Search Marketing Sage

The first session that I attended on Day 2 was SEO 101, which took a look at the fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In this session, Bruce Clay discussed how SEO can be used to increase website rankings on organic searches.

Clay began by discussing factors that are important for getting top rankings for organic searches:

• On-Page Factors: The site’s actual content (including tags: title, description, keyword, headings,  body copy)
• Expertness: Do others believe I am an expert? PageRank increases when others link to your site (inbound links, outbound links and internal links)
• Copy writing: Structural content, sentence structure, word usage and clarification words
• Architecture of site: Must match structure and content of the site to the intent of the search query (ex: Shopping sites have more bullets and lists, while research sites have more sentences).
• Engagement Objects: Pieces of content that help the site’s ability to be ranked (video, images, maps, books, news, blogs, etc). Popular videos can really help rankings, so use these in order to move to the top of organic results. The more engaging the site is, the higher it will rank.
• Server/ Software Performance: Slow servers discourage spiders . So faster sites will rank higher.
  

  

My first official session of the day was a discussion led by a panel of search veterans that looked at the future of Search Engine Marketing (SEM). The speakers on the panel were Chris Boggs (Director, SEO, Rosetta), Robert Murray (CEO, iProspect) and Bruce Clay ( President, Bruce Clay, Inc.). The moderator of the discussion was Anne Kennedy (International Search Strategist, Beyond Ink USA).
After each panelist introduced themselves, they were asked what direction they think SEM is headed in and if they feel SEO is a dying practice.

Is SEO as we know it over? The consensus seemed to be that SEO is not dead; it has just become much more complex. Some of the main points discussed were that:

• Ranking is no longer the sole factor of success.
• Content is extremely important; focus on this, and generally rankings follow.
• Put more budget towards developing content in order to compete.
• Google is becoming much more localized for organic results so SEO should be geo-targeted.
• Focus content and budget on local searches.
• Over 90% of all online mobile transactions are done on one of the top 3 platforms/ smartphones.
• PR departments should be involved when planning out SEO strategy because they deal with press releases, which are content, and should be optimized for search.
• It is natural for links to come and go.
• Links are now coming from news sites less and from social media more.
  

  

I recently read an article entitled Fortune 500 Companies Fail at SEO by Laurie Sullivan.  In this article Laurie discussed the learnings of a study performed by Conductor.

Summary of the Article:

The article discussed how Fortune 500 companies fail at search engine optimization on the bases that many companies still don’t link paid-search keywords with SEO campaigns.

One day late last week, my day started like any other day with checking E-mail and my Tweets.  Barry Schwartz aka @Rustybrick tweeted a Search Engine Round Table article about a situation that I was already aware of, but the idea of it finally hit home.  Yahoo is essentially going away this year for search engine marketers and the count down to its irrelevance has begun.

It’s far from a done deal, and there are more than a few potential obstacles in the deal actually getting approved, but sometime this year Yahoo as we know it will likely be gone (I’m betting much later in the year).

So the question has to be asked is all this work I’m doing to make Yahoo PPC accounts perform all for nothing?

At the end of this July, a death certificate was signed for a company.  That company was Yahoo.  It wasn’t heralded by Yahoo as being a death certificate, in fact the powers that be in charge of Yahoo proclaimed that it was a great deal.  The deal in which Bing.com essentially takes over natural and paid search for Yahoo, gives Yahoo 88% of the revenue of the PPC clicks derived from Yahoo.com.  It allows Yahoo to essentially shed hundreds of millions in technology and development costs (along with employee salaries and benefits).

Yahoo CEO, Carol Bartz had already made in known in the press that Yahoo wasn’t really a “search company” and never had been a search company (Huh?):

Yahoo, according to Ms. Bartz, simply feeds search results for people who have grown curious while reading one of its news stories or watching a video. It doesn’t generally pop into peoples’ minds as the first place to go look for answers during the course of their day-to-day activities.

As such, Ms. Bartz said she could continue to live with the 20 percent or so share of the search market Yahoo has today, calling it “a very viable number.” “It is very profitable,” she said, “and we would be happy all day long.”

The biggest thing for Yahoo is increasing the number of pages people consume and slapping as many display ads as possible across those pages. “My fortunes are tied to my pages,” Ms. Bartz said.

It’s very well documented that Yahoo obviously is and was a search engine, and Bartz was rightfully raked over the coals for trying to spin Yahoo’s declines.  Either way, the damage was done and Danny Sullivan wrote a marvelous eulogy proclaiming: