DISC in the Media - Visibility Magazine
Summer 2010 - Visibility Magazine
(Original Article reprinted below)
Pick a discipline of study and slap "neuro" on the front end of it. Chances are the new name you've created is an actual discipline being studied somewhere. Go ahead; try this one -- tack "neuro" onto the front end of "marketing". As you may have guessed by now, neuromarketing is an actual discipline and it is in practice all over the world right now. It's not new, but it is gaining attention as the proprietary data piles up, the tools get better, the discipline is fine-tuned, and the ROI results roll in.
But what is neuromarketing, and why should you care?
Neuromarketing is a private endeavor more than an academic discipline, so a clear definition is difficult to come by. Generally speaking neuromarketing is the practice of measuring nervous system response to marketing messages. Tools range from high-end Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans to lower-end measures of heart rate, breathing rate, and "galvanic skin response". More specifically, neuromarketing seeks to measure brain activity to determine which marketing is most effective.
Some people expand the definition to include the use of neuroscience and other behavioral study findings to improve marketing strategies.
The bottom line is that these marketers, and the companies who employ them, believe that better understanding of the brain can lead to more effective marketing strategies.
Why would clients pay for such high-end market research? Over the last decade, several of the findings of various social science disciplines - particularly Behavioral Economics -- have discovered some key things.
Decision-making is a largely irrational act.
People are shockingly bad at predicting their own behavior.
Emotions play a key role in decision-making.
These findings led researchers to begin questioning and testing how people made decisions. One startling and particularly relevant discovery was that even when people wanted to be honest in predicting their behavior they were often wrong, thus shedding doubt on the efficacy of consumer surveys or interviews alone.
Advances in neuroscience, behavioral economics, and neuroeconomics have provided insights into why such discrepancies happen, and neuromarketing has emerged as a field to "see past" the conscious into the unconscious mechanisms that drive consumer decisions.
Predicting Buying Behavior
Savvy businesses and marketers have known for a long time that consumers rarely convert or remember a brand because it's rational to do so. They convert, they remember, they buy because it makes them feel better in some way.
Despite this knowledge, marketing campaigns fail all the time, and these failures can come from the same team that had a win yesterday. Marketing is too often a hit or miss proposition that requires costly experimentation to "get it right".
Even the combination of rigorous market research combined with a savvy marketing team can still produce hit or miss results.
Much of this comes down to what Behavioral Economist Dan Ariely refers to as our "cognitive limitations". We humans are much less rational than we like to believe, and even when marketers and businesses "get" that the way to reach people is to hook their emotions, their own cognitive limitations can get in the way of nailing down the most effective strategy.
Neuromarketers, on the other hand, don't need to intuit anything. They can see past their own cognitive limitations, and the cognitive limitations of others, by looking directly at the brain's response.
How They Do It
Most of the top neuromarketing firms that have made their techniques known to the public use a combination of electroencephalography (EEG) and eye tracking. Common across the bigger firms are the measurements of three key markers:
Attention
Retention
Emotion
As a test subject views a commercial or an ad, eye tracking follows where the subject is looking, and EEG gives a simultaneous "view" of brain activity in various regions by measuring brain wave activity across the scalp.
This gives the neuromarketer a view of what is going on in the brain as a subject views an ad and what parts of an ad garner the highest overall engagement. When brain activity is simultaneously high in regions of attention, memory, and positive emotion, this is considered to be a positive highly engaged response. It means their interest is peaked, they are paying attention, they are emotionally engaged, and they are committing what they are seeing to memory so they can recall it later. This is the gold marketers are looking for.
Why Should Web Marketers Care?
Neuromarketing is the latest marketing rock-star on the scene. It's interesting, it's effective, it's controversial, and according to its proponents the ROI results are positive. Interest in the techniques is growing rapidly. CEOs are calling in neuromarketing experts to their business conventions. Nobel prize winning neuroscientists are joining neuromarketing firm advisory boards. Speakers on the topic are being called to present to standing room only audiences.
This doesn't mean that every web marketer, or business owner, need return to college to get a neuroscience degree, but it does mean that one should at minimum be aware of the practice in order to interpret findings or to be prepared to work with a neuromarketing firm formally. Understanding what's behind the wires and lab coats will make it much easier for you to assimilate findings into your own marketing strategies.
At present, cost barriers will keep most businesses from access to neuromarketing tools and qualified experts. Accessibility will no doubt open to a wider audience as tools become more readily available, training more widespread, and the technology advances. In the meantime, businesses and web marketers can still learn from the findings of various brain study disciplines.
Here are some tips derived from neuromarketing to get you started.
Usability - Usability has already been aided by eye tracking studies for years. Eye tracking data triangulated with brain experience can offer even stronger data about how users are engaging with a site to improve website usability and user experience.
A study published in Feb 2010 by Foviance looked at "web stress" and found that subjects were likely to feel the most stress during the 'search' and 'checkout' stages. Poor usability in these areas increased user stress significantly. This may seem like a "no-brainer" to experienced web marketers, but such formal studies can facilitate creative-to-client communication and decision-making about where to focus usability improvements.
Design Elements - Optimization of website design elements such as logos, or off-site banner ads can be facilitated by neuromarketing research. Optimization through collecting brain response data to specific design elements reduces reliance on subjective opinion and can make the decision of where to place a logo, or which version of a logo to use, or even the size of a logo on a web page, more precise.
Marketers or business owners without access to neuromarketing tools can still use collected public propriety data to enhance design elements. According to various data, throw out dark backgrounds and smiling faces. Lighter backgrounds and enigmatic facial expressions capture attention better.
Copy - Copy matters! From font to message, various studies show that copy that is you-centric, emotionally engaging, visually easy to read, and cognitively easy to think about will be most effective. Copywriters should become familiar with theories like "cognitive fluency", and business owners should become familiar with exceptional copywriters!
Your Users Prefer Now - Both behavioral and brain studies have shown that most people will choose to have something now rather than wait, even if the reward is larger if they wait. Whatever you're marketing online, be sure to streamline the conversion process to make it easier for your users to be rewarded sooner rather than later.
Just Another Tool in the Box
Neuromarketing is not a discipline that can stand alone to craft a winning marketing strategy any more than design can stand without SEO, or content can stand without usability. It's another tool in the box.
The same holds true for each "finding" from neuromarketing, or any other behavioral study. Even if all the data says one thing, context matters. There are times when what works flies in the face of data, or maybe it works because it flies in the face of data.
It's important to note that neuromarketing may have a leg up by way of direct insight into brain response, but without a brand or design or ad or commercial to start with there is nothing to measure. Creative minds will still provide the ideas and the deliverables to be measured and improved upon.
Neuromarketing, along with all the other behavioral study disciplines, can help businesses and marketers glean more insight into their consumers' wants and needs. These are tools every savvy professional would do well to add to their toolbox.
March 2009 - Visibility Magazine
(Original Article reprinted below)
SEO professionals have long debated whether one can ascertain and benefit from an ideal keyword frequency, density, and distribution (FDD) in SEO copywriting. Some assert that FDD was more heavily weighted by SEs in the past than today. The SEO people at DISC have not found a convincing refutation to the argument that
• Search engine algorithms must assign some weight to the FDD of key phrases and conceptually related phrases;
• SEO copywriters do write in key phrases, with or without an FDD ideal in mind;
• strategically repeated key phrases in SEO writing does not take a lot more time than producing good copywriting anyway;
• therefore, having at least a loose FDD guideline, preferably one supported by FDD reverse engineering, is better than having none at all.
Even if FDD accounts for only 25% of a page's search engine position, that 25% is relatively easily controlled, thus making FDD deliver high ROI. And what if FDD accounts for more like 50%? The verbal components of a site's CMS-SEO can be written correctly once and for perpetuity. If a given page's copywriting does not have to be changed frequently, the ROI is even better.
Reverse Engineering FDD
In theory, one can reverse engineer FDD by compiling data from equivalent, top-ranked sites, and then using spreadsheets (perhaps helped by software like GRKda) to derive normative values. Given enough data, one can arrive at a useful, if not precise, FDD for all verbal parts of a web page. (Explaining how to factor out PageRank, number of incoming links, age of the site, internal links, key phrase distribution in link anchor text, and several other confounding variables exceeds the scope of this essay). DISC has done this reverse engineering yearly for about 10 years. In the early years of SEO, there were less confounding variables because SEs weighed fewer off-page factors than they do today. You can imagine that the typical repetition of a phrase when humans write about a topic would not change much because human brains and the deep grammar of language have not changed much, if at all. DISC's research confirms this logical supposition.
Other SEOs have reverse engineered FDD, and come up with widely varying results. DISC has found published estimates of ideal density ranging from 2% to 10% (not counting wild outliers), with an average in the 4% to 6% range.
This percentage applies to one key phrase, so a related question is how many phrases to target on a page. After all, if you're targeting six phrases, each of which will occupy about 6% of the text, then more than a third of the text would have to be key phrases. Although one can and should include shorter, more competitive phrases within one long-tail phrase, this simple math suggests a practical limit to the number of key phrases to target per page.
Even if reverse engineering could arrive at a precise and unchanging FDD - and it can't - SEO copywriters should still diversify around that FDD when writing several pages in a web site, which means that an imprecise formula still serves the practical goal of guiding SEO copywriting.
Concept Clustering and Natural Language Algorithms
Search engines strive continuously to make their ranking algorithms mimic humans' understanding of language. This effort has produced such terminology as latent semantic indexing, term vectoring, concept clustering, concept space, data clustering, term-document matrix, and the more general natural language processing. The upshot is that increasingly the SEs rank a page not merely by the occurrence of the searched term, but also by the amount and kind of conceptually related phrases. In theory, a search for "car" could produce a top-ranked page that contains no mention of "car" but plenty of "auto," "automobile," and even "Chevy." Would occurrences of "engine" or "gas mileage" also help? While there are ways to determine what phrases the SEs link in such clusters, and thus what other phrases one should write into a page, the time/effort/cost in doing this research for each page is high, and in the end one would do what one should do regardless of this research: write rich, relevant copy that contains a variety of key phrases which augment the core ones and which ring bells of relevance in human readers. After all, natural language algorithms aim to mimic human language processes. In theory, the day will come when just good writing will constitute by far the single best rule of SEO copywriting.
Concept clustering makes reverse engineering so much more difficult that, arguably, the best guides to FDD have to based on research done in the late ‘90s and early 2000s.
Human Art and Search Engine Science
What practical, cost-effective actions can SEO copywriters take away from this web of intricacies surrounding FDD and its ostensible foundation on reverse engineering? As with any art, in performing SEO copywriting according to FDD, discipline and experience are foundational: A scientifically researched FDD is the sketch or the music score. Upon that foundation, the heights of excellence and effectiveness in SEO copywriting are limited only by the artistry of the writer, as he or she strives to please human readers and the increasingly human algorithms. An SEO Einstein would beat the best of us every day.
December 2008 - Visibility Magazine
One-Time vs. Ongoing SEO
(Original Article reprinted below)
True expertise consists largely of knowing what should be done immediately, later, or not at all. Of course SEO - and all marketing - should be ordered by ROI projections, but for most budgets the cost-effectiveness of top-priority, one-time SEO is so high that the decision to proceed moves quickly from the dawn of understanding to the high noon of action.
This article aims to
- help web marketing managers prioritize SEO by differentiating between one-time, high-ROI tasks and worthy procedures that can be budgeted over months or years. I will also briefly situate these priorities within other marketing channels, according to ROI;
- help buyers of SEO services ascertain what should be covered by one-time fees vs. monthly retainers;
- help my professional peers sell SEO services by providing clear rationales for prioritizing clients' and prospects' budgets within the current climate in which "liquidity" is a prayer and firms are altering their marketing budgets.
The time and cost estimates below, which factor into ROI and thus prioritization, apply to one web site and assume professional knowledge of how to perform the tasks. A business that first has to learn, for example, the many rules and steps of SEO technical reports and CMS-SEO will need many more hours than estimated below. Even a larger business with a good in-house SEO team may benefit from contracting for training from an SEO firm that has years of varied experience, much like getting a second or third opinion from doctors. Such training and consulting will increase costs, but those costs apply equally to the spectrum of SEO tasks, thus preserving the ROI-based prioritization below. Finally, the time estimates below are minimums; in most cases you can spend more time or money profitably. For example, after setting up webmaster services accounts at Google, Yahoo, and Bing, you can and usually should spend additional time analyzing the reports to find new SEO opportunities. But here too, this extra time applies to most of the SEO jobs equally.
The time estimates are based on DISC's costs for these services, which are derived from our records of time spent on past jobs. DISC determines our prices by reasonable profit on time required, not by what the market will bear. However, DISC has been too busy lately to complete our annual review of average time needed on SEO tasks, which means that most of the time estimates below are on the low side. Also, many SEO firms don't price their services on average time required, but instead on what the market will bear, so that the time estimates below multiplied by hourly rates don't necessarily reflect the prices you will find in the SEO market.
Partly because of space limitations in this article, I don't include the deployment of social networking web sites or user-generated content, though one could argue that these activities can help web sites' SEO.
The SEO tasks below are listed in diminishing order of priority, though your situation may call for minor reordering of the list.
ONE-TIME, HIGHLY COST-EFFECTIVE SEO
The tasks below are mostly one-time jobs, assuming that you relegate all follow-up reporting to a distinct category, like the "Periodic SEO Technical and ROI Reporting" in the ongoing SEO section below. Some tasks, like dealing with XML sitemaps, may require updates within a year, but for the most part the tasks below can be done once and left as is for at least one year.
Remove SEO Technical Blockages
Detecting and removing a site's technical impediments to the search engines is relatively quick and inexpensive, so this is priority one. Over the past eleven years in which DISC has been performing SEO, about 75% of new clients came to us with significant web site and server blockages to the search engines. Roughly 30% have had substantially harmful ones. Repairing such blockages is usually quick and easy, requiring an average of 5 hours to remove, though a few CMS's and server platforms may require closer to 15 hours to correct. In any case, SEO technical problems imperil all SEO, justifying priority one. Assuming that your team knows all the tests that should be run, the first time would take about 12 hours, and with practice would come down to about 8 hours.
Estimated average hours needed: 17 average; 27 max.
CMS & Database SEO
CMS (Content Management System) & Database SEO is almost always the most cost-effective SEO - or search engine marketing of any kind - that a firm can do, and it is performed once for perpetuity. Visibility Magazine published two of my articles on this crucial subject: see the December 2007 and March 2008 print editions or view them online at www.visibilitymagazine.com/issues.aspx. In short, CMS SEO entails programming your CMS to pull keywords and phrases from your product or information database into all web-page parts relevant to SEO, except for the body copy (though you can automate some body copy as well). Because CMS SEO performs a lot of SEO automatically and treats an unlimited number of pages, and because its cost drops to zero after one implementation, it is by far the most cost-effective SEO tactic after all SEO technical impediments are removed. Regarding time required, this is hard to say because it could take weeks of steady work to gather and vet information about all of the precise 25+ CMS-SEO rules, which is a reason to use an SEO firm that knows these rules. If your team knows the rules in the first place, then checking your site according to them and implementing them would require a rough average of 20 hours, though there's a broad and flat bell curve sloping from either side of that average. Some SEO firms price this service by value, not by average time required, so that prices are often well over $5000 prior to re-programming your CMS. (DISC prices this service partly by value, not time, because so much time has gone into ascertaining and writing the rules; our cost is $2625, not including web site reprogramming according to the rules).
Estimated average hours needed: 35 (assuming complete knowledge of CMS-SEO rules prior); 60 max.
Set-up Webmaster Services/Tools Accounts
Google, Yahoo, and Bing offer free webmaster services or tools to help web marketers manage and assess web site integration with the indexes. These services produce reports on your site's ongoing SEO technical status, inbound links, PageRank, XML sitemap feeds, rankings, and other useful information. Over the years, web marketers repeatedly requested these webmaster services, testifying to their value. A competent professional setting up and then actively using these tools will require about 10 hours. Problems reported by the tools would require a rough average of 6 hours to resolve, with a broad and flat bell curve sloping from either side of that average.
Estimated average hours needed: 16 (10 if all SEO technical report problems were resolved previously).
IYP and Local SEO
IYPs, such as SuperPages.com, are rapidly gaining traction and can deliver superb ROI. Much of the ROI comes from the fact that the top search engines use IYP databases (and other databases) to populate their rapidly growing and improving local search results. Registering with many of these databases is free, while some cost a little and some try to up-sell you to programs with laughably negative ROI. Signing up for the free databases requires about 6 hours (assuming you know all of the places worthy of registration), and I would allocate about 6 more hours to reviewing options for enhanced listings.
Estimated average hours needed: 12.
SEO'd Video Marketing
Assuming you already have one or more half decent videos, your team should place them in your site near relevant keyworded text. You should also post the videos on the top ten or so video sites, filling all available meta-data with relevant keywords. This task requires about 4 hours, plus 5 hours per video, with economies of scale if handling many videos. Keyword research done prior to this work, which I recommend, adds another 10 hours at minimum. ROI reporting is not included here, for such reporting is part of a broader, ongoing reporting task described below.
Estimated average hours needed: 4 (14 with keyword research), plus 5 per video.
Add Social Bookmarking Tags to Your Site
While this tactic often does little or nothing, we've seen it do plenty, as have many other web marketers, and it takes about 2 hours to set up.
Estimated average hours needed: 2.
Initial SEO Copywriting
More extensive SEO copywriting is in the "Ongoing SEO" section below. Even initial SEO copywriting takes considerable time and expertise to do the prerequisite keyword research - at least 20 hours and often much more - and SEO copywriting is a demanding art and science that requires excellent language skills and experience, and averages about 2 hours per page. However, in most cases your site will gain rapid and enduring search engine positions, which justifies the placement of this tactic within the category of one-time, highly cost-effective SEO. For many web sites, the home page and main category pages change infrequently enough that most of your SEO copywriting can be done once for at least one year. If all of your site's crucial information pages change frequently and substantially, then this task is part of "Database SEO and Ongoing SEO Copywriting" in the "Ongoing SEO" section below.
Estimated average hours needed: 20 for keyword research; 2 per page.
Produce a Link Page and Link Instructions Page
People are much less likely to link to your site without prompting than they were in the early years of the web, but some people may still do so, and at any time you may form partnerships or reciprocal link agreements for which these two pages will prove cost-effective in ensuring ideal code and language in inbound links. The link instruction page should provide all instructions, code, two or more language options, and optional logo, and encouragement of prospective linkers. Some examples: www.sonicsolutionsllc.com/lets-link.html, www.the-homestore.com/letslink.html, www.framed-arts.com/lets-link.html.
Estimated average hours needed: 4 to design and write the pages and SEO links; 3 to build the pages.
What about Submissions to Search Engines?
Provided that your site has some incoming links or has set up webmaster services, you don't need to submit to top search engine indexes. Submitting to the Open Directory or Yahoo requires about 4 hours to do optimally. (Old-timer SEO pros may recall the many exacting and nuanced rules for ideal submission to directories.)
Estimated average hours needed: 4, but often not needed.
ONGOING SEO
Database SEO and Ongoing SEO Copywriting
This entails SEO writing within text fields of your product or information database and within other information pages beyond the pages covered by the initial SEO copywriting described above. Obviously the time required depends on the number of database items and information pages. Keyword research to inform SEO copywriting requires a minimum of 20 hours, and can go much higher, depending on the breadth of topics. SEO copywriting of pages or database entries averages 2 hours per page. Your budget and revenue capacities determine how much time or money to invest per month.
Estimated average hours needed: Depends on your revenue potential and budget.
Periodic SEO Technical and ROI Reporting
Some of the SEO technical tests should be run monthly, some quarterly, and some yearly. This requires about 20 hours per year. The extent of optimum monthly and yearly ROI reporting depends heavily on the size and diversity of the web site and its revenues or its value of conversions. Setting up monthly, quarterly, and yearly templates for ROI reporting so that you accumulate clear, actionable trends requires at least 15 hours, and can profitably occupy well over 50 hours for large web sits with diverse content and offerings. Running and digesting the ROI reports monthly requires at least 4 hours per month or 48 hours per year. (Some web site dashboards cost over $10,000 per year, and the sky's the limit on integrated business intelligence packages). Reporting may seem like an optional expense, but consider that many risks and opportunities, both in SEO technicalities and in changing market behavior, exist for you right now in the form of probabilities, and managerial accountants often factor probabilities into valuations of capital investments and business entities (investment bankers notwithstanding).
Estimated average hours needed: Depends on your revenue potential and budget, with a minimum of 83 hours in the first year and 48 hours in subsequent years.
SEO'd Public Relations
Time required and results are similar to those of "Initial SEO Copywriting" above, except that I would double to 4 hours the time needed to write each SEO'd press release page, and you should probably purchase the distribution services of a web press release firm for a few hundred dollars.
Estimated average hours needed: 20 for keyword research to cover all future press releases within a general topic (unless this was done for SEO already), and 4 per press release, plus roughly $250 to $450 per release for a good web PR distribution service.
SEO'd Blog Marketing
It's easy to blog; it's hard to blog profitably. Good blogging takes time. Setting up the blog and producing a plan and policies requires about 30 hours. Keyword research, if it hasn't been done for SEO already, adds a minimum of 20 hours. Monthly blogging time will take a minimum of 20 hours. Even medium sized firms hire full-time bloggers. Most businesses have plenty of higher priority SEO to do before investing in blogging.
Estimated average hours needed: 20 for keyword research to cover all future press releases within a general topic (unless this was done for SEO already); minimum of 20 per month for ongoing blogging.
Make Videos and Then Place and SEO Them
SEO'd video marketing of existing videos is discussed and estimated above. DISC does not offer video production services, but I imagine that production costs can go very high if you strive for Madison Avenue quality. The range of time and costs for video production is so varied that I can't offer a useful average, but I would guess that the rock-bottom minimum is 6 hours per video.
Estimated average hours needed: 6 (16 with keyword research); 5 per video for SEO'd placement; minimum of 6 per video for production.
Link Campaign
A link campaign done right takes lots of time and has relatively low ROI. It is required for a new web site to get on the search engines' radar at all, and a minimum job is 10 hours. If you have a top-down marketing budget with some elbow room remaining, you could allocate a few hours per month for link campaigning. There are diminishing marginal returns, so that, for example, most firms have many higher-priority SEO and other web marketing tasks than spending ten hours per month trying to increase one's incoming links from, say, 1000 to 1100.
Estimated average hours needed: in addition to the "Link Page and Link Instructions Page" described in the one-time SEO section above, 10 minimum; monthly allocations beyond that depend on your revenue potential, budget, and the quantity and quality of existing inbound links.
PRIORITY OF SEO WITHIN ALL MARKETING
This topic deserves its own article, if not a book, but a few salient points are in order.
A usability critique for conversion rate optimization is often more cost-effective than any SEO task. You can achieve at least 80% of ideal usability without costly usability testing. A 2007 ClickZ.com article trumpets testing and derides any usability re-engineering that doesn't perform expensive testing, but that argument ignores ROI considerations for small- and medium-sized businesses, many of which can easily double or triple conversion rates merely by applying the many well-established usability rules. Of course your budget and revenues may justify methodical usability testing.
My firm has produced extensive affiliate marketing plans with ROI scenarios for several clients, and I can tell you that the ROI can be good only if you are ready to spend a minimum of 30 hours in set-up and 25 hours per week.
In theory, the day will come when the costs of doing SEO successfully will be on par with non-web marketing, like TV/cable, radio, magazine and newspaper, direct mail, telemarketing, etc. So far, ignorance and fear about SEO - and a lack of adoption due in part to under-qualified or unethical practitioners poisoning the SEO pond - have left many business fields with plenty of room for superior ROI. Also, my June 2008 article in Visibility Magazine (www.visibilitymagazine.com/issues.aspx) discusses the enduring shortage of qualified SEO people, which means that there are several years remaining for firms to beat their competition in SEO and to exceed the ROI of other marketing channels, despite the rising sophistication and costs of competent SEO work.
This article's argument makes clear that web marketing managers should put on the top of their priority lists all of the one-time, highly cost-effective SEO, and budget the ongoing SEO over months and years.
December 2008 - Visibility Magazine
When it Comes to Social Media, Think Tribal
(Original Article reprinted below)
Here's a radical idea. Social media is not new, at least not entirely. The technology that delivers and facilitates it is new. The social part is as old as humanity, dating all the way back to when we lived in small tribes, and even though we no longer live in small tribes, human design is based on that early environment. Evolutionary Psychologists (also known as Darwinian Psychologists) propose that all human social behavior can be traced back to evolutionary adaptations. From reciprocal altruism to gossip, it is all driven by the purpose of keeping our species alive. Social interaction between humans is an innate, powerful, and sustaining force.
When viewed through this lens, it becomes difficult to shrug off social media as a passing fad. The various tools can surely rise and fade with surprising rapidity (remember Friendster?), but the premise that drives it is ancient. Understanding the social premise that drives Social Media can help search engine marketers and businesses sort out the fads from the staples, as well as lay the groundwork for harnessing and leveraging it.
Social Media is a loose term for all things "social" on the internet to include blogs, wikis, video sharing (YouTube, Google Video), podcasts, social networking sites (Myspace, Facebook), picture sharing (Flickr), social bookmarking (Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit), and now even social browsers like Flock.
So Social refers to the ability to interact, and Media refers to the tools. This article focuses primarily on the "social" part of the equation.
Science has arrived at a few models to explain human social behavior, from Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs to evolutionary psychology's position that everything we do is driven by the need to carry on the genes. Either theory pertains, and neither needs to be understood at an academic level to demystify Social Media. Just think tribal. Social activity and the underlying emotions that drive it are a means to an end, the tools that execute the logic of survival. Status, leadership, power, affiliation, reciprocal altruism, cooperation, sharing of knowledge, trading of goods, pair-bonding, and even aggression are all part of the social milieu that help a group work toward that same survival end game.
It is at once deliciously complex and beautifully simple.
How Tribal Behavior Translates on the Internet
Up until Social Media, the internet was largely impersonal, random, and intimidatingly large. It was difficult to know which businesses were legitimate, which sources of information were accurate, and generally who could be trusted. Humans generally don't take well to such conditions. A child in a new school will feel anxious until a new peer group is secured. Potential peer groups will remain suspicious of the newcomer until his/her character is revealed so that they can determine what the newcomer can offer. Once accepted, the peer group shares important information to help the newest member navigate his or her new environment. This sharing of knowledge, while imperfect, is efficient, and a form of reciprocal altruism. Even information that seems frivolous, such as gossip, has its purpose by helping to make determinations about what characters to invest time in.
At the base of this is a powerful drive to connect that is felt. Humans feel a strong need to connect with others to make sense of their world, to not feel lost in a sea of infinite possibilities and to share in mutual benefit. Though the underlying motivation is survival, the conscious emotions are social.
Social Media tools transformed the internet from an unfamiliar, socially disorganized, and unwieldy landscape to a humanly manageable series of social circles. From that point of view, the advance of Social Media is inevitable, not the next hipster flash in the pan. The kid at the new school has established his peer group, and thus carried out evolution's plan.
Social Media offers tools for people to establish social groups, and to behave online much as they do offline. For example:
-
Social Networking establishes social circles, personal character and status.
- Social Bookmarking allows for sharing of knowledge and gossip.
- Blogging facilitates all of the above.
Yet, how does this help a search engine marketer determine what Social Media tools to leverage? How does this help a big business figure out how to market in this sought after arena?
Thinking Tribal to Leverage Social Media
First, here is an example of what would happen if a business failed to understand basic human social interactions in the real world.
It's a Wednesday afternoon in Ms. New Mommy's house, and she has invited some of her friends over to share an afternoon of coffee, conversation, and mutual admiration of their plump-faced, wide-eyed progeny. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a wild-eyed man busts into the house wearing a sandwich board, wielding a bullhorn and shouting into it, "USED AIRPLANE TIRES, 50% OFF!! BUY, BUY, BUY!!"
Absurd, isn't it? After the bewilderment of the women wore off, chances are this guy's next potential customers would be his cell-mates at the local lockup. It would be hard to find a marketer or business that would be foolish enough to try this tactic, and all the reasons why it wouldn't work hardly need to be deconstructed. Yet, online marketing in Social Media sometimes takes such a counterintuitive approach. When Facebook hit the big time, businesses were hungry to break in and market there. They wanted, in essence, to crash the party screaming, "BUY, BUY, BUY!" and when the Facebook tribe responded with active ignoring, banishment, and even public shaming, some marketers sat back in startled confusion. What went wrong? They failed to think tribal.
The marketers who succeeded in leveraging Facebook understood that particular social arena and anticipated social behavior within it. That initial understanding enabled them to create tools that would be, not just accepted, but popular. One such application, ILike, launched a start up into success.
There is no doubt that a group of mothers are consumers as much as they are friends, wives, and mothers. Successful offline marketers long ago figured out how to think tribal. They understand when and where and how to best communicate to a group. They ask questions and respond by providing products that are desired by a particular group, whether it be for status, basic survival, efficiency, protection, or exchange of knowledge. Successful offline marketers understand human nature, and online marketers need to as well to leverage Social Media.
To best demystify and thus understand how to navigate and engage with Social Media then, simply take out the "media" part, or in other words, translate it into offline social correlations. In this way, the question no longer becomes, "Should my company (or my client's company) have a blog or videos on YouTube?", but rather, "What Social Media tools are the best fit for communicating with my consumers?" or, "What should I bring to the party?" A business must first answer such questions before they send out the tech troops to develop widgets, shoot videos, or set up a blog.
Why the Tribe Won't Let You Ignore It
Another mistake created by wrong-angle thinking is the dismissal of Social Media altogether. Failure to understand it, leverage it, or make direct and immediate return on investment leads many businesses to ignore Social Media. If they can't understand it, they would prefer to leave it out of their marketing arsenal. A business can no more expect to ignore Social Media than could a tribesman ignore the people standing in front of him who wished to make a trade of goods. To behave in this way would have resulted in any number of social punishments. We witness that very same behavior online when a powerful blogger speaks out negatively against a company, or when a group of users on Digg "bury" a story from a user that isn't "with the program".
Think of it another way. For the better part of history, trade was a face-to-face transaction. Merchants interacted with their customers in small markets, or village stores, and trade was as social as any other activity of the day. Customers shared their knowledge of merchants an goods with their social circle. They bargained and bartered. Merchants got to know their customers and introduced them to new goods that could enhance their lives. Sly merchants could get away with fooling their customers for a time in this small social context, but not for long, and would soon be driven out of town. Honest merchants, friendly merchants, and steadfast merchants were able to sustain and prosper their business over time.
The internet marketplace now resembles a virtual village. Customers can once again share knowledge and reputation of merchants with ease with their social group and beyond. So the snake oil salesman can put up a good front, but will have a hard time sustaining business. Businesses that make the mistake of thinking of the internet as endless and faceless, fail to think tribal, and they may pay the price for it. Take a recent example straight out of the blogosphere where a semi-prominent webzine was discovered clipping copyrighted pictures from a popular blogger. The webzine, even though they were bigger, ended up in a rapid and public back pedal to try to salvage their reputation and readership. As with the small village, those merchants who engage with their customers with transparency, honesty, and friendliness, who play the social game, will gain a leg up on the competition for the simple reason that humans are social, and now the internet is too.
Understanding the social matrix upon which all human interactions are based, including merchant to customer, results in an organic understanding of what questions a business needs to answer to determine how to leverage Social Media and the virtual tribes it has created. In short, behave with your customers online as you would as a merchant in a small village.
June 2008 - Visibility Magazine
Supply and Demand of Literacy in SEM
(Original Article reprinted below)
Excellence in SEM/SEO requires excellence in language and literacy. The current shortage of search marketing talent is based partly on rapid growth in demand, but it also reflects serious cultural and ultimately economic priorities in the US. This problem is and will long remain an opportunity for highly literate employees and prospective employees. Conversely, this shortage of supply will remain a problem for employers for several years. This article elucidates the problem, and proposes both immediate and long-term solutions that will help everyone, except, perhaps, the highest priced SEM firms. The solutions will likely contribute to the prosperity of the countries that embrace them.
The Wages of Ignorance
Ignorance is profitable - other people's. In keeping with the inexorable law of supply and demand, the current shortage of well-qualified SEM workers results in relatively high prices and profits for suppliers of all forms of SEM (to the extent that many SEM firms price by "what the market will bear," rather than by fair profit on labor). On the other side of that same coin, this shortage increases businesses' costs for SEM services and employees, or else incurs opportunity costs due to unavailable or under-qualified (because under-paid) SEM workers. In the global market place, this shortage affects the US economy and blocks one avenue towards maximizing US exports to English speaking countries. While a shortage of qualified labor is to be expected in a rapidly growing profession, the alarming deficits in US adult literacy amplify this shortage and retard the process of increasing the supply.
Spelling Success in SEM
Linguistic aptitudes inform all SEM activities. Keyword research, SEO copywriting, PPC, naming products (or articles, or videos, or whatever populates a web site's database of offerings), URL writing (and all other CMS-SEO), terse and actionable ROI reports and recommendations - if hands are hovering over a keyboard when working on a web site or its marketing, the linguistic acumen of the mind connected to those hands holds the key to maximum web-based profits.
In a 2003 article about hiring versus outsourcing SEM, I prioritized and elucidated the skills required of SEM employees, and those priorities remain the same today. In order of importance, that list is: (1) linguistic aptitude ["SEM is primarily a linguistic activity, wherein you match the query language of searchers with the language of your advertising and web site through the nexus of search engines. ( . . . ) Linguistic aptitude alone is not enough, but is absolutely required"], (2) research skills, (3) brains and education, (4) technical aptitudes and experience, and (5) SEM experience. In 2003, so few people had solid SEM experience that, in the interest of practical solutions, I placed it last in the list. Today I would place it . . . last on the list, or maybe fourth if one is hiring only for SEO keyword research and copywriting.
Some Examples
One might argue that my background in teaching literature at a university during most of the 1990s and my firm's employees' extraordinary language aptitudes prejudice my views, and to an extent I'm guilty as charged, but I hope that the following hypothetical illustrations will indicate just how thoroughly language proclivities pervade SEM labor.
- A recent business major graduate bids on "art supplies" in a PPC campaign, and does pretty well, but weeks later he learns that a competitor's English major thought from the outset to exclude "martial art supplies." That kind of little oversight, multiplied many times, adds up to tens of thousands of dollars of wasted click costs in the PPC campaign. The business major is later found reading his first book in two years, What Color is Your Parachute?
- A company's brilliant off-shore web programmer has learned from an SMX search marketing conference how to open large, database-driven web sites' URLs to search engine spiders and to pull keywords from the database into the meta-tags. But a competitor's web programmer, who grew up in Cambridge (US or UK) and is an avid reader, has the linguistic propensity to realize that she can pull keywords into sub-headers within all product pages' body copy, and, in an act of programming poetry, she even writes a paragraph at the bottom of each page in which she programmatically pulls database keywords into sentences without compromising the grammatical correctness of the writing in all of the pages. She was also sure to put the important keyword "color", not "colour", in the appropriate HTML titles of her US web site. The Cambridge programmer enjoys a huge holiday bonus because her site gets tons of relevant, organic search engine traffic and sales, and her employer reinvests some profits in other employees as well as vendors in its supply chain.
- An account manager at an SEO firm writes a superb executive summary in a quarterly ROI report. The client's CEO reads it (and the well written email it was attached to), is impressed, and, after all, feels comfortable paying the firm to do a lot more SEO copywriting on vital web pages.
If you have seen the in-process Excel spread sheets that emerge from a couple of days of professional keyword research, you know just how vast is the linguistic terrain one must explore to unearth the handful of the most searched yet winnable phrases that are relevant to the client's market. Viewing only the relatively short, final lists of phrases aimed at one web page per list fails to reveal the strategy by which, for example, the SEO employee selected the best two phrases and the best four single keywords all within one selected phrase. In this area, as in the meticulous yet inspired SEO copywriting, there exists no upper limit of excellence in the expression of disciplined verbal artistry. An SEO Einstein would beat even the best of us every day.
Just the Stats, Mam
While I suspect that governments are not good educators, I was startled to see where the US ranks globally in enrollment and in education spending as a percentage of GDP, including both governmental and non-governmental spending. According to the Economist's 2008 Pocket World in Figures, the US is not ranked in the top twenty-five in either category. Curiously, there are no statistics on US literacy reported in that guide, while there are for many other countries. The most recent US government supplied statistics are for 2003, and it's a good bet that with increasing costs and stagnant wages, never mind a recession, the US is headed downhill in this department.
At best, US literacy rates are average when compared to other developed countries. (See http://www.steamthing.com/2007/12/is-literacy-dec.html.)
According to The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/health.asp), the most recent comprehensive study of literacy in US adults, only 13-15% of adults were proficient across three measures of literacy, while roughly 50% were intermediate, and about 35% fell into the basic and below basic ranges. The Education Testing Service (makers of the SAT and other tests) predicts that average levels of literacy in adults will decrease by about 5% by 2030. While education matters, with literacy levels increasing as levels of education increase, literacy levels declined between 1992 and 2003 more for college graduates than for high school educated or below. Literacy levels averaged across three areas had declined by 6% for college graduates between 1992 and 2003.
With high demand for Search Engine Marketing expertise that requires English language acumen, those jobs are fetching high salaries. A quick search of http://www.careerbuilders.com revealed hundreds of postings for jobs related to the search engine marketing industry with starting salaries averaging about $50k, while management level starting salaries ranged from $70-$120k. This reveals a great opportunity for college graduates with high literacy skills.
Demand for SEM workers is likely to stay high while supply of well qualified workers remains low due to declining literacy rates in the US. Ignorance is profitable - for a few.
Solutions for SEM Workers and Employers
A problem as vast and cultural as declining literacy deserves, and no doubt gets, whole books and dissertations. Meanwhile, I broach a few solutions for both SEM workers and employers.
Solutions for SEM workers and trainees: (1) Actually read one of those grammar and style guides that colleges (used to) require - the good ones are not at all boring if one likes language. (2) Read good books. Thomas Jefferson wrote that "The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers" --and blogs. (3) If still in college, elect and exert yourself in literature and writing classes. (4) Practice writing -- in journals, in considered emails to friends and family, in fiction, in op-ed pieces, in anything. And yes, you definitely get credit for writing good blogs.
Solutions for employers: (1) Hire SEM employees with strong and proven language backgrounds. (2) Ask for several very different kinds of writing samples before hiring. (3) Look for verbally gifted employees to promote to SEM positions. (4) Contribute to employees' continuing humanities education. (5) Support higher education, through votes, cash, or, failing that, cocktail conversations and pillow talk.
March 2008 - Visibility Magazine
CMS & Database SEO Guide
Part 2: Site-wide URL and Code Issues
Second of a Two-Part Article
(Original Article reprinted below)
CMS (content management system) & database SEO entails programming your CMS to pull keywords and phrases from your product or information database into all web-page parts relevant to SEO, except for body copy. The first installment of this two-part article, published in the December edition of Visibility, situated CMS SEO within the steps of a complete SEO job, discussed database and site design issues, and explained per-page rules of CMS SEO. This second installment conveys an intellectual attitude helpful in solving CMS SEO problems, and it addresses such site-wide CMS SEO issues as Ajax, IFrames, breadcrumb trails, product sorting systems, and much more.
The December installment concluded: "Programming your CMS to pull keywords into your pages may require a week of skilled labor, but you end up with an intelligent SEO machine that works for you in perpetuity. True, the resulting SEO is not as good as careful manual work - which should be done in addition - but the ROI escalates over months and years because your SEO costs in this area drop to zero."
At the risk of sounding self-serving, I suggest that, unless you have a long history of research, practice, measurement, and reflection, you should consult with an experienced SEO professional when dealing with site-wide CMS SEO, though this article will resolve many common problems for you. One or two wrong decisions in this area can do serious damage or prevent serious profit.
How to Think about CMS SEO
Page-level CMS SEO can be summarized with brief rules of thumb, but site-wide code and platform issues in SEO are so varied and often so complex and contingent on context that we should begin by establishing a general perspective that will help you to think your way towards solutions to unique and future problems. In all of your SEO work, imagine that the search engines are asking you to be a good librarian, and are providing database rules for classification and taxonomy. Your job is to play by those rules. Deviation from the rules may work but at the cost of increased risk. Moreover, black-hat tactics usually take as much time and/or money to implement as do the more enduring, low-risk, white-hat tactics. In any one case, shady tactics may be countervailed by legitimate tactics, thus creating the illusion that the shady tactics worked, when in fact they hurt a little, and may suddenly hurt a lot more in the future. If you're a good "librarian" who uses legitimate SEO conservatively, your SEO investment will survive the likes of Google dances and pull in years of handsome returns.
For example, I've seen successful use of the <noframes> tag for stuffing links to spider food pages on a site without frames, but why risk it when you can accomplish the same ends using legitimate tactics with little or no additional cost? A DHTML link, when clicked, can instantly reveal more good text below the link, which is a useful design tactic, but since this tactic breaks the rule of making all text visible to both search engines and people, think twice about using it. This DHTML example illustrates another general principle of SEO that has existed since 1995: sometimes you have to compromise design to obey rules that emerged rather arbitrarily from the technical constraints of search engines. One could insist that a design tactic, like a Flash interface, should be allowed, or one could compromise a little by using an SEO-friendly alternative that earns more profit in the end. Having said all this, my firm recently did use DHTML to reveal more text upon a user's click because it really was the best usability solution for that page. If that client's SEO results prove questionable, we may remove the DHTML - which means that there is a present cost, in the form of a risk of future cost, but I deemed the present cost worth assuming in this one case. The golden rule of SEO is: Do anything that might help, and nothing that might hurt, within the practical constraints of good design. If your site has good but not great SEO design or has some SEO-unfriendly code, it may be impractical - that is, too expensive or untimely -- to change now. Again, I advise consulting with a qualified professional, sometimes even if you are a qualified professional, to help you decide what SEO risks are worth assuming in the interest of good design.
Are XML Sitemaps a Magic Bullet?
No, they aren't. They are a must but are not sufficient. They can be buggy because of the search engines or your XML programmer, and protocols change. Unlike proactive CMS SEO, they don't boost the rank of pages already in an index, or at least not by much. They do not prevent damage from many CMS SEO errors.
See http://www.SiteMaps.org, http://www.google.com/webmasters/start/, http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com, http://help.live.com
A Quick List of No-Nos
- Don't neglect robots.txt protocols. See http://www.robotstxt.org and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt.
- In the <head>, don't use the "revisit-after" or
tags, unless you want to raise a little flag that tells the search engines, "hey, I don't know what I'm doing, and here and maybe elsewhere I'm trying to manipulate you deviously." Follow the rules: http://www.robotstxt.org and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt.
- Frames: Just say no. They are counter to both good usability and good SEO, and they rarely if ever offer advantages not available with better design tactics. Since you should not use frames, you should not use the <noframes> tag under any circumstance.
- IFrames can be useful in design, but with regard to SEO be advised that the engines ascribe the content of the IFrame and any links within that content to the external page being invoked, not to the site employing the IFrame.
- Session IDs: Fuggetaboutit. They assign unique URLs to each session, creating an infinite number of "pages" for the spiders to either choke on or deem duplicate. A surprising number of sites still use this obsolete method to maintain and track user sessions, but most sites use and should use cookies. One recent reliable study posited that 1% of browsers block first party cookies, while controversy surrounds reports of higher percentages.
- Google explains: "Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site."
SEO'd URLS
The first consideration in SEO'd URLs is the naming of files and folders. File and folder names provide further opportunities to bolster the SEO keywording in your site and in links to your inner pages. Files include html pages, images, videos, and any other object embedded in or linked from a page. The file naming rules apply to small, static sites as well as large, database-driven sites. File names should have up to three words, with the keywords separated by dashes, not underscores. The same goes for folder or directory names, though try to limit folder names to one or two words. Evidence has emerged in the professional forums that Google may assign a spam flag (which is less than a penalty but could become one) to long, multi-worded folder and page names. The phrases you pick should always pertain to the file or folder, while also adhering to an organizational scheme that facilitates site management. Ideally, your CMS automatically assigns product names to product images, with dashes instead of spaces between descriptive keywords. On a scale of 1 to 3, with 1 the most important, the importance of renaming files and folder is about 2.
Renaming URLs may require the mod_rewrite module for Linux/Apache or the likes of IISAPI Rewrite for Windows/.NET. Many CMSs produce long parameter strings in the URL, usually after the "?" character, and though the search engines have gotten better at indexing two, maybe three, parameters, you must rename such URLs to contain what looks like a directory path with keywords (for example, DomainName.com/bedroom-lighting/children/brass-lamps.php). This renaming not only helps SEO directly, but also tends to make incoming links to inner pages contain keywords, which in turn makes PageRank boost SEO further. Moreover, such renaming can help some intra-site search modules return more accurate results.
If it is impractical to do this substantial CMS programming now, consider that a programming guru at the Search Engine Strategies conference series has been saying for years that there is never a need, no matter how involved the database queries, for more than two URL parameters. Meanwhile, SEO is helped by pulling certain pages out from a recalcitrant CMS and making them static. These pages should be infrequently changed and keyword-rich, like the About Us page, general information or how-to pages, and perhaps some key category pages.
Your URL structure should be as consistent and stable as possible, so that incoming links remain valid. If the URLs do change while remaining spiderable, eventually the search engines will include the new URLs, but there would be a delay of several days to weeks, during which time organic search engine referrals will drop and 404 pages will be delivered when searchers click from the search engines.
Over the years, SEO pros have debated the value of a flat directory structure. Without getting into the many pros and cons, it's safe to say that you shouldn't go to either extreme. That is, don't have all pages on the root after DomainName.com/, and don't have directories buried more than, say, four folders deep.
Your JavaScript Brew: Ajax, "Degradable Ajax," Hijax, and an Easy Way Out
The first simple rule is to offload your JavaScript to an external .js file on the server. This has both code and SEO benefits.
The topic of JavaScript quickly becomes detailed and technical. In general, search engines don't execute JavaScript, so that navigation menus using JavaScript (e.g., for menu roll-outs) won't be spidered and wont circulate and amplify PageRank. There have long been CSS solutions to this problem. Space precludes detailing the code, but the tactic involves "externalizing" the hrefs, as is well described here: http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/blog/more/A180_0_1_0_M/.
Ajax (Wikipedia.com defines) is generally inimical to SEO. As with Flash, you should make plenty of your site and all of your navigation not require this technology. A good primer that explains how to do this and how to use what some call "Hijax" to produce "degradable Ajax" and thus do less harm to SEO, is found here: http://www.softwaredeveloper.com/features/google-ajax-play-nice-061907.
Now for an easier way out. In the navigation menus of larger sites, you can unite excellent usability and SEO in several ways that do not require special JavaScript, CSS, and Ajax/Hijax coding. You can make a category page's submenus appear only when a viewer is in that category. Examples of this solution are found in http://www.StacksAndStacks.com, http://www.Gene.com, and http://www.DickBlick.com. These solutions, especially DickBlick's, not only avoid JavaScript roll-out menus that impede SEO, but they also boost SEO and circulate PageRank.
Finally, use an old-fashioned, non-XML sitemap that viewers can use, and, where fitting, a text-link menu to main categories on the bottom of pages. These solutions are not sufficient for large sites, but they help, and usually they are sufficient for smaller sites.
DHTML - Don't Hide Text; Make Legitimate
The section immediately above and the first section, "How to Think about CMS SEO," address this topic. (DHTML uses JavaScript and CSS.)
Leave One Breadcrumb Trail for Search Engines
Breadcrumb trails, which greatly improve the usability of larger sites, should use href links and not cause the search engines to index more than one URL path to any page. The one-URL-path rule is a lot easier said than done. Implementing this rule with precision is essential to prevent the search engines from indexing duplicate pages or punishing duplicate content or simply giving up on indexing because of multiple breadcrumb paths seeming to exponentiate the number of actual pages. In the section below I touch on solutions that apply here too.
Straiten Salamandrine Sorting Systems
Sites that present a large selection of products with multiple styles, sizes, or other attributes can greatly enhance usability and findability via sorting functions that winnow down the list of products according to the order that a user clicks on the attributes. For example, in a landscape lighting category a user can click a price range, then a finish, then a brand. And the user can sort by those three attributes in a different order of clicks. As with the breadcrumb trail, this system can create an almost limitless number of "pages" which, though not duplicate, can exhaust the spiders long before all the product pages are indexed. (A "product" could also be videos, articles, or anything in a large, sortable database.) This problem can be amplified by << Previous 1 - 2 - 3 - n Next >> menus within a sorted page. This is a problem for which there is no brief explanation of a solution. Suffice it to say that you need to apply a masterful combination of robots.txt, noindex and nofollow meta-tags, and XML Sitemap feeds.
CMS SEO means programming once and profiting many, many times.
December 2007 - Visibility Magazine
CMS & Database SEO Guide
First of a Two-Part Article
(Original Article reprinted below)
CMS (content management system) & database SEO entails having your CMS pull keywords and phrases from your product or information database into all web-page parts relevant to SEO, except for the body copy. Although it does not apply to static sites without database-driven content, many of the CMS SEO rules below can be applied to such sites manually. Because CMS SEO performs a lot of SEO automatically and can treat thousands of pages, it is the most cost-effective SEO tactic.
This first installment of a two-part article situates CMS SEO within the steps of a complete SEO job, discusses related database and site design issues, and explains per-page rules of CMS SEO. In the next edition of Visibility, the second installment will address the more complicated site-wide CMS SEO issues, like URL rewriting, breadcrumb trails, product sorting systems, file and folder naming, JavaScript, session IDs, iframes, and Ajax.
Most good content management systems allow you to program the CMS rules below. But unfortunately, some CMS application service providers prevent you from implementing some of the rules. There is a market need for off-the-shelf, SEO'd CMS systems, and in fact my firm has spent six months building one that incorporates a back-office ERP (enterprise resource planning) system (with CRM [customer relationship management] and inventory management) within an SEO'd CMS. I expect more firms will soon offer comprehensive SEO'd ERP systems, and recent changes in patent law likely will make such systems widely affordable.
CMS SEO in the Context of All SEO Steps
CMS SEO should be part of a complete SEO job. Below I list all of the steps of SEO, mentioning in each only what is relevant to CMS SEO.
- New job or new client questionnaire: This comprehensive questionnaire must ascertain the web site's programming language, server, and database; frequency of web site updates; any major changes on the horizon; web team knowledge of SEO; multiple domains and domain pointing protocols; and anything relevant to the marketing situation.
- SEO technical report: assessment of some CMS-related attributes (robots.txt, 404's, 301's and 302's, search engine penetration and PageRank, etc.) constitute a minority of the many technical SEO tests that must precede any SEO job.
- Keyword research: While one can do CMS SEO without this, one would have to guess at the most important keywords to have your CMS include automatically in some areas of your web pages, which would impair results.
- CMS & database SEO: This is the focus of this article.
- SEO copywriting: CMS SEO treats all parts of a page except for body copy, and you should override CMS SEO on key pages and do manual SEO copywriting on all parts of those pages. Typical key pages are the home page, the about us page, and salient category and product pages. (Henceforth I use "product" to also include services, news articles, videos, and any other offering in a site's database.) Ideally, your CMS will allow overriding site-wide rules on selected individual pages. If not, you should create some static and infrequently changed pages outside of the CMS province. A frequently updated home page should get careful SEO copywriting during each update.
- Submissions to top search engines, directories, and industry portals: An established site with good CMS SEO will likely be indexed well by the top search engine spiders. Google's xml Sitemap service (and its other webmaster tools) should always be used, but a well-SEO'd CMS is designed so that Sitemaps aren't required. (However, anecdotal evidence suggests that even an ideally SEO'd CMS without Google's Sitemap may not be indexed by Google as thoroughly as it would if the Sitemap were used.) If you can implement CMS SEO completely, you won't need Yahoo's new dynamic URL rewriting service.
- ROI reporting: This is crucial for all web marketing, and it is also crucial for assessing problems and opportunities in your CMS SEO. I recommend comprehensive quarterly reports that include SEO technical reports, link reports, and SEO results reports.
Assuming that you begin with the essential SEO technical report, CMS SEO earns the highest ROI amongst all SEO processes and usually amongst all SEM as well, for the simple reason that in one job you eliminate all search engine blockages and liberate your CMS to continuously produce SEO on all current and future pages without further SEO labor time required. Of course, one should do other SEO and SEM, but you could apply only CMS SEO, let the cash registers ring for a few months, and later reinvest profits in the other types of SEO, other SEM, and conversion rate optimization.
The Database
CMS SEO assumes that your database's product descriptions are already somewhat keyworded. All businesses with a history of revenues obviously have demand for their offerings, and that demand is reflected in searches and in the names of the offerings in the database, which means that some SEO is built into your database. However, you can always enhance the keywording of the offerings in the database, and over time you should apply SEO principles to product names. For example, a product name in a database might be "Pablo Easel," but SEO research might dictate that it should be named "Pablo Artist Easel," "Pablo Studio Easel," or "Pablo Wooden Artist Easels."
Some databases have fields for both short and long names, and both are candidates for SEO rewriting and for your CMS to pull into your site's pages.
Of course, product descriptions can't be automatically written by any CMS, and thus they are part of SEO copywriting, not CMS SEO.
SEO Graphic Design, Layout, and Usability
The CMS SEO principles below touch on the design of your web site, but a complete SEO job may require that you make significant changes to your site's design and page layout to accommodate CMS SEO tactics. This article assumes that your site does not contain major SEO design errors, like flash-splash pages, images of text rather than actual text, gif menu links, non-keyworded menu links, minimal text, etc. Whether or not you have to make design modifications to accommodate SEO, you should consider a complete usability critique to maximize conversion rates. One can achieve at least 80% of ideal usability without usability testing; if you have a sufficient budget and revenues, methodical usability testing may be justified. (A recent ClickZ article trumpets testing and derides any usability re-engineering that doesn't perform expensive testing, but that argument ignores ROI considerations for small- and medium-sized businesses, many of which can double conversion rates merely by applying well-established usability rules.)
CMS SEO Rules
Each rule below is prioritized by 1 through 3 to the right of the bold title. You must do 1's, really should do 2's, and can get away with not doing 3's. Because of technical, resource, or (all too often) ego constraints, it is rare that a web team implements all CMS SEO rules. Obviously, the more rules that are implemented, the better. The golden rule of SEO is, "Do everything that might help, and nothing that might hurt, within the practical constraints of good design." Programming some of the CMS rules may not be practical within your budget.
This article discusses page-level CMS SEO rules; the next edition of Visibility will discuss site-wide rules.
Page-Level CMS SEO
Duplicating key phrases among HTML titles, keyword and descriptive meta-tags, copy headers, and footer taglines within a given web page will help SEO without any risk of raising a spam flag, assuming that you don't overuse the phrases in the body copy.
After describing the six page-level tactics, I will show examples.
HTML titles (1): HTML titles, which remain disproportionately important in SEO, should contain keyworded text written to prompt appropriate clicks.
HTML titles should contain an average of seven words, with considerable variation of that number among your pages. In fact, diversifying tactics in all SEO areas covers a variety of search engines and possible future fine-tuning of the ranking algorithms. Fewer words means more weight per word, so it's OK if your CMS automatically produces some one-, two-, and three-word product or category names.
A persistent question in SEO tactics is whether to include the company name and/or domain name in addition to the category and product words in HTML titles. The pros and cons are too numerous to explain here, but ideally you would program your CMS to use both tactics in your site. If your brand and/or domain name are well known, lean more towards including it.
Another rule for product marketers to consider is to add the SKU #, preferably in parentheses, after the product name in an HTML title. This can help the site's own search module, and it also help users match up a product with a print or PDF catalog. This rule is more important for sites that are reselling well-known manufacturers' brands with standardized catalog numbers.
Headers in body copy (1): Your CMS should pull your database's product names into the top of each product page's body copy, and placed in bold via <H> tags. The <H> tags can be <H1>, <H2>, or (slightly less preferable) <H3>. You can control the <H>. font size by using CSS (cascading style sheets). Your CMS can pull category names into category pages as well.
Descriptive meta-tags (2, but for click-throughs, not for SEO): The descriptive meta-tag is weak for SEO but important for clicks because it is often displayed in SERPs.
The descriptive meta-tag should contain 12 to 20 words, but can be longer. The important rule is that because it can be truncated differently in different search engines, and truncation rules may change in the future, you should be sure that the wording reads well at various cut-off points, with the first 8 to 10 words forming as coherent a marketing message as you can practically program in your CMS.
Keyworded footer taglines (2): A powerful SEO tactic is a keyworded, bold, <H>, footer tagline at the bottom of the body copy of each page. Unlike your company slogan at the top of every page, the footer tagline can be different for each category and subcategory page. Ideally, one starts with a generic, recurring phrase and pulls in product names from the database that are specific to that page or at least to that category.
Keyword meta-tags (3): The keyword meta-tag has little or no SEO impact, depending on the search engine. In fact, any part of a page other than the HTML title that isn't readily seen by viewers is of little value to SEO, and sometimes can raise a spam flag, precisely because so many people have abused hidden or semi-hidden text areas when trying to game the search engines. Therefore, you needn't spend a lot of time messing with this meta-tag.
To avoid spammy repetition, do not repeat a word more than three times, regardless of different phrases the word may be in. Commas in this meta-tag are ignored by the search engines but help SEO writers to organize. Where possible, combine phrases to avoid excessive repetition: for example, if the keyword meta-tag contains both "entertainment center furniture" and "contemporary entertainment center," it should be rewritten as "contemporary entertainment center furniture."
An efficient way to program this rule into your CMS is to simply repeat the database pull that you use for the descriptive meta-tag. You should add to that rule some generic words, e.g., discount, art supplies, artist materials, or art supply store, which can be applied programmatically throughout the site or varied according to main categories.
Alt tags (3): Alt tags are helpful to vision-impaired users, but are such a weak SEO tactic that this article's word limit precludes discussion. Suffice it to say that you can program your CMS to pull relevant language into these tags.
Examples of the Above Rules
In the examples below, the product name in the database is "Winsor & Newton Artists' Watercolors." Any other text below recurs site-wide (or category-wide), and the CMS is programmed to place the product name within that recurring text. There are some devils in the details not discussed here: ensuring grammatical correctness in database feeds within boilerplate text, using breadcrumb trail and/or cascading category data feeds to enrich the SEO, and managing short and long product names and options, to name a few.
Header tags:
<title>Winsor & Newton Artists' Watercolors (SKU #)</title>
<meta name="description" content="Winsor & Newton Artists' Watercolors and other discount art supplies from YourDomain.com">
<meta name="keywords" content="Winsor & Newton Artists' Watercolors, artists materials, discount art supplies, art supply stores, discount art supply warehouse, paint for artists, watercolor paints">
Body copy header:
<b><h1>Winsor & Newton Artists' Watercolors (SKU #) </h1></b> (intentional redundancy of <b> and <h1>; reduce <h> font sizes by using CSS)
Keyworded footer tagline:
<b><h2> Your-Company-Name or YourDomainName.com: Winsor & Newton Artists' Watercolors and other discount art supplies online from an art supply store offering quality, selection, and affordability. </h2></b>
Alt tag for a product image:
alt="Winsor & Newton Artists' Watercolors"
If you have the resources and a flexible CMS, you can set up your CMS to allow copywriters to make manual SEO additions and alterations. For example, you can customize the descriptive meta-tag in order to increase clicks from the SERPs to your site. Below, the underlined phrase was manually written to override the CMS, with SEO and conversions in mind.
<meta name="description" content="Winsor & Newton Artists' Watercolors - art paint with unique brilliance, clarity, permanence, and free shipping."
Such manual SEO writing can be reused in other SEO areas.
Program Once - Profit in Perpetuity
Programming your CMS to pull keywords into your pages may require a week of skilled labor, but you end up with an intelligent SEO machine that works for you in perpetuity. True, the resulting SEO is not as good as careful manual work - which should be done in addition - but the ROI escalates over months and years because your SEO costs in this area drop to zero.
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