Content is King.

Web content.  What is this “king” that search engines, web-savvy intellects and other industry gurus refer to?  According to Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, content is broadly defined as the “stuff in your Web site” (second edition, page 219).  While this may be a loose definition, web content can be further defined as the text, data, applications, images, video files, and audio – among other things – that make up your site.  In other words, anything that is textual, visual or audible in nature can be deemed web content. While each of these should be focused on, as far as optimization goes, in order to improve a website’s results within the search engine rankings, textual content is the most viable for optimization – and a primary focus for most SEO departments in an online marketing company.

Yet, when referring to “Content is King”, “content” is implied as the written HTML text, or a derivative thereof, that is easily index-able by the search engines.  So…how is this relevant to SEO?  It’s relevant for a couple reasons.  One being, that if a search engine can index the text available on a site quite easily, the search engines can then determine which categories, keywords, etc. that each page of a site is about.

Now, you may still inquire as to the relevancy that the content plays in optimizing for organic results…to which I continue to my second point.  So, how is content useful in gaining rankings within the search engines?  Easy.  Since search engines use the information that they have indexed to “match up” with what a searcher seeks when querying for a certain phrase or topic, the pages of a website that have the most relevant content on that particular phrase or term (topic) will be those delivered to the searcher in the order of most related sites to least related.  Therefore, the more a certain phrase is used within a page – or multiple pages – of a website, the more likely that those pages will appear in better positions of the Search Engine Results Page or SERP.

For example, I have a website that sells designer handbags.  I carry some of the following designers: Prada, Louis Vuitton and Chanel.  If I want to show up in the top spots for terms such as “Prada handbags”, “designer purses”, “Chanel hand bags”, etc., I better make sure that the content I place on my site includes these phrases.  Keep in mind that I will also want the page of my site that features the latest Prada bags to include relevant and optimized Titles and Meta Tags featuring these keywords as well.  I would not include terms that are irrelevant to the products I offer.  Some examples of keywords that I would refrain from using include:  snowboard equipment, dog collars, picture frames.  Why?  Well…hopefully it’s obvious, but none of these terms have anything to do with my site or the products I offer because I only sell designer purses and handbags.

Once you understand the important role that content plays in the scheme of website optimization, you should better understand the need for your site to update its content or improve its relevancy.  As one of the most important elements in reaching desirable rankings within the search engines, it is no wonder that content is king!

For further information on the do’s and don’ts of content strategy…stay tuned.

Brittany Passante

If you have not started already; NOW is the time to prepare your PPC Campaigns for the Holiday Shopping Period.

More and more people are turning to the internet to doing their Holiday shopping. Need more incentive, last year during the Holiday season consumers spent $24.4 billion online according to comScore. So you need to get your PPC Campaigns ready and loaded to take advantage of the increase in internet shopping for the Holiday Period.

Your campaigns should already be up, but if not you need to get them up soon.

You should start by making sure your Holiday PPC Campaigns contain all the holiday keywords appropriate for your products and don’t forget to make sure your ads are relevant and contain as much information as possible on your specials. With all the completion for the holiday shoppers you will need to be creative with your Ad content to draw attention to your Ads. You may want to make smaller Ad Groups where you can be sure to include Products in the Ads and any special prices you may have on those items. Also, remember that offering Free Shipping and including that in the Ad is advisable if possible.

Another must do, is make sure that in December as pace really increases to monitor you Campaigns more closely. The increase competition will mean that you may have to adjust your bids more often to keep your Ads in positions to get noticed. Also, don’t forget to have multiple Ads to allow you to do Ad testing and to continue to make tweaks to the Ads to draw more visitors.

Good Luck and Happy Holidays.

One of the top site analytic/measuring companies in the world, Nielson/NetRatings, announced plans to shift from reporting Page Views as the metric of how popular a site is, to using how long users spend on a website (or Time Spent on Site).

With the continued emergence of AJAX, dynamic content, online videos and other new technologies, the “page view” has lost it’s accuracy, which has led marketers to rely on other metrics like “time spent on site”.

There’s a lot of talk about how this affects where Google ranks among other sites… The talks are trivial in my opinion, since Google is primarly a search engine and visitors aren’t suppose to spend a lot of time on the site.  The visitor is suppose to quickly find what they’re looking for and go to another website.  Spend time worrying about non-search engine sites, not Google.

Yahoo Search Marketing has been switching users over to the new Panama Version since the 4^th Quarter of 2006.  I have had the pleasure of working with the new Panama Version of Yahoo since November 2006.  While not everything is as user-friendly as I would like, it is a great improvement over the older version. 

Let’s start by reviewing a few of the Pros of the new system:

1. One of my favorites is being able to group together like keywords and write one or more Ads for all of them instead of individual Ads for each term.
2. The time it now takes to get items through the editorial review process is normally less than 5 minutes, where before it could take 3 or 4 days.
3. It allows you to be more specific when needing to geographically target a campaign; now you can target individual states.
4. The new Panama version also allows you to set a separate budget for each individual campaign if you desire to do that.
5. Changing from the old system of bid amounts determining ad position to using relevancy (similar to Google) is a plus for evening up the competition for the top positions and better quality for the searcher.
6. Allowing for a longer version of the Ad to appear when your Ads are in one of the preferred positions.

A look at some of the Cons of the new system:

1. The conversion process is one of the biggest Cons.  Regardless of how well you try to follow the instructions prior to the conversion, expect there to be problems once your account has upgraded.  To get as close as you can, you need to make sure that the keywords you want grouped together have the same Ad, including: title, description, and destination URL.  But even doing this does not necessarily mean the system will see the keywords as being similar enough to group them together in the upgrade.
2. There is still no good way to make a lot of changes to your account unless you have at least a gold account.  The bulk upload option is only available to those accounts that spend $6,000 a year or more.
3. You’re still not able to set up schedules for your accounts to run unless you are a Platinum account; spending $80,000 or more a year.
4. Another CON is the amount of negative keywords allowed.  You are only allowed 50 negative keywords at the Account level and another 50 at the Ad Group level.  There are situations where this may not be enough to allow you to filter out unwanted traffic. 

There are more Pros and Cons and I am sure they will all vary depending on the likes and dislikes of each account user.  While I still think Yahoo has a ways to go to make their system friendlier for the normal user, the new Panama Version is a major step in the right direction.

Yahoo has finally wised up and implemented support for a new Meta robots tag that will allow you to “opt-out” from having your Yahoo! Directory title and description show up in the search results.

The tag is called “NOYDIR” or No Yahoo Directory, and can be used as follows:

meta name=”robots” content=”NOYDIR”

or the less common

meta name=”slurp” content=”NOYDIR”

The 2nd tag being specifically for Yahoo’s spider “Slurp“.

This is great news for site owners who feel like they’ve been handcuffed by the Yahoo! Directory editors and their minimally optimized directory listings.

The two biggest stories the past few weeks related to internet marketing and SEO are probably the new tools that Google and Yahoo both rolled out.

Google unveils more links
Within your Google Webmaster Tools account, you can now view/download a much larger scope of incoming links to your website.  In addition, you can view the links to specific pages on your site and generate an outgoing link report as well.  Here’s the official word from Vanessa Fox over at GWT:

You asked, and we listened: We’ve extended our support for querying links to your site to much beyond the link: operator you might have used in the past. Now you can use webmaster tools to view a much larger sample of links to pages on your site that we found on the web. Unlike the link: operator, this data is much more comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded. All you need to do is verify site ownership to see this information. Read the full story

I’ve tested the new link reports out and it doesn’t give you too much information that you probably don’t already have.  In addition, Matt Cutts stated that the reports are by no means 100% of the data available and don’t reflect the true number of links pointing to your site.  He also stated that just because a link is showing up in the report, that it’s not an indicator that the link is counted in the algorithm - it’s a simple report of the links, nothing more.

Yahoo Pipes unveiled
The general scope of “Yahoo Pipes” is the ability to combine RSS/feeds (or mash them together), and then manipulate the data in a way that’s useful for you or your website(s).  It’s basically an RSS masher & re-hasher.  The “pipes” name comes from the Unix pipes that let you combine commands (foreign to this writer).

What Is Pipes? Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line. Read the full story

Nice link from Yahoo Pipes btw… what, you couldn’t figure out how to use Mod Rewrite?

It’ inevitable… you hire a design firm to build you a great website and you expect the site to perform well.  The only problem is, your web designer omitted some meta tags, used too many images, or added some bogus HTML coding to your website.

Let’s go through a few of the more common SEO blunders that designers & newbie SEO’s are responsible for:

• Displaying text as images - Ok, so you thought it would look good to add shadow & flair to each of your page’s headlines or category names.  What you didn’t think of is how that might affect the site’s SEO strategies… If you’re converting good keyword phrases and primary page compenents into graphics, then you’re losing the keyword value.
• Not having enough text/content - Designers like to keep a site clean and pretty a lot of times… this often comes at the expense of content/text.  Unfortunately, it’s the text/content that get the search engine rankings, not the “clean and pretty”.  Make sure each page of your site has sufficient content on it.
• Using the same Titles & Meta tags on every page - Ok, so everyone’s probably done this at least once… you’re lazy, you build a site template w/ a standard Title, Meta description and meta keywords and then you build out the rest of the site w/ the same information.  This is a sure fire way to make sure your pages land in Google’s Supplemental Index (let’s just say it’s not the main Google results you’re use to seeing).  Good SEO’s know that a unique Titles & Meta tags on each page are crucial to achieving success on a search engine optimization program.  Just as bad as using the same information on each page is omitting Meta tags altogether and/or having broken tags on your pages… clean it up folks.

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