Online Marketing Blog

UK based e-consultancy holds periodic round tables meetings with agency and client side search marketers to discuss issues in the industry with a report published afterwards. The most recent September report, which highlights a number of search engine industry developments, SEO challenges and tactics motivated me to write this post. Many of the issues in the report are on the minds of in-house and agency marketers world wide.

Here are a few of the issues discussed and my own thoughts as they relate to each with a nice little rant at the end:

Editor’s Note: This week we welcome the first of a series of guest posts from client side marketers about search marketing. Paul O’Brien gets things started with a post focusing on how optimizing for local search engines is about more than directory listings and geographic modifiers. Event based local search marketing provides an additional boost in reaching target audiences. Companies like Paul’s current employer, Zvents, provides a platform for this kind of event promotion as well as a local search destination.

Countless SEO guides provide the most important considerations: title tags, keywords, straightforward navigation, and structured content but local optimization requires several unique considerations:

Mobile search optimization is not something that users should be thinking of, but it’s something they should be doing now. Rachel Pasqua of iCrossing said there are 2.3 billion mobile subscribers compared to 1 billion computer users. It’s easy to forget that not all jobs require the use of a computer on a daily basis. But, most jobs require a mobile phone to stay connected.

“Writing for Search Engines” is a long standing session by Heather Lloyd-Martin and Jill Whalen. It’s a great session covering the basics of SEO friendly copywriting and a good primer for those new to SEO.

Search Engines are constantly improving their ability to sniff out the spam and de-value irrelevant links such as those from link farms. They are making the same kinds of improvements to the indexing, categorization and sorting of web pages in the search results.
In order to make it easier for search engines to do their job, it’s important to incorporate the keywords for which you wish to be found in your site content, title tags and meta descriptions. Now when people search for those keywords, there’s a greater likelihood that search engines will rank the web site higher than a competitor site who doesn’t have relevant keywords in the content and links of their site.

Day 1 of the Search Engine Strategies Expo in San Jose got off to a really fruitful start with Danny Sullivan giving us a lottery tip. His session, Introduction to Search Marketing, gave us good examples on how to buy tickets and win big in the search engine lottery.

Emphasizing the importance of title tags, meta tags, meta keywords, Danny explains many ways to optimize a site to be found more easily by all visitors, human or otherwise. He discussed how to research the best keywords to place in the content for your site, stating that if you don’t have enough time to do a huge amount of keyword research, “go with your gut”. You know your users. You know your site. What would you search for to get to your site?

A long time client of ours is re-doing their web site after 5 years and we’ve been in discussion with them about the need for a SEO migration plan. The developer wants to use a new platform for the site, meaning urls are going to be different. This is an ecommerce site with thousands of product and category URLs so the move to the new platform needs to be executed correctly or it could go very badly as far as search engine visibility.

Shortly after explaining this to our client I was reading a prominent PR web site that listed various resources to “digital PR” articles. I clicked on one and came upon this from Entrepreneur.com:

One of the most critical early achievements for a successful search marketing project is to gain company-wide support on the client side. Without buy-in from the team members that live and breathe the client’s industry, a successful campaign will be difficult.

In our experience, it’s the client staff that interact with customers that have the best idea of what those customers want. They know the pains and issues faced; they understand the solution that the customer is looking for.

A successful search marketing program taps into the needs of the customer. This is how to grab their attention. Without understanding those needs, engaging them can be problematic.

When you create a new site design, you should always remember a few key points. If you don’t, not only is it bad for search engines, but also visitors.

1. Consider keeping the same file naming structure so that it will be easier for spiders to re-crawl the new site and peoples bookmarks don’t return 404 error pages.
2. 301 Redirect all old or changed URLs to the new corresponding page.
3. Create 404 error pages so that when errors occur, visitors get a nice message with the site’s look and feel.

This session covered things from what a small business owner should be paying attention to, what you shouldn’t, and gave ideas, tips an information for the small business owner. All great tips to consider when trying to compete with the larger companies.

• Stop algorithm chasing and forget about magic formulas like % of keywords on the page.
• Link age is becoming more and more important.
• Click backs becoming more important. Example: If someone clicks on your listing in Google, then returns seconds later to the Google results, it tells the engine that that ranking wasn’t a good match for that person.

I just noticed today that AllBusiness.com had posted the basic SEO videos from the shoot we did a month ago or so. Most of them are pretty short little snippets and turned out ok, but I think we’ll shoot some in our office so we can do multiple takes. I had very little sleep the night before and it appears my facial muscles have a mind of their own.

I see Matt has added 3 more videos including:

Session 4: Dynamic URLs, Sitemaps and Geotargeting
Session 5: (Adds background) 301 Redirects, Content Themes, Dynamic to Static URLs and Split A/B Testing
Session 6: Supplemental Results
I think there is a lot more to learn from this than just the content of Matt’s videos. It’s also an exellent example of creating excellent content which can produce an abundance of links and traffic.

Maybe “RocketGoogle” isn’t such a great name. Since these are really the opinions of Matt Cutts and not Google per se, then maybe RocketMatt? Or MattBoom?¬† Oh, and be sure to note the disclaimer.

Spotlight on Search Interview with Laura Lippay, SEO Program Manager for Yahoo

We’ve been on a bit of a “Spotlight on Search Interview” hiatus the past few weeks, but I can assure you this one is worth the wait. Today we have a very nice interview with Laura Lippay, SEO Program Manager for Yahoo Media Group. I first became aware of Laura’s SEO wisdom via her animated stick figure avatar in Jill Whalen’s High Rankings SEO forum. Dispensing excellent advice to newbies and old timers alike, Laura has gone from circus performer extraordinaire to Flash-superstar-wannabe to a dream gig as an in-house SEO for Yahoo. I want to say thank you to the exceptionally thorough legal and marketing folks at Yahoo for letting Laura do this interview. Now on to the good stuff.