idea1: how to avoid the search engine marketing hype

Reverse direct marketing

We are officially in the era of the self-building, self-selecting marketing prospect list, as predicted by the Cluetrain Manifesto. For a brand that’s the good news — the audience if defined and segmented by need, where they are in the pipeline, and their criteria for purchase. The bad news: they have even more information about you. They know what you're good at and what you're not. And if they don't now, they soon will.

So what’s today’s marketer to do? First, remember that beyond all the new fangled technical wizardry, the same marketing and sales principles still apply: focus on who you’re selling to specifically, learn your basic sales process to the point that it is second nature, focus on removing obstacles — real and imagined — from the buying process, and let the chips fall where they may. Search engines are simply a service. For the most part they, do connect the person looking for goods or services and the provider of these goods and services. Done all that? OK, now we can really get to work.

Since you know your sales process inside and out you probably know what gets people interested. Recommendations from others, technical superiority, uniqueness, and brand appeal are some of the usual suspects — so how do we translate that online?

The key is keywords

First, it all boils down to what you’re reading right now: the words. What words would you associate with what you sell and how do those overlap with words that people are searching for? To start, make a list of what you think and head over to the Overture keyword tool here. Try some words and phrases and see how they rate in popularity. Now here’s the rub: the more popular, the more likely keywords will draw an audience, which makes them the hardest to own. Less popular terms draw fewer searches, but are easier to ‘own.’ This is part of the reason the company is called idea34… it’s a somewhat easy term to own as any search engine result will show you.

Now you’ve that made a decision on what terms make sense, let’s talk about making your content ‘friendly’ for those terms. Head on over to a keyword density checker like the one at Webmastertoolkit.com. and try your current web content to see how it stacks up. Typically a density between 2% and 7% is ideal because the search engine bots like to filter out obvious attempts to ‘spam’ against particular keywords (remember the old days when every search yielded some form of porn?) So how’d your content stack up? Not so great? Here’s a host of little technical tricks that will work until everyone starts doing them:

 

Some proven techniques for improving search engine spidering of your content

  • Homepage Description: Google gives you 50 characters in your title and 150 per page as the description that comes up when you do a search. Make sure that this is a well-crafted, literal description (another reason to make sure your marketing/brand planning is done) which shows up on your homepage and any other page you want indexed to provide searchers with a reason to click through.


  • Domain names and Page names: Do a bunch of searches for obscure terms and look at what pages come up, what the description shows and what the resulting linked page yields. After a while you’ll start to see some patterns. For example, a page named: ‘search-engine-friendly.html’ or a domain named, ‘www.cute-puppies.com’ will index against the individual keyword terms they contain very well. Google literally translates them into individual keywords.


  • HTML tags: In some ways the engines like the low-tech approach. There appears to be more credibility given to the simplest patterns of html usage. Do a ‘View Source’ on any page and look for the trends. Titles with <H1> and <H2> tags index well for example, almost like there is support for the idea that an individual publishing information with a very simple structure is more credible than pages loaded with technical wizardry like JavaScript and tons of CSS based design. The way around this? Use CSS to redefine standard html tags — one of the major tools of companies that rework content.


  • Document Extensions: Another area where the low tech or what appears to be ‘neutral’ non-marketing is favored. Documents that end with a ‘.html’ extension do better that pages with complex code strings like, ‘index.php?content=hello&page=everyone.’ For some reason other ‘information-rich’ extensions are also favored like .pdf, .doc etc.


  • Validation: Search engines hate errors in code that produce invalid results from html, css and other validators like those available at the WC3 here. Check your pages and see how they do and whether they produce errors.


  • Robots.txt: This is a file that exists in the main directory of your website. Along with Metatag info “robots follow” instructs search engines and bots on what content they should follow. Many sites don’t control what is indexed, leaving private documents to get found, indexed by Google, and made available to the public. I’ve seen presentations, order documents, credit card info and all manner of document left unprotected. This file can also be used to block bots looking for email addresses and holes in your site. Here's my robots.txt file as an example.


    • Now you’ve got all the technical things having to do with your actual content and structure done, it’s time to get serious and talk about linking. Linking pages to each other is what makes the Internet the Internet. Search engines support this concept fully. Linked content within a site (pay special attention to what the linked words are as well) and links to sites from other credible sites are some of the best ways to boost how high up on the search order content shows up. So an example might be links from major news sites with high traffic like CNN.com or Yahoo.com to a piece of content on your site. This would give a tremendous boost to that content’s ‘credibility rating.’ So just get them to write some online articles about you! So it is very important to cross-link your site’s content as much as possible and get as many external links pointing to your content as possible.

    The irony of all the ‘Search Engine Optimization’ hype is that if you just do your job with quality content, quality code and keep a few of these principles in mind, the search engines will find your site and reward you with top placement. So that's it. A few simple tips to toward removing one more barrier between you, your prospects and the sales you’re looking to increase.
     

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