Organic Response

When people think about the best way for their website to be found online they typically say something like, “I want my website be ranked #1 on Google for terms x, y, and z.” An SEOs natural reaction is to set the expectation that there are no guarantees to be ranked #1, but if we can rank for those terms, and a host of other long tail terms, that we will discover through keyword research, your website will likely receive a significant amount of continuous qualified traffic that we can measure through onsite analytics. That’s all well and good, but there are a lot of questions that come to mind regarding the impact of search on your company that goes beyond the measurement of traffic from Google searches:

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This year I’ve been able to finagle my way into going to three full days of Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo in NY (March 24th – 26th).  Here is a rundown of the sessions I am most looking forward to:

1. Thinking Outside Your Website: Branding Without Borders – With the popularity of sites like YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook, brands increasingly need to engage with their customers outside their website. The portability of content and viral connectivity that occurs online requires a new approach to branding. Participants will learn strategies for increasing brand awareness and protecting brand equity in today’s socially connected web as well as tactics that can be implemented in today’s resource and budget constrained environment.
2. Key Points in Launching a Global Website – As the world becomes smaller and search marketing becomes more complex, the era of “ranking well in Google” is over. This is especially true for companies who are targeting multiple markets or countries. This new opportunity also brings many new complexities to be considered other than standard SEO. This session tackles these key issues critical to successfully developing, optimizing, and launching the Global Websites that would meet those next generation marketing goals, without losing control or your mind ( I was even lucky enough to have interviewed one of the speakers that will be at this session. Marjorie Madfis, Interactive Marketing Manager and Web Editor at IBM.  Check out the interview over at the Ogilvy PR 360 Digital Influence blog: SES NY Interview Series: Key Points in Launching a Global Website)
3. Video Search Engine Optimization: 2009 and Beyond – According to comScore, nearly 139 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 83 videos per viewer in March 2008, viewing a total of 11.5 billion online videos during the month. However, the average YouTube video receives only 100 views a year. This makes optimizing video for YouTube one of the biggest opportunities in the fast-changing and complex world of search. This session will look at how video search engine optimization (VSEO) has become the most important new use of search engine optimization today.
4. Facebook Workshop: Harnessing the Social Graph – Are you wondering how to effectively advertise on Facebook? Kasey Galang, Product Marketing Manager and Rebecca Sawyer, Online Sales Operations Manager at Facebook will guide you through the social graph and provide tips and tricks for leveraging and optimizing your advertising on Facebook.
5. SEO Through Blogs & Feeds – Not yet running a blog? Not syndicating your content through web feeds? Then you’re missing out on an important area that can help your overall SEO efforts. Learn more about the unique advantages blogs and feeds offer to search engine optimization.
6. News Search SEO – News search engines offer a great way to receive targeted traffic related to breaking topics or to help with a public relations launch. In this session, we look at how to make use of press releases and news content to tap into the power of news search.
7. Online Communities: A Bonanza of Content for Searchers and Search Engines – All the basic SEO best practices should come into play when developing a community based site. This session will discuss techniques for getting your community and review sites indexed, including Google webmaster tools usage, minimizing duplicate content, technical issues that may arise, and tagging. Attendees will learn how to use communities and review sites as part of an internal linking campaign to help the engines understand what pages on your site are important for displaying in search results. Two case studies – 1 B2B and 1 consumer – will be used as examples of well-indexed, well-linked communities.

What sessions / speakers are you most looking forward to?

I found a great list of social media sites beyond the obvious ones. Check out my post about them over at the Ogilvy PR Blog. Social Networks will continue to pop up on every topic you can think of. Eventually something like Google’s OpenSocial will link them all together, and social networks will be like air.

I was surprised to see that a Squidoo lense for FriendFeed did not already exist, so I went ahead and created one. The lense is currently fairly basic. It has a brief description of what FriendFeed is, pulls in blog posts about FriendFeed from Google’s Blog Search, pulls in content from del.icio.us that is tagged with the keyword “friendfeed”, and finally has a list of all the social sharing sites with a short description that can be pulled into your friendfeed. I learned about some pretty cool social sites like Disqus, Tumblr, Jaiku, and Goodreads. Go check it out and tell me what you think. Definitely sign up for FriendFeed if you haven’t already.

I just came across a great post by Chris Silver Smith, lead Search Strategist at NetConcepts, about the benefits of Flickr for search engine optimization. This is a strategy I considered about a year ago for a casino hotel account I worked on at BKV, but never did anything about. Now that I’m working with leaders of the social media space on Ogilvy PR’s 360 Digital Influence team, I’m excited to present this strategy. If you’ve had any experience using Flickr for SEO please share…

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.

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.

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?

I just successfully survived my first WordPress upgrade, but not without more than a few skipped heart beats. After deleting the appropriate files, and uloading the 2.3.2 using the FTP Client FileZilla, I proceed to the wp-content/upgrade.php page, and I get….”FATAL ERROR…”. Thanks to an esteemed colleague, and WordPress support, I got back up in running.

Not being especially confident messing around behind the scenes and this being my first “down time” experience, I must say this was quite a scare. Were months of original, heart-felt content down the drain? I am of course being a tad mellow dramatic because I backed up all my files, but being able to go to my blog to see those soothing blue skies whenever I want, and all of the sudden having that ripped out from under my noise, was, let’s say….not cool.

Anyways, if its your first time going for the upgrade definitely proceed with caution. It was after all a great learning experience, and an important advancement for the future of Organic Response. See ya soon…