This is part one of a three part series that was first published as part of Marketing Pilgrim’s Scholarship Contest. The finalists were determined by the number of visitors that read the post as well as factoring in bonus points for a low bounce rate and high average time on site. While this post was not a finalist, it did have the second lowest bounce rate of any entry and the eleventh highest average time on site. I guess what that means is that I should have made an effort to drive visitors to the post.  Oh well, there is always next year.

But, without further adu here is part one of the post.

How does search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising relate to your quest to have an amazing night out at the hottest bar or club in town? And, what friend should you make sure to bring along so that you will definitely have a night to remember? Well, I won’t require you to have the patience of SEO. But instead, I’ll give you the instant gratification of PPC.

Two friends, SEO and PPC are getting ready to head out on their quest to have an incredible time at the new local hotspot. They decide they will meet at the club since they live on opposite sides of town. As usual, PPC quickly gets ready and heads out the door. There is no style lost, however, in the quick process of getting ready. In fact, PPC is looking quite flashy and really stands out from the crowd. PPC quickly finds a parking spot right next to the club and heads past the long line waiting to get in. As usual, PPC is on the guest list and is ushered right inside.

SEO on the other hand takes a long time to get ready, but once ready looks every bit as impressive. After SEO finally makes it out the door, through the traffic heading downtown, SEO eventually finds a parking spot far away from the club a new obstacle arises. SEO does not seem to be on the guest list and instead has to wait patiently in line. SEO could be upset and frustrated, but instead excitedly anticipates the fun night that hopefully is about to begin. An hour goes by, but eventually SEO is let through the doors and to the party inside.

Does this sound familiar to all you SEO and PPC experts? PPC is always the one that can be up and running in no time with a flashy ad and ranking in top positions for all the important keywords. PPC can slip right into the party and start generating sales in no time. SEO on the other hand has to be patient since you’re likely not going to be able to join the party on the first page of the SERPs right away. Instead, it will take hard work and a lot of patience before you finally make your way in. That hard work and patience, however, can really pay off and potentially can be more cost effective than PPC in the long term. But anyways, back to the story…

Next week part 2…

Just when you think people may be starting to understand what Search Engine Optimization is all about, and how it can help your site – you come across a Website that just doesn’t get it such as this one from the Gruniad (old joke about the name, they’re famous for typo’s)…

It’s all about search engine optimisation these days, readers. See, ORGY the more words SEXY BITS that interweb types search for PARIS HILTON COVERED IN GREASE that the Mill HOW TO GET A GIRLFRIEND, YEP JUST ONE WILL DO, IS THAT ASKING TOO MUCH? sneaks into this article the higher up it will PARIS HILTON COVERED IN KETCHUP appear on Google…

Is that what SEO is? Merely stuffing keywords into the body content and sticking <Strong> tags around them? Well, they did place the term Paris Hilton in the title tag, a <h1> tag, and in the alt tag of the image of Paris Hilton (the description tag reference a post from another day, looks like they forgot that one); so they are trying to see if they can rank for these terms.

Why are they doing this? Surely, the Guardian is a well respected newspaper / site in the UK.  Do they really need to resort to this kind of rubbish (ranking for non-relevant keyword terms)? No they don’t, and the reason they’re probably doing it is just because they want to see if it works.  Or, possibly because they want to see if they can get these terms to show up on the analytics reporting and embarrass whomever presents the reports. Why? Well, it’s because this particular section of the Guardian is known for it’s humor and wit (or in some cases failing attempts at both).  And, because the site itself is well trusted, with a large number of incoming links…they stand a good chance of success.

Photo by casaroger, fake ketchup added by me

How is it doing for them? Well, after a few hours they were already ranking first for “Paris Hilton Covered in Grease” and “Paris Hilton Covered in Ketchup”.  Although, you really have to wonder how many people are going to search for those terms (according to KeywordDIscovery that would be 0). Even if people are searching for them, how pleased would they be to find upon arrival at the site they didn’t find their hotel heiress covered in condiments as promised, but instead found a recap of daily soccer rumors for July 3rd? Probably not too thrilled, so they’ll mostly head right back out the way they came.

This all gets back to the issue of relevance. Whatever your goal is for your site, your content should support that. For you to increase your conversions, you need to funnel people in in specific ways.  Tricking them onto your site may increase your traffic, but it’s going to substantially reduce your conversions, and that’s what really counts (unless of course, the only metric you’re measuring is traffic, in which case I’d suggest also adding time on site and bounce rates into the mix).

Whoops… wrong Flash. The big search news from Google, Yahoo and Adobe is that those two search engines are now able to pull all text from Adobe flash (swf) files. So if there is text within the file it can be indexed and found through a subsequent search.

What are the implications? Well, for starters it means that I need to make changes to my SEO training slides where I state that Flash should only be used sparingly if at all (although I do believe that making Flash readable in some manner this year was an ADA requirement). It also means that you may see a shift in the search results as they roll this out, as it’s not a new form of flash that’s being indexed, it’s all flash that’s already out there. The difference is that there’s a new flash parser (reader) that Google and Yahoo are taking advantage of.

One other implication is that any urls in the flash will be crawled, which could result in flash files being stuffed with links in the near future.

So should you rush out and “flash up” your site? Well, since we don’t know yet how well this is going to work, I’d advise caution, plus you also need to think about the usability of your site. Does flash present the look and feel that you feel represents your organization best?  How will the search engines handle the state of the Flash file?  Will they be able to take you to a particular location in the Flash file, or only to the start?  What about sites that are entirely flash based?  Will everything just point you to the first page?  These are just a few of the many things to think about before making the Flash leap.

What I can say is that this is a good move for Adobe, as by giving over 85% of the search market the capability to index Flash, they’ve removed a fairly large barrier for using that format.

Just a little reminder that your error pages need to be NOINDEX-ed or added in to your robots.txt file to be excluded, otherwise things that you don’t want ranking for your brand … may.

Anchor text is the text on a Web page that you click which takes you to another page. To get a little bit more technical, it’s the hyperlink text. It’s the text that the search engines look at to get some idea of the context of the page being linked to. If the anchor text says NonProfit Services, then the search engines start to think that the page has something to do with NonProfit services. Simple enough?

Then, why do so many people still insist on using “Click Here” as the anchor text? Back in the early days of the Web, when the average user was still getting acquainted with the Web - informing the user of the action that they should take was more necessary.  These days it’s downright wasteful.

The page on your site with the video on the starving children in Africa isn’t about “Click Here.”   You should motivate users to “View the Video on Famine Stricken African Children,” or whatever keywords you’re trying to target.

If you really do want to rank for “Click Here,” you’ve got one heck of a job ahead of you trying to knock the current champ off that perch…

One problem that I’ll frequently hear when gathering requirements for a Search Audit, is that a site used to rank well for a particular term, but no longer does.  I’ll ask what content they had that used to rank for that term.  Sometimes I’ll hear that it was either pages that were taken down due to redesign, or due to seasonal content.  The most common response is – “We don’t know, that’s why we called you in.”

In those cases, a simple 301 redirect could be used to preserve those rankings by redirecting the page equity to a page with similar or like content.  What you don’t want to do is have a 404 page (always No-Index them) or some other stop page be presented to the user.

In the example below, Oxfam had a page calling for donations for the 2004 Asian Earthquake.  This campaign is now over.  So, what did they do with that page?  They changed the title to “Campaign Expired” and presented a “This Campaign has Expired” page to the user.  As you can see, this doesn’t look good in their search results.

What should Oxfam have done?  I would recommend that they put together a landing page that talked about the results of the 2004 campaign which would be linked to current campaigns – with strong calls to donate on the page.  This lets people see what’s been done with money in the past, gives them a chance to donate to wherever the need is now (opening up the previously closed conversion funnel), and preserves the rankings by providing like, relevant content for the search.

Here at Serengeti headquarters, I am seeing something nobody else in the office is: news, blog posts, and video displaying below the third result in Google’s SERPs.

Is anyone else seeing this?

So your marketing plan has you pushing the advertising for your company through several seeming disparate marketing channels at the same time. Let’s say that you’re doing search, online video, email, tv, radio, billboard. Should those mediums interact? Should they carry their own messages? Should they all carry the same message? Should one funnel to another? How can you track which is providing value for money and therefore generating a higher ROI for you?

The active word for this multi channel marketing strategy is synergy . When you get all of those seeming disparate pieces working together, what you can get out is much more than if you had them working separately.

So, if we have a tv ad that ends with a URL, and a radio ad that ends with a url, how do we tell which is driving the traffic, if they’re both running at the same time? Easy, simply have your ads mention different landing page URLs. The tv ad can send people to a page that reinforces the visuals that they’ve seen on the tv directed at one demographic, an email landing page reinforcing the message sent to either an in-house list, or a rented list (different demographic potentials) and a radio landing page that reinforces the message heard through that medium. Could they be the same look and feel pages with just different tracking URLs? Yes they could, as long as you create the structure such that you avoid duplicate content issues.

If your company devises a new term, or product name, or service offering, or slogan, then your search effort should focus on ranking for that term, for people will search for it after they locate it through another medium, and by getting yourself listed you’re not losing that further opportunity to direct them through your sales funnel.

There have been many instances of companies doing their traditional marketing push, and not involving their search team. All that does is give someone else (your competitors) the opportunity to swoop in and pluck customers from your grasp, when by simply involving all of the channel owners in the planning, strategy and execution of the marketing plan you’d keep them and hopefully convert them.

Co-operation is the name of the game when it comes to making the most of your marketing budget, and we at Serengeti can help you determine the right mix for your Multi-Channel Digital Marketing Plan, and ensure that the message is consistent, and that the funnels to conversion flow as smoothly as possible.

So, you want to know about SEO? Where do you learn? What should you learn? How should you start? Well, there are a few options open to you, so let’s look at each.

Self taught, on the job:

This is always going to be one of the best ways for you to find out what works for your particular niche.  No matter what other tactics you use to get your knowledge to the level it needs to be, this is where you’re going to get most of your experience.

Reading & Participation:

• Books are a fairly decent source of information; although in a lot of cases, they can tend to be outdated rather quickly in this industry.
• E-Books have the benefit of being more regularly updated and therefore, more current.
• Reading the right blogs can give you insight into industry trends and direction.  Although, not many bloggers give out their closely guarded secrets to one and all.
• Forums are another great repository of information.  By participating, you can help shape the discussion and get answers for problems that have perplexed you.

Conferences:

There are many conferences held throughout the world that purport to provide SEO training.  Some concentrate on specific topics while others cover general topics with maybe topic specific tracks to follow. The topic of conferences was covered in our Monday post, so I’m not going to go into it again here.

On-site training:

On-site training gives you and your company personal attention with targeted training to your needs and directed towards your niche.  So, when you apply the concepts you’ve learned, they’re easier for you to move forward with. Again, we covered this topic more in our Monday post.

What to learn?

It sounds simple, but what you need to know is what you don’t already know. When you’re starting out in SEO, you need to start with the basics:

• Keyword Research
• Site Architecture
• On-page Optimization
• Internal Linking
• External Linking

Once you have those down, you need to then look at other, wider topics to see how they can impact / assist with your SEO campaigns:

• Social Media
• Analytics
• Multiple Channel Marketing

Where you are in your own knowledge impacts what you need to learn. We typically run training classes on client sites for people of all knowledge levels – from zero knowledge to experienced. As long as we work with the client beforehand to establish the topics and skill levels of the attendees, the course(s) are tailored to meet those needs.  That’s what you need to be looking for your training partner to do as well.

One of our ‘bread and butter’ tasks here at Serengeti Communications is that of the Search Audit. We will either perform these in conjunction with an Analytics Audit, or stand alone. That said, what is in a search audit? What do you find out? How does it help you?

Let’s start at the beginning and walk through it step by step.

1. The search audit basically starts off by taking a look at your current site. This indepth analysis looks at the structure of the pages on your site and the underlying architecture – to ascertain whether your current structure supports your intended goals.
2. Next, we take a look to see what your site is currently ranking for. In most cases, that’s not what you think you should be ranking for.
3. Then, we take a look at your identified vertical competitors to see what & how they’re performing.
4. Following that, we perform indepth keyword analysis to see what you should be attempting to rank for.  For this, we use several research tools, as well as information garnered from your competitors’ sites. Note: the highest traffic keywords may not be those that are the best for your site – those that bring the highest level of qualified traffic are.
5. Should you be performing PPC or wanting to perform PPC, we create an optional report showing the anticipated costs for the recommended keywords, as well as expected traffic for each across the various PPC providers.
6. The final section of the document details the recommendations for the site, and outlines an action plan along with any anticipated costs, should you decide to implement the recommendations internally. We’ll also include a proposal if you’d like us to implement the recommendations.
7. We come in and present the key points & recommendations of the document, and answer any questions that you may have.

Essentially, you come out of the process with a audit document that you can use to evaluate the current status of your site, and a path forward to the next level for your site.