The week began with an Iraqi journalist throwing a pair of shoes at US President George Bush. On Monday, a few people shared ideas on Twitter for what might be a good tabloid headline for the story and came up with “Sock and Awe”.

By Tuesday one of the ‘Twitterers’, website designer Alex Tew, who founded the Million Dollar homepage, had come up with a game and posted it on a website called sockandawe.com.

Yesterday he sold the site on eBay for £5,215 to a company called Fubra, who have already placed adverts on the site and claim they will have made their money back by tonight.

A clever Christmas e-mail campaign from T-Mobile, sent to my inbox today, which manages to raise their brand awareness and generate leads directly through an incentive driven data capture form.

Existing customers receiving the e-mail above are directed to www.t-mobilechristmas.co.uk, where their forename initially appears in lights, before being pre-populated in a data capture form that encourages them to e-mail a Christmas message to their friends (and hence increase T-Mobile brand awareness).

Potential customers directed to www.t-mobilechristmas.co.uk can also e-mail a Christmas message to their friends and opt into receiving communications (allowing T-Mobile to directly market their products).

Well done T-Mobile and Experian CheetahMail!

Coca-Cola - christmas on the Coke side of life

Application from Coca-Cola powered by Google maps…

Last Christmas ‘OfficeMax’ created the Elf Yourself site, which you probably found in your inbox a few times.

This year, they’ve expanded the application to include five friends. Visit www.elfyourself.com if you happened to miss it.

Google have released a free PDF document called the Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide. 

Pulling this together is a great victory for common sense and will help demystify a subject some people can obsess over.

The guide deals with around a dozen basic topics for websites that want to achieve good organic search engine rankings and they boil down to creating great content, easy navigation, sharing and indexing.

Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here. Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it. This could be through blog posts, social media services, email, forums, or other means. Organic or word-of-mouth buzz is what helps build your site’s reputation with both users and Google, and it rarely comes without quality content.

Google SEO Starter Guide v1.1

Of course this isn’t to say that SEO is easy. Creating great content is always going to take work, but it does allow us to focus on what matters and take a welcome break from the smoke and mirrors of some SEO companies.

But what about SEO Companies?
There is still a place for SEO companies, as there are a number of things Google aren’t telling us here, but I do hope that this guide helps shift the conversation back towards the users of websites, and away from the less-savoury end of Search Engine Optimisation. Not surprisingly, as a company that creates accessible, content-rich websites, we’d welcome that!