Chris Hooley’s -ThinkBait-

“You’re not a real SEO until you get a domain banned”

Seriously, I have heard this on more than one occasion.  Are you kidding me?  That might be one of the worst schools of thought in the entire microcosm of SEO.

A few similar phrases (to show how dumb this way of thinking is):

• “You’re not a real fisherman until you sink your boat”
• “You’re not a real doctor until you kill a patient”
• “You’re not a real stripper until your boobs fall off”

I would like to propose a new statement to circulate through the SEO community to respond to the more asinine, established one.

“You’re probably not a real SEO if you are getting your sites banned“

I sent my team an email today about how to leverage your research for SEO / marketing value. After reading it, I thought it would actually make a helpful blog post for those who ask lots of questions.

I am in no way implying anybody is dumb, I just thought that title would be nice and catchy for the blog post. Here’s the email I sent out today:

Hi Team,

Often our jobs require that we need to research a topic… software, new info for content development, changes in the advertising landscape, etc. We “Google” things probably a dozen times per person per day in this department. We also ask each other tons of questions, which is great communication.

There is a way however, that we can get the answers we need AND some SEO value (maybe some links, maybe some buzz) from our own curiosity as well. By visiting forums, blogs, question & answer sites (like answers.yahoo.com), and other social media sites, we can create relevant profiles and even have little signatures that have a link back to our site. We can link to our website in our questions too if it makes sense and is not spammy.

Researching this way has a triple benefit. You can get your questions answered by people who are experts or junkies in a certain area (try visiting a software forum for a question about software, they will probably be very passionate about the discussions), you can help brand our company by being a friendly contributor to these communities, AND you even can help our SEO efforts by getting free links back to our site where it makes sense.

I strongly encourage you to try this method of research, since it will help us expand our presence into the social web and may help us for SEO as well. We might even learn some neat new things that we can bring back to our colleagues here :-)

Keep up the good work guys, you rock!

Now that my team is growing, I can imagine these types of emails will be more frequent than things like “Is this project done yet” or “Can you try this font?” or “Please go get my dry cleaning” (kidding!)

Do you think that emails like this, ones that give broad guidance instead of specifics, are an effective way to manage a large team of web marketing managers and professionals? Seems like the higher up you get in an organization, the more it is about vision than specifics.