SEO Strategies for Large Websites
Yesterday I attended a session at Pubcon on SEO & SEM for large websites. The speakers included Marshall Simmons from the N.Y. Times and Bill Hunt from IBM.com Global Strategies as well as two other excellent speakers.
I was struck by some key points they made. Most of their challenges in managing SEO and SEM for large website, typically with more than 1 million pages, are organizational issues, not best practice issues.
For example, Simmons gave the example that one of the first actions he took when he assumed the role of Chief Search Strategist at the N.Y. Times was to move “N.Y. Times” from the beginning of the title tag to the end of it so the primary keywords were presented first to the engines. He said orchestrating that change with their IT folks took some selling and some time. He also shared that working with long tenured journalists and asking their collaboration in writing content that is search engine friendly is challenging. He said he views a part of his job to educate staff, including veterans and new hires, on how to think in ways that will benefit their SEO efforts. Often it can come down to internal communication about new deals, announcements, ventures, etc., that can be leveraged in their search strategy. He referenced a situation where he heard about a new deal that was done that could have been leveraged in his SEO efforts had it been communicated to him in advance.
One point made that resonates with me is the importance of communicating successes. In SEO often results can take months to fully realize. So, where there is a success it should be communicated throughout the organization to fuel the education process and the inspiration process.
Another point worth mentioning is that other teams in the organization can implement marketing programs which should be communicated to the SEO team. For example, an offline advertising campaign should be orchestrated to ensure continuity of SEO strategy especially if there are landing pages involved. You wouldn’t want advertising driving traffic to an outdated landing page. This is important not just to maintain consistency in messaging, but in technical architecture.
Sometimes advertising campaigns use tracking codes, which can be “the kiss of death” in SEO. Orchestrating such details can have a big impact on SEO success in a large website.
Another point mentioned is the importance of standardizing on the CMS architecture so it is friendly and consistent to the SEO strategy. Details such as the global size and font of the header tags, and allowing the SEO team full control over the meta data of each web page so that each page is unique. When IT maintains control over such details, that’s a “worst practice.”
These are just a few of the key points presented during this session. I was struck by the commonality of these issues with SMB SEO (small, medium businesses). The only difference really is the magnitude of the issues.
In the end SEO best practices are SEO best practices.
Everyone involved in creating content or in marketing in any organization no matter the size, needs to have an understanding of SEO best practices. Just like a football team needs 11 guys working together on the field so does a business need to have all relevant members of the team understanding their respective roles in SEO success and cooperating.
Bernie Borges
@berniebay
SEO Basics Revisited
I recently conducted a table session at an AMA event in Tampa on SEO basics. It’s funny how when you revisit basics sometimes things click in a new way. I didn’t learn anything new in conducting this session other than maybe a way to communicate SEO basics.
I began by explaining how search engines work. I explained that search engines attempt to crawl a website starting on the home page and seek to “find” as much of the website’s content as possible. As marketers our goal is to make it as easy as possible for search engines to find (and index) our content.
When we describe search engine optimization we refer to optimizing the chance that search engines will list our web pages high for our most desired keyword phrases.
I explained Google’s explanation of their search technology which boils down to two factors: 1) PageRank which is an analysis of your website’s link structure (external and internal), 2) Text matching.
Google explains how their patented PageRank technology looks at the complex link structure on the web to determine the extent to which others link to your website and the extent to which your website pages link to each other. BUT, Google also considers the text matching that takes place among all those links.
For example, say you want your website to be found for the keyword phrase “accounting software,” your website would need to have a lot of incoming links from this phrase and a lot of text within the website matching this phrase as well internal links from this phrase. The truth is there are a lot of websites that have text and links for “accounting software.” So, often it’s wise to optimize for more targeted keyword phrases which are less competitive. For example, “project accounting software,” is more specific to a particular type of accounting software and is less competitive. This SEO strategy is known as a long tail keyword strategy.
Sometimes a short tail keyword strategy (accounting software) is realistic but only when the competition factor is not exceedingly high and you have the ability to produce enough of a link structure (both external and internal) to win that SEO strategy.
When we deliver SEO services to our clients we discuss both long tail and short tail strategies to explore the trade offs and the realities of both approaches.
Another factor when considering basic SEO strategies is the URL structure of each web page. Optimizing for a keyword phrase should ideally be done for a web page that contains the search phrase in it, such as ….project-accounting-software.com. Note the keywords are separated by a dash, not an underscore.
The simple rule of thumb in basic SEO strategies is to remember that we want to make it as easy as possible for search engines to find and rank our website content.
Bernie Borges
SEO: The Perfect Storm
I often talk with marketers about the difference between SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay per click advertising). I remind myself that, unlike me and my team at Find and Convert (and others in our business), most marketers don’t spend their days thinking about Internet marketing strategies as we do.
So, when we look at the difference between SEO and PPC, it goes beyond the costs. After all, most marketers understand that PPC can cost a lot more than SEO. But, for so many marketers PPC (also known as SEM) is the path of least resistance.
Many marketers believe they can measure results from PPC easier than from SEO strategies. But, let’s examine some of the facts.
We spend a lot of our time producing reports for clients. These reports summarize (usually in painstaking detail) many statistics. For the sake of this blog post I’ll hone in on the most telling stats which really point to the advantages of SEO over PPC.
Time and again we see that visitors to our client’s websites which come from organic searches spend more time on the website, visit more pages and have lower bounce rates than paid search traffic. The first two stats mentioned here should be self evident. A bounce rate refers to someone who visits a web page on your site and does not visit another page, essentially “bouncing” off your site.
Moreover, when we provide reports on our PPC plans for clients, we track the cost of conversion (the desired action for the client). Such conversion costs are tracked for the ads and for the keywords. The most telling conversion cost is for the keywords we track. This metric really tells us the cost to produce a lead for the most desirable keywords.
All too often we see marketers show the most interest in the most competitive keywords. They wind up paying dearly for these keywords simply because they are competitive.
In SEO strategies, we are able to (with a lot of hard work) build optimization strategies for select keywords which are less competitive (long tail keywords). For example, we work hard for a client to rank on page one for “project accounting software.” But, the software client we represent has a product that runs only on Oracle. So, when someone searches for “oracle project accounting software,” we hit a home run in ranking and in a qualified website visitor.
So, the message in this post is to think long term with SEO strategies. Do the hard work which will require ongoing care and feeding, but can have long lasting and cost effective sales results through organic search traffic. And, don’t be afraid to target lower searched, less competitive and long-tail keywords.
I’ve always said I’d rather be found by the 10 people who are a perfect fit, than targeting 1000 people who may be a fit but are harder to reach and therefore a higher risk search strategy.
