Ideas for Business

On the heels of the PRSA conference last week, the topic of how search plays a part in online PR effectiveness has continued to enter into the increasing numbers of discussions we’ve been having with companies working on figuring out where to best leverage their 2008 marketing/PR dollars. It’s that time of year again.

Now more than ever, PR and media relations efforts can benefit from attention to how search engine visibility influences consumer perceptions and the way both consumers and the media find information online. With an increasing variety of search types to choose from including standard search like Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask as well as platform or content type specific search such as news, blog, image, video and options within social media web sites, brings new opportunities to optimize content.

In the past I’ve used the Push and Pull PR model to explain how traditional media relations outreach fits in with the idea of optimizing content. The “Push” includes standard tactics like the distribution of press releases via news wires and pitching both traditional media and bloggers via phone, email or other creative methods.

The “Pull” is where the content optimization opportunity comes into play. Optimizing not only text based content such as press releases, but also the various media types being produced for PR purposes will result in a greater footprint of visibility on the web for journalists doing research on topics and looking for subject matter experts. In essence, to “pull” themselves to you.

News, blog, image, video and social bookmarking search channels each provide excellent opportunities for writers to monitor emerging trends and to find information sources for articles. Making it easy to find relevant content on those search channels can increase opportunities for companies to present their topical authority and subsequent PR coverage.

Visibility to the media is not the only benefit of optimizing of PR content. By optimizing and promoting the media types available, especially blogs, video and images, benefits for online reputation management can be achieved. With the combined search results features implemented by the major search engines this year, it is a fairly straightforward task to achieve multiple representations of the same company within the search results for a single query.

Typically, a web site is limited to a maximum of two URL listings in the search results for a unique search phrase. With positive brand representations on media specific or social media sites often included in “Universal” search, companies can push down negative search results and/or occupy numerous positions outside of the normal and indented listings that are typically possible. It’s possible for those representations to appear on their own as well, but Universal search provides additional opportunity.

By making the optimization and promotion of multiple media formats a normal part of the process for publishing PR content, companies can build up a more solid “defense” against dissenting blogs that try to “Googlebomb” brand names. Such a process also improves overall search visibility of the corporate web site.

Overcoming the challenges involved with moving companies towards a more search engine and social media savvy PR process must start with the fundamentals of how these channels work. Understanding the mechanics and social rules of content sharing and social media sites will help make the decision as to what types of PR content to start optimizing and promoting first. In most cases, starting out with the basics such as optimizing and distributing press releases and incorporating a blog powered online media room can provide ample opportunity for increased exposure of PR content via search.

Sponsored By: WebmasterWorld Pubcon Las Vegas The SEO conference we’ve been waiting all year for.

Organization of content on a website is very important for search engine index-ability. It can be a challenge to create a system that is friendly to both human visitors and search engine bots. A common example is a list of articles. Even with categories, over time there can become a huge amount of articles within any given category. Then what? You don’t want an enormous page with 1000 article titles on it…do you? So, of course, you use pagination. The most common way is to have multiple links at the bottom (and sometimes top) of the list such as that allow users to navigate through the various pages within a category. This works well for users, but here is why it isn’t so good for search engines:

Your first category page will have links to the first 10 articles. This first category page probably has multiple links to it (site footer, navigation) such as “Visit Article Category 1″. So, to make this easy to understand, let’s say we have a 100 page website. Each page has a link to the category pages in the site footer. Therefore each category page will have 100 internal links. All the articles listed on the first page of the category will only ever be 2 clicks away for a user. So….what about the articles that are listed on page 2, page 3, etc of that category? Well, if this particular category had 10 pages, then page 2 of that category would only have 10 internal links. And, all the links would be labeled as “2″. Not a very good description of the page for the search engines. Also, the articles listed on these secondary pages are 3 clicks away, rather than 2 (if we start on the home page….1 click on the footer link to the category page, 1 click on the “2″ to go to page 2, then 1 click on the article link). You are essentially telling search engines that you place less value on the articles listed on page 2 then the articles listed on page 1.

The best fix for this problem is to break down articles into manageable categories that are small enough to list on articles in the category. However, this may not be possible for websites with a huge number of articles so you may also want to consider a better navigational table than 1 2 3 4….. Try something like Category A Page 2, Category A Page 3, etc. This way, at least you are referencing your deeper category pages with relevant text. You can also link to the secondary pages from places like your sitemap and maybe even the footer if it doesn’t bulk it up too much. That way, you minimize the damage caused by burying your secondary category pages with pagination.

Tags: seo, pagination, search engine indexing

I was reviewing a website today that was a flash only website and needed to know if the company that built the site was smart enough to include a HTML version of the site for search engine indexing. The short answer…no.

At SMT we do use Flash, but only as elements within a website. As any seasoned SEO expert will tell you, search engines have a hard time indexing sites that are totally developed in Flash. This is not to say that Flash sites can not get indexed, but when is the last time you saw a Flash only website at the number one spot?

So my quest to find out how I can optimize Flash only websites for the search engines has lead me to the topic of Search Optimized Flash Architecture (SOFA). SOFA is a technique of converting the Flash content into XHTML. Once the content is converted to XHTML it can now be indexed by search engines.

I also came across another technique using the JavaScript function called SWFObject(). The primary content of the site is placed with a DIV on the HTML page. The function determines if the browser is capable of viweing Flash. If it does not, then it will render the content from the DIV on the page.

Some may proclaim that this is cloaking, but as long as you are serving up the same content that is in your Flash you will not have anything to worry about.

A third option is to use the Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK. This program extracts links and text from a Flash SWF file and returns the data as a HTML document. Learn more about the Flash Search Engine SDK.

Tags: flash only website high ranking, seo for flash only website, optimize flash website, flash for search engine, search optimized flash architecture, sofa, flash

While the nature of marketing web sites has continually evolved from a focus on optimizing text to include an array of media optimization such as images, audio, video and content delivery formats like RSS and mobile, there continues to be a significant value in basic SEO.

In many cases, small businesses or small web sites especially, there’s a lot the site owner or webmaster/developer can do to improve the search engine friendliness of the site, i.e. fundamental content optimization, before pursuing outside help. However, those that do end up outsourcing on-page optimization and link building often do so because of a lack of resources or the desire to leverage expert experience to avoid big mistakes that can end up costing more to fix than a SEO consultant in the first place.

For those individuals and organizations considering their own basic SEO, here are a few items for review:

• Define clear and measurable goals for the site and take benchmark measurements
• Keyword research - generate a glossary of keyword phrases that addresses both prospect needs and the content you’re publishing. Here is a list of the best keyword research tools as voted on by our readers
• Content creation plan - Think of it as an editorial calendar for your web site. You must PLAN on creating keyword sensitive content on an ongoing basis that adds to the user experience
• Keyword mapping - Using a spreadsheet, map keywords to the page or category. Focus is important, 1-2 phrases per page
• Keyword phrase order - Does the keyword order in the page match order in the query? Anticipate queries and match the word order: “luxury hotels Chicago” vs “Chicago luxury hotels”
• Keywords and the buying cycle. Consider the content and where it fits within the buying cycle: Research, Consideration, Evaluation, Purchase
• Keyword prominence (how early in the page content or title/meta description tag) - Guide: most important phrases high and to left
• Write to inform and convert as your priority, not to rank. Title tags and meta description tags should be written with keywords in mind, but the focus must be on motivating the reader to click through or to perform some other desired action
• Keyword in alt text of images, particularly of images that link to another web page. Keywords should be relevant to the page being linked to
• Filenames containing keywords are useful, but do not change your entire site URL structure if you’ve already published another URL syntax
• Use hyphens in file names, not underscores
• HTML site maps listing links to all pages or top level categories on the site are still a good idea
• Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo Site Explorer accounts can provide useful crawling and link information/resources
• For bloated pages, try to place JavaScript and CSS data in an external file to speed page load and to move content up in the document
• Implement and review web stats for trends, visitor behavior, content performance, referring traffic and optimization enhancement opportunities: Google Analytics, WebTrends, ClickTracks, Index Tools, HitsLink Enterprise

About Links:

• Anchor text of interlinking site pages should include relevant keywords, not “click here”
• Are all internal and external links valid? - Validate all links to all pages on the site
• Employ a tree-like/organization chart linking structure with a minimal number of clicks to any particular page
• Intra-site linking - Use appropriate links between lower-level pages. cluster links between sub categories
• Linking out to external sites - Only link out to relevant, information rich sites. Do not link to sites that do not add value to the visitor experience
• Avoid exchanging links for the sake of improving rankings
• Ensure link stability over time - Avoid “Link Churn”, i.e. changing outgoing links often

Linking tactics:

• Employ a linking program to acquire incoming links from relevant web sites by researching back links to high ranking competitor web sites
• Contribute articles using keywords in titles to industry publications - not article directories
• Engage in blogger PR and online media relations with relevant industry web sites
• Submit keyword optimized press releases to search engine friendly wire services such as prweb.com, prnewswire.com, marketwire.com or pr.com
• Submit the site to major directories - Yahoo directory, BOTW.org, DMOZ, Business.com
• Leverage social networks and micro-blogging to promote linkable content
• Diversify your link building tactics

A few things to avoid:

• Don’t block your entire site from search engine spiders with a robots.txt during development and then forget to allow after publishing (believe me, it happens more often than you think)
• Avoid all Flash, all Ajax, iFrames or anything that makes it difficult for a search engine to find and understand site content
• Avoid more than 100 total links going out on any given page. Site maps can be broken up
• Avoid JavaScript for navigation links. Use CSS for rollover or foldout menus instead
• Avoid temporary (302) URL redirects. Use permanent redirects (301)
• Avoid dynamic URLs with session ids, or URLs with more than three parameters and approximately 10 or less characters per variable
• Avoid buying links from networks of blogs or sites of unrelated content. While we don’t have any particular issue with the idea of buying links as advertising, at TopRank, we prefer to “earn” links for the most long term value and lowest cost per acquisition

This list is about a third of the checklist I’ve recently revised for our internal use on text-based SEO projects, but should offer small web site owners ample insight into the variety of considerations with fundamental site optimization and link building. Interestingly enough, while things are constantly changing in the world of SEO, some things stay the same as you’ll see in this 2002 post from Brett Tabke, “Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone“.

A deep historical knowledge base combined with active engagement, testing, learning and analysis is what keeps web marketers savvy in the ways of SEO and depending on internal resources, it’s also why some companies are better off outsourcing than handling SEO on their own.

Sponsored By: WebmasterWorld Pubcon Las Vegas The SEO conference we’ve been waiting all year for.

With the competing search engines not showing any signs of letting up on their innovation, it can feel confusing. Do you do paid search? If so, should you use Google or Yahoo? What are the differences? Are they only for larger businesses, or should I consider it for my small one as well?

Outsell, Inc. recently turned the tables on the two 800 lb. gorillas and had small business owners rank them instead. 58% of small business owners felt that Google’s search is effective, which is healthy compared to the 32% Yahoo garnered. Large businesses were also surveyed, and the numbers were more evenly rated, showing 63% gave google the nod, while 62% also felt Yahoo is effective.

Given that most businesses out there are small ones, this is more important than it may appear on the surface. Small businesses tend to spend more for online advertising relatively speaking, but the largest deterrent and disappointment for this group is the rate of click fraud they claim to see, which reflected 14% for small businesses.

Search is still one of the best ways to drive organic and qualified traffic to your site, and as a small business owner you’re not alone when it comes to evaluating your options! For the full press release describing this survey, go here.

Caroline Melberg
Small Business Marketing Mavericks
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