysterious than just writing “web design”, “graphic design” or “programming”. Let them click to find out or bounce if they are not patient enough.

3. Fancy JavaScript menus
Since at least 1999, the more complicated JavaScript menus you used, the better, many of them are still not crawlable by search engines, also most people won’t click hidden menu items.

4. Hidden headlines
While HTML offers 6 headlines tags, h1-h6, web developers started using divs and spans for headlines artificially making them bigger using font-size: 600% e.g. while the Google bot did not even know that it’s a headline.

5. Bizarre URL structure
Many high profile websites still use URL structures that are unstable, seemingly random and unreadable for both humans and robots. They probably never heard of the term URL design.

6. Obnoxious fonts and font sizes
A few years ago Flash pixel fonts were en vogue but so small that only hawk eyed youths could decipher them. With the dawn of the web standards movement the opposite was the case, the bigger the better so that simple text become unscannable or sometimes unreadable due to sheer size. Also Verdana headlines still haunt me sometimes. Why not find a middle ground?

7. Duplicate titles
When every page has the same title how am I supposed to find out the differences? Google thinks so too. Every page needs it’s own title.

8. Multiple meta tags
Many websites still use at least a dozen meta tags while they get ignored by Google and people can’t see them anyway. They just clutter the code. Meta description and meta robots are perfectly sufficient.

9. Multiple meta keywords
The meta keyword tag is a relic of the dark past of the pre-Google era, unfortunately webmasters still assume that you need dozens of keywords in there. You can skip the tag altogether.

10. Excessive Pagination
Do you think people click 3, 5, 10 pages just to see some images? Some do, but you loose a large part of your audience with each click. Also those who only scan the page will leave instantly.


Simply avoid these hideous crimes against findability to get along with the search engines and the online population.

Don’t make people think, be straightforward.

Web design and development is not an artform. You want people to buy your services, don’t you? So first they must find you and then find out about them.

All these issues seriously interfere with this objective. These CSS findability guidelines might be a good start.

My friends on Twitter report that TinyURL is or was down. What to do when TinyURL is down if you need short URLs (concise Internet/web addresses or URL forwarding) for Twitter or elsewhere?

Fortunately there are lots of URL shortening services. I tested multiple of them and found out the best 10 TinyURL alternatives.

Short URLs which are

• even shorter
• easier to remember
• make more sense fur human readers in the first place

instead of the cryptic TinyURL URL strings.

Check out these 10 short URL services that are more advanced alternatives to TinyURL: The first link is the homepage of the service, second is my example, I shortened this URL: http://seo2.0.onreact.com/top-10-fatal-url-design-mistakes

1. is.gd, http://is.gd/LVK
2. www.x.se, http://www.x.se/jpfv
3. urlpass.com, http://urlPass.com/9n3
4. yep.it, http://yep.it/10url
5. xrl.us, http://xrl.us/urldesign
6. urlcut.com, http://urlcut.com/urldesign
7. doiop.com, http://doiop.com/urldesign
8. urlpire.com, http://www.urlpire.com/?urldesign
9. thnlnk.com, http://thnlnk.com/onreact/urldesign/748
10. d95.com, http://d95.com/urldesign

Number 1 - 4 are shorter than TinyURL, number 4 - 10 are more readable. #10 d95 has a clue: It creates a frame-set for your URL so you see on the URL shortcut in the address bar of your browser and the original page gets no direct credit, which is advisable in some cases.

Feel free to spread this list.

Famous painting, image by caribb, but no clue in the URL: http://flickr.com/photos/caribb/2355878576/

Do you know what the New York Times, the World Bank, Wordpress.com, PHP.net and others have in common? Their URLs suck!

A few days ago my list of the top 10 fatal URL design mistakes has been hugely popular:

To prove how messed up URLs, these most important guiding units on the Internet, still are, I made a list of renown sites using completely inappropriate Internet addresses, directory and other URL structures.

You’ll be surprised to recognize some of the top 10 url design failures out there. I listed the examples accordingly to my original URL design mistakes list:

1. Bloomberg.com, renown news outlet: Session Ids (+ multiple random URLs for each page #5). Example: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aH5xJRoWZFOU&refer=home
Also try
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aH5xJRoWZFOU&refer=spam
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aHhgZh8jHAs02
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087

2. Inhabitat.com, Technorati Top 100 blog: Mangled apostrophes in URL (+ date based URLs for timeless information #9): http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/07/02/philippe-starck%E2%80%99s-designer-windmill-for-all/

3. Fox News, infamous war propaganda machine: Numbers instead of speaking URLs
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,308077,00.html
What’s wrong here? Consider the headline: “Pop Tarts: Angelina Freaks Out Seeing Herself Naked in ‘Beowulf,’ Calls Home to Explain”

4. PHP.net, homepage of the world’s most popular server side script language: Multiple canonical URLs
http://php.net/
http://www.php.net/
http://www.php.net/index.php
etc.

5. New York Times, most renown US newspaper: Too many parameters which also change randomly, this example is so horrible it mus be repeated.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/technology/27google.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=business&adxnnlx=1214553738-5Jvl01JfMCKLx5duMGRv9g&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Also try:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/technology/27google.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&new-york-times-urls-suck
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/technology/27google.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/technology/27google.html

6. New York Times and multiple bloggers: Only one very broad and boring keyword in URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/technology/27google.html
If you’re eager to know what Google did on this date check out also this blog:
http://julielemonde.com/2008/06/27/google/
In fact you can find such intriguing URLs for almost any date.

7. World Health Organization (WHO): Too many useless subdirectories
http://www.who.int/csr/don/archive/country/arg/en/
Also make sure to check out the “killer” content of this page!

8. Universities: UUCP, Berkeley, UCN and the World Bank, the world’s most hated bank: Check out these Joomla! crap URLs, don’t they have some smart computer science students to fix that?
http://www.uccp.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=29
http://iurd.berkeley.edu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=173&Itemid=164
http://global.unc.edu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=75&Itemid=81

Remember those black clad anarchist in Seattle 1999? Yes, one of them apparently infiltrated the World Bank’s computer department to sabotage their URLs, this is one of the worst examples of URL crap:
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:21828803~pagePK:34370~piPK:34424~theSitePK:4607,00.html

9. Wordpress.com: Blog service and Smashing Magazine, Technorati top 10 blog:
Now tell me, is the date the most important and first to be seen info for this post here?
http://princessofsomething.wordpress.com/2008/07/06/where-the-heart-is/
Is this resource’s most important factor the the date when it was published, like it’s a 4th of July celebration or something?
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/04/web-form-design-patterns-sign-up-forms/
Also consider this article, would you still read it after seeing the date?
http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/2005/06/27/google-video-to-launch-video-playback-service

10. SEO 2.0, blog dominating the global SEO 2.0 market: Yes, I failed here recently when I renamed my categories
http://seo2.0.onreact.com/category/reputation-building/
This will result in an error. I could have used this WordPress SEO plugin instead to prevent this error.


So you see the Web is full of broken URLs and there must be much work done before this mess is cleaned up. In 2008 we still face even huge sites which get the most fundamental findability and SEO basics wrong.

These top 10 URL failures prove that point. Contact their webmasters and make them aware of these issues. they can save thousands of dollars or even lives in the case of the WHO.

Address by sam.d

URL design? Is there any design involved at all in deciding how your Internet address and directory structure will look like? Yes, there is, or at least there should be! Nonetheless I see the same mistakes daily all over the place as if URLs wouldn’t matter at all.

A bad URL means your website or page won’t be found, clicked, visited and linked or submitted to social media. Without proper URLs most of your other great web design, usability and SEO measures get wasted.

Thus I decided to show the top 10 URL design mistakes which I encounter most frequently and which are in many cases fatal for your findability:

1. Session IDs: What’s that? Yeah, I ask you, what’s that: e967ef2d7f923aab20e10ddb4164a351 ? It’s a session ID. It’s different for every user so every user has a different address, it’s like inviting people to a party and giving them all a different address.
2. Apostrophes and other special characters: %e2%80%93 - This is an apostrophe in a URL. You can’t submit this to StumbleUpon. If you do you end up with a broken link at best.
3. Numbers instead of speaking URLs: Decide, 123 or angelina-jolie-naked, which URL speaks your language, which one you’ll rather click?
4. Multiple URLs for one page: www.example.com, example.com, example.com/, example.com/index.php, example.com/index.php? all leading to one homepage? No you have 6 homepages and counting! Use a canonical URLs script (WordPress 2.5 already does by default)
   
5. Too many parameters which also change randonmly. Ever tried to submit the New York Times to a social site? In many cases it’a a duplicate as http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/technology/27google.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=business&adxnnlx=1214553738-5Jvl01JfMCKLx5duMGRv9g&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/technology/27google.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin
   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/technology/27google.html
   and dozens of other combinations are possible. This is even worse than #4
6. Only keywords in URL: Recently bloggers tend to shorten their URLs inasmuch as their posting become totally boring. I won’t click /2008/06/27/google if I see only the URLs (like, say, in an email) but I will click google-files-for-bankrupcy
7. Too many subdirectories or mimicked oney via URL rewrite: world/politics/asia/korea/local/ Huh? Do you know what I mean? If it’s that far down the hierarchy, why should I care at all? I want the frontpage news.
8. Simply PHP crap: Do you use Joomla or Mambo CMS? Their standard URLs suck big time: option=com_content&view=article&id=72&Itemid=37 They suck for both Google and StumbleUpon, the 2 most important traffic sources nowadays. As a user I don’t want to look at such crap either.
9. Finally date based URLs: 2008/06/27/ is fine but do you think I’ll click 2005/06/27/ ? No! I won’t. If you’re not into breaking news stop using the date as your most important first part of the URL.
10. Changing URLs after publication: If you use a WordPress URL like mine
    http://seo2.0.onreact.com/how-to-spot-content-theft-on-social-media-and-elsewhere
    and change it after publishing to say
    http://seo2.0.onreact.com/10-ways-how-to-spot-content-theft-on-social-media-and-elsewhere
    the users who’ll visit via Technorati, Google BlogSearch etc. will just encounter an error. You can prevent that by using post numbers and descriptive URLs in WordPress

My 10 URL design rules are quite simple:

1. Make the URLs clean
2. Make them simple
3. Make a URL human and machine readable
4. Use one URL per page
5. No special characters besides a minus/hyphen “-” ideally
6. Use slashes like real directories
7. Enhance URLs with numbers but don’t rely on them
8. Skip the date, it’s not the most important info
9. Do not ever change URLs once set
10. If you have to change URLs move them with a “301 permanently moved” redirect

So you see: Achieving findability by appropriate URL design is not rocket science, it’s more preventing stupid mistakes. For deciding which URL structure is best in WordPress (not mine!) check out his how-to article of mine: WordPress URL Design. Also make sure to follow these 10 Coding Guidelines for Perfect Findability and Web Standards.

Did I forget something? Tell me.

Ethics
1. Do no evil, unless money is at stake and nobody watches
2. Don’t like our corporation? You can always use these other competitors’ services who are much worse
3. Come on, your computer, iPhone and your sneakers are Made in China too so what’s the problem with Google China?
4. We do not censor, we just remove questionable material others asked us to remove, especially with dirty words like “anal sex” and “democracy“.
5. We’re not a monopoly, you always can use a different product, move along

Privacy
6. The friendly brother is watching you
7. The more free Google services you use the less free you are
8. Google has got your data and we respect the local laws, so if the police calls…
9. We own your Google documents, didn’t you know? Read the ToS next time
10. We know everyting about your website and we’ll tell the competition

Website optimization
11. The more you try to fulfill Google’s wishes on your website the less it’ll work in the long run
12. Once you managed to gain a good position in Google’s results Google will change something and you drop back down
13. To abide by Google’s webmaster guidelines you need to watch them closely, they might change any day
14. Website optimization techniques which were perfectly legitimate once will be spam in the future
15. If you ask us how to optimize for Google we will reply that great content is it, even if you already have great content
16. The more Google conformity on your website the more clutter
17. Writing for Google is writing for robots
18. Any way of gaining links for a better Google ranking is artificial and once we find out we will clamp down on it
19. What big corporations are allowed to you are not
20. You can’t call Google once you have been kicked out of the Index, unless you’re the BMW manager
21. Paid links are only paid if you receive the money directly and tell others about it and they don’t point to Google sites or our partners
22. We’re patriotic, you won’t rank high in the USA if your site is from India


I assume this list of 22 Google laws is not complete as some aspects beyond ethics, privacy and website optimization are barely covered or not covered at all, so if you work at Google and know the rest of them make sure to add them in the comments. Your name will remain strictly confidential [take note though that I use Google Analytics and the comments will be sent to my GMail account].

You can copy this article and spread it but please do it with an attribution and a link to this page. The truth about Google must be uncovered!

1. Being told by a renown blogger and marketer that he is a “huge fan of my blog”
2. Meeting people from the largest national publishing houses who “want to do something with blogging and/or social media” and want me to ***
3. Getting lots of business cards by business people who want to do “some social media business” with me, at least 5 wanted to work with me on such projects, damn, I need to find time to write them all.
4. Getting a job offer for full time employment for a “big corporate client”, I still have to decline it (if I’d reply to every message instantly I would never have the time to blog) I actually prefer self-employment and independence
5. Eavesdropping on the competition by flattering them
6. Meeting my clients who normally pay me without ever bothering me besides that
7. Actually feeling like an expert. You don’t unless 150+ people really listen to you without throwing things at you.
8. Getting a day off: Come on, the SES was vacation for me, it wasn’t work at all, I felt like a newborn (as we say in Germany)
9. Getting an authority link from SES, hey we’re doing SEO here after all ;-)
   
10. Getting free food (I’m not a gourmet at all, despite the “Chef” in my name, but the food was not what I expected, sorry)

So all in all, you clearly see that search engine conferences are, similar to social media and blogging, a complete waste of time. I want my money back!