Search Engine Marketing Extravaganza
I went to two and a half sessions on search engine marketing today, and at last got some real nitty gritty information. After this post, I need to re-write my site.
The first session, Buying Your Way Into Search: Paid Listings, with a panel all smartly dressed in black, had some interesting case studies, but no real meat.
The second, Organic Search Engine Optimization: Natural Search Listings was paydirt. All the good stuff is below.
The half was lunch, very graciously provided by Did-It and featuring nothing earth-shattering in the speeches. So I’m here to blog you the good stuff.
The Paid Listings seminar featured:
- Dakota Sullivan (is that great name or what?) Looksmart, Moderator
- Sara Hendricks, Director of Marketing, Bizrate.com
- Robin Byrne, Hilton Hotel Corporation
- Kevin Ryan, Wahlstrom Interactive
- Adam Soroca, Group Product Manager, Lycos InSite
The Ad-Tech brochure promised “You’ll receive a solid understanding of the role that bid management technology and services can play in ehanncing your paid search ROI.” That didn’t happen. But here are the highlights:
- you can’t trick people with keywords. Hilton initially bought “bed and breakfast” and “wine festival” but found that people searching for “bed and breakfast” didn’t want Hilton. Said Byrne, “We were young, impetuous. It was the 90’s.”
- get your site right. It all starts with a well-constructed, well-written site.
- make sure your landing page is optimized for keyword content
- set ROI goals and know exactly what every click is worth and what you are willing to spend per lead.
- Test multiple messages and positions and don’t insist on being Number One. Sometimes two or three is better, although no one ever seems to explain why.
- include your search terms in the page title
- do paid search in multiple engines and carefully track results
- all agreed that you need to make both pay-per-click and natural search part of the marketing mix.
- conceptual search isn’t there yet. try it only if you have lots of money.
The Organic Search Optimization session was a bonanza of good advice. The panelists were:
- Marshall Simmonds, About-Inc.com, Moderator
- Barbara Coll, CEO, WebMama
- Jeffrey Herzog, CEO, I-Crossing
- Jill Whalen, CEO, HighRankings.com
- natural search is “PR on the Web.” Being found is more like PR,where you get the impact of increased exposure over time. “It’s the most cost-effective opportunity in web marketing.”
- “the Number One position in Overture gets 4% click-through per month.”
- trying to misuse Google algothrythms is the equivalent of spam. “It’s important not to turn SEO into a suicide application like email. We need to develop ways to meet the criteria, not beat it.”
- descriptions need to take the different search engines’ character limitations and keywords into account.
Barbara Coll:
- People tend to overlook technology when they think of search engine marketing. You need to make technology decisions early and factor it into directory structure and file/directory naming.
Flash / No Good
Image Maps / Can’t Read
Javascript / Some follow
Image links / OK, getting better
Drop down menus / Yuck
Submit or search / Poooeeeey
Text links / YES!!
- Engines can’t see the contents of your drop down menus. They do not drill down.
- Graphic designers do not know anything about SEO. Fight with them!
- Text link, text link, text link
- Keep your important pages at root level in your directory. Search engines will not do deep crawls.
- On every single page of your site, include a paragraph about who you are and what you do. Optimize the content, submit all major pages. People don’t all come to your site through the home page and they don’t always know what you do until you tell them.
- Site maps are fabulous for spiders. They contain text, links and have lots of keywords. HomeGain.com has an excellent site map because keywords are in links and text; keywords are in html not gifs; and navigation is good. Safeway.com has a lousy site map.
- Make sure you have good 404 pages and include keyword phrases on them. New York Stock Exchange has a good error page.
- Do not use splash intro page. period. If you must have flash, include a link to it in a window on the home page.
- domain names all carry a lot of weight. Every top 10 result will always have a keyword term in it.
- Don’t re-direct away from the company name. Search engines see re-directs as a spam attempt. Never use session IDs in re-directs and don’t use meta tags or javascript either. Don’t use re-directs in urls. Put them in code instead.
- Take frames down. The frame, not the content will be indexed.
Jill Whalen:- Keyword-rich content is crucial and natural listings should be half of your SEO campaign.
- Change text images to real text. Graphics are unreadable by search engines.
- Use alt tags.
- Regular text gets the most weight
- Flash intros are not readable
- A list of words or phrases separated by commas or hyphens has no weight unless it is there for a legit reason
- Read through your copy and look for the Five Ws: Who, What, Where, When and Why. The answers should be in the keywords.
- Use keyword PHRASES, not single words. Single words don’t count in search engines anymore.
- Use different forms of the same words
- Have links to FAQ answers at the top of the FAQ list.
- Be descriptive. Take out generic keywords. Don’t say “our product” or “our service.” Say “our skin care products” or “our adventure travel services.”
- Instead of “Travel with us,” say “Adventure travel with us.” Instead of “what to expect on our tours,” say “what to expect on our bike and walking tours.” Use the most descriptive phrases you can, and repeat them as often as it makes sense. Don’t strain to get them into the copy more times than is natural.
- Go through your pages and look for existing single words and convert them to phrases. If your company helps set up sponsored visas, say “sponsoring H1B visas, technology visas and work visas” instead of “visas sponsored.”
- If you are a local company, make the location clear in all content. Instead of “our office,” say “our New York City office.”
- Use singular, plural and -ing endings mixed into the copy. Be sure to incorporate all forms that are found in Wordtracker. For example, “engineering jobs, engineer jobs.” People search using different forms of the same phrases.
- If there are different ways to spell something, like t-shirt and tee shirt, email and e-mail, use only one form on each page, don’t mix the forms. Do separate landing pages for each form of the word.
- Only target two to three words per page.
- Good writing matters big-time. Don’t leave the writing to the search engine optimization agency, unless they have copywriters. Hire professional writers who know SEO.
Etc…- Cascading style sheets are crucial in your design.
- Keywordcount.com is a good tool for keyword ratios.
Good sources for more info:
- SEMPO.ORG
- Danny Sullivan’s SearchEngineWatch
- High Rankings Advisor
- For copies of these presentations:
Jeff Herzog:
Jill Whalen: she will post it on her site or you can email:
Barbara Coll: info@bcoll@webmama.com
- Ad-Tech says that will notify all paid attendees and press of where to get all conference presentations a few days after the show.
