The “picture is worth a thousand words” often seems to be taken a little too literally.

Take the main page of the Nuance UK website:

The image is striking, but conveys nothing. And the text overlay does little by the way of clarification.

A click on the Learn More About Nuance button takes me to the following page:

Another person with their head thrown back, but I’m still no clearer, so I click on the Learn More button again:

The images on these pages serve no purpose, aside from adding some colour.

Images employed on your website need to either convey relevant information or entice your visitors to act.

By way of example, Amazon’s own graphics and visuals are almost non-existent. The visitor is instead bombarded by images of the products that they sell, and nothing more.

Research demonstrates that our eyes are initially drawn to the images on a web page. So why not go for something more productive than eye candy?

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Automation is a wonderful thing. I use Macro Scheduler to automate a large number of tasks every day, and it probably saves me in the region of 3-4 hours a week, sometimes more.

But not everything should be automated.

I find it unnerving that planes can take off and land automatically, but take some comfort in the fact that a (hopefully stable) computer might do a better job than a person. At least that’s what I tell myself, when sitting inside the many tons of metal that are hurtling themselves towards the ground at terrifying speed.

I’m also baffled by companies who choose to trust Google’s automated settings to handle their AdWords accounts.

Automation is easier, but before flipping the switch, think about what you might be doing.

Google make money from AdWords. They make money from you by how you set up your account.

Do you really want Google to decide how the account should be run?

Do you want Google to decide how much you should pay for a click, or how much you should spend a day?

There are many settings within an AdWords account. Yet none of the defaults are in the interests of the advertiser. Not one.

Google’s system is setup primarily for Google.

The Inside AdWords blog recently announced that Google have raised the number of automated rules from 10 to 100.

Don’t be tempted. Don’t consider automation.

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Effective AdWords Management is an increasingly elusive beast, but mastering the basics of AdWords really isn’t difficult.

So why do so many companies make the same mistakes time and time again?

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Search engine optimisation (or optimization if you insist) is the process of making sure that the search engines recognise, qualify and index the content of your website.

I recently attended a presentation on black hat SEO that I found interesting. The speaker clearly knew a lot about the darker side of SEO, but his polarised views were more than little disconcerting.

For example he considered so-called White hat SEOs to be “losers”, and frequently referred to Matt Cutts of Google disparagingly and with a surprising level of venom.

SEO is about helping the search engines understand the visitors that you want on your website.

Like any business relationship this can be anywhere on a scale from absolute honesty to complete deception. But no-one can dispute that black hat techniques carry a degree of risk.

A black hat SEO may argue that the rewards outweigh the risks, but if you’re contemplating following the dark side, you might want to think about what you’ll be gambling.

If SEO is about making sure the engines index your content, there should be no room for techniques that jeopardise that aim.

The dark side might be tempting, but the good guys usually win.

Note: The next issue of our Competitive Edge newsletter will be covering this issue and some of the finer details of practical and safe search engine optimisation.

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Self-belief and confidence can play an important part in success, but it’s easy to go too far.

Take the following comments in a well-known forum:

“I tried X, it didn’t work, therefore X is pointless.”

An open mind and a hunger for experimentation can be more profitable than past experience.

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