SAScon 2010 now launched! Search, Analytics & Social Media 28th April

We’ve been working hard on a project that we’ve been keeping under-wraps for quite some time, so it’s a huge relief to finally get it out there! I am so pleased to announce the launch of a new Search, Analytics and Social Media conference to the UK online marketing scene: SAScon.

With the support of SEMPO and Manchester Digital, SAScon has been organised by a team of digital marketing specialists from around Manchester and the UK. It’s a conference for the online marketing industry by the industry – a tweaked cliché, but oh so true! It’s combined the energy, attention and talents of the following online marketers:

• Myself, Ben McKay, Mediaedge:cia
• Richard Gregory, Latitude
• Pete Young, MediaVest
• Simon Wharton, Pushon
• Richard Hudson, Vanilla Storm
• Peter Cobley, iSpy
• NickyWake, Don’t Panic
• Gary Bramwell, Brazen PR

It’s kind of funny really, individually I had previously spoken to many of these people about how great it would be to put Manchester on the international map for all the talent that currently exists and create an event that people want to travel to…And this one is certainly going to be one of those events!

Confirmed SAScon Speakers

Working as part of a project that has drawn such a high calibre is quite an honour, and I think it’s going to be an event to really draw the industry’s attention. Excitingly, I can announce that speakers attending include:

• Fantomaster / Ralph Tegtmeier – a prolific SEO tool developer, often associated with what some might describe as the darker arts of SEO. Will be an exciting session!
• Richard Gregory – Chief Operating Officer for Latitude Group, a leading European, digital agency.
• Joost de Valk / Yoast – a hugely well regarded developer of SEO tools and widgets, and recently established Orange Valley online marketing.
• Jon Myers – Head of Search at MVi, the online marketing arm of the Mediavest Group.
• Massimo Burgio – a founding member of SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organisation), and Chief Strategist for Global Search Interactive.

More speakers to be announced, but I can assure they are truly superb, super high-calibre speakers. Getting a ticket now wouldn’t be a bad idea at all whilst they’re on the early bird discount.

Who should attend SAScon?

So, so, so many people should attend…here are a few:

- Agency-side Search & Social Marketers

- Client-side Search and Social Marketers

- IT Professionals

- Web Designers and Developers

- Heads of Marketing

- Heads of SME

SAScon Event Details

Date: April 28^th 2010

Venue: The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, UK

Early Bird Tickets: £225 + VAT
Early Bird SEMPO / Manchester Digital Member Tickets: £195 + VAT

SAScon is going to be one of the UK’s finest search and social events for those agency and client side looking to excel in their field. If you haven’t already, ensure you pop-by SAScon.co.uk to register for your ticket – at £250, they’re an absolute bargain!

What does an SEO Strategy look like?

Over at Mediaedge:cia we’ve been developing a SEO training programme entitled the MEC SEO Academy.  Something that I think is very cool and hopefully adds to what will be a framework where true excellence in SEO is encouraged.

We’ve got a load of print-outs from our favourite SEO websites and a number of SEO books laying around but there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of a summarised version of the items to consider when building-out a SEO strategy.  So, I’ve quickly whipped-up a number of items that I thought could help to provide a framework for approaching SEO strategically.  As such it’s a work-in-progress, but would be interested to hear your thoughts.

I’m hoping this sort of SEO strategy / thinking could prompt a fairly versatile and integrated approach to SEO, e.g. how does the company consider temporal factors – maybe through ongoing link-building, up weighting link-building in line with other channel’s activity or releasing content to the website.

The SEO Strategy

Click SEO strategy to enlarge.

Analytics & Reporting

Laying out the framework for what should be analysed and reported on as part of any SEO activity naturally helps factor in accountability and clarity regarding activity, outputs and opportunities in order to develop a more informed SEO strategy.

Ranking Factors

As SEO’s, we know better than most what factors could be feeding in to rankings and visibility of websites online.  This though, is a prompt to consider how these ranking factors are evolving, in the case of Google, at the rate of 300 changes per year.  In addition to the core algorithm changes we are also seeing huge shifts in how the search results are considering a broader array of display and ranking factors, such as Universal, personalisation and real time.

Geo-targeting

Local SEO and international SEO consider on-site factors and off-site factors…but so too should they consider things like mobile devices too.  For example, people that access your content in transit, looking up information on their iPhone, might have quite different intent to those using a desktop computer.

Geo-targeting (and temporal factors) could indeed be considered an relevancy factors but I just wanted to draw extra attention to them considering the different levels of intent and approach to marketing required.

Temporal Factors

Importantly, recently What is deemed successful in the Spring may be quite different to that seen in the Winter.  Conversely, patterns from trend data are not always so apparent if they are new to develop, however getting a foothold in a niche early on can have huge gains.  So too can regularity – by releasing content on a regular basis you can help establish yourself in a niche, gain regular links, benefit from return visitors, and from fresh visibility from a fresh range of terms.

Consumers / Personalisation

Understanding consumers, profiling their needs and responding accordingly is the centre-piece of so many marketers’ campaigns.

Naturally, all needs can’t be responded to in this way and some degree of anticipation / speculation is required to get ahead of the game.

But there are so many ways of profiling users considering items such as referrals, analytics, click path analysis, link-profiles, brand citations, SearchWiki, internal searches, demographic profile tools such as Quantcast, Hitwise data, user interviews / questionnaires, etc etc…

Online Visibility / Multiplier Effect / Assets

This is where pulling together the strategy begins to see outputs in taking advantage of

Here, one of the greatest areas of value will come from the USPs of the business, a consideration of where genuine value can be delivered to the user of the website, and the relationships harnessed both SEO relationships and business relationships.

Budgets, Business Goals & Brand Development

Direct visitors are the cheapest after all, so a thread of brand awareness can hugely beneficial as part of the SEO strategy.  Ultimately it comes back to the business goals.  1 million visitors might be a goal for the website but if these are blog visitors, then the over-arching business goal to increase turnover by 20% might be unachievable considering this traffic type.  As such, consideration of how one feeds in to the other, where the priorities lie, how the budgets are allocated and how long-term growth can be achieved is vital.

Competitors

AND, hugely important is what the competitors are doing across these strategic areas.  Is it likely they are not considering all areas, quite possibly, but what areas of their SEO strategy are these most keenly developing?

External, Environmental Factors

Using the PESTLE (Politics, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal and Environmental) points you can begin to speculate, plan or simply prepare yourself for unknown changes in the environment that you operate in.  So many items in search, marketing and business can’t be prepared for but a model that factors these considerations on a fluid basis is still important in my view.

The Wrap Up

So these are my thoughts, what would yours include?  This is a diagram that’s certainly open to being developed…are there any glaringly obvious factors that should be included?  What would your diagram include?

80+ SEO Job Interview Questions

Bookmark this page on Delicious for later.

I’ve written a few questions that might help structure a SEO interview or even help someone get a SEO job.  I think though, there are a great deal of ways to answer many of these questions.  I’ve toyed with the idea of writing example answers but I think as long as you have a clear idea of the kind of answer you expect to hear back then this should do the trick.

A SEO interview needn’t be a long list of technical questions (as I expect many people might have differing perspectives anyway) but rather a chance for you, as the interviewer, to understand their technical SEO skills, depth of knowledge and interest the candidate has in SEO.

Some people might also disagree with the ethics of asking some of these questions, but feel free not ask them if, of course, you don’t want to. 

SEO Interview Questions

Death by interview has been known so I wouldn’t recommend asking all of these questions.  Pick and choose at will…

Open-ended SEO questions

1. What is your favourite aspect of SEO?
2. What is the most difficult aspect of SEO for you?
3. What has been your biggest mistake in optimising a website for search engines?
4. What has been you biggest success in SEO?
5. Do you have your own website(s)?  What are they?  What is their purpose? How effective have they been?
6. What business sectors have you previously worked in as a SEO?
7. What is the most competitive sector you have worked in as a SEO specialist?
8. Do you like Matt Cutt’s?! 

Knowledge of the SEO Industry / engagement in learning about SEO and engagement with the SEO Community

9. What is your favourite SEO website/blog, and why?
10. Who do you most respect in the SEO industry, and why?
11. Who do you least respect in the SEO industry, and why?
12. Which website do you go to learn something new every time?

Analytics

13. What Analytics packages have you used?
14. Talk me through the process of setting conversion goals?
15. Explain the process of advanced segmentation and an example of why you might use this?
16. If you could develop a new feature for an analytics package that is not currently/easily available what would it be?

Algorithms

17. Please explain the PageRank algorithm…
18. What is the most important aspect to you of the PageRank algorithm for link-building?
19. What is page segmentation?
20. What is LSI / LSA and its relevance to SEO?
21. Explain to me how phrase-base algorithms work?  Clustering?
22. Describe any perceived differences in the main search engines?
23. Have you noticed any algorithm changes lately that you believe to have affected your rankings?  How do you work to protect your online visibility?

Keywords

24. What process do you typically go through when researching keywords?
25. How could this process be improved?
26. How do you carry out competitive analysis of keywords/SERPs as part of the keyword research process?
27. When targeting keywords on-page, discuss some considerations you might make?

Accessibility

28. What factors hinder search engines access to a website’s content?
29. What is the most responsible way of using Flash?
30. Tell me how you might use the Robots.txt file?
31. What is the difference between an xml sitemap and an html sitemap?

On-page Ranking Factors

32. If you were reviewing a landing page, what on-page ranking factors would you consider?
33. How would you analyse the strength of that page as part of the site?
34. Are you competent with HTML and CSS?

Onsite Ranking Factors

35. Talk me through factors you would consider in building an optimised website. (Possible answers might include the discussion around information architecture, site structure, title tags, link structures, keyword relevance, etc).
36. What are onsite ranking factors for building a successful landing page strategy?
37. Please provide examples of blackhat SEO techniques?
38. What are your thoughts on blackhat SEO techniques?  What, if any, have you used, or tested?

Offsite Ranking Factors

39. What would the perfect inbound link look like?
40. What do you like and not like about link-building?
41. Explain to me your involvement in link-building in the past?
42. What approach to link-building have you had most success?

Linkbait Development and Marketing

43. Would you consider yourself as creative?
44. Have you ever successfully carried out a linkbait campaign for a client / in-house? What was the success?
45. Talk me through the process you might go through in developing a linkbait strategy?

Copywriting

46. Are you confident writing and publishing content online?
47. Please provide examples of the content that you have written. What was the purpose of this content and what keywords were you targeting?

SEO Tools

48. What keyword research tools do you use and why?
49. What is your favourite ‘SEO tool’? Why?
50. Do you think SEO tools are effective in competitive markets? Why?

Testing

51. Have you carried-out split-testing / multivariate testing of content?
52. What did you learn from this process?

Image Optimisation

53. What factors can you do to encourage the chance of ranking for images?
54. What is hotlinking? How can this be successfully optimised?

Video optimisation

55. Have you ever carried out video optimisation?
56. What are a few considerations of optimising video content?

Social Media Interview Questions

Open-ended Social Media Questions

57. Which social media sites do you most like?  Why?
58. Which social media sites do you most dislike?  Why?
59. What has been your biggest achievement in SMM?
60. Do you feel that you are well connected in Social media spheres?  Does your social media account carry influence?
61. Do you prefer to use the same pseudonym across your social media profiles? What are the pros and cons of doing this?
62. When did you get into social media (and marketing)?
63. What is your oldest social media profile?
64. Would you ever sell or buy social media profiles?
65. What has been the most effective social media marketing campaign you have been involved in?  How was it effective?  Metrics / exposure / links?
66. How do you effectively use social media to support SEO campaigns, or vice versa?

PPC Interview questions

67. Although not strictly SEO, the understanding of the cross-over of visibility in paid-listings can be very important for effective SEO campaigns.
68. Have you worked on/with PPC accounts?  How did it go?
69. How do you integrate PPC and SEO?
70. What considerations might you make when carrying out paid search competitive analysis?

Business Acumen and ROI

71. What are the key performance metrics you have previously reported to clients?
72. What are effective metrics for highlighting return on investment from SEO?
73. What would you like to change about the SEO reporting process?
74. What other areas of business present opportunities for organic search visibility?
75. If your SEO efforts aren’t getting the visibility you would hope, what would you do?

Pitching for Business

76. Have you prepared proposals for SEO clients?
77. Have you presented proposals to SEO clients? How did it go?
78. What was the biggest mistake you have made in a meeting with a client?
79. What is your greatest strength when presenting to prospective SEO clients?

Retaining Business

80. What do you think is the most important factor in retaining a client?
81. From the previous company that you worked for, what was one process that they could have improved in retaining and gaining clients?

Closing questions

82. Where do you see yourself in 5 years time?
83. What are you salary expectations?  Availability?  Etc, etc…
84. How did you feel the interview went?!

The Skills needed to get a SEO Consultant Job

One of the things that I did a couple of years ago, was look to see what other skills were being required from SEOs. I saw some jobs promoted as web development orientated jobs with SEO tagged on, and others that were promoted as specialist SEO consultants. The reference to SEO is crossing-up in more role descriptions (PR, marketing, copywriting and website management) so it’s all the more important to get a good understanding of how the SEO labour market is getting on and what is required of us (also see the 80+ SEO interview questions article).

The SEO Career Path?

There are no predetermined career paths in to SEO, like there are for a doctor for instance, but what is clear is that this variety of backgrounds makes it a vibrant and creative place to work in!

And wouldn’t you want to work with these guys?!

My SEO career to date, like most, hasn’t taken a traditional route but a stint in offline marketing and campaign management means I bring something else to the table, and I personally find it quite interesting to read about people’s backgrounds. Taking a slight tangent, I remember David Harry telling me that it’s always a good idea to look at the background of people who are involved in the search engine technology’s development (when reading patents) as this provides a sort of agenda / context for the what is being read. Maybe the same can be said about the developing skill-set of SEO’s?

SEO and a range of Web Development Skills and Understanding

Looking at IT Jobs Watch’s in-house SEO section, these are the other items that were quoted in their survey as required skills over the last 3 months:

1. (54.12 %) Marketing
2. (39.36 %) CSS
3. (37.72 %) HTML
4. (31.02 %) Pay per click
5. (30.22 %) JavaScript
6. (24.04 %) Internet Marketing
7. (21.65 %) PHP
8. (20.15 %) XHTML
9. (18.79 %) .NET
10. (17.76 %) E-Commerce
11. (16.17 %) Google
12. (14.95 %) AJAX
13. (14.85 %) Photoshop
14. (14.71 %) XML
15. (13.92 %) ASP.NET
16. (13.59 %) Flash
17. (12.61 %) MySQL
18. (12.56 %) CMS
19. (12.04 %) Web Development
20. (11.06 %) Internet
21. (10.40 %) Web Design
22. (10.22 %) SQL Server
23. (10.03 %) ASP
24. (9.606 %) Finance
25. (9.513 %) Content Management
26. (9.466 %) C#
27. (9.325 %) Advertising
28. (9.185 %) W3C
29. (8.388 %) Dreamweaver
30. (8.247 %) Web Analytics

For outsourced SEO consultants, interestingly it looks like a slightly different skill-set is required:

1. (39.78 %) HTML
2. (37.55 %) CSS
3. (30.48 %) Marketing
4. (27.51 %) JavaScript
5. (22.30 %) PHP
6. (20.07 %) CMS
7. (18.59 %) XHTML
8. (16.36 %) .NET
9. (15.99 %) MySQL
10. (15.99 %) Pay per click
11. (15.61 %) Content Management
12. (14.50 %) Photoshop
13. (14.50 %) XML
14. (14.50 %) AJAX
15. (13.75 %) Finance
16. (13.01 %) SQL
17. (13.01 %) Flash
18. (11.52 %) E-Commerce
19. (10.04 %) Dreamweaver
20. (8.550 %) ASP
21. (8.550 %) ASP.NET
22. (8.550 %) Web Design
23. (8.550 %) Google
24. (8.178 %) Web Development
25. (8.178 %) Internet
26. (7.807 %) W3C
27. (7.807 %) Oracle
28. (7.435 %) SQL Server
29. (7.435 %) Java
30. (7.435 %) Advertising

I wouldn’t use this list (from IT Jobs Watch) as a prioritised list of skills that you need to develop to become a SEO Consultant, as many jobs advertised here that reference ‘SEO’ are web design/development jobs.

The Range of SEO Jobs and Specialist Areas

Many SEO Consultants have specialisms, frequently because they have not had the experience of multiple areas of SEO – it is after all a very large field indeed. SEO roles have certainly been expanding in potential skill sets over the years as we see more opportunities to develop our website’s visibility in the search engines, a few examples include:

Don’t Forget Fluffy Skills!

You could add a whole host of adjectives and more ‘fluffy’ qualities to that list too; highlighting more links to marketing, creativity and management…but as this is an technical job description, let’s not be too pedantic! A SEO person specification as part of the job decrption will of course look quite different.

SEO Job Opportunities

I hope this helps people learn more about SEO and realise the opportunities that exist in the industry (if you didn’t know already of course!). Take a look at a couple of Google custom search engines that I built for SEO jobs, social media and PPC jobs, both in the USA and UK.

7 P’s of Marketing (and Link-Building) for SEO

Following on from a guest post I did for David Harry (aka theGypsy) where I dabbled with the idea that traditional marketing models can play an important role in carrying out SEO projects successfully, I want to provide coverage to an idea that I raised in that post. The essence of which was that I didn’t see why we should not be enjoying the scientific and creative merits of REAL marketing.

With this, I thought it might be helpful  for myself and possibly others to go through an old-school marketing framework and see how it can be used to make us think about covering all the bases in developing and managing link-building strategies.

An understanding of REAL Marketing can help with link-building

I certainly don’t think SEO’s need to reinvent the marketing wheel.  With traditional forms of marketing having so many more moons to develop strategic and day-to-day tools and prinicles that can add value.  So, I think we should take advantage of this.

What is blatantly obvious is that, a successful link-builder must be more than a copier and paster, sendng cold email after email via website contact forms.  Instead though, does it mean that they need to have a greater knowledge of marketing?  Well, being self-critical, I would suggest that it is not strictly the case, but I do think that the person in charge of designing and planning the link-building campaign should…this can hone their efforts to build a link-profile to be proud of.

The 7 P’s of Service marketing and link-building

The 7 P’s are attributed to service marketing, and essentially link-building acts as a service in two respects.  You are providing a service for the website that you are working on, and, you are potentially providing a service to another website owner by raising their awareness to your products, services, cause, etc…

It’s also the important to remember the traits of a service.  Services are typically:

• Perishable – they cannot be stored and perish at the point of consumption
• Intangible – you cannot touch a service like you can goods
• Inseparable – services cannot be separated from their service providers
• Heterogeneous – difficult to make eash service provision identical

The reason I raise these points is because even in this list there are reminders that we, as service providers, should build these considerations into the delivery of reassurance/trust/accountability to our clients.  A link-building service carries each of these traits, so consider factors whereby you can provide an exemplary service to justify your activity in the next 7 items.

The 7 P’s of Link-building Success!

Product – market the features and benefits cleverly

Why would they ever want to link to your website?  What is the products relevance to the site you are approaching? What are the features and benefits to that particular site owner? Why would they ever envisage that linking to your site would add value (or highlight appreciation) to their visitors.

Bear-in-mind that the best sales-pitches are so often those that are not salesy.  An indirect approach to selling can be far more effective than hitting the prospect with a heavy sales pitch out of the blue and with no prior knowledge of you.

Price – buying and selling links

The grey-area of link-building. Buying links is, as we know, ‘frowned-up’ by search engines. Beyond this, it could be argued that ‘they would never know’ – unless of course you are buying into a network of sites that have been ear-marked as

Place – the link placement for optimised link-building

Think semantically. The links placement is ultra important regarding the how positively the link is perceived by the search engines and the weight that it passes. E.g. a text link, sat in a relevant paragraph, prominently in the content of a relevant page,

I think if you tackle the other 6 factors correctly then this iten should really be a by-product of naturality of link-placement.

Promotion – PR not link-building

What incentive are you providing for the user to link-back to your site? Is it newsworthy in a way that they will drive people to pick it up in a way that they want to share it with their users? How does it stand-out from other link requests? Does it include a discount coupon for a purchase that they might want to share, a fun, friendly, challenging piece, or even tool that provokes natural interest?

What is it about the item you’re building links for that makes people think: ‘oh that’s funny / quirky / interesting / helpful??

Often the answer is that it doesn’t look like a link request and is simply providing something of value. So often it’s the case that people will hit the easy links first (friends and family) and try to build a bit of a buzz about it. But that buzz needs to be maintained not simply be allowed to dissolve – the world-wide web is after all a ultra-fast marketing platform and marketplace.

People – link-building is about the people, the friends, the contacts….

Get sociable. Making friends and building contacts can be one of the most effective ways of building links online. It’s via these that not only can you directly gain links, but also spread the buzz about your link-worthy item.

Process – manage your link-building with attention and care

This could well be the most important aspect of managing the link-building campaign. The process defines both the intent, the market, and the approach. Essentially it should also include a continual feedback loop of what worked, who needs to be followed-up, and where do new opportunities lie. If something works, push it some more – think: snowball-effect.

On a day-to-day basis though, maybe you could think about:

• How is the link-building activity integrated into the optimisation of other areas of the website?  Keyword research and analysis, landing pages, conversions, site structure, information architecture, flow of link-equity?
• Keeping a contacts database.  This can take many forms:
  • It could be a customer management database
  • An opt-in email / newsletter database naturally built from the site
  • Friends and family contacts of course
• How you are alerted by new links (Google Alert, other?)
• How are you alerted by removed /dead links?
• How do you value the links?  Do you analyse and report on the semantic nature of the placement of the link?
• How do you manage the feedback loop that tracks what is working in your link-building, PR  and SEO efforts?
• How much flexibility is there in what you are doing to mould it to the things that are proving to work?  How you time have you factored in for this feedback analysis and revisions?

Physical evidence – incentivise, you’re more than an email

This is the toughest one. So often is the case that people get a random, unsolicited email via the ‘contact us’ form on a website asking for a link-exchange (often to a new and poorly optimised website, of little relevance or interest to your ideal visitors). Approaching webmasters can work, no doubt about that, but it’s 10 times easier when there has been a bit more of a personal connection made…a business transaction, a meeting, a training session, a direct mail shot…some physical presence other that simply a dot com website.  I wonder how many people have sent out corporate gifts with the hope that they will receive backlinks, even?

Do you find this kind of thinking helpful?

Previously, I have found my SEO thoughts returning to my marketing education and experience to tackle issues, develop proposals and carry-out activities. Maybe this could be a good way of making sure that you are considering a wider (and deeper) variety of factors that influence effective link-building and your online marketing efforts?  It helps me, how about you?

Is Semantic SEO the Marketers SEO?

This post looks at the cluttered web, filtering process that focus on meaning and quality in the form of semantic SEO, and simply good quality search marketing services – something we all can work towards. It’s a work-in-progress but I’d be keen to hear your thoughts. Thanks.

The rehashed bit…

Blurring the lines: brands in hands of the social web

Does semantic SEO exist? Most people would say that SEO is exactly that…SEO is semantically driven, as it is driven by the meaning of the words. Although this is only a relatively recent phenomenon in search engine’s information retrieval. It is not necessarily about keywords any more rather about key-meaning.

I needn’t explain why this is important but what I should do is explain it’s ramifications.

Most unoriginal statement of the century

Information on the internet is merging…uh oh here we go – heard this all before! Well it really is. (Sometimes we have to start from the obvious statements to build an argument!).

I want to remind everyone of how it used to be, in the good and / or bad old days…

Standalone websites > Internet in an Information Flux

Companies and websites used to operate online as standalone businesses, picking and choosing where their brand operated. Any brand that was mentioned in a forum or blog was relatively underground. This is a very important distinction compared to where we are now. Just think of the flux and flow of information on a topic – information is continually being encouraged to flow on and off a page through all forms of social media and the like. It can now take an increasingly wider array of forms, but what are the implications for online marketers?

The interesting bit…

Human and Bot Comprehension

We have become immune or numb to this information online, with clever neurological filters, but just think how radically it is different to a basic search engine’s comprehension of the web. Imagine the complexity of the information in it’s most raw form and then try to realise the complexity in evoking ‘meaning’.

Busy Crowd or Quiet Space? An online marketers conundrum

With websites taking various forms, everyone becoming a blogger and information transferring across various social media platforms, it provides a great deal of channels for marketers but so to a great deal of noise. For search engine marketers, this noise can be quite disruptive if we are using the same keywords and marketing techniques in similar ways. How can we stand-out? Does it mean fall into sync with your cluttered neighbourhood and unleash a torrent of content, or, leave some white space by stepping away from the crowd and promoting clarity of meaning? Both cases have been proved to be successful.

140 characters of clarity

Information rich societies are ultimately brand managers’ dream come true and nightmare all wrapped into one big ball of string. Brand managers love communicating clear messages, but are so too clearly misunderstood. Clarity rocks! Does 140 characters express a clear message, why yes, it certainly can. Can 140 characters express a clear message as it moves across the screen where 14 other conversations are taking place…maybe? My confidence in the clarity of the message communicated severely drops when I ask that question.

How can your website, your online presence in general maybe, take a form that markets your activity in a way that stands-out from the crowd, or even apart from the crowd? Your online activity, is your brand…what can you do consistently to represent your brand? Do you use the same colours for all your activity, the same images, same logos, the same presentation style? How often does McDonald’s change it’s logo?! These are the same triggers of recognition that provide visual meaning to your future contacts / network / clientele / friends.

Search Bots and Meaning

For the search engines that dominate the industry, they unfortunately don’t have the capacity to understand these characteristics…so they look elsewhere. In fact search bots have and do fail on many quality scores, focussing more on relevancy and popularity and NOT necessarily quality…hence the rise of social media sites, and more recently SearchWiki.

Search engines are coming around to latent semantic analysis highlighting the importance here, so this in itself makes it especially important in thinking along these lines.

In search marketing, quality is therefore quite obviously deemed to be important – it builds traffic and builds conversions. But what is quality in respect to search marketing? To me quality is something that has relative value regarding purpose and / or meaning. This is almost a definition of semantics.

Semantic HTML > SEO?

A guy I work with, Ben Hunt, from Web Design from Scratch, deliberately focusses on promoting website design that ‘Saves the Pixel’…using semantic concepts in coding and presentation. It works, and, he’s drawn a great deal of attention as a result.

He told me last weekend that he is currently researching [maybe you can help him out?] into semantic pixel saving, to see whether his hypothesis on the correlation between stickiness and semantic html is correct. Simplicity in design and marketing is certainly an option I like the sound of!

As search marketers this is something that we should certainly be interested in, but how can we expand it to be even more relevant to what we are working towards?

Search Marketing can take something away from this…

Semantic HTML might help tidy up the page, reduce the page load speed, increase cross-browser compatibility even…but there’s more to it than that for search marketing. Semantic-thinking, helps us see advantages of so many activities in search that already exist but aren’t always capitalised on…it helps us align our attention with what really matters: meaningful search quality.

Examples of Semantic SEO

I’d be keen to hear of people’s thoughts on the use of semantic-thinking in search engine optimisation, and how it feeds into everyday activities. These are my initial thoughts on semantic SEO anyway…

1. The use of long-tail terms would be one answer…long-tail keywords certainly get your message across clearly….but it’s still an under utilised facet of search marketing. A focussed long-tail strategy can create a great deal of quality, convertible traffic.
2. Thinking about keywords in greater detail, we can think about their role in the context of what has been said – our good old friend latent semantic analysis pops up it’s head again. Meaning is everything in search marketing – semantics in communication is therefore vital…
3. What about your landing pages? Are you focussed on who you are targeting. Have you ever written a landing page for [strictly] one purpose and [strictly] one outcome. I’ve not, although I probably should. One message, one call to action and one outcome…it would be an interesting exercise.  We so often provide too much information, and too many options.  This is why great designers are simply great at what they do: they can see what is necessary for the information to be communicated clearly.
4. Think about the page structure too…everything there regarding the order and layout of the content and code has weighted meaning.
5. Every sort of interaction of information (aka web and website information architecture) presents meaning to search engines…this is what we have to ALWAYS remember as SEO consultants. An example of this is where links act as a sort of funnel where surrounding text and anchor text’s meaning falls through the funnel and carries meaning through to the next page.

I expect there are dozens of examples, please feel to share where search marketers sometimes miss opportunities to express meaning in their day-to-day activity.

Competing on the grounds of meaning

We’re dealing with clutter by making more clutter, so essentially we are crowding the market by trying to stand-out from the crowd. The Tragedy of the Commons becomes all the more apparent as we allow our marketing activity to be driven in this way.

Digital space is essentially infinite, and it seems that we, online commerce and other competing organisations, are competing on grounds of size – scalability of content/keywords/links that drives traffic. And in essence this is how marketing has always been – a scalability game of reach, pick-up rates, visitors, etc. How about if we started competing more along the lines of meaning…scalability/presence plays a role, but more as a bi-product of producing meaning for all those parties your trying to draw attention to search engines.  I believe the best search marketers do this.

Semantic SEO ticks a whole lot of marketing boxes, regarding surfers, visitors and search bots. Shouldn’t this level of meaning be what we work towards as search marketers?  So is Semantic SEO the Marketers SEO?  Yes, I think it is.

[This piece is a work in progress, but I would gladly take feedback on the subject, so please feel free to share you thoughts...]

Ben McKay is famous, and some!

Being a search marketer you would think that I was used to my name and work being up in the SERPs limelight, but today has borne a new benchmark…

Well, lucky for you guys it’s only going to be a short post because I have to go to Poland for my Birthday early tomorrow morning, but otherwise this would have been a thesis on my new found fame…

I gladly signed-up to a competition to become a famous SEO overnight, and was asked to write the first post for DaveN’s blog…what an honour.  If you’re a little out the loop on the importance of this, Dave Naylor is essentially the original UK SEO.  He was a SEO, before there was an alphabet to give us the title.  Here’s a little bit more about Dave Naylor to fill you in on why I am so pleased…

Read the full, light-hearted post on OfGoog and the SEO industries’ options regarding regulations, accreditation and representation.  Signatures will be sold via my tuck shop.

Why every SEO specialist needs to be a marketer

Search engine optimisation relies on the facets of technical insights into the orientation of search engine algorithms and provides only a little guidance regarding marketing, of which may appear to be directly, algorithmically lead anyway.

What I mean by this is that SEO consultants are at risk of continually making decisions because it will help them rank better, getting links on relevant sites, building content, but there are larger forces at work that can make an impact in the longer-term on an exponential level…it’s far less direct as an approach to SEO, but is seen to be very effective indeed.

For me at least, search engine optimisation needs to be about seeing opportunities beyond items such as:

• On-site work
• Link-building
• Content Creation
• Site analytics

SEO needs to be far more about marketing prowess…

Case Study 1.

I worked as a Campaign Manager for a national children’s charity once upon a time, before making a permanent move into search. The campaigns that I set-up had to be on the scale of where they could be self-managed…ultimately, the campaigns were not going to raise the kind of funds that I was aiming for if I had to set-up, promote and run each fundraising event.

I took the strategy of targeting the top of each industry-sector, hitting the biggest companies in the fields that I was campaigning with big ideas, backed-up with plans on how they could be effectively implemented. Some of the largest organisations turned these ideas down for a variety of different reasons, but a bi-product of this was that I could develop these rejections into a to-do list. I gradually moved down and across the industry sector’s, talking to companies about these improving plans, until I found a company to push them on my behalf.

This turned out to be very effective on many counts building relationships with Government departments, national pub chains and gaining large-scale sponsorships packages. Interestingly, the charity was relatively unknown compared to other national charities but because I was able to hit the top of the industry pyramid with creative ideas, we were able to build relationships that very effectively trickled down.

Case Study 2.

If you’re a SEO consultant reading this, you might like to think about the relationship Distilled and SEOMoz have, especially since May 2008. One reinforces the other across the Atlantic, which of course assures the reader that they are in fact reading the best content out there…like many blogs do. That is the fundamental nature of the web, and something that companies do not always strategically take advantage of.

The three points to remember:

1. Find your place in the industries pyramid. Hit the highest point in the industry where you think your skills and resources can be realised and then only work

2. Even the set-backs provide have been a chance to raise awareness to your plans, provide context and talking points in future, and of course develop your ideas.

3. SEO efforts can and are exponentially built from marketing efforts too. Joint alliances, business relationships, can really reinforce efforts to improve rankings. Awareness breeds awareness.

Your next task:

• Come-up with ideal solutions on where you can build an online strategic alliance.
• Find somebody, or a website, with similar interests and aspirations.
• Build the relationships that you already have. Maybe they gave you a link, maybe you comment on their blog a great deal (or vice versa), or maybe you met them at a conference?
• Approach the person confidently but not arrogantly, highlighting the mutual benefits.
• Be proactive in every aspect of your search marketing efforts, even down to prospective keyword research.

Who will your next online strategic alliance be with? Start thinking………now!

Prospective Keywords: beyond the long-tail…

The best thing about keywords are that they generate traffic.  You could essentially be write the most ground-breaking piece of content on the “credit crunch”, but if you don’t use those or related keywords then it might not capitalise on what is already there.  This is where search engine optimisation plays it’s biggest role…

Responsive (and misguided) Keyword Research

The fundamentals of keyword research are based around the principal that you must immerse yourself in what people are searching for using various keyword research tools, such as Google’s, WordTracker and Keyword Discovery, 3 of my favourites, but in my opinion this immersions doesn’t always go deep enough. Being a marketer I believe this to be a little responsive, missing the up-and-comers that even long-tail keyword research may not pick-up on as there may not yet be a search volume for those keywords.  Keyword research therefore has to be designed to be far more proactive.

Prospective Keywords

The thing I found so interesting about digging around for prospective keywords is that essentially you can create your own search volume, build your page / website around these terms and essentially be far more effective in ranking in the future. For instance, my site is currently relatively new, but I woudl hope to start to see “just me and my” and “justmeandmy” further down the line in my analytics data.  Arguably, this example is brand building, but the notion goes far beyond this.

…think about the credit crunch. Not words people strung together before June 2007, but they’re now words that are high on people’s agenda now. Take a look at Google Trends, a tool that maps keyword usage over time:

Keywords in your Community

One of my favourite bits of ‘keyword research’ is spending time in the community of their sector. This is your chance to learn how people use the keywords, how they don’t and how they string them together by spending time reading sector blogs, forums, social media sites…

I put together a mindmap using a new tool of mine that I’ve been playing around with to highlight the opportunities that exist around proactive keyword research, click to expand:

Proactive Keyword Research: click on the image to expand...

Keyword Recognition

Search engines are not the only way people use the internet. Keywords that people use within communities can be quite different to those that used in search engines, so when they do come across your site, see those same words that they themselves use in their community, that may well lead to them valuing your site a whole lot more simply through keyword recognition.

Community Keywords > Trigger Words > Keyword Recognition > Value > Returning Visitors

And just because the visitor found your site initiallly by searching for “SEO”, it might be that next time when they want to find you they look for the words “justmeandmy blog”…simply create your own keywords.

SEO Alignment…

When I talk to clients, I talk a lot about SEO alignment. This refers to the functional aspects of on and offline marketing activity integrating.  Essentially it’s how the direct and indirect marketing channels pull together to market the website, avoid SEO being a stand-alone activity, and provide an informed picture to search engines.

SEO Alignment

This needn’t be excessively pushy or spammy, nor need it be a search engine marketers headache, but provided the search consultant asks the right questions and are provided with the business and marketing information then plans can be put in place.

SEO Planning

The analysis and marketing plan is one of my favourite aspects of working in search marketing, for good reasons. The analysis is the detective work: highlighting the current situation, trouble areas and the very best opportunities to market the website online. The search marketing plan is essentially building this into a road-map of activity, and on a micro-level, creating a to-do list that will improve the site’s performance.

The IT and Marketing Case

Search engine optimisation is a fascinating merger of technical I.T. skills and marketing prowess. What we tend to see from successful SEO specialists is that the more effective the SEO’s marketing approach is, the better the return on investment from the technical input. This essentially means that optimising websites is not simply about engineering them for search engines, but rather that a sprinkle of marketing flare can go a long way.

Although, don’t let marketing flare and technical aspects of web dev or SEO collide by treating them as independent functions.  Let them run in a way that helps them act as a catalyst for progress for one another by providing them with overlapping agendas.  An example of this would be challenging them to work on creating the optimal, accessible website structure for users and bots.

So day-to-day, how can this be applied?

To integrate SEO, marketing and IT, it’s really a case of each area of the business (if unique) knowing the what’s and the how’s of everything. Sometimes an SEO specialist can help simply by integrating and capitalising on what is already there. It’s vital to draw marketing information from as many parts of the business as possible, maybe start by asking:

• What is the website’s purpose as part of the business or organisation? Brand-building, sales, social media / newsletter-sign-ups, educational, post-sale support, cross-selling, affiliate, etc…?
• Who are the ideal visitors? Ideal customer behaviour?
• Access to the current market research and plan?
• Are there other websites that the company owns?
• Does the company have other business partnerships, affiliates?
• SEO project team – company integration as opposed to simply the SEO consultant?

Integrating the technical and analytical activity, along with marketing flare and planning, become the new, qualitative ranking factors, where rankings can be shown to increase exponentially if all items are pulled together…SEO alignment.