I know I'm a bit late for Mother's Day. I love my mother every day though. Do you? In case you love your mother reshare this!

Now, who will say "no" and refrain from resharing? Many people will feel compelled to do so. Today I will show you a few little social engineering tricks that pretty much everybody and their mom is using out there on social media.

In SEO we had the ever-present dark side of black hat SEO but what many overlook is the downright manipulation of people within social media.

Indeed social media by itself is a kind of manipulation where corporations earn money by making you create content for them for free and monetize your relationships. That's  a longer article though.

This time I just want to explain the few simple methods people use to make you share their updates or vote them up artificially. I'll use Google+ to show that but it's even more common on more popular sites like Facebook or Tumblr.

Reshare This if You Love ...

Social Media is about identity. Whether you have to disclose your name and address like on Facebook or are able to create a virtual identity like on Tumblr it's about who you are most of time. You are what say and what you share.

Online you are always alone and just connected to people who are elsewhere on the globe. That's why you see everybody staring at their mobile these days while fewer people talk to or even look at each other in real life. You create a connection by saying and sharing things others like. In case they don't you end up ignored or being a troll.

Things we all can relate to are easier to share. That's why cute images of cats and other pets rule the Web.

Everybody can relate to that. Facebook is also full of baby photos but that's not as simple anymore. People who can't have kids for example my be pout off. Others may not want to look at strangers' kids.

Click "+1" to Vote

Usually a social media vote equals appreciation. That's the case for sure with the "+1! by Google or the !like! by Facebook. What about the people who do not like something though? Don't forget those undecided, unable or unwilling to choose whether they like something or not. How to make them vote? Well give them the fitting options.

Of course you need something that is not really important but almost everybody by now will have an opinion on it.

The more opinionated the better. For example you could make them choose between three common operating system options by asking "what is the best OS?"

1. Linux
2. Mac
3. Windows

Social sites will of course count all these votes as genuine engagement, it even is to some extent, you din't pay anyone to vote!

Click "like" to Win!

You have seen plenty of those sweepsateks on Facebook. Click "like" to win an iPhone or something. Google+ doesn't allow contests ion their TOS so I can't show you an actual example here but you know what I mean.

Even scammers have used this "click to win" technique by setting up fake Facebook pages.

They would post something like click "like" to get a 100$ coupons and 50k people would do it without even looking closely at the page they did it on! In some cases those who clicked downloaded some malware.

Of course the likelihood to click and really win is minuscule. It's far too easy to click so that far too many people will do it and the few items that get given away will be given to a tiny fraction of those who clicked if at all.

At the same time all the people clicked the "+! or "like" as if the y truly appreciate it. Now that's a big win for the manipulative person or company. We're still in the early stages of social media so that kind of inflated popularity doesn't get really discounted.

Real Social Media Manipulation

There are of course more advanced techniques of manipulating social media audiences at large. For example

the US military has a whole social media division and uses fake accounts

dedicated to spread news and rumours about America's enemies. That's why you read so many awful stories about Iran despite our ally Saudi Arabia being much worse. Such manipulative efforts are far harder to spot though.

Also people are so used to view the bad news about Iran that they tend to vilify the country by themselves. Remember that Iran for example is a democracy while in Saudi Arabia an absolutist king is reigning with an iron fist.

Just recently Saudi Arabia's army has destroyed the democracy movement in the neighbouring Bahrain. Instead the main news for a year has been the civil war in Syria where rebels" supported by the US and the EU are fighting the Syrian government, an Iranian ally.

This post is not about politics though. Neither Syria nor Iran are perfect, I know that, but isn't it strange how much worse offenders who are "our rogues" get away with murder while our enemies end up in the spotlight all the time?

Meanwhile I guess you still love your mother, so please reshare this! The Google+ button is below or just select any image or text part and click to win more hearts and minds!

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This is a sad story with a happy ending about the way Microsoft has made the Web ugly and what to do about it. You have to act now though or you lose readers and customers. In a more descriptive way it deals with body text readability in the age of default font smoothing.

The typography of many sites is literally broken without their respective owners' knowledge it seems. You can't ignore the fact anymore that your copy is fuzzy and difficult to read. You simply turn away visitors from your site!

Have you heard the term anti-aliasing? Most people probably haven't unless they are graphic designers. Do you know what ClearType is? Both are dealing with font smoothing. What you need that for you might ask? I'm not sure myself.

Ideally font smoothing makes text appear more readable and good looking on screens. In reality it doesn't unless you make sure it does.

Web-safe Fonts

It all started with Times New Roman. Early websites used that font known from newspapers. It didn't look good nor was it very readable on the Web but at least you could print it out in the early days of the Internet. Later on more so called Web-safe fonts like Helvetica and Arial appeared and finally a really good crispy font for body text took center-stage: Verdana. Web-safe meant available, readable and looking the same on all platforms. Then things got worse again.

Starting with Windows  XP Microsoft introduced a proprietary technology called ClearType to smooth fonts.

Windows ClearType

Windows not only ships with ClearType pre-installed since XP, it's also activated by default since Vista. So whether you like it or not, most people use ClearType on Windows to smooth fonts. I use Windows too but I don't like smooth aka fuzzy body text fonts that strain my eyes and look ugly. That's why I switch ClearType off on my machine.

So in recent years I was able to ignore the fact that my body text looks pretty and readable to me while to most other people it doesn't.

Web-safe fonts looking blurry

I was testing a site lately on different browsers and platforms and was again alerted to the difference font smoothing or lack of it makes. Maybe I'm one of the people who can't distinguish colors as good as the Clear Type technology requires to be of use. On the other hand even highly accepted fonts such as Helvetica/Arial look blurry and clumsy when font smoothing is on. Just compare these two, first the crispy version without ClearType, this is what I see and then the default ClearType font smoothing version, this is what most of my readers see:

Is the second one really better readable as Microsoft claims? I doubt it. In case it's just me, look at the font, it looks blurry and ugly. Even in case you don't care you will notice on a sub-conscious level and dislike the overall user experience. The smoothed Arial barely resembles the elegance of the classic Helvetica font it is based on.

Microsoft has introduced a special set of proprietary fonts that look OK with ClearType, most notable Calibri, but these fonts are mostly Windows only:

So users on other platforms may see other fonts instead. Apple and Linux systems are reportedly better at font smoothing than Windows but you also want to make your site look more or less the same on all platforms, don't you?

Font smoothing not activated

It doesn't even have to be a corporate identity. The sheer readability of body text improves or deteriorates a lot depending on whether you have taken font smoothing into account or not. Many fonts that are perfect in small sizes without font smoothing are causing problems once font smoothing is switched on. On the other hand your perfectly smooth font can look really broken on systems not using font smoothing. Not every font works both ways with font smoothing turned on and off:

The example above is ironically taken from the Usability Post article on font smoothing. With ClearType off there is no font smoothing left and the font is looking really weird, notice the bizarre additions to the "e" for example.

Some people turn off ClearType on Windows of their own accord, others simply do not have it activated it as they use Windows XP on netbooks for example.

Anyway, neither keeping on using your standard fonts like Verdana or Helvetica/Arial nor using some new smooth by design fonts like Calibri is the perfect solution. For each one of them there are cases or rather users who won't be able to view them properly.

Webfonts for body text

Of course there is third kind of solution I want to suggest today: webfonts. Webfonts are a by now popular way of modern font replacement for high quality typography. Webfonts are often basically rented fonts you access on a third party server.

You can display body text using Webfonts not just headlines unlike the early font replacement techniques.

There are even a lot of free Webfonts from a few services you can use. Sadly it's not as easy as you might expect. The choice of the right font and font size is crucial to ensure readability.

• Some fonts will look OK with old school font smoothing but not with ClearType.
• Some font sizes are too small to be still readable using webfonts.
• Many fonts are too fancy to be of use for body text.

So you have to chose the body text font wisely and test it even on Windows on several browsers and with ClearType on and off.

I have tested lots of free webfonts on my own microsite over at onreact.com - Finally I chose Muli for both h2 subheadlines and body text. It works best with simple anti-aliasing and still OK with subpixel rendering. That's what ClearType does too. Different browsers on Windows will treat smoothed fonts differently. Firefox simply anti-aliases them (first screen shot), Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer use subpixel rendering (second screen-shot from Chrome):

As you see the readability here is not perfect yet. At least it looks the same with ClearType on and off now. Please note how the same font size is a lot different on both browsers though. On FF the readability is better. On Chrome etc. the font looks more like the original design of it but is harder to read.

Vinny La Barbera's blog uses Questrial as a webfont. It looks both good and is readable. It works for headline and body text. Still, on Chrome the display is not perfect here either.

Another similar free webfont that I have seen working pretty well in the wild is Quicksand. All three are not perfect though. In some common sizes and colors the readability suffers.

I consider using some high quality paid Webfonts instead. I have collected lots of them for testing purposes and have still to choose one. I may follow up on this topic in the future.

Webfonts, even free ones are not only available from Google Webfonts. You can get them from Adobe as well or Fonts.com where you can get high quality professional fonts for 10$ a month and many other vendors. A professional font like ITC Avant Garde Gothic in its Web optimized version works well both from a readability perspective and to please the eye.

What about you? Do you care about readable body text or do you just focus on getting your visitors and assume that once they are on your site they will stay there and read your text no matter how it looks?

* Creative Commons image by matt knoth.

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BuzzFeed reports that

"Traffic from Google to digital publishers dropped 30% over the past eight months."

based on traffic statistics from over 200 major media properties, among them

1. BuzzFeed
2. Time
3. Huffington Post
4. Rolling Stone
5. Sports Illustrated

Overall social media traffic to publishers, even Facebook traffic by itself amounts to more than Google search traffic for quite a while by now, 3 months in a row.

Danny Sullivan stopped right in claiming that it's all so called "not provided" traffic that doesn't get shown. That's not true though. That's only a small fraction. Where did all the search traffic go then? I'll explain. Here are the reasons:

Google Knowledge Graph

The so called Google Knowledge Graph is designed to keep searchers on Google, give them all the information they need onsite or send them over to similar search pages. Searchers do not need to click actual search results anymore. For example Google scrapes content from Wikipedia and display it right in the results.

Google Image Search content theft

Google Image Search has been updated recently. The new versions steals your images and hotlinks them on Google-page. There is no way to redirect the searcher to the image source anymore with frame-breakers or similar means. Advanced hotlink protection can help to recover some clicks partly but can't stop Google from this large scale content theft.

Paid only search "results" above the fold

For many search queries, especially those that make money Google doesn't display real search results right away anymore. Instead you'll only use ads and hidden ads  that is "paid inclusion" Google services. You have to scroll to see some actual organic search results. Most people click what's on top instead and often do not even notice or care whether it's an ad or not.

Social media dwell time grows, search dwindles

For a few years in a row the so called dwell time on social media sites has grown while the one search sites e.g. Google dwindles. Dwell time is the actual time you stay onsite and use it. Users spend hours on Facebook per week while the search only for minutes. That's why Google tries desperately to push Google+ as an alternative.

People go to sites directly

When I search for [seo] I see almost the same low quality search results for a few years in a row. I see Wikipedia, Google's own "anti-SEO" FAQ , some information for beginners and a few spammy sites. When I search for something new on SEO I use other sources. I use Topsy and other tools, I check what my social media friends share.  So using search is only for first time users in many cases. Once you know where you want to go, you can go directly. I will check out SEOmoz or Search Engine Land without the help of Google.

A small amount gets wrongly attributed

Google hides more than half of so called referral data from publishers. That is the will see that some came from search to their site but not what they searched for. They have to buy ads on Google to see that data. That called "privacy" in Google's Newspeak. The Safari browser on some mobile devices, that is newer Apple products will hide that traffic altogether and won't tell you that it's search traffic at all.

Answers instead of search results

So what's the overall trend here? Google tries to become a destination itself. The gate-keeper is closing the gate more often so that fewer searchers can go though. Modern search is about answers not search results. For others it's just a toll-booth.

It's no wonder that Google traffic dwindles. Their short term goal is to keep users on Google and grab as much third party content as possible.

When it comes to mobile interfaces or images the process is already very painful to publishers. Social media also replaces search for many people. You rather trust your friends than a buggy Google algorithm.

So where did all the search traffic go? Most of it didn't go anywhere, it stayed on Google. The rest moved to social media.

* Image courtesy of BuzzFeed.

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You have to admit: it didn't work out! Your quest to replace the stigma of SEO was futile until now!

• You wanted to practice internet marketing to no avail, you still just did keyword research, onsite optimization and link building.
• Then you tried to become an inbound marketer but were sending out all these cold outreach messages to unsuspecting bloggers.
• Lastly you jumped on the content marketing bandwagon by publishing more and better content than the keyword-stuffed gibberish you did earlier just to get hated by real content marketers who have done that for a decade.

You are still an SEO.

Everybody still considers SEO a dirty word though so you may have decided to quit SEO as a belated April Fools joke.

There is one problem remaining though. How to call yourself now? All the marketing terms are already used by real marketers with university degrees in marketing and 30 years of experience. Words everybody understands like findability do not sell incredibly expensive SEO services as they don't sound enough like magic. So what now? You need a new acronym. Also you need an acronym that is positive and doesn't have the bad rep of SEO.

I have repurposed a few common acronyms with a positive or ironic vibe that could readily replace SEO, here are the best ones:

1. LOL (love of links)
2. ROFL (relationship optimization for links)
3. UFO (user findability optimization)
4. SEX (search engine experimentation)
5. COMA (content marketing)
6. people oriented optimization - POO
7. OMG as in Online MarketinG

I understand that it will be difficult to rank for those as they get used by average people for different meanings but who cares? After all we're SEOs! We will optimize our sites and get tons of links and ultimately outrank all the other sites.

I just wonder which of these ideas is really the best one. Which one do you prefer? Personally I tend to focus on people oriented optimization as that's what SEO 2.0 is about in its core. I guess some people think that acronym stinks though!

* Creative Commons image by Alex Cockroach.

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Simplicity is the ultimate (form of) sophistication - Leonardo da Vinci

When it comes to design or self improvement - two topics I follow in my free time - simplicity is widely accepted as the path to success. When it comes to blogs, social media or search many people still tend to overlook it.

Just think of the biggest successes in all three areas:

1. When Google introduced the clean and simple search box homepage instead of the cluttered portals of the 20th century they had an amazing success. Of course many aspects fuelled it, the better results, the young sympathetic team, the playful corporate culture etc. Nonetheless the simplicity in web design or UX as we call it today played a major role.
2. On social media one of the most successful sites, Twitter has been made what it is today by its super simple approach to publishing. The limit of characters and lack of features was exactly why everybody started using it.
3. You may call it a social network but I consider it a blog platform: Tumblr made blogging simple again and took over myriads of users from WordPress and Blogger. Additionally they got high numbers of users from Facebook and other social sites. These people were not even into blogging.

OK, I hear you saying "yes, but these are huge corporations, I'm just an average business person". How does simplicity work on blogs, social media & search to make real life business owners without millions in venture capital succeed? I could offer you examples of people that have succeed by simplifying. One is enough though.

Zen Habits is probably the best example of success through simplicity.

The author has a hugely popular blog with a "million+" readers. Every article of his gets re/tweeted hundreds of times at least:

While he treats SEO with disdain and isn't optimizing for any major keyphrases like

• [self help]
• [personal development]
• [life hacks]

he nonetheless ranks on top for most of his current articles, e.g, he wrote one on calmness two months ago and is #4 on Google for the term outranked only by Wikipedia and two dictionaries:

I read a lot of other self improvement blogs by authors who are even more sympathetic but none of them has a similarly big audience.

So what do the other self improvement bloggers wrong?

• They have shiny interfaces with lots of colors and images.
• They push their latest ebooks on their blogs.
• They have very long and sensationalist post headlines.
• They have lots of guest posters from other blogs.
• They display lots of social media buttons everywhere.

Now you wonder: are these things really wrong? Aren't everybody and their aunt suggesting them? Haven't I suggested myself to do some of these? Well, apparently adding more and more, be it features or items or authors or whatever isn't always the best solution.

The people of our age are bombarded non-stop with messages, things and offers.

Do not force even more down their throats. Try it with less.

1. fewer features
2. less clutter
3. shorter headlines

without that many "long tail" keywords. I have even banned Google here on my blog to be able to return to a less Google-begging writing style.  I don't have visible social media buttons. I don't ask you to buy my ebook. That's why my readers are returning. Some of them are with me for 6 years now.

* "What is simplicity" poster by Paweł Kadysz.