Provide marketing people want. Be honest. Just try. It will make for a better world and a happier inbox.

I know that you probably get as many spam emails as I do in your business from anonymous folks who claim they have reviewed your website and can solve all your traffic problems in 30 days with their genius methods! I typically just delete them, but this one came on a day when I was feeling particularly snarky and I just can’t let it go. We’ve been working hard on our own marketing so I am sensitized to this, but I also know our clients get stuff like this all the time and it drives me nuts! Here was the meat of it:

If you are in business you probably hear the term SEO, or Search Engine Optimization quite a bit. While there are some technical pieces and parts to SEO services for small business, the fact is that anytime you do anything related to your website to try to help it rank better, you are engaging in SEO. Getting found by search engines is the single goal of any type of SEO work. Whether you are changing the title tag on your website home page so it ranks better, or you are writing blogs to create new content, you are engaging in SEO.

In a world where a lot of people are less than happy with their jobs, coworkers, clients and overall lives, I want to give a shout out for gratitude and happiness this week. Here are my five W’s on work. I hope reading these causes you to pause and take stock of the reasons you have to be grateful.

Just about every day at HaBO we post a blog about internet marketing, how to create the best landing pages, what makes a good website or how to keyword your online content. This week, in the spirit of this great Thanksgiving Holiday, I want to turn the spotlight a bit inward, and tell you a few things I am grateful for here at the Bubble.

The debate continues regarding the importance of social media for business. The idea of using social media in business seems to be gaining ground, but there is still a lot of debate about its effectiveness.  On our side of things we would argue that social media has some tangible benefits for marketing and lead generation, and some intangible benefits. Beyond those, however, is the key issue of strategy.

Okay, we all get a TON of email in our inboxes and emails from travel agencies and airlines advertising their incredible deals. I am the person who ritually selects and deletes these every morning unless I’m feeling desperate to get away.

Not infrequently I am reminded of how lawyers must feel. Jokes about their sleazy tactics and money grubbing ways degrade the entire profession. That lawyer who truly cares about his client and what is right and wrong must feel pretty discouraged and alone in the world.

In thinking about what makes a good website, one reality that needs to be taken into account is how different people see and interact with visual data in their world. While it is more complex than this, to keep things simple let’s talk about “word people” versus “picture people.”

As the ongoing “keyword not provided” issue is getting a lot of attention and Google is withholding more and more information from marketers, you might be asking if it makes sense to even think about how to add keywords to a website. Will keywords continue to be useful moving forward? Will we have any shot at knowing what is working and what isn’t as we head into 2014 and try to sort out what online marketing looks like?

On Monday September 23 the announcement came out that Google is now going to be blocking marketers from seeing what keywords people came from when they visited your website. I am a marketer and my first response was “I hate Google.” Mostly that came as an initial reaction and the sense that Google controls too much of the world and wants to just make more money on its AdWords, but it was also because we care a lot about keywords in our internet marketing strategies. A bit of digging by my partner and the voice of reason indicated it isn’t as tragic as it sounds, and we will be publishing a blog about that in a couple of days.