(There really deserves to be a bigger, harder, longer pun in this one, but I’m hard pushed for time and this keyboard is really stiff)

Neil McIntosh has been blogging about recent reports on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - and there’s an article by Shane Richmond in The Telegraph and not one, but two hilarious Guardian columns playing along - and, without free drugs to boost my memory, it brought back to my mind the time, before the credit crunch, I saw a company try to boost web ranking by inserting the phrase women’s car insurance into a release.

A release about a car crash.

And that was how it read.

It was so bad, it was a cock up and a balls up. It had lines like “The driver, who did not have women’s car insurance was unhurt after the incident” and “the drivers of the other cars, who did not have women’s car insurance - some because they were male” and “drivers are reminded that women’s car insurance is a must”.

It was awful. You can say it was trying to sex up a routine car crash, but it was worse than a piece of Harry Potter sex fanfic. I would like to think we’ve moved on from that, but for some, I don’t think we have…It’s almost as bad as the SEO firms that think online PR starts and ends with free PR release sites (though, as you’ll see from above, I’ve started handing out PR tips for free. iPhones - old style and iPhone 3G should be able to access it and it should be viewable on the Wii and PS3 browsers as well. For free.).

(And the company who had the naked cheek to write that release aren’t anywhere near the top Google rankings for women’s car insurance or SEO strategy I’m pleased to say.)