Online Marketing Blog

Search engine optimization can be challenging enough, especially for large, enterprise organizations rich with digital assets.  They’re also rich with policies, procedures and often times a labrynth of  content approval and publishing processes.

An effort to optimize and promote those assets to search engine bots can be even more challenging than standard SEO. And yet it can also be far more rewarding. The notion of Digital Asset Optimization came out of TopRank’s efforts in early in 2007 to describe for internet marketing clients what new opportunities there were to enable prospects and customers to pull themselves via search to company content.

Thank you to Jonathan Dingman, who writes the Google News, Inside blog, for attending the DPAC II conference in New York this week and blogging the session, “SEO: Is Finding Your Inner DAO the Answer?” which included: Ron Belanger, Vice President, Agency Development at Yahoo!, Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner at Beyond Ink, Jolina Pettice, Senior Account Manager at TopRank Online Marketing and Noah Elkin, Vice President of Corporate Strategy at Steak as moderator.

Digital Asset Optimization (DAO) is something that any publisher, of any kind, ought to be doing on a regular basis. Alright, so if you should be doing it, what exactly is DAO?

DAO is, essentially, optimizing what you own as an asset, digitally. It’s pretty straight forward. Whether it’s a video, an image, presentation, or a podcast, as a few examples, those are your digital assets. A video is an asset which should be optimized for maximum exposure.

The search marketing industry is rich with acronyms: SEO, SEM, PPC, ROI, SERPs (even LMAO) as well as buzz phrases such as “search engine optimization” and “social media optimization”. Do we really need another?

One of the few things to be counted on in search marketing is that there will be change. That change comes in many forms including search engine algorithm changes (albeit more gradual than large, single events), changes in consumer search behavior and the introduction of evolving search channels such as social search and the semantic web.

With these changes come opportunities whether they are consumer, search engine or marketing driven. “Digital Asset Optimization“ refers to the practice of taking inventory of a company’s marketable, digital assets and implementing a process for keyword optimization and promotion to relevant channels.