Where My Mind has Wandered

Search Engine Strategy

Almost every client will tell you that they want a search engine on their site to make it usable, easy-to-use, easy-to-navigate. That is what user interface and information design is for. I used to enjoy telling people that search was the remedy for a bad Web site, and that if site was doing its job no one would use search. I think that is less true today because we have trained people to rely on search more and more.

Search engines are not designed for Web sites. They are designed to be search engines -- connecting people who are not yet at their destination with either the destination they are looking for, or a list or potential destinations that are likely to have what they are looking for. What they are not designed for is way finding at the destination itself.

The typical search engine algorithm does not give weight to what the business wants people to see when they search for a specific term. Most people have no idea how their own search engine ranks search results. And even those that do are unlikely to ensure that search results meet the needs of the business. Yes, the needs of the business should correspond to the needs of the user, but the business has the opportunity and responsibility to affect the search results.

A good analogy is paid vs. organic results. Why not pre-determine the top-three links you want a user to see when they search for a term and then allow for the organic results below? The organic ranking could be based upon page views, a relevancy rank of the language on the page, the posted and/or modified date, or any combination of criteria. Then allow the user to sort the results based upon that criteria. But why not use the opportunity to pick what links you show for key terms, in essence doing your own paid keyword advertising on your site?

Go to your Web site, search for a term, and then consider that is presented to you in the search results. Are those the pages you want people to go to? Can you even tell what pages they are? If the answer is no your organization needs to take a more active role in determining how search results are generated.

Search Engine Opti-Media Buy

I continue to be disappointed by how little many supposed SEO-experts seem to know about SEO. There are many lotion and potion salespeople in the marketplace right now … banner ad mills masquerading as search engine optimization specialists. They aren't very interested in the impact of language analysis and earned media on search engine visibility. They want to sell banner ad campaigns and make money off the creative and media buy.

Paid media campaigns are effective in driving traffic, but only a short while longer than they are active. They won't have the sustained impact of an earned media campaign, in which the inbound links are less likely to expire. The vast majority of banner ads are tracked using Atlas, Dart or an equivalent third-party ad serving service. In order to track the ads, the URLs are redirected through a tracking server which cookies the user and track in order to track their behavior on the destination site. This redirect negates the search engine impact of the inbound link -- no Google juice as my colleague Andy Barnett would say.

Andy is our agency's resident SEO expert. His perspective on the current state of the SEO marketplace is below:

"Focusing on site optimization worked well. In fact it worked very well in 1999. Today, however, for the overwhelming majority of competitive search terms, gaining inbound links is paramount to achieving success. Too many so-called SEOs focus solely on title and meta tags and forget that Google is not the gullible simpleton it was eight years ago. Yes, there is certainly a benefit to deploying unique title and meta description tags. And, yes, it is definitely beneficial to have an optimized URL architecture (read: static URLs) among other onsite tactics. But, at the end of the day, the only way to truly move the needle in Google is to establish inbound links. If you don't build links, you're not an SEO. It's that simple.

It's my belief that the future of SEO aligns perfectly with the core competencies of progressive communications agencies. It can be summed up quite simply: create compelling content and promote it through online outreach, social media, and other communications tactics. That is the way to build permanent, one way links from highly relevant sites to your client's site."

Organizations need sustained SEO campaigns which in simple terms combine thorough language analysis; using the right words, in the right places, in the right frequency; good meta data; relevant outbound links; and a solid outreach strategy that generates high-quality inbound links. The benefit of doing it right is that you gain something just as valuable as search engine visibility: long-term relationships with key stakeholders.

This does not mean I don’t value paid media campaigns and the positive impact they have on online visibility and site traffic. They should be used in combination with earned media campaigns to generate the best possible outcome. But beware traveling SEO salesman that present a large portfolio of banner ad campaigns. After the paid campaign they will move on to the next client and you will be left wondering where all your traffic went.