A rainbow on the floor of the Louvre. Relevant? Nope...

Provide the best possible service to your human users, and the machines will follow.

Web 2.0 and SEO, when executed correctly, can be great marketing and virtually free. Free PR in a recession. Awesome, right? It should be.

I recently came across The Five Ways Social Networking is Changing PR after a few months of rediscovering the social networking world for the purposes of driving business. It’s just so easy to put up some pages on Facebook, or to open an account and get Twittering. But how do you keep these pages from disappearing into the ether? After a while, you’re the only one updating them and you’re effectively spending a ton of time discussing topics with yourself. Or tearing your hair out figuring out how to keyword stuff your meta-data for that matter. But you’re not the one who needs to be sold on what you’re selling.

So, have a think about who you’re selling to, instead. I went to an SEO seminar today that insisted we should all be writing content, metadata and PPC ads to compliment Google’s search algorithm. Since when did machines become more organic than humans? Think about your end user: what they want/need/are looking for, and how you can provide it for them. It’s not hard, actually, because you already know this. It’s your business after all.

Ever wonder why what works for you in SEO or PPC in January doesn’t translate in October? The spiders and algorithms are very smart. But all they’re doing is upgrading themselves to better serve human behavior. So, the next time you find yourself thinking, “how am I going to outsmart the machine?”, stop it.