Domain7

SEO, meet Content Marketing—your new boss.

Much has been said lately about the idea that SEO (search engine optimization) is no longer relevant. Some industry pundits have even gone so far as to succinctly state provocatively that ‘SEO is Dead’. The proponents of this school of thought will often point to comments like this one Matt Cutts, the Head of the anti-spam team at Google, recently made at SXSW:

“ All those people are doing (for lack of a better word) over-optimization, versus making great content and a great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it—like too many keywords on a page—or exchange way too many links, or go well beyond what you normally expect. “

In recent years, experts from the search engine world have strongly downplayed the traditional tactical mix we know collectively as “SEO”: link-building, keyword-stuffing, an unnatural fascination with PageRank, etc. All of this is now considered passé in 2012.

Today, we are to expect, you just need to make great content. Period.

So making great content trumps SEO… sort of. This is the understanding that drives the phenomenal growth of Content Marketing—the recognition that your content lives across many digital channels beyond your website, like email newsletters, whitepapers and podcasts, or shared in thriving social media spaces. But great content should also be found, or it’s like that proverbial tree falling in the empty forest.

Is SEO still relevant? Of course. But now it’s more about deconstructing what the “great” in great content actually means. Great content should be informed by research and a solid understanding of your target audience. For this, we can turn to (among many sources) keyword research tools (like Google’s own version). Keyword Research, which used to provide information for SEO, now helps us understand exactly what content we need to produce if we want to find our people where they are. If people are searching for this content, we need to take the steps to make sure our new content will be found by search engines, and the people using them.

We use keyword research to discover keyword phrases. We try to ensure they are relevant, understand their frequency (how often are they searched), and balance this with an understanding of the competitive landscape (or pressure). We write meaningful and relevant content which takes the form of copy in body sections and headings. We craft descriptive page titles and make sure our links and navigational structure support the content. This is all starting to sound an awful lot like SEO.

So is Content Marketing just the new name for SEO?

No. Content marketing is more than SEO because it is concerned with all of our digital channels. Content marketing is the bigger idea, if you will. It is about delivering content that makes your target audience smarter and builds up your credibility and brand.

SEO is not dead, it just found a new job … working for Content Marketing.

If you would like learn more here are some interesting links:

• Watch the webinar, SEO is Dead. Long Live Content on YouTube (courtesy of Compendium)
• Track Google’s Algorithm Changes (infographic)
• Read some easy and practical tips for creating great content (courtesy of SearchEngineWatch)

Google Gives Advice: Be Relevant

Every so often in the world of SEO, Google shuffles the deck a little and performs an algorithm update. The latest in the string of updates was (oddly enough) tagged the Panda Update and was rolled out in April of this year. For the ‘algorithm-chasers’ of SEO this kind of update always spurs a flurry of activity and rampant speculation from everyone. What is maybe a little different this time around is that Google is actually talking about it (without giving away the farm with too much detail of course).

Amit Singhal of Google mentions in his blog post at Google Webmaster Central Blog that “we incorporated new user feedback signals to help people find better results”.

In other words, how real users respond to your website content.

Towards that end Google offers some helpful advice as to what you need to know to make a ‘high-quality’ site. The long and short of it is that Content Marketing matters. Creating your place as a thought leader and industry expert is paramount. You want to stop selling your product and start delivering information to your potential customers that makes them more intelligent and better informed consumers and clients.

Talk to us at about assessing your organizational abilities and leveraging the tools to help you get there. Content Management Systems, eNewsletters and Blogs are just a few of the tactical components. We can help.

Search Engines confirm Social Media Influence

Recently (Dec 2010) Search Engine ‘Guru’ Danny Sullivan interviewed representatives from Google an Bing as to whether or not (and how) social media influences search engine results. For the first time representatives confirmed that social media involvement, specificallyy Facebook and Twitter, are indeed a ‘signal’ they use to determine ranking relevancy.

The full interview can be read on the SearchEngineLand website but in it Google and Bing confirm they look at retweets and links referenced in Twitter. Both confirmed that public information on Facebook (ie Fan Pages, links shared to ‘Everyone’) are also tracked.

Clearly social media engagement is important to anyone serious about search engine marketing efforts. If you produce meaningful, engaging content and you want to recieve the full benefits of this you want to be sure you are exploring social media optimization to its fullest.

Google Instant Search

With Google Instant now in use for several weeks I thought it would be interesting to examine the potential impact on your website traffic and search marketing programs. Has it made an impact on your website?

Google Instant Search, for those unaware, is the new search enhancement that shows search results as you type your query into Google. As of today, it is launched only on Google.com and is not yet available in Google Toolbar or globally (in Canada) - but they have announced plans to expand in time. Google promises it will save people time (2-5 seconds per search reputedly).

If you are interested in seeing how this change may be impacting your website I would recommend the following quick exploration in your Google Analytics account.

• Create a quick segment to include only US based traffic (Visitors > Country/Territory = United States).
• Apply that segment and set your date range to run from September 9 (the day after the change was rolled out) to some point in the future. Select a date range to compare before September 8 with an equal number of days.
• Review your Traffic Sources, Search Engines and Keywords and look for any significant differences.

If you are running AdWords in the US marketplace you could also use the same date periods and compare impressions and click thru rates for your top keywords.

Many of you may not see anything yet as the changes are likely subtle - or too early to be significant. Also I suspect a large portion of Google referred traffic actually originates from the Google toolbar (or other embedded search bars) where Instant is not available and would therefore have no impact. However in time one may suspect that we could see less long-tail keyword phrases (3 words or more) in favour of shorter ‘suggested’ search phrases.

In essence Google may define the search queries for users and work more like the Google toolbar search suggestions does now. For search marketers this brings challenges and opportunities. Remaining to be seen is whether users will really embrace the change - and how it will work within a Toolbar where it will require more than AJAX (additional plug-in?).

We will keep watching this one to see. Stay tuned for an update.

SEO School - How to Transition Your Website

Okay so it’s time to launch that redeveloped website. Hopefully in addition to pre-planning all that new content, graphics and navigation you have taken some time to consider how you will manage the transition in the search engines. Here are few thoughts and areas to consider in preparation… especially if you enjoy already decent search engine performance and would like to see that continue.

First keep your unfinished ‘development’ files out of the public domain of search results. Robots.txt disallow /dev/ is your best approach (page level meta noindex can lead to issue when you inadvertantly upload it live) These half-finished pages can stick in the search engine results for months if they get in - and they might have errors, broken links and image references and all kinds of problems.

Are you changing your brand and (by extension) your domain name? Domain name changes can have a very dramatic effect as your old domain name carries all your past link equity built up over the years. You need to strategize how you will deal with this with smart redirections (probably 301 Permanent Redirections). This is one of the most significant and common mistakes companies make in a web transition. I have seen traffic reduced by 70-80% immediately! If you have to change your domain name in the process - plan ahead and expect a few more bumps along the way.

Check and Benchmark your Analytics. Identify your top referring pages (besides the home page) and carefully map them over to your new content. Benchmark your search engine referred traffic before (in % of overall and absolute) and watch it carefully for 2-3 monthes after launch.

Keep your urls if you can. If you are not changing your underlying programming (ie .php to .htm etc) try to maintain the same urls and file names. If there is no need to change www.yourwebsite.com/products.htm to www.yourwebsite.com/productoverview.htm don’t do it. If you have to change file names (and url’s) then map these out for your .htaccess file (or equivalent).

Update your robots.txt, your .htaccess file (if applicable) and your sitemap.xml files of course. Pay particular attention to links to your old home page that need redirection (ie index.php > index.htm or index.html or index.asp etc.)

Setup Google Webmaster Console before and monitor it daily after launching to see what indexing issues occur. Google offers this tool now and it takes a lot of the guesswork out of indexing issues - you want to use this.

Clean up your old pages. Don’t leave them sitting there in search results for people to find. In addition to potentially putting out old out-dated stale information it is likely the links and image references on these pages are broken.

Create an integrated / branded and nicely worded custom 404 page. This is a page your visitors get when they try to access an old page. If your server handles it they will just see a rather stark unfriendly page that says “Error. This page does not exist. Please go away.” (ok not quite but you get the idea). I like to show a nice page that says ” We are sorry. That page has moved. Please browse the handy links below” (provide a mini sitemap set of links). Make sure your menu bar and key navigation is there and most people will just click over to the page and never even remember it was an error. Make sure you return a 404 Status though on this page for the search engines to update their index.

Update any PPC landing pages of course - and pause them for a short while in the immediate transition. If you changed your domain name contact as many of your key inbound link providers to get them to change it over to the new one. Pay special attention to your directory listings, enhanced yellow pages listings, etc.

Finally, expect some turbulence in your search engine results for a while. You are going to have some old pages floating around, drops in your search engine referred are common for a while. But if you followed the best practices it should be temporary and you should return to where you were (or better - if hopefully all the other content and pieces do what they need to do).

Also, here are a number of ‘must-have’ Drupal modules for a website redevelopment launch!

• http://drupal.org/project/google_analytics
• http://drupal.org/project/nodewords
• http://drupal.org/project/pathauto
• http://drupal.org/project/robotstxt
• http://drupal.org/project/search404
• http://drupal.org/project/globalredirect