Archive for October, 2009
My redefinition of SEO is comprised of three core elements: Strategy, Engagement and Optimization. This post focuses on the 2nd element – Engagement – and why it’s crucial to the whole “web presence” thing. I touched on Optimization (in the form of scaled website optimization) a couple of days ago.
Engagement = Understanding and interacting.
Whether you’re a large corporation, a local branch of a not-for-profit organization, a collective of artists or a couple of friends trying to start a new business, there’s one constant: you have people. Even if you’re a fresh start-up, you still have people – they just haven’t found you yet.
What kind of people?
For the large corporation it could consist of stock holders, employees and customers. For the non-profit it could be groups of volunteers. There’s aspiring talent and potential collectors for artists, and the daring pair of entrepreneurs could be indebted to a number of venture capitalists. It doesn’t matter, though – the point is that everyone has people who rely on them for one thing or another.
There’s an inherent level of trust in something like that, but if that trust isn’t built on, it won’t be of much use. Staying engaged keeps communication flowing freely between parties, which helps increase the level of trust over time.
This isn’t a new concept, of course. It’s been done for generations, and it’s one of the cornerstones of traditional business activities.
Think back to your first part-time job. Remember the importance of customer service?
I worked in retail – a thrift store, actually – throughout high school, so I’ll be using the goods & services industry as my example.
In the case of retail, “our people” are the customers that we serve, and one of the first things we’re taught is that customer service is top priority. Know what the customers want; know what they need; know how to help them. Understanding the customer is crucial in order to keep them happy. The happier they are with the provided customer service, the more inclined they are to trust the business.
This early experience gave me a total appreciation for “working the floor” and helping people while simultaneously learning more about them. And most of those values have stuck with me over the last several years, straight through college and right into my current career.
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View Comments | Posted in Internet Marketing, SEO
When folks talk about optimizing for search, they’re usually referring to website optimization (which I covered last night). But what about the personal data that’s collected on home computers?
From email and tax documents to photographs and video, we’re storing more things locally than ever before. A good indicator of this trend is the exponential growth of data storage capacity, both within consumer-level and enterprise-level technology. But are we improving how we store things on our own computers? Not really.
The following tips are taken from traditional search optimization best practices. I’ve implemented them both at home and at the office, and they work quite well. Even if you don’t embrace all of them, they should still give you a good “starting point” for developing a system of your own.
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View Comments | Posted in Technology
In yesterday’s post I proposed that the definition of SEO be changed from Search Engine Optimization to Strategy, Engagement and Optimization. Now I’d like to go a step further. The following is my (simplified) definition of what website optimization is, and how it can be scaled for different projects.
** Please note that this post addresses website optimization for search engines. There are many other aspects of a site that can be optimized, from technical performance (loading times and resource usage) to usability and accessibility (user experience and interaction with the site itself). Although they all fall under the Optimization category of “Strategy, Engagement and Optimization“, covering all of it would be far too daunting for a single blog post. **
Website Optimization for Search: It’s marketing, too!
Let’s break down the traditional search engine optimization planning process:
Like any marketing endeavour, it involves three components – a goal (what you want to accomplish and why), a strategy (how you’re going to accomplish it) and tactics (the specific steps that will make your strategy happen).
In most cases, all three components (in terms of search optimization) are as follows:
The goal is to increase site traffic by ranking highly on search engines for specifically-chosen key terms/keywords. The strategy involves determining what the key terms should be, and how you’ll target them. Finally, the tactics involve keyword research, producing content, measuring the effectiveness of the content, and constantly tweaking/maintaining the content to establish (or sustain) relevance*.
*This includes working with information architecture (the relationship between content) and site structure (the tech stuff), amongst other things.
These components are the essentials of on-page website optimization.
When done properly, a well-executed optimization plan will improve the quality and performance of a website.
But what happens when you can’t build a plan from scratch? What if you’re limited in resources, be it money or time (or both)?
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View Comments | Posted in Internet Marketing, SEO
Wikipedia defines SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as the following:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.
It’s a a straightforward description of (what appears to be) a straightforward practice: optimizing websites, typically through on-page means, to perform better in search engine results.
The logic behind SEO as a marketing strategy makes sense, of course. Search was, at one point, the primary way – if not the only way – that most users discovered new content on the web. Search engines provided much-needed structure and organization, and they were the primary method of online navigation.
Needless to say, if you wanted to be discovered, you needed to rank in the search engines. If you ranked higher, you’d get more traffic, and ultimately more business.
But as we head towards 2010, is it enough for SEO to be focusing only on search, as Wikipedia’s definition would suggest?
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View Comments | Posted in SEO
My blog redesign, which started a few weeks ago, has finally been completed.
There are still a few things that need to be touched up, and as you can probably tell from the top navigation, there are a handful of new sections being added to the site.
You’ll also notice that there are a bunch of broken images in my old blog posts. I made the mistake of failing to back them up when exported the WordPress database, so although old content has been re-imported, a good number of the images will remain broken. (Luckily most of them were of little importance.)
I’ll be tying up any loose ends over the next week, so expect intermittent downtime until everything has been resolved.
Cheers!
View Comments | Posted in Site Updates