Organic Response

I’ve got a fairly large international SEO project a head of me, so I’ve been scouring the internet to learn everything I can about the best ways to appear in search engines in other countries.  Here are seven pretty basic tips to international SEO:

1.  Identify the language with the Meta tag: <meta name=”Language” content=”CN”>   (for China)
2. Use domain extensions of the country (.fr, .co.uk, .cn)
3. Provide crawlable text using the native language.
4. Include street addresses within the country
5. Obtain inbound links from the sites in the country you wish to do SEO.
6. Host the site in the country
7. Spell words accordingly for similar languages (“optimization” in the US vs. “optimisation” in the UK)

Here’s a great illustration showing the above.  

Here is a direct quote from the Adwords support pages:

“Google’s Gmail service, which is part of the content network, also displays AdWords ads. Gmail ads are placed by Google computers using the same automated process that matches relevant AdWords ads to web pages and newsletters. If our automatic filters detect that the topic of the email is sensitive, no ads are shown.”

What does that last line mean?  How does Google define “sensitive”?  Our ads show up on x-rated sites, but somehow Google knows if your email too sensitive to have ads show up.  I would love to know how this filter works?  Any ideas?

I recently posted on 360 Digital Influence’s group blog, How Search Engine Marketing Can Help Measure Word of Mouth.  I talked about the importance of defining and measuring goals when conducting an SEM campaign to promote Word of Mouth efforts, or the illusive request of “increased awareness.”  When there is no sale taking place on the site it becomes difficult to measure ROI, and thus difficult to optimize the campaign.  After reading this great article, Bounce Rate: Sexiest Web Metric Ever?, by Avinash Kaushik, the Analytics Evangelist for Google, I think we should be talking about bounce rate. “In a nutshell bounce rate measures the percentage of people who come to your website and leave “instantly”.  This is the metric we in the Word of Mouth industry need to start focusing on.  Once we can readily adjust campaigns based on bounce rate, we can move on to loftier goals like getting people to download that widget or comment on that blog, but first we need to get people to stay on the site for longer than 5 seconds.

I’m currently listing to the founder of the human edited search engine, Mahalo.com, at SES NY.  He started off by saying he thinks “white hat seo” is important, and his comment 3 years ago at SES San Jose about seo being bogus was actually only referring to “black hat seo”

Mahalo currently has 400 people working from home submitting pages to the Mahalo for money per page submitted.

He’s now talking about a pretty cool service on Mahalo that allows you to submit links (descriptions, tags, etcs…) to 12 different social sharing sites all at once.

Mahalo has a rather robust social network that allows users to build friends, and discover their likes and dislikes.

“The New PageRank” Calacanis believes, is an algorithm based on human trust…This appears to be built based on the human review process.

Good Reads…social networking for books.  You can import your reviews of books on Good Reads to the Mahalo search results…

Flickster…social networking for movies

One more thing…Mahalo content will be syndicated into Google search results… the future SERP is part engine & part human….

SEO people “stuck in short term think”…”more into the gaming of the system than the long term value”…”black hats are poluting the web” leads to consumers not trusting the internet…”create less pages, but make ones that are really a lot better.”

Before attending my first marketing conference I decided to consult an industry veteran, well known social media blogger, and fellow Ogilvy PR / 360 DI colleague, Rohit Bhargava. Rohit has spoken on and moderated several Search Engine Strategies panels, so he’s definitely a qualified teacher for a novice like myself. Here are some of his pointers for making the most of a day at SES:

1. Have a back-up plan for which speakers/panels you want to attend each day in case you don’t like your first choice.
2. Sit near the back so you can slip out to another session if you don’t like it or got what you need out of it.
3. Choose a presenter or two to introduce yourself to.
4. Hit up the expo hall to get some cool gear
5. Look for vendors who offer something innovative and different
6. Don’t try to write everything down. Just make note of the big ideas

As a favor for providing his expertise, I’ll be passing out some flyers created for Rohit’s book coming out soon, Personality Not Included: Why Brands Lose Their Authenticity – And How Great Companies Get it Back.  Hopefully tommorrows Search Engine Strategies Expo will be a success and I will be able to develope my own list of tips for making the most out of such a day of learning.  Here are some of the sessions I’m most excited about:

Social Search Track
Social Media Marketing – What is it and What is it Good For?
Marketing to and through social networks means humans are hot again. Not as directory editors; it’s Web 2.0 and your customers are in control. The old-fashioned media buy has gone bye-bye. Social Media marketing is fast emerging as a must-have in search strategies. Learn about the social search revolution, and hear case studies of how marketers have successfully promoted brands and products with it.

Vertical & Retail Track
Big Brand Search Strategies: Build Connections and Fuel Online Promotions
If 80% of web browsing starts with Search—and consumers are spending up to 50% of their media time online—then why are many major Brand companies spending on average only 2.5% of their media budgets online?

As consumers search, they are expressing their interest in specific categories, brands and interest areas. How can Brand companies better connect with these hand-raisers and how can they better leverage their offline media investments? And how can SEM dramatically improve those connections, conversion, brand health and volume rates?

Carol Kruse, VP of Global Interactive Marketing at The Coca-Cola Company will address what it takes for big brand companies to shift their marketing mix to align with new customer behaviors, putting more ad budget to Search and digital advertising.

Presentation topics include:

• Tips for how to win budget increases for digital advertising within Brand companies
• How Search acts as a bridge between offline advertising campaigns and online interactive experiences leading a customer to action
• How to increase brand connections and fuel online promotions by enticing customers with relevant, affinity and community based offers such as the Olympics, and Nascar
• Tips on how Search can amplify the effectiveness of online campaigns such as Display and Social Media to fully realize the opportunity for customer engagement
• How Search can drive direct marketing goals for customer loyalty programs such as My Coke Rewards

Social Search Track
Social Media Research: Informing Search Strategies
If search engines are tapping into human knowledge more widely through tagging, click through tracking, search history features and other methods, so can search marketers. Social networks, blogs, feeds, tagging, social bookmarking and immersive game environments provide 24/7 real-time focus groups. Learn how Buzzmetrics, Cymfony and others help quantify and reveal critical insights.

Stay tuned to find out what I actually learn…

I will be heading to Search Engine Engine Strategies in New York for one day this Wednesday, March 19th.  I will be representing Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence team, and plan to do a live blog post on the DI group blog.  I am excited to hear Jason Calacanis speak, the Founder & CEO of the Mahalo human edited search engine.  The sessions I will be attending will mostly be on the social track in hopes that what I learn will be able to benefit Ogilvy’s word-of-mouth discipline.  Stay tuned for more…

On Wednesday night the 360 DI team of Ogilvy PR hosted a Mashable Meet-up. Upwards of 150 people attended the event, and I had the pleasure of registering people as they came in the door. It was a passionate and innovative bunch with several interesting presentations about different social media start-ups. The most notable presenter was Mixx.com, an alternate to Digg and del.icio.us that allows you to create your own blend of what you find interesting on the Web. It appears to be fundamentally the same as other social sharing sites, with tagging and user voting, but the interface is very user-friendly, and allows for a seamless switch between searching for different content formats (i.e. news, photos & video). Go Mixx it up and tell me what you think…

While I am fairly new to the social media scene, from this Mashmeet turnout it seems that DC may be becoming the east coast place to be for social media.

The summer camp I attended as a camper and counselor for many years is redesigning their website and they asked me to give them an SEO Checklist to keep their web designer on track when building the site. Here is the list of on-page optimization tips I came up with. Think I’m missing anything big?

1. Keyword Research

• While much of the language that will populate the pages of Agawam’s site is most likely pre-determined as a result of the rich tradition of the camp, it is important to know the core keywords (i.e. “summer camp”, “sleepover camp”, “boys sleep away camp”) that searchers are using to find out information about summer camps.

• Before any copy is written a list of 10 to 20 core keywords should be designated for use throughout the site’s textual content, and in strategic places that will be highlighted below.

• Each page should focus on 2-3 core keywords.

• Copy should be written for the user, and not appear to be “stuffed” with keywords. This will appear to search engines as spam, and the site will be devalued in the rankings. Synonyms should be used when possible. 3-8% keyword density per page is a good rule of thumb.

2. URL Structure

• The site’s URL structure is one of the first elements to be developed. Each file name should use descriptive text and be keyword focused when possible.

• Words in the sub-directory should be lower case, and separated with dashes (i.e. www.campagawam.org/summer-camp-activities.html)

• Every page should have its own static unique URL, as opposed to pages that are generated dynamically.

• Avoid using parameters in the URL (i.e. ?, &, =).

• Do NOT use session IDs or user IDs in the URL.

• If a URL is ever changed make sure to use a 301 redirect to tell the search engines that the page location has moved permanently.

• When the old Camp Agawam site is taken down be sure to put a 301 redirect on all the old URLs directing them to the new site.

3. Web Page Structure

• Try to avoid the use of JavaScript. Especially do not use it for the site’s navigational links on each page’s menu.

• Do NOT put textual content and links inside images.

• The higher the text appears in a page’s HTML code, the easier it is for the search engine spiders to find and index it. Save space in the HTML code by copying JavaScript and placing it in an external file uploaded to the server. Delete any unnecessary white space in the HTML code.

• Use Flash sparingly, and with a purpose if at all. If Flash animation is used on a page be sure to provide a balance of HTML formatted text.

• If possible, built PDFs into their own HTML pages.

• Build frequently updated content, such as newsletters, using Really Simple Syndication (RSS), an XML feed that is especially conducive to attracting search engine spiders. In addition, visitors can subscribe to the feed and receive an update every time new content is added to the site.

• Incorporating a blog into the site using WordPress.org is also highly recommended from a search engine perspective.

4. Internal Linking

• Use absolute links instead of relative links.

• Make a decision on www vs. non-www and follow the same convention consistently for all links on the site.

• Create an HTML sitemap page with links to all the pages on the site. Provide a brief description of the page next to each link. A link to the sitemap should appear on every page.

• Where it makes sense hyperlink keyword focused text within the copy to other pages on the site.

5. Tagging

• The title tag is the most important tag. Each page should have a unique title tag that labels the contents of the page in a concise keyword focused way (character limit: 60)

• The meta description should provide a brief sentence or two about the contents of the page (character limit: 150)

• The meta keywords should include the page’s core keywords as well as any secondary keywords (10 keywords max)

• Descriptive ALT tags should be used on every image.

• When naming image filenames use descriptive language and keywords where possible instead of img_1, img_2.

• Use H1, H2 and H3 tags around the different header levels on the page. Try to incorporate keywords into the headers.

• On occasion, bold certain core keywords.

Aggregating content onto a microsite via RSS is becoming an increasingly popular strategy among PR marketers in the digital space.  Government and non-profit clients have loads of informational content that, if repurposed in an user-friendly manner, can become an effective tool for communicating on the Web.  RSS allows marketers to present this information in a “snackable“ fashion that is appealing to internet users constantly being bombarded with information.  Because of this new strategy, PR marketers need to become smart about the search engine optimization implications of RSS.  RSS and SEO are attached at the hip because of the fresh content and frequent linking intrinsic to syndication.  RSS feeds, however, can become significant search engine visibility assets if utilized in the right way.  Entire link building strategies can and should be built around the submitting of RSS feeds to RSS directories, as well as creating opportunities for your feed to be aggregated on third party sites.  Stephan Spencer gave a great lecture at last years Search Engine Strategies, called RSS and SEO: Implications for Search Marketers.  This is a great place to start learning… 

I’m only a few pages into The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, by John Battelle, and already my world has been turned upside down. Read the following two sentences and tell me your not just a little disappointed:

“It’s seductive to think of crawlers as tiny little robots wandering the vast halls of cyperspace, but the truth is a bit more mundane. Crawlers are in fact homebodies, siting on their own servers and sending out vast numbers of requests to pages on the Internet, much as your browser does.”

On some level I think I always new this, but to not think of search engine spiders as actually crawling from link to link, well…that’s just no fun. Ultimately its important to understand how pages are actually indexed, but I think I’ll always envision Googlebots with 8 little legs, and explain to my clients that search engine spiders crawl the Web drinking link juice and eating good content… How do you explain the inter workings of search engines to the novice client?