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What do you want to be remembered if once you were a black hat search engine spammer but now you're seriously into mainstream search engine optimization and you want to be trusted and loved by Google and a large number of clients too?

Well if you run a large well-known company that employs some high-profile people and you have clients spread all over the globe then you don't want to be remembered for your black hat exploits at all.

So you take your high-profile people aside and have heart-to-heart talks with them about the evils of search engine spamming, you get them to write pathetic pieces about how wonderfully ethical your business is and how horrified they are that some search engine conferences might actually drift a little from the pure white path and you keep your spin machine working overtime in the hope that people won't learn the truth.

But sadly for you some people have long memories and they're going to remember that you were just as black as those that you're now criticizing and every now and then they'll remind you of that fact. Perhaps you should have been doing a little reputation management way back when you were wearing your black hat. Maybe you should have been promoting the idea that black hat SEO were nothing more than aggressive pioneers as one SEO expert suggested after that conference that reminded you of where you came from.

Now I wonder what title we could give ourselves so that we don't get labeled with terms that are less than flattering. Seriously, it's something we should all be working on because things could begin to get nasty now that Max Candy has been found guilty in Tampa.

A great Firefox extension
While we're talking about being aggressive let me tell you about a great little Firefox extension ... their term for a plug-in ... that Steve came across last week. It's called SeoQuake ... that's the correct spelling ... and it shows you some incredible information about any websites you might visit while the extension is turned on.

You get information on the links to the site that can be found in each of the major search engines, you get Alexa ranking, the age of the domain, internal and external link information and keyword density too ... not that keyword density should be all that important to you. And it's all displayed in a toolbar at the top of the browser.

You will also find that it gives you some interesting information about any affiliate advertising that may be displayed on the site you're checking and there's even more information when you have the tool turned on while you're looking up a term in the major search engines. It is a bit of a resource hog so you wouldn't want to leave it turned on all the time but it really does look like an invaluable tool if you want to do a little 'research' on what your competitors are doing.

Thinking outside of the box
I've talked about Twitter here before and if you've heard about it then you'll know that many people see it as nothing more than a social networking tool. However there's a whole lot more to it than that and if you're interested in marketing or search engine optimization then there are some real gems to be found there if you follow the right people.

However, it seems that there's even more to Twitter than social networking and research and a major telephone and Internet service provider is using it in a way that is really thinking outside of the box. Comcast has a presence on Twitter as a customer service tool and there are some people out there who suggest that, in their experience, it's the only way to get Comcast to do anything when it comes to customer service.

So what could you use Twitter for?

In fact, what new and innovative ways could you use any of the tools we now have at our disposal? If you're running an affiliate program what could you provide your affiliates with that might make use of these tools in a different way?

For example, lots of sponsors provide RSS feeds for affiliates that want to incorporate them into their blogs. But is there something else you could be doing for affiliates with blogs?

There's one mainstream program out there that provides their affiliates with a plug-in ... not an RSS feed ... for WordPress blogs so could you do the same?

FriendFeed and Plurk are two more social networking sites that could be useful to you and your affiliates so have you taken the time to have a look at them?

As times get harder you're going to need to be out there on the cutting edge or marketing if you want to survive ... and you're going to need to work on the terms that people associate with what you do too.